All or Nothing, page 3
Miss da Silva made another restless gesture with one beautiful hand, her ring catching the light. Suddenly he remembered how that flash had made him look away from the deal last night. She and Henney between them had card-sharped him!
It was a crime and he should be appalled, but he wasn’t particularly. Instead he thought, If only I could somehow do the same to Clement...
Maybe he could.
“Let’s make a new deal,” he suggested. Clement won’t be happy. His stomach churned a little, but he ignored it. “You come with me to my house party and pretend to be my mistress.”
She blinked. “You can bring a mistress with you to a house party?”
“It’s...” He sighed. “It’s not a respectable house party. I imagine there’ll be a lot of...goings-on. I’m there to work, but I know they’ll try to drag me into things. And I really just want to get my job done. So you pretend to be my mistress and give me an excuse to leave a room whenever I like, and you can be assured of good food, excellent wine, and a feather bed for two weeks.” He started to smile. This would work brilliantly.
Her mouth twisted, considering. “Are you sure you only want me to pretend?” she said rather plaintively.
No. “Yes,” he said firmly.
She sighed. “Are your friends amusing?”
No, he almost said, but Clement was very amusing, and while Simon usually disliked his other friends, they were probably her kind of people. “Yes.”
“It’s a bargain, then.” She held out her bare hand. Simon shook it, wishing passionately that he wasn’t wearing gloves. Maybe this wasn’t as good an idea as it had seemed half a minute ago.
Too late now.
“So what are the rules?” Miss da Silva asked. “When we’re in company, can I kiss you or hang on you to shore up our pretense? Or should I keep my distance?”
“Let me think about it a moment.” Simon’s voice emerged about an octave higher than usual.
She sat beside him in a rented post chaise, wearing a sea of white muslin dotted with tiny whorls of spangles and hemmed with more glittering greenery. She had also been sporting a striped redingote and an enormous straw hat in a style Simon’s mother had dismissed at the time as “Puritans at the seaside,” but despite the open windows it was so hot in the chaise that she’d given up and exposed her muslin and her carefully curled hair to the dust. She looked playful and seductive, and she spoke so matter-of-factly. Simon wanted her to kiss and hang on him. In company and out. She could start by sitting in his lap right now.
He was conscious that he himself had spent rather a long time in front of the mirror this morning. He’d tied his cravat in one of the fancy knots he hadn’t bothered with in ages. He and Clement used to practice them for hours, to the despair of their laundress.
Hopefully Clement wouldn’t think Simon had chosen the cravat for him. The knot had an unfortunately sensual name, he remembered suddenly.
But he was crawlingly conscious that he had partly dressed for Clement. Oh, he wanted nothing more than for Clement not to desire him anymore. It would make everything so much easier, not least for Clement himself, and yet...the idea of Clement thinking him unattractive made him a little queasy. As if he would be unattractive, if Clement thought so.
And Clement would know. He would look at Simon and he would know.
Shoring up their pretense was an excellent idea. “One or two kisses in the first few days should suffice,” he said. “You may hang on me as much as you like.”
Miss da Silva’s smiling face caught the sun from the carriage window. “And what name shall I call you?”
He had somehow, even in his darkest imaginings, failed to comprehend how dangerously tempting this charade would be. “Simon.”
“And you must call me Maggie.”
He couldn’t help smiling back. “I’d like that.”
“And...” She traced one of the spangled curlicues on her gown with her finger. “When we’re alone. Shall I keep my distance then?”
He looked away, out the front window, but as that placed the well-developed arse of the postilion squarely in his view, it did less to calm him than he’d hoped. “I’d appreciate it if you would.”
“Why? I’m not trying to talk you into changing your mind, I promise. But I don’t understand. I like you, and I think—I think you like me, and it isn’t as if I’m asking you to marry me. Only for us to enjoy each other’s company for a couple of weeks.” There was a slight nervous vibrato in her voice. He was so flattered that she cared enough to be nervous, and he wanted to make her happy, and God knew he wanted to enjoy her company. He almost gave in.
