Master of Love Page 6

“Nothing.” Her father’s old refrain had always sounded cheery when he’d said it; she’d been repeating it since his death as a grim incantation.

  Finally, Callista completed her nightly ritual of reading with Daphne in the girl’s room. Much begging on her sister’s part had won the concession that she was old enough to take turns reading aloud with Callista from the new and wonderfully scandalous Jane Eyre.

  She was yawning heavily when she at last made it to her bedchamber. She pulled an eiderdown around herself against the evening chill and sank into her chair to read the post Billy had left. Mr. Garforth’s packet she saved for last as she sighed over two creditors’ bills and a bank draft that would just barely cover them from one of her last remaining clients. The elderly gentleman had been a dear friend of her father; she suspected he ordered foreign books from her now simply out of pity, two a month, regular as clockwork. She cashed his drafts with just as regular a prick to her pride.

  Mr. Garforth’s language of updated rental increases, retail disclosure, and heretofore noted subclauses etched a deep frown in her brow. Although she was familiar with contracts and read the document carefully twice, she couldn’t decipher the dense legalese, with some of the subclauses notated merely “to be discussed.” Something was amiss. The unclarity of the document fretted her as much as the sense of a significant renegotiation to their land lease—she could afford neither trouble nor an increase in rent.

  A knock at the door ushered in Billy. “Are ye ready for yer bath, Miss H.?” Although strong for his age, he huffed from hefting the steaming buckets up three flights of stairs. “I’ve got yer water pipin’ hot, just as ye like it, and two more ready to bring up.”

  She put down the papers. Tomorrow, she’d ask the viscount’s coachman to stop in Arlington Street off Piccadilly at the business offices of Mr. Garforth, as it was only a few blocks away from Rexton House. The land agent’s clerk could arrange an appointment for the day after Mr. Garforth returned from the duke’s seat in Bedfordshire. It was all she could do for now.

  “Billy, you really don’t need to do this every night.” She pulled the shallow copper hip bath from the corner. “You must be tired after our day at Rexton House.” The lad found the idea of a nightly bath a truly dangerous fancy, but once he’d discovered how fond she was of the practice, there’d been no stopping him. If Miss H. wanted a bath, by crikey, he’d see she got one.

  “It’s no trouble, miss.” He poured, careful not to spill. “Ye should let me light the fire before I fetch the last buckets,” he said, casting a displeased eye toward the dark grate. “It’s bad enough to take a bath without doin’ it in the cold as well.”

  “The weather’s turned wonderfully warm, Billy.” She smiled at him brightly. “I think spring is definitely here. I shall be fine with just the rest of the hot water.”

  He shook his dark head, clearly thinking her crazy. “If ye say so, miss. I’ll be right back.”

  By the time she’d settled into the water—knees tucked to her chin, steam rising, and heat biting at her skin, bless that Billy’s heart—she felt the weariness of the day down to her very bones.

  Her evening sherry and bath were the sole indulgences left over from her old life. Most people washed up in the morning upon rising, but Callista had developed the habit in Paris of a nightly soak in a hot tub. Marie had laughed and called her la princesse, but it had become her one time to herself, her one time not to think and plan. Especially in the last year, when it seemed everything was slowly falling apart, it had become her private time to relax—for just a few minutes—and not worry about bills and debt and dwindling sales and the way shop owners looked at her when she tried to offer foreign- and rare-book sales and, worse, the way they and other men looked at her when they tried to buy what she wasn’t selling.

  Tonight, however, not even Billy’s hot water could chase away the nipping chorus of worried voices in her head. How in the world was she to pull off this library commission? The organizational task was daunting enough without the added torture of the luncheon she’d suffered through with the ladies Vaughnley and Barrington. She dreaded the prospect of the stories they might be circulating even now in the London ballrooms. And what of Lord Rexton? An image flashed through her mind, of him bent over the hand of some celebrated society beauty, grinning wickedly and saying, “You should see my little sparrow of a librarian, pecking away at the stacks of books!”

  She grimaced: Besmirched or belittled, take your pick.

