Page 27 of When the Marquess Needed Me (The Rake Chronicles #4)

Chapter Twenty-Five

I n the end, Beatrice needn’t have worried. When they entered the opulent townhome of the Duke of Edington, they were instantly shown into the drawing room, where they found the other two couples. They were all seated comfortably—Lady Tremberley, or Henrietta as Leith called her, was even on the floor, in her stocking feet, eating strawberries from a dish.

While the others weren’t quite so dishabille , they had an air of comfort that was unmistakable. Beatrice exhaled when she realized that Leith had not exaggerated. She was not going to be expected to observe the niceties of a society that she did not understand.

“Oh, wonderful, you’re here,” their hostess said, her kind blue-black eyes glimmering with excitement. “Miss Salisbury, we are so delighted to meet you. Come, sit with me and Henrietta and talk a while. Leith, leave us ladies be.”

Leith cast a wary eye at Henrietta.

“I will be listening,” Leith warned. “So you two must behave yourself.”

“Leith, have I ever wronged you?”

Beatrice reflected, that with her silvery-blond hair, dark eyes, and intelligent, sweet countenance, Lady Edington looked like a creature from a different world. She trusted her implicitly.

“It’s not you I worry about, Catherine, as you well know.”

Catherine shook her head. “You have nothing to fear from any one here. Now go see John and Trem.”

“Scream if this coven of two become vicious,” Leith said to her, real concern lighting up his eyes.

She shook her head. “I am sure I will be very safe.”

“You should worry about yourself,” Catherine interjected. “The gentlemen are full of questions for you .”

Leith sighed and glanced over to where the duke and the viscount were seated.

“Very well.”

It was amazing, Beatrice thought, how bored he could sound. He fairly drawled out his answer. He was once more now the aristocrat he had been in Lord Montaigne’s drawing room that first day. With her, when they were alone, he was so different.

When Leith strode over to his friends, Beatrice turned to the duchess. “I so appreciate your kindness in inviting me.”

“Oh, it is I who should be thanking you. We haven’t met a…paramour of Leith’s since—well, in fact, as we were just discussing… Neither of us think that we have ever met a woman he has favored.”

She gestured towards a sofa and Beatrice followed her. Beatrice had to admire how easily the duchess carried off the difficulty of her scandalous relationship to Leith.

On the sofa, she sat next to the duchess, who proceeded to offer her refreshment of all kinds. She accepted a glass of wine and some teacake but was too on edge to ingest much of either.

Lady Tremberley inquired kindly after her family and whether she had been enjoying her stay in Leith’s town house in St. James’s. Then the duchess asked a few clarifying questions about where her family was from in Somerset. Beatrice understood that Lady Edington had an academic interest in folklore and her questions seemed to tilt in that direction. But she did not get far before she was interrupted.

“I am sorry, Catherine,” said Lady Tremberley, her pretty face alight with mischief. “But I cannot abide you talking of Somerset when I am burning with questions of a different nature.”

“Henrietta!” Catherine said, in a tone that Beatrice herself would have used with Sally. “We are not to plague Miss Salisbury with our questions. And you wouldn’t want to upset Leith.”

“Speak for yourself. I am too curious to be contained.” She turned to Beatrice. “Miss Salisbury, we have never met one of Leith’s mistresses. He positively refuses to introduce us, no matter how much we beg. And now you’re here.”

“I am here,” she agreed, unsure of where this line of questioning was going.

“And so I must know, what is he like? Is he different with you than he is with us?”

“Well, I suppose that depends on how he is with you.”

“Oh,” Henrietta said casually. “Well, I’ve known him all my life—I’m John’s sister, if you didn’t know—and so I’ve known him as long as I can remember. And he’s always been the most prig—”

“Reserved, she means,” Catherine interrupted, giving Henrietta a gaze full of warning. “And a bit formal. We love Leith. But he likes to have matters arranged neatly.”

Henrietta gave a little huff. “That is one way of saying it.”

“He’s fastidious about his affairs,” Catherine said, with a decided tone, which seemed to function as both a reproval and confirmation of Henrietta’s intimation. “But, of course, we all want him to find love.”

“We do,” Henrietta said, tartly. “Although it is hard to be optimistic on that score.”

“That is taking it a bit far,” Catherine said. “I have not quite abandoned hope of seeing him happy.”

“He has, of course, sworn he’ll never be felled,” Henrietta said, with a roll of her eyes. “But they all did once, did they not?”

“Well, not Monty,” Catherine said. “Or, at least, when he did, none of us knew it was because he was still in love with Olivia.”

Beatrice found herself, truthfully, a bit overwhelmed by this comfortable banter. It appeared the relationship between Augustus and Olivia had been quite the dramatic affair indeed.

“Well, Leith almost put an end to that, didn’t he?” Henrietta said.

“Henrietta, really,” Catherine said.

“It’s no matter now, Catherine—they have resolved the matter. I think now we can speak of it.”

“What do you mean?” Beatrice asked. “Leith tried to part the earl and his wife?”

For a moment, Beatrice imagined that Leith had fallen in love with the beautiful Lady Montaigne himself. But, on a second thought, such a thing made little sense, given what she knew of him and his history with women.

“I fear we are making a terrible hash of this conversation. It is all a bygone drama now. When she was younger, Olivia was a maid in Augustus’s house—the very house that she lives in now—and they fell in love. But she received a note ending their affair and so left London altogether.”

“It turned out, however, that Monty never even sent the note!” said Henrietta in a hushed whisper. “It was Leith! He knew his hand—from school.”

“That’s dreadful,” Beatrice said, her stomach sinking.

“He was very young,” said Catherine. “They all were. I believe Olivia blames herself nearly as much. She says that she should not have gone flying off without speaking to Monty first. It was a ghastly thing to do, but he was not the only one who made mistakes. And we have all moved past it now.”

“That’s very generous of Lord and Lady Montaigne,” Beatrice said.

She remembered what Leith had told her about his best friend. That he hadn’t bedded a woman in the intervening thirteen years. He had waited, with no promise of her return, for that long.

“It’s very romantic how they found their way back to each other,” Catherine said. “But perhaps I think so because my love story with John was not so different, in a certain way. Although I promise that Leith did not try and tear us asunder.”

“Yes, my brother nearly ruined you in a garden, if I remember correctly,” Henrietta said, dryly.

“That is far from true,” Catherine said. “We shared a kiss—or, well—” the duchess blushed “—a little more than a kiss, perhaps. But we were even more foolish than Monty and Olivia. We knew where to find each other all the while and still it took us a long time to find our way back together.”

“Ugh, a euphemism if I ever heard one,” Henrietta said. “My brother is a beast. He brought Catherine back to Edington Hall as my tutor! Imagine my surprise when I realized that he was secretly engaged to her and she was technically our sworn enemy. Our sworn enemy whom he had clearly been tupping—”

“Henrietta!” Catherine exclaimed. “Really!”

Henrietta laughed, meeting Beatrice’s eye. “My brother is a terrible hypocrite. He nearly killed Trem when he realized that we had been precipitating our wedding vows.”

Beatrice’s head was swimming from all of the new information—about these ladies and their own love stories, but mostly about Leith.

“But that’s not why I started on this train of thought,” Henrietta continued. “I was not trying to talk of the past. I wanted to know if he is different with you. Because it is hard for me to imagine him—well, enjoying a woman, if you understand me. He has always been a rake, so called, but he is the least rakish rake I’ve ever met.”

Beatrice smiled. She could understand now why Leith didn’t care for Henrietta. Her analysis was rather near to being correct and she doubted that Leith appreciated her perspicuity.

And in answer to this question, she could only be honest.

“Oh.” She smiled. “Yes, he’s very different, I would wager. He does have formal manners at first, but those fall away quite quickly.”

“No! Truly!” Henrietta exclaimed. “La, I cannot imagine it.”

Beatrice nodded. “He is a very passionate man. The most passionate I have ever been with.” As she said the words, Beatrice realized that they were true. Yes, she had been with men who were more exuberant than Leith. But his passion was clearly immense, especially given that he had to overcome his persistent scruples and anxieties about the bedchamber.

“He doesn’t like messiness. That is true. But he can’t help himself anyway.”

A shiver ran, unbidden, down her back. She wished, suddenly, that they were already back at his town house in St. James’s. It seemed that she could not get enough of him. And with their time together so short, she hated to think she was wasting a moment.

“It’s a unique combination.”

The two women were silent for a moment. They each were staring at her, their mouths slightly agape.

Finally, the duchess managed to speak. “That sounds—wonderful.” She paused, looking down at her hands, and then back up at Beatrice. “And I must say, Miss Salisbury, if he is bringing you here, then you must be very special to him. Perhaps it is you who are the unique one.”

At these words, Beatrice’s heart skipped a beat.

Did she want them to be true?

She didn’t know.

She didn’t know what she felt for this man.

Or what he felt for her.

All she knew was that she couldn’t get enough of him.

The rest of the evening passed very pleasantly. Beatrice had been nervous that she would find his friends and their wives to be formal, judgmental aristocrats, but the reality was far different. Not long after her exchange with the ladies about Leith, the conversation became general. The men were very kind to her, both courtly and deferential.

Towards the middle of the evening, after the duchess excused herself to pay a call to the nursery, Leith stood and walked across the drawing room, settling himself on the sofa next to her. Beatrice observed Lord Tremberley and Lord Edington exchange a glance.

Then, when Leith took her hand, Henrietta actually choked on her wine.

For a moment, everyone else in the room appeared to struggle with their countenance.

Until Lord Tremberley launched into an anecdote clearly just to cover the silence.

Beatrice did not know what to think.

Such doings supported what the duchess had said.

She studied the marquess who, for the moment, had her as his exclusive property.

It did not, she was aware, strictly make sense.

Here was a handsome, wealthy, powerful man, a near god to most, who had enjoyed every advantage of existence since his birth and who had bedded many of the most beautiful women of the age.

And she was just a plain woman from the minor gentry, selling herself in the hopes of hanging on to her hopelessly encumbered family estate.

Of course, she had made men fall in love before.

Men of modest means.

One unscrupulous single vicar.

The linen draper.

But she was not delusional about her charms.

No, she thought.

The duchess must be mistaken.

It was impossible that the Marquess of Leith had fallen in love with her.