Chapter Fourteen
Edmund should have walked straight through the ballroom and out the front door of the mansion.
There was no reason to linger. No reason to find a darkened corner where he could watch Lydia Balcomb with a distant, covetous gaze.
No reason to add more tension to his taut muscles as the craving in his blood continued to simmer and scald.
He’d done his best to douse his desire after she left the conservatory.
Standing with his hands clenched at his sides and his eyes closed, he’d breathed deep to dispel the fire she’d ignited with her curious gaze and her firm, innocent touch on his thigh and the soft gasp she’d made when his lips touched hers.
The swiftness and intensity of his physical reaction was shocking considering he’d never had any previous trouble mastering his sensual needs. They’d inspired him but had never ruled him. He was a hedonist to be sure, but he wasn’t a beast.
Yet, it took only the briefest flickering glance at her when he stepped into the light of the ballroom to restore his desire to full strength.
The only thing to temper his lust was the painfully hard expression she wore.
Noting her obvious distress, his stomach clenched with a harsh twist and his steps nearly faltered with the urge to go to her. His rational mind pulled hard on the reins of his instinct and he managed to walk away with a careless saunter. But he couldn’t leave.
His tension swiftly shifted from that of untended desire to something more concerning as he observed her over the next hour.
His experience in society—though full of a certain amount of anxiety over exposing himself as the low-born man he was—had also been rich with revelry and amusements. Not to mention the amorous attention of ladies who quickly distracted from any fear of not being accepted.
Lady Lydia’s experience in society was very different.
And though she’d tried to tell him exactly that, he could see it now quite clearly.
Initially, as he watched one gentleman after another subtly avert his gaze as she passed and other young women slide her sideways glances without any greeting, he wanted to get angry on her behalf.
But then he noticed something odd.
Narrowing his focus, he watched these non-interactions more closely.
In almost every situation, Lydia acted first. She was very subtle.
A tilt of her chin, a turn of her head, a clenching of her jaw.
All signals she sent out to tell anyone who glanced at her that she was not interested.
In truth, she didn’t appear the slightest bit offended.
In fact, she appeared rather bored with the whole production.
There were only a few exceptions, but they helped to prove the rule he was witnessing.
One elderly gentleman—with silver hair and a tiny pair of spectacles—gave her a solemn nod of respect, which she returned in similar fashion.
And two ladies, one of middle-age and the other probably nearing her sixtieth birthday, greeted Lady Lydia with smiles as the three stopped to engage in a brief conversation.
To Edmund’s gaze, they appeared to be quite casually acquainted, though their interaction remained brief and formal. There was an air of some deeper association between them that they didn’t wish to display in the current environment.
Interesting. Perhaps the two ladies were bluestockings, as well.
Eventually, he realized that, despite her earlier distress, she was fully capable of handling her evening as she wished. Feeling his presence to be superfluous, he left.
Later that night, as he lounged on his balcony, swirling his brandy, he couldn’t stop thinking about Lady Lydia.
He’d never paused to wonder what young ladies did in their lives when they were not flouncing and smiling and twittering at society’s grand events.
If he were forced to imagine something, it would be along the lines of tea parties and quiet walks in the park and maybe a little sketching or some sort of charity work.
But he could not envision Lady Lydia doing any of those things.
As soon as he had that thought, he recalled her argument that she was no different from any other woman.
Maybe that was true when it came to her core wishes and needs. Or maybe he just hadn’t known enough varieties of women, but Lady Lydia was undeniably unusual. The more he got to know her, the more she proved to be unlike any woman he’d ever known.
And though she’d agreed to allow him to guide her in a bit of sensual exploration, he suddenly felt as though it wasn’t enough. He wanted more than her intellectual interest in the subject. He wanted her full passionate engagement. And he suspected he wouldn’t get it by the usual methods.
He’d have to be clever.
Luckily, it wasn’t the first time he’d set himself to the task of learning an entirely new world of existence.
*
In the carriage ride home from the ball, Lydia eyed her mother carefully.
She noted the stern jawline and dark piercing gaze that had earned Lady Loxmarch a well-deserved reputation for being a bit of a harridan.
Most people didn’t know the half of it. Behind private doors, the marchioness was far more ambitious and bitter than anyone could know.
Angela Fairchild had been born a year before her brother.
And while she was filled with an education of feminine domestic skills such as how to run a household via menu planning, flower arranging, embroidery, and other such things, she watched as her younger sibling was groomed and molded into the future duke.
While he learned Latin and complex arithmetic, she was taught how to limit her conversational topics to those that would encourage a suitor to think her clever enough to be interesting, but not so clever that she might overshadow his own intelligence.
For a person as ambitious as the marchioness, Lydia knew the limitations must have rankled her mother. She suspected that was why Lydia often caught her eying her brother the duke with a very subtle glare of resentment.
But the marchioness was still a product of her upbringing.
After proving herself an excellent student of her feminine education, she’d accepted the proposal of an extremely wealthy lord from a long-standing family of nobility and honor.
And if her husband eventually proved to be far more concerned with his political responsibilities than advancing their place in society, well, the marchioness more than made up for his failings.
And as Angela had excelled in her training to be a proper daughter of the haute ton, so she expected her own daughter to follow her example.
Imagine her shock and disbelief when Lydia showed very early on her disdain for everything her mother deemed to be of value.
From the time Lydia was three years old and first complained of having to wear petticoats and a pinafore when her brothers were allowed short-pants, the two had been locked in a battle of wills.
Lydia endured countless lectures about her duty as a daughter to a peer-of-the-realm.
Her responsibility to behave in a way that reflected favorably upon the greater Fairchild family and the legacy she must uphold to marry well and create a family of good-standing that earned the respect of the haute ton.
No matter what Lydia said or how she tried to explain that her priorities in life were simply different, her mother could not seem to understand.
In fact, the marchioness grew increasingly determined to force Lydia to accept the future as it had been written for her, not only since her birth, but for generations and generations past.
And this year had gotten so much worse now that her mother had taken over as her and Bridget’s chaperone.
The talk of finding a husband had become a nightly thing as Lady Loxmarch listed the attributes of one eligible bachelor after another like a butcher selling cuts of beef, finishing with an ominous reminder that she expected Lydia to be betrothed by the end of the season.
Lydia wished there was some way to convince her mother that she need not rush into marriage—that she need not marry at all. But she’d tried for years to get the marchioness to consider that there were other ways for a woman to claim a fulfilling life. To absolutely zero effect.
A day would come when one of them would inevitably be forced to relinquish their equally firm stance on the matter. And that day was getting frightfully close.