  “Hold yourself gently,” her mother used to say. “You’re so serious, Callista, so hard on yourself.” But someone had to be serious in her family of impractical, romantic intellectuals, and the lot had seemed to fall on her. Her parents could while away the days reading and the evenings talking animatedly about books. She was the one who made the menu plans even then, and after her mother’s death, most of the other plans as well. Despite Marie’s loyal words, she knew she was no beauty, no vivacious conversationalist, no charming flirt. She was simply competent and organized and well-read.

  She shook herself mentally. So be it—she was who she was. Pretending or wishing otherwise was mere folly. And what these aristocrats thought of her was none of her concern.

  She sank lower into her cooling hip bath and screwed her eyes shut.

  She wasn’t getting out until the last of the heat was gone.

  Dom’s mood hadn’t improved by that evening, when he sat nursing a sherry in Anna’s front parlor, awaiting her entrance for their engagement at the Duchess of Worchester’s ball. Everyone assumed, he knew, that he and Anna were lovers. Tonight’s appearance at the first major event of the London social season was simply another in a string of performances designed to bolster that impression.

  The problem was he felt no sufficiently vital desire to make her his mistress in fact.

  The truth was his reputation as lover extraordinaire was a sham. He was a master of flirtation and innuendo, of charm and roguery, but that was all. He never took it further.

  Lady Martin had been his first lover, a rich widow in her thirties who’d seduced him at a weekend house party when he was barely fourteen. His voice had deepened and his muscled form had filled out early. When Lady Martin swooped down on him, he was already taller than his father. It was she who’d started the pet name “Lord Adonis,” spreading none-too-discreet stories about her young lover while she’d arranged rendezvous with him on and off for a couple of years. By the time his physique developed into what Lady Martin called his “full manly glory,” he was inundated with attention from debutantes, their mamas, other widows on the prowl, professional courtesans, and common streetwalkers. He’d turned them all down, at first very taken by the older lady’s interest and the sex act’s intense physical pleasure. He’d thought they’d marry when he came of age, but when he made Lady Martin his earnest proposal, she’d merely laughed in his face. By the end of their affair, the contrast of the sexual pleasure with her near-total indifference toward him as a person left a scar almost as deep as the cold contempt with which his father lashed him. And by then, the outward damage was done as well. His reputation was set throughout society. Everyone saw him as a young lothario. Everyone saw his golden face and physique. No one ever saw him.

  No one took him seriously, except as a lover.

  So that’s what he became.

  Not in reality, where the soullessness of sex without emotion and his status as trophy still made him shudder in distaste, but in what passed for reality among the ton: the gossip and rumor mills of the ballrooms and soirées that seemed the only place he was accepted.

  The role was easy enough to learn: smile, compliment, bow, dance, flirt. Cast a few smoldering glances and the deal was cinched: the Master of Love, his second title, was born. He allowed his name to be linked to an endless series of ladies eligible for dalliance, very few of whom seemed to mind—even more depressingly—when he took no steps to make them his lovers in fact. Apparently, even the illusionary appearance of being lover
to the illusionary Master of Love was enough for the ladies. Who he was under the mask, the secret identity he crafted and carefully buried, became more and more hidden.

  Despite this cost, he’d continued the strategy for years. When celibacy proved uncomfortable, he set up a discreet relationship with Jeanne-Claire, a merchant’s daughter from Marseilles who’d made her way to London via Paris. She’d taught him much about a woman’s pleasure, and they’d gotten along well. A year and a half ago, she’d returned home with his blessing to marry a childhood sweetheart who’d done well in shipping. With the dowry Dom provided, she was well launched into the French bourgeoisie.

  He’d been alone since then, though by reputation he was lover to Lady Barrington and dozens of others whose names he’d forgotten.

  Anna finally strolled into her parlor, breaking his morose reverie. “Rex, why ever did you bring that strange creature into your household? It’s bound to create a scandal.” She was pulling on her kid leather elbow gloves, dressed for the ball in a frothy gown of spring-green satin and lace tulle.

  He inclined his head in greeting and silent salute to her beauty. It was their matched blond looks, he knew, that accounted for the general opinion that they made the perfect golden couple. Like a pair of fine grays purchased for show in harness, they cut such a dashing swath that the ton simply assumed they belonged together as lovers, perhaps bent in due course on marriage. He’d thought as much himself, he supposed. When they’d first met several years ago, he’d found Anna to be intelligent and well traveled. When he’d discovered her in the reading spectacles she tried never to let anyone see, he’d thought it the most charming part of her. Her late husband had left the royalties from his travel memoirs on the “lands of the philosophers” to the Philosophical Society, and they’d used that excuse, as well as a distant cousin-by-marriage connection, to have her serve as his hostess whenever the society met at Rexton House. She presided at many of his other gatherings as well, when the ladies of his family weren’t in town. Indeed, she’d rather developed the habit of treating his mansion as her own.

  “Rex?” She tapped his black evening-jacketed chest smartly with her fan. “Whatever were you thinking?”

  “Perhaps that you’d help me ensure no scandal ensues?” He wasn’t sure where that tart remark came from. Anna’s wide-eyed recoil told him she was just as surprised.

  “You want me to condone and chaperone her presence in your household? Sir George may have the eccentricity to find his scheme charming, but I have no power to convince anyone else of that notion. Any attempt on my part to do so would only make me look complicit.” She turned away, chin high. “I think it’s quite badly done of him to put you two together.”

  Dom’s eyes narrowed at her critique of Uncle George. Eccentric the man might have been, but he’d been the only one ever to take seriously Dom’s love of learning as a boy. “Is the woman not allowed to earn a living?” It was the unanswered question from luncheon today, albeit one he couldn’t honestly claim to have worried over before on behalf of the gently bred but penniless ladies of London.

  “Not here like this,” Anna replied, “under the pretension she’s somehow one of us, the daughter of a peer.”

  He felt a chasm opening between him and Anna. Both their purposes were served by allowing polite society to believe them lovers. But with a sudden sense of conviction, he knew he would never take this woman to bed, nor marry her.

  “Come, let’s head to the ball,” he said, leading her out by the elbow. “Remember, the duchess requested we open the country dance as top couple. What was it she said? ‘Such a pretty pair you two make!’ We wouldn’t want to disappoint, now, would we?”

  Anna’s tight-lipped look told him he’d only partly succeeded at keeping the bitterness from his tone.

  Careful, old boy, the mask is slipping.

  You’d think after a lifetime, he’d have learned better.

  The next two weeks settled into a pattern that Callista, whose nerves were badly shredded by months of financial free fall, began almost to trust as an end to her problems.

  She’d resolved to ignore the issue of her reputation. While being in trade was beyond the pale for the peerage or upper gentry, there was no real dishonor in earning fees based on a specialized skill, such as that of a portrait painter or landscape designer or author—why, look at Sir Joshua Reynolds or Lord Byron! She’d simply frame her work in that manner: she accepted commissions in book acquisition and library organization, all quite respectable, really. The issue of being an unmarried woman in unchaperoned contact with gentlemen was a separate problem, but one without solution at the moment.

  To that end, she resolved to ignore Lord Rexton as well, as much as she could. Indeed, one morning, meeting him in his entry hall as he returned from a morning ride, she found with some alarm that she could look neither at his face—high with color and framed by tousled hair—nor, when she quickly glanced down, at his powerfully muscled thighs encased in tight breeches. Was nothing about this man short of perfection? Ignoring him seemed not only wise but necessary. He quite overwhelmed and dazzled the eyes.

  She simply had to hope all would be well enough if she stuck to the barest of professional book conversation in her dealings with Lord Adonis—Lord Rexton, she thought, quickly correcting herself—and refused to be drawn in by any of his teasing banter.

  As she watched his retreating back that morning of his ride, after she’d cut him almost rudely short in the hall, she tamped down the strangest wayward surge of disappointment at how quickly he seemed to fall in line.

  Every day of the week—except for Sunday and her half days off on Wednesday—Callista worked with the books. Knowing that so many of the volumes had passed through her father’s hands added a bittersweet tang to her task. But she couldn’t allow herself to tarry over sentiment. She set anxiously to work starting with an inventory and rough classification of the books on the temporary tables and shelves Graves had delivered, along with a big stack of blank card stock, foolscap paper, extra inkpots, and pen nibs.

  At Lord Rexton’s continued insistence, she took luncheon with him daily as well. It was always a grand, gourmet affair. “Dinners are so formal,” he said, shrugging, “but there’s no reason one shouldn’t eat well at midday.” It was unusual, and for anyone else it would have been disgracefully unfashionable, but he, of course, pulled it off as the height of style. Once, to her great consternation, they ate alone, without even Mr. Danvers, but most often there was a tableful of guests. Occasionally Lady Barrington was present, haughty and cutting without ever losing her veneer of politeness. Increasingly however, the viscount’s sister, Lady Yarborough, presided with him at the Rexton House table, watching Callista with shrewd but kind eyes. The guests were usually bookish sorts, always some members of the Philosophical Society and sometimes politicians or scientists or other professional men. Ladies came as well: the gentlemen’s wives and women who were portrait painters or social reformers, and even one who’d been a botanical explorer to the Orient. Callista sat, saying as little as possible and grateful for the luxury of eating so well, as it helped with the grocers’ bills back home. To her delight, she even received a commission from her only new customer in months: a request for a first edition of Robinson Crusoe for the twelfth birthday of Mr. Plumptre’s grandson.

  Callista was coming to see that Lord Rexton was not the entirely usual sort of viscount. He was a hard one to figure out: always the charming and near-scandalous rogue with the ladies and in the news rags Marie read her every evening, but sometimes almost shyly keen on books with her and his scholarly guests. She could tell from the household comings and goings that he kept much of the standard male aristocratic schedule: riding every morning in Hyde Park, sparring at fencing or boxing three times a week, the occasional parliamentary session, and out for dinner parties, the opera, and balls every evening. But he also disappeared each afternoon on a mysterious errand. And, despite his self-deprecating jokes, he seemed to do so
me serious writing in the mornings as well. When she neared his desk, newly installed in the library, to inquire about it, he quickly covered his papers and evaded her questions. Once, she came into the room and surprised him as he stood apparently engrossed in the latest issue of Philosophers’ Quarterly. With something like a guilty start, he put it down upon her entrance.

  Another time, he surprised her as she traced her fingertips over the spidery letters of her father’s signature on the frontispiece of a heavy Chaucer volume. The book must have been in her father’s own library before he sold it to Sir George. Rising tears pricked her nose before she snapped the cover shut with a thump loud enough to cover her sniff at his lordship’s entry. He’d looked at her sharply but made no comment.

  Later that afternoon, he came by with Graves bearing the coffee tray and gifted her with a beautiful seventeenth-century edition of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia. It was a duplicate from Sir George’s collection that Lord Rexton already held in his library. She would have refused the present, and of course should have, save for the bashful way he offered the book. He, supposedly the self-confident master of seduction, looked down at the heavily gilt-scrolled black leather cover and mumbled words to the effect that she was the expert but he thought the illustrated edition rather fine; he wondered whether she’d do him the honor of accepting this copy as a memento of her work. Ridiculous though it was, to refuse the gift seemed like refusing a child’s offering of a first painting.

  “I’ve enjoyed the Historia myself,” he added.

  “Really, my lord? You read Pliny in Latin?”

  “Well, yes,” he said rather defensively. “I have.” And then he stopped and looked at her, tight lipped and with the oddest reddening across those high slashing cheekbones. Surely he couldn’t be blushing?

  She suddenly became conscious of the heavy smoothness of Marie’s borrowed royal-blue day dress, the first time she’d worn silk in months. Her seamstress friend had finally won the argument about Callista’s wardrobe. The plain gray wool she’d been wearing every day seemed better suited both to her personality and the task. But she’d given in when Marie flung up her hands in the air and insisted in rapid French that she’d use up her last bolt of yellow silk on a new gown for Callista if her friend didn’t wear the blue.