Chapter Four
It was a relief not to be the Duke for a while.
Gabe prowled the ballroom of Rutland House, prickling with the odd sense of being the only one who knew how out of place he was.
Put him on a rooftop in Alexandria, Egypt, raising doves for food or scrounging scraps of fabric to sell, and he would make his way.
The same was largely true of Wokingham, where Powlett had established the family when they arrived in England.
Being poor was much the same the world over.
He supposed the same was true of being very rich, but he hadn’t experienced it long enough to know.
One thing that was the same no matter one’s social class: the way women decorated themselves to be alluring, and the way men prowled about in pursuit of them. There were so many bosoms on display in the room, so much soft, pale feminine flesh, he almost didn’t know where to look.
That was, perhaps, the one solid benefit of being the Duke now.
Orde was right about one thing. The women available to him were of much higher quality than anything he’d been able to attract as Gabriel Declan, man about town, supposed bastard of a duke’s second son.
Now, as the legitimate Duke in blood and truth, relatively young, and possessing an estate known to be more or less solvent, he couldn’t set a foot outside his house without becoming the target of some ambitious damsel and her aspiring mother.
He wondered how he would fare as simply himself.
Without a name, without a past to stumble over, without the shadow of his history or the great glorious burden of his ducal greatness to drag about like golden chains.
If he approached a woman here, trying to sate the restlessness that gnawed and scraped at him, what were his chances of success?
He decided to find out. He had to discharge this cursed favor for Rutland, who had also invited Gabe into some secret brotherhood that only English Dukes knew about and were admitted to.
Having had a taste of the hazing processes required for admittance to secret societies during his time at Abington School and then Worcester College at Oxford, Gabe wasn’t altogether convinced he wished to be admitted to a society of any sort that was exclusive to the stuffy ranks of English peers.
But Rutland hinted that the character of the group would suit Gabe, once he knew the others.
Thwart a blackmailer. He wasn’t sure how to go about such a thing, unless it involved fisticuffs. He was handy in a brawl, and Orde and his mates from school could attest.
Then, find a woman.
He surveyed the opportunities at hand, to take notes for later. There was toga-draped Cleopatra with a black wig, so much black kohl about her eyes that they looked bruised, and a quantity of alabaster bosom on display that would cast the marbles in the British Museum into the shade.
There was a Marie Antoinette in her shepherdess guise with a powdered wig balanced on her head and a sliver of nipple peeking above the décolleté scoop of her bodice.
And there was a lady in a sheer muslin gown of decades prior, from the heyday of the Regency, who had damped her skirts so they clung to her legs and outlined her shape from the waist downward, at the risk of catching a fever.
All three of them making offers he might take the liberty of inquiring about, once his business of the night was discharged.
Then the woman in the crimson gown stepped out from beside the statue where she’d been concealing herself, and Gabe saw nothing else.
It wasn’t what was on display, but the how.
She was the shapeliest creature he’d seen in his life, and the court gown, fashioned for a previous century, made her look regal, dainty, demure, and despotic, all at the same time.
She wore her mask and her hoops and her towering pile of curls as if she knew they were designed to devastate a man, and devastate she did.
The swish of her fan above the square shape of her bodice, with breasts pushed high by the stomacher, made him want to take her hands in his and hold them away from her body so he might inspect her properly.
The narrow waist set in the swelling curves of her skirt promised womanly curves ready and waiting for the press of a man’s body.
Even the small black silk patch on the side of her face made him want to touch her. Peel it off and see the full shape of her face. Run lips, then teeth, over that delicate, gleaming skin.
She turned her head, responding to something her companion said, and Gabe’s mouth went dry. The arch of her cheekbones and the proud slope of her neck. The way her hair curled at her nape in tiny sprigs, like spring flowers. Her red lips.
The bold jut of her collarbone, inviting the sweep of fingers across satin skin, then drawing the hand lower, lower. That red silk which, in the burn of the oil lamps, burnished her skin like antique gold.
Hell’s boots. He’d never been struck dumb by a woman. He usually held his tongue during intimate exchanges as a matter of preference; those were a transaction, not a social call. Chatter was not a skill he possessed, even when he was fully clothed.
This woman made him feel naked as a babe, as if he were a clothes dummy and a great hook had yanked his suit straight off, leaving him nothing but his raw form.
She was stepping toward him. Her eyes behind the mask swept over him, a flicker of lashes. She was saying something to her companion, and still moving. In a moment she would be past, and yet he could not speak.
So he simply stepped forward, blocking her progress, and stared down at her.
She stared back. He would have thought the moment frozen but for the slow swish of her fan and the way her lips parted, ever so slightly, as if she were preparing for a rebuke.
Or a kiss.
“I’ll leave you then, shall I?” said her companion in an amused tone.
Neither answered. The other woman—she had been in the reception line—shrugged and strolled away.
Gabe leaned forward, trying to discern the color of his siren’s eyes. The black silk mask shielded the upper half of her face, but he had never seen this woman before. He would know if he had.
His body tightened, and the air between them felt hot and dry, charged, the way the air did in Egypt before the khamsin winds blew down in the spring carrying the stinging dust of the desert.
He knew those winds, the way dust in the mouth could choke the lungs, the way walls of sand moved for hours, rearranging the landscape, leaving everything raked over and strange.
“Do you have a name for me, then?” she asked. Her voice was low and musical, but steady. There was nothing cautious or uncertain or self-conscious in her manner, as one might see in a younger girl. She was a woman in her prime, he would guess, accustomed to command. And to being obeyed.
An odd request. Was he supposed to know her costume? Would that mean something?
“The Marquis de Pompadour,” he guessed. “Mistress of Louis XV.” Stupid to add that last bit. Everyone knew who Madame de Pompadour was.
She arched a brow as black as his. Artificially darkened, perhaps, since her hair had been powdered, quite artfully, a deep cinnamon red. Glints of gold and crimson peeked from the auburn depths as the wicks in the oil lamps shivered and danced in the draughts of the room.
“No, of course not,” he said when she did not answer. His tone sounded foreign to his ears, as if he’d entered a second manhood and his voice had dropped a register again. Perhaps he’d never known what being a man meant until he met a real woman.
“And not Jeanne du Barry, a commoner’s daughter. You would be Diane de Poitiers. Her colors were black and white.” He ran his fingers along the ostrich feathers attached to her mask, skimming the black silk as he reached toward her.
She shivered. “Why a mistress? And why only to a French King?”
“Because the French Kings were known to choose only the most beautiful women,” he answered. “And because you could be no mere queen. You were made for pleasure and rule.”
What maggot had entered his head? He never spoke like this. He never bantered with a woman, never teased or flattered. But the tactic kept her standing before him, head slightly tilted as she listened.
“Yet you would take that rule away from me, would you not?” There was a note in her voice, low, hopeless, that pulled a loose thread in his heart, paining him.
“I? Never. I would see you on a throne, with followers about you on bended knee, and your enemies vanquished at your feet.”
He was being exceedingly foolish to talk this way. He couldn’t give her any of these things.
The most he had to offer any woman was his roughened hand and the title of duchess. Which was all she might be able to keep once Fenton succeeded at doing Gabe in and taking the title of duke for himself.
Her brows pulled together. Someone bumped him from behind, but he took no notice.
They stood alone in the swirling crowd, with the haze of burning oil thickening the room, music thrumming in his ears as the background to her voice, and some subtle scent rising from her gown and skin, complex, layered, deep.
She tilted her head to the side, and he wanted to run his mouth down the slope of her exposed neck. “Are you not one of my enemies?”
“Not I, Reinette. I will be your sword and shield.” And also her lover, if she allowed it. That first and foremost.
Her eyes narrowed suddenly. “Are you by any chance making your way to Strawberry Fair?”
He frowned again at her odd question. “No, I—” Oh, blast. “Yes,” he said through gritted teeth. “There’s a maid I am to meet along the way.”
She snapped her lips together. “One with ripe cherries and roses red, I presume?”
Blast and damn. “You’re her. She,” he corrected himself.
She huffed out a stream of air, and he could not take his eyes from those red lips. “And you’re him. He.”