Notorious Pleasures

“I hope so too,” Hero said in a rush. How she longed to confess all her doubts and worries! But Lady Mandeville would no longer look at her quite so kindly if she knew how Hero had deceived her son. “Thank you.”

Lady Mandeville gave one last tug to her gloves. “Good, my dear. I’m glad. Now, don’t keep Thomas waiting too long. I know he expects to take you driving this afternoon.” So saying, the lady bid her farewell and left.

Hero donned a pretty green jacket with Wesley’s help.

Wesley stood back to admire her work and nodded, satisfied. “My Lord Mandeville will be quite taken with you today, my lady.”

Hero smiled slightly. “Thank you, Wesley.”

She descended the stairs and found Mandeville already waiting for her in the sitting room.

“My dear,” he said as she entered. “Your beauty puts the sun to shame.”

She curtsied. “Thank you, my lord.”

“And how are the wedding plans progressing?” he asked as he guided her from the sitting room and down the front steps. “I hear the dress is nearly finished.”

“Yes, only a few more fittings.” Hero glanced at Mandeville curiously. This might be the most personal interest he’d ever shown in her. “Your mother told you before she left?”

He nodded and he helped her into his open carriage. “My mother loves a wedding. You should’ve seen the flurry she was in when Caroline was married. I think her only disappointment now is that a son does not require a trousseau.”

Hero glanced at her hands folded in her lap and hid a smile at the thought of Mandeville being outfitted in new stockings and chemises. “I quite like your mother. She’s been a great help with the wedding plans.”

“I am happy to hear it.” He concentrated on the ribbons for a moment, guiding his lovely matched bays into the crowded London street.

Hero tilted her face up surreptitiously. The sun was out today, a welcome last stand of autumn. The London traffic ebbed and flowed around the carriage in a giant stream. A heavy miller’s cart trudged along ahead of them, and sedan chairmen deftly wove in and out of slower pedestrians, their passengers jogging along in upright boxes. A few soldiers on horses clattered by, ignoring the shouted insults of a pair of butcher’s boys who’d been splattered by the horses’ hooves. A single tattered woman bawled a song by the side of the road, her two children at her feet with hands outstretched.

“She likes you, you know,” Mandeville said.

“Your mother?”

“Yes.” He slapped the reins as the carriage cleared the miller’s cart, and the horses stepped into a trot. “She has a dowager house, naturally, but I find it’s easier if the two of you get along.”

“Of course,” Hero murmured. She straightened the edge of her glove. “Did she like your first wife?”

Mandeville glanced at her warily. “You mean Anne?”

Was it such an odd question? “Yes.”

He shrugged, returning his gaze to the horses. “Mother manages to get along with nearly everyone, it seems. She never showed any outward dislike or disapproval.”

“Did she show any approval, though?”

“No.”

She watched him for a moment as he handled the reins with expert ease. He was a private man, she knew, but in only weeks they would be man and wife. “Did you love her?”

He flinched as if she’d said something obscene. “My dear…”

“I know it’s none of my business,” she said softly. “But you never speak of her to me. I just would like to know.”

“I see.” He was silent a moment, a slight frown between his eyebrows. “Then I shall endeavor to assuage your curiosity. I was… fond of Anne and quite sad when she died, but I hold no disappointed love for her. You need have no worries there.”

She nodded. “And Reading?”

“What about him?”

“I’m afraid I’ve heard the rumors,” Hero said carefully. She remembered Reading’s own reply on the matter when she pressed him about whether he’d seduced his brother’s wife. No, God, no. “Do you truly believe your brother could’ve betrayed you so?”

“I don’t have to believe,” he said very drily. “Anne herself told me.”

*      *      *

THOMAS WATCHED HIS fiancée’s delicately curved eyebrows arch in surprise and felt irritation crawl under his skin. What had she thought? That he’d harbored some insane suspicion without any evidence?

And why the hell was she quizzing him anyway?

He faced forward again, guiding the bays around a shepherd with a herd of sheep milling in the middle of the road. They were nearing Hyde Park, and he longed for the open air. Wished he could give the bays their heads and let them run wildly down the lane.

Hardly a fitting activity for a marquess.

“I’m sorry,” Lady Hero murmured beside him, quietly contrite.

Well, even the most perfect of women became emotional once in a while. They could hardly help it, made the way they were. Anne had been a mercurial creature. Lavinia was passionate, but more controlled. In comparison to them, Hero was a model of restraint, really.

He sighed. “It was a long time ago in any case. I cannot ever forgive Griffin, but I can certainly try and lay the matter aside and go on. As I’ve said, you needn’t worry about what happened in my marriage to Anne. It’s in the past.”

For a moment he tried to remember what Anne had looked like that terrible night. She’d been hysterical, weeping as she tried to push her poor, dead babe from her body. At one time he’d thought the sights and sounds of that night would be engraved in his nightmares for the rest of his life. But now all he could remember was the still, gray body of the baby, its features curiously flattened, and the thought that all of the blood and hysteria hadn’t mattered anyway. The child had been a girl.

A tiny, dead girl.

“I see,” Lady Hero said beside him.

Thank God the gates of the park were within sight. He hated thoughts like these, useless and dispiriting. Ones that challenged his authority and his place in the universe: A marquess should not have to hear the dying confession of infidelity from his wife. Should not have to see the dead body of his baby girl.

“We won’t discuss this again,” he said. “Now that you’ve had your questions answered.”

She didn’t say anything, but then she didn’t have to. Naturally she would acquiesce to his wishes. It occurred to him that Lavinia would’ve kept arguing the point. Odd thought—and hardly helpful. He endeavored to put it from his mind.

The park was crowded today, the fine weather drawing out all walks of society. He guided the bays into the slowly moving line of carriages and horses revolving about one end of Hyde Park.

“I saw Wakefield yesterday,” he commented.

“Did you?” Her voice seemed a little cool, but then she was probably distracted by the passing parade.

“Indeed. He tells me that there is a possibility that he soon will have a titled gin distiller in his grasp.”

She stiffened beside him. Many women found political talk dreary, but he’d thought her more tolerant than most. After all, she was sister to one of the foremost parliamentarians of the day. And of course she knew of his own political ambitions.

“Do you know who?” she asked, calming his sudden worry.

“He hasn’t said. Most likely keeping the matter under his hat until he’s certain. Your brother is a dark horse. Ah, there’s Fergus.” Thomas nodded to Lord Fergus sitting with his rather plain-faced wife. Behind them sat their two daughters, also, alas, plain-faced. “He’s in the naval department,” he murmured sotto voce as he pulled the bays alongside the Fergus carriage.

And then he was proud, for Lady Hero graciously nodded at the introduction of the ladies and then complimented Lady Fergus on her bonnet, prompting the lady’s sallow complexion to turn pink. The two girls leaned slightly forward, and all four were soon in animated discussion.

“A good match, Mandeville,” Fergus rumbled after they’d discussed the latest Lords scandal. “You’re a lucky man.”

“Indeed, indeed,” Thomas murmured.

His recent ridiculous doubts fled. Lady Hero was above all a calm and demure creature, not given to the type of awful drama Anne often acted out.

Fergus nattered on for another ten minutes—the man was prone to be didactic—and then they made their farewells.

Thomas took up the reins again. “I hope you didn’t find talking to Lady Fergus and her daughters too boring.”

“Not at all,” Lady Hero replied. “They were quite nice. Besides, I know how important these kinds of little meetings are for you and your career, Mandeville. I want to do everything I can to aid you.”

He smiled. “I keep forgetting that your perception rivals your beauty, my lady. I am indeed a lucky man.”

“You flatter me.”

“Don’t all ladies wish to be flattered?”

She didn’t answer and he glanced her way. Lady Hero’s face was in profile as she looked fixedly to the side. He followed her gaze and felt as if he’d been struck in the belly.

Lavinia Tate was two carriages over, laughing up into the face of that Samuel fellow who’d escorted her to Harte’s Folly. She wore a quilted jacket the color of spring poppies, and the sunlight glinted off her damnably bright red hair. If any man in Hyde Park hadn’t noticed her yet, it was because he was dead.

Or a fool.

“Who is she to you?” Lady Hero asked quietly.

“No one,” Thomas said through stiff lips.

“Yet you stare at her as if she’s someone very important indeed.”

“What?” He tore his eyes from the sight of Lavinia and looked at his fiancée, her face too pale, her hair merely a tasteful, natural shade of light copper. She was a watercolor next to Lavinia’s vivid oil. “She’s… someone I once knew.”

“You no longer know her?” Lady Hero tilted her head in gentle inquiry.

Lavinia’s laugh floated on the autumn breeze.

Thomas wanted suddenly to shout at Lady Hero, to make that gentle expression fall from her face, to shake her until she quit her questions and her perceptive looks, and then he wanted to jump from the carriage and plant a facer in that stupid young buck with Lavinia.

But he did none of that, of course. Gentlemen of his rank never acted in such a way. Instead, he merely urged the horses on, waiting interminably to pass Lavinia’s carriage.

“She’s in my past,” he said through cold lips. “I met her when I was rather down, I’m afraid.”

He remembered when he was the man who she laughed up at, the way it had made his chest swell. And he remembered the sight of her in the morning light, so carnal, so wise. He’d been able to see every single line in her face, the slight sag to her breasts, and strangely it hadn’t made a whit of difference. She’d been the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

Would ever see.

He cleared his throat. “That’s in the past now. We’ll not talk of it.”

She sighed beside him, the sound sad and somehow lonely. “Perhaps you’re right. It’s best to put aside what might have come before. Our future together should be what we focus on.”

She laid a gloved hand on his elbow, slim and comfortable. “We’ll make an admirable pair, you and I, Thomas.”

He was able to summon a smile to give her. “Yes. Yes, we will.”

And then they were finally past Lavinia Tate.

WESLEY WAS PUTTING the finishing touches on Hero’s toilet the next morning when Phoebe burst in the room.

“You’ll never guess!”