“I’m five-and-twenty,” he said slowly. “I’m not seeking to enjoy myself. I’m trying to be sensible and earn a living. I’m making a go of things as an architect.”
“Don’t you design follies?”
Why couldn’t anyone believe he was really working? Maybe because your last commission was four months ago, and after renting this carriage you have less than twenty pounds to your name, a voice suggested. “I didn’t say I was a Quaker!” he snapped. “And there’s nothing really foolish about follies. They’re ornamental buildings, that’s all. Times are difficult, and they provide work for idle men. I always encourage my clients to use local stone, so there’s quarrying, hauling, and building all to enrich the district.”
Her smile was skeptical.
“Beauty has its place too, and joy. What’s the purpose of that dress, when a sack would do as well?”
The contrary woman looked pleased. “You like my dress.”
“Of course I like your dress. And I like you, too,” he admitted. “But I do, actually, want to find someone who’ll ask me to marry them.” That wasn’t entirely true, since he was as likely to find himself wishing to spend his life with a man as with a woman. “Settle down with, anyway. Not someone to drink and play cards with and dress outrageously and shock people for the sake of it and come into my room in the middle of the night because you ate too much opium, sobbing and demanding I tell you I love you over and over again for five hours when we have exams the next day!”
Maggie’s eyes were lovely green saucers.
Simon could not quite manage to regret his reckless honesty. One didn’t reveal such a thing by accident, not when one had always had to be careful. He did want to be honest with her. Maybe not even with her. Maybe this carriage, hurtling across England, was a small square of liberty between two places where he had to be careful, and he wanted to enjoy it to the fullest. “I’ve done that,” he said, feeling tired and strangely peaceful. “You seem to think I’m the height of respectability, but my name was linked with a wild crowd at school. Some of the people we’re going to see, in fact. And I’m through with it.”
He just wished he’d managed to find a new crowd to replace them.
She leaned thoughtfully against the squabs. “I’m seven-and-twenty, you know. Older than you. I’ve been done with that kind of Cheltenham tragedy for a long time now. I only mention it because I resent your implication that that’s how I live. Of course I’ll keep my distance, since you wish it.”
“Thank you.” He hesitated. “Please be discreet. I suppose it’s obvious I wasn’t talking about a woman, just now.” He was trying to earn his living now, and one never knew whom it would matter to.
“My lips are sealed,” she said at once. “Don’t all English gentlemen do that at school, though? There aren’t any women, after all.”
Simon’s nerves jangled. “I suppose.” He hadn’t ruled out continuing to do it after school. He liked it just as well as the other. That was the difference.
She nodded. “Thank you for trusting me.”
I don’t, he thought, but he didn’t say it.
“I’m sorry you and he couldn’t sort things out. Love should be easier than it is.”
“We could never have sorted things out. We were too different.” Unexpectedly, his eyes stung. He hadn’t felt different from Clement at the time. They’d met mounting a production of Antony and Cleopatra at Eton. Simon had managed the scenery, and Clement, of course, had been Cleopatra. Simon had been moved to tears at every rehearsal of the death scene, and Clement had admired his scenery, and that had been that. Like two peas in a pod, his mother had said when he brought Clement home.
If he saw that scenery now, he’d cringe at its lack of historical authenticity. But he couldn’t shake the belief that thirteen-year-old Clement would make him cry all over again with As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle—O Antony!
“Do you want children?” she asked, tracing spangles again, and then gave a frustrated jerk of her head. “I’m sorry, that was awfully rude. I didn’t ask because of—I meant because of what you said about settling down. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Yes. I think it would be nice.” He’d daydreamed about it more than he’d care to admit, actually. One could always foster someone else’s child, if one’s own was not available. “Do you?” he asked, since he thought when she said, I wasn’t thinking, she had meant, I was thinking of myself.
“Yes,” she said quietly.
“Does Henney know that?”
She shook her head. “I don’t...can you be discreet?”
He leaned forward, thrilled to know something about her that Henney didn’t, despite his resolve to keep his distance. “I’m a closet lock and key of villainous secrets.”
“I don’t want... No, I’m sorry, I can’t tell you.”
“That’s unsportsmanlike of you.”
“You’ll think it’s a criticism of Meyer. And you already don’t like him, and it isn’t one.”
“You don’t want to have children with him,” he guessed.
“He doesn’t want to have children with me either,” she insisted. “It isn’t anything wrong with him! We’re only... I don’t know. We aren’t right for each other that way. We couldn’t raise a child together. We’d quarrel over everything.”
Simon sympathized. He himself had always suspected that Clement would be a fair-weather kind of guardian. Simon would have always had to deal with tears and mete out punishment.
She sighed. “It’s my mother’s fondest dream that I marry him, and he’ll go back to clerking for his uncle, and we’ll have nice lodgings in the City and eight children.”
“Does she have any reason to think this might come to pass?”
“He offered once.” She gave a rueful half-smile. “I thought I might be increasing. And he was very kind about it! But he was also very relieved when my courses came. My mother, on the other hand, was very disappointed.”
That was one terror Simon had been spared by confining his youthful adventures mostly to boys. “How did you feel?”
“I was relieved and disappointed.” She looked determinedly out the window, seeming to regret having let the conversation become so personal. “And do you want to tell them all the truth, about how we met, and why I’m here? Not the whole truth, I mean, but...the faro game?”
“It would be pointless to lie. There were a lot of people at the club that night. No one will think anything of it, I assure you.”
She nodded briskly. “One last question. You said it’s to be a rather scandalous party. If somebody else invites me to his bed, do you care how I answer him? Will it affect your standing with your friends?”
Was she really asking his permission to bed his friends? Couldn’t she go two weeks without fucking somebody? He’d gone most of a year now with no noticeable ill effects. However, it was none of his affair and he certainly had no right to demand fidelity.
“You may do as you please in the daytime. But I’d appreciate it if you would spend the nights with me. And...if anyone troubles you, or importunes you more than you’d like, you must tell me at once, and I’ll deal with it.”
She didn’t laugh, as he’d been half-afraid she would. “Thank you. Can you think of anything else we ought to discuss?”
He couldn’t, and she gave her attention to the scenery, evidently setting herself to be cheerful. “I haven’t spent much time in the country. Well, I suppose I live in Marylebone now. I grew up in Lisbon and the East End, so that nearly qualifies as rural. Meyer and I have toured the grand houses in Richmond and Hounslow a few times, too. But you can’t even see a house from here. Living in the middle of nowhere must be terribly dull after a while, but it’s so pretty.” She knelt on the seat to stick her head out the side window, leaning dangerously farther and farther out. Alarmed, Simon steadied her. Her hips felt more solid than he’d expected inside all those petticoats, wide and curving...
“Thanks,” she shouted.
When the postilion turned round to see what the noise was about, she gave him a friendly wave, and he grinned at her. What was it like to be so easy with people?
She popped back inside the carriage. “Just a moment, I want to take my hair down.” Honey-and-walnut waves did not precisely tumble over her breasts—they just brushed the upper curve of her bosom and, like all hair just let down, hung in frizzing hanks, rather. Simon was overcome anyway.
She dove back out the window. “Hold me tight, I’m going to let go!”
He seized her round the waist, and she threw her arms wide, shrieking with delight as her hair whipped about her face. “Faster!” she urged the postilion, who bent low over his horse and obliged her.
Which left Simon the only person not having fun. He supposed there was nothing to stop him pulling her back inside and taking a turn himself, except that it was dangerous and stupid and he wouldn’t trust her not to drop him.
He was so tired of being sensible and not enjoying himself, and somehow ending up doing stupid things anyway.
Clement bounded down the Throckmorton steps and kissed Simon full on the mouth. Simon tensed at the unexpectedness of it. But of course: Clement had seen Maggie dutifully hanging on Simon’s arm and wanted to assert himself.
“Pardon me, I’m terribly old-fashioned,” he said with a wave in Simon’s direction. “Did you know in our grandfathers’ time it was considered positively French to kiss on the cheek?” He looked very handsome in his mourning, romantically pale and only a little wilted in the summer heat.
Simon felt a pang of loss, that the scent of Clement’s soap and the familiar press of his lips—chapped a little from the sun—could produce such overwhelming annoyance.
Maggie, though, gave every appearance of being charmed. “I didn’t know that! I enjoy an antique flourish myself, as you can see.” Her curtsey showed off her billowing skirts.
“Miss da Silva, may I present Mr.—I mean, the Viscount Throckmorton.”
“A pleasure, Lord Throckmorton.”
Clement, obviously noting the dust on her glove, did not take old-fashioned manners farther than a kiss in the air several inches above it. “Good Lord, Simon, I thought you were taking a closed carriage.”
“May I speak to you a moment, Throckmorton?”
“Of course, Radcliffe-Gould.” Clement drew him happily into a corner of the hall. His eyes ran up and down Simon, lingering on that damn cravat knot. Simon flushed. “I’m so glad you could come down. I had them bring up your favorite wines for dinner, the 1805 Verdelho and—”
Simon almost gave up. Clement was in a good mood, and he took everything so hard that it always felt cruel to confront him. I’m glad I could come down too, he could say.
But in the end, he couldn’t say it. “What if I hadn’t told her?”
“Told her what?”
“You know what.” For a long, silent moment he thought Clement might really pretend not to know. If he did, the pressure in Simon’s head might actually levitate his hat.
“But you did tell her, evidently, so there’s no harm done.”
He tried to say it gently. “I didn’t tell her about you, because I thought you might like some choice in the matter.”
The happiness drained out of Clement’s face. His mouth shrank in on itself, almost disappearing.
Simon’s stomach churned. “Clement, please don’t sulk.”
“I just got carried away. I was happy to see you.”
“No you weren’t.” You were jealous. But he would deny that too, and Simon would feel so angry, and Clement would be hurt, and what was the point? He was stuck here until he could design a folly. He should let it roll off him, like water from a duck’s back. Why couldn’t he ever do that? Instead, Clement’s sadness clung to his skin and dug balefully in.
“Are you even happy to see me anymore?” Clement asked in a small voice, fidgeting with one cuff.
He had been. That was the worst of it. Even now part of Simon wanted to set all this nonsense aside and talk about the book he was reading, and the sheet music he’d bought, and the funny thing the girl at the shop said that morning.
And if he did, Clement would think it meant something it didn’t. “Of course I am,” he said, feeling as if the words were drawn out with pincers. “I’m always happy to see you. You know that.”
The moment hung in the air as Clement decided whether to push it. Then he smiled, relaxing. “I do, I’m sorry, I’m just being silly and thin-skinned. Now tell me all about Miss da Silva. She’s too pretty and Continental. How did you meet her?”
“I won her in a game of faro, actually.” Simon did his best not to preen hypocritically about it, even when Clement whistled.
Simon had already given a great deal of thought to the fact that he and Maggie would be sharing a room. He had imagined the darkness, and the sound of her breathing, and how he would have to stay turned resolutely on his side to keep from touching her.
He’d imagined the bed so vividly he’d forgotten about dressing and undressing. Now here she was in shift and stays and a clean sprigged petticoat, fussing over her wardrobe like a mother hen with her chicks. She’d brought two enormous trunks of clothes with her, insisting they were necessary both for the charade and to prevent them from being stolen in her absence. “I’m sorry, I know I’m disgustingly particular,” she told the maid who’d come up with the trunks. “But all these petticoats have got to be hung up, and not pressed all together either.” Maggie darted a ruthless smile at Simon. “If you’ve got to squash something, squash his things.”
