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She missed her club.
She turned back to West, who was still smiling. “Skull drinking?” he asked.
She waved away the words. “Do not ask.”
He nodded. “Fair enough.”
“You see now why I need a husband. She’s too precocious for her own good.”
“I don’t see it at all, honestly. She’s charming.”
She smirked. “You are obviously not good ton.” He went serious, and she suddenly felt as though she’d misspoken. She added. “And you do not have to live with her.”
“You forget, I have a sister who is similarly eccentric.”
It was a perfect word for Caroline. “Tell me, are most gentlemen seeking eccentricity in their wives?”
“As I am not a gentleman, I would not know.”
Something flared inside her, unfamiliar and yet thoroughly recognizable. Guilt. “I didn’t mean —” she said.
“I know,” he replied. “But you were not wrong. I am not born a gentleman, Georgiana. And you would do best to remember it.”
“You play the part well,” she said. And he did, looking every inch the gentleman now, and each night on the floor of her club. He’d played it well when he’d rescued her from Pottle’s slithering, disgusting grasp. And in the years leading up to that moment, during which he’d never propositioned her. Not once.
“You think so?” he asked casually, as they trailed behind Caroline and Cynthia, whose conversation grew more animated by the minute. “You think I played it well when I manhandled you on the floor of a casino? When I nearly stripped you bare?”
They were in public – in the middle of Hyde Park. And to an unsuspecting observer, they were all propriety. No one would ever know that his words sent heat coursing through her, warming her straight through, as though they were in that shadowed alcove in her casino once more.
She did not look at him, afraid he would see what he had done to her.
“When I wanted to do much more than that?” he added, the words soft and full of promise.
She’d wanted it, too. She cleared her throat. “Perhaps you are not such a gentleman after all.”
“I promise you, there is no perhaps about it.”
She was certain that anyone who watched them would know what he said. How she enjoyed it. How shameless they both were. She looked to the Serpentine, trying to pretend they discussed something else. Anything else. “What are you, then?”
He did not answer for a while, and she finally turned to look at him, finding him watching her carefully. She met his gaze, finally. He held it for a heartbeat. Two. Ten. “I would have thought you’d recognized it the moment we met. I’m an utter scoundrel.”
And in that moment, he was. And she didn’t care.
Indeed, she wanted him more for it.
They walked farther, trailing his sister and her daughter as they edged around the curve of the Serpentine lake. After long moments of silence, she could not bear it any longer, the wondering what he was thinking. The hoping he’d give voice to thought. The hoping he wouldn’t.
So she spoke first. “My brother’s wife nearly drowned in this lake once.”
He did not hesitate. “I remember that. Your brother saved her.”
It had been the beginning of a love for the ages. One that did not end in tragedy, but in happiness. “I suppose you wrote about it.”
“Probably,” he said. “At the time, if I recall, The Scandal Sheet was the only paper I had.”
“I just had a conversation with Caroline that leads me to believe that it still holds a fair amount of influence.”
He turned to look at the girls. “Oh?”
“Yes. As you may have divined, she reads the gossip pages.”
He smiled. “She and every other girl in London.”
“Yes, well, most girls of her age aren’t reading about their mother’s search for a husband.”
He slowed his pace. “Ah.”
“Well put.”
“What did she say about it?”
“She asked why I wish to marry. And why now.”
The girls now quite a distance away, and she and West were both public and private. As with everything in Georgiana’s life these days. The situation was by design, yes, but it did not mean she enjoyed it.
Although, if she were fully in private with Duncan West, there was no telling what might happen.
They walked a little farther in silence before he said, “And how did you answer?”
She turned to him, shocked. “You too?” He lifted a shoulder in an expression she was coming to recognize in him. “You know, you do that when you want someone to think that you aren’t interested in what they are about to say.”
“Perhaps I’m not interested. Perhaps I’m simply being polite.”
“Since when does politeness include prying, personal questions?” she asked. “Did you not receive the lesson I just delivered to my daughter?”
“Something about skull drinking.” She laughed, taken by surprise, and he smiled briefly, the expression there, then gone, leaving only a pool of warmth in her stomach as he added, “Well, as your daughter pointed out, I am a reporter.”
“You’re a newspaper magnate,” she corrected.
He smiled. “A reporter at heart.”
She couldn’t help her matching smile. “Ah. Desperate for a story.”
“Not for all stories. But for your story? Quite.”
The words dropped between them, and they both seemed surprised by them. She was taken aback. Did he really mean it? Did he really care about her story? Or was he simply in it for the information she promised? For the payment she always rendered when he did the Angel a favor?
And why did the answers matter so much?
He saved her from the questions swirling through her mind. “But today, I will settle for an answer to Caroline’s question.”
Why did she wish to marry.
She shook her head. “There are a dozen reasons why I should marry.”
“Should is not wish.”
“That’s semantics.”
“It is not at all. I should not have kissed you yesterday. But I very much wished to. There’s nothing at all the same about the two.”
She stopped, the words sending surprise and something richer through her. Desire. She met his gaze, registering the heat in his brown eyes. “You just…” She hesitated. “You cannot simply announce things like that. As though we are not here, in a public place. In Hyde Park. At the fashionable hour.”
“That must be the most idiotic description for four o’clock in the afternoon that ever there was,” he said, and the conversation had changed. As though he hadn’t just said the word kiss in full view of London’s aristocracy.
Perhaps she’d dreamed it.
“So, tell me, Georgiana.” Her name was a caress even as they walked, a yard between them, in a perfectly innocuous portrait. “Why do you wish to marry?”
The question was quiet and liquid, and made her want nothing more than to answer it, even as she knew it was none of his business. She started with the obvious. “You know already. I require a title.”
“For Caroline.”
“Yes. She needs the protection of a decent title. With your help, she’ll receive it, and with it, hopefully, a future.”
“And you expect Langley to be a decent father.”
The words came so easily, with such a lightness, that she almost didