“Very well,” she said, pushing her hair behind her shoulders. “I really must get back now, Thorn. Adelaide will be wondering where I am.”
Looking at her, Thorn suddenly understood what could lead a man to break all the rules of civility in order to bind a woman to him. Put India’s intelligence and passion together with her shapeliness, her mouth, her laugh, even that beauty mark . . . she was enough to drive a man to madness.
“You must tell me the moment that Vander proposes,” he said.
She frowned. “Are you saying I need your blessing?”
“We must not kiss after you are promised to another.”
“You’re implying . . .”
He grinned at her, Lala wasn’t his yet, and India wasn’t Vander’s yet. So he kissed her.
But something still bothered him. “You were not walking easily earlier today,” he said, tracing her lower lip with his finger.
India’s eyes had a desirous look that made him long to push her backward and simply thrust into her. Not that he would, but he wanted to.
Oh God, did he want to.
“I didn’t what?”
“When you walked around the drawing room with Vander . . . your movement was rather stiff.”
The dazed expression in her eyes disappeared; she straightened and scowled at him. But her lip was swollen from his kisses, and her frown just made him harder, hungrier. Still . . . he had to know.
“You walked as if you had been a virgin last night,” he said flatly.
It was one thing if Lady Xenobia India was a loose woman, practiced in the arts of shaking the sheets, taking her pleasure where she would. He would never fault a woman for that, any more than he would fault himself.
But if he had seduced a virgin . . . Actually, there was something oddly relieving about the thought. He’d have to marry her. They would fight all the time. They’d probably make each other miserable. But he would have no other choice.
“India?” It came out like a command, though he had meant it only as a question.
She picked up a heavy fall of silky hair and pushed it behind one shoulder. “I fail to see why I should share the history of my intimacies with you. As I told you, I was not a virgin.”
He watched her carefully. “I don’t know if I believe you.”
She jumped to her feet. She looked outraged, like Juno fighting with Jupiter. This could be his life. He couldn’t help himself, and grinned at her, which just made her angrier.
“You are insisting that I say this aloud again? Then I will. You were not the first.”
Well, that was definite. Thorn was well aware that his pang of disappointment was absurd. He had forced her to admit something that no lady would wish to announce. He was an oaf, a thoughtless, mannerless oaf.
“I’m an idiot,” he admitted. “I thought you were walking stiffly.”
She gave him one last furious glance and turned on her heel. “I shall return to the house in the pony cart, and you can find your own way back, Mr. Dautry.” With that, she was gone.
Thorn climbed the stairs and entered the nursery. Rose was curled on her side, arms around Antigone, all that duckling hair of hers spread over the covers. He leaned down and kissed her good-night.
Instead of returning to the main house, he walked to the gatehouse, to the bedchamber where he’d bedded India the night before.
He stripped to the skin, because that’s the way he always slept, and slipped naked between sheets that still had the faintest scent of India. She had called her perfume “moonflower.” He’d never heard of it.
They probably didn’t have moonflowers in London; certainly there were no flowers down by the Thames. He lay awake, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling for a long time.
Perhaps it was time to put the Thames behind him. He was tired of measuring his life by whether a mudlark would have known what a moonflower was. Who cared? At the heart of it, the really important point was that India smelled like a woman beneath that delicate trace of flower.
Not just any woman, either: India. Spicy, sweet, bold, desirous.
He’d never had a woman like her before. Even thinking of the way she moaned, low in her throat, made him harden to the point of pain.
Yet his life was planned. There was no space for a woman who made him feel unmoored. He had to shovel all this feeling back into a hole in the ground and bury it.
It wasn’t healthy. Some madness was making him imagine, over and over, the journey from the gatehouse to the main house. A quiet trip up the stairs, a left turn, and straight to India’s bedchamber.
She slept deeply, and she wouldn’t wake when he entered the room. Not until he drew back the covers and slid into the bed, naked, ready, his hands slipping beneath her nightdress. Even the thought of touching her limbs made his cock throb.
And that slapped him back to reality. Had he lost his mind? One woman and one night, and he forgot reason and logic? He wasn’t a gentleman, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t have an obligation to Lala.
He did.
Plus India was exactly what Vander wanted. They would have a marriage like that between his father and Eleanor. Exactly what Vander had talked of. Their children would have India’s hair.
He and Lala . . . well, they wouldn’t. She wasn’t a simpleton, the way everyone in the ton thought, but she wasn’t India, either. They would have children as well.
It was unfortunate that the thought of babies with Lala’s timid expression, even if they had her dazzling beauty, made him feel slightly queasy, but that was the truth of it. He would be kind to his wife, and she would follow him about the way a duckling follows its mother, quiet, docile, obedient . . . sweet and fluffy.
Thorn reared up, punched his pillow violently, and lay back down. No more kissing India, touching India, making love to India . . .
That was for Vander now.
Chapter Twenty-four
The next day India didn’t see Thorn until evening. She spent a less-than-wonderful morning talking to Lala and her mother, who had come downstairs for a few hours before retreating back to her bed. And in the afternoon she helped Rose create an elaborate schoolroom from paper, complete with a bookshelf and fireplace.
“Where on earth have you been?” she asked, as Thorn came into the drawing room before supper.
“The factory. Look at this, India.” He pulled something from his pocket and showed her a queer-looking string that seemed to form a closed circle, without a knot or seam.
“What is it?”
“It’s your band.”
“What?”
“The band you wanted. Made of rubber. We were able to solve the problem once we made it small, which I never considered.” He gave her a smile so glowing that India’s heart actually thumped.
She took the band and stretched it. “This is brilliant,” she said, muttering because she was thinking of all the ways she could use it. “Can you make me more? I’d like one about half this size, and one twice as large too.”
He started laughing, which caught the attention of the whole party. They all came over and stood around, admiring the band.
Lala was particularly enthralled. Her eyes became very bright, and she came up with a plan to put the ear trumpet Dr. Hatfield used to listen to people’s chests on a band around his neck. “He kept putting it down,” she told everyone, “and some houses are not as clean as they might be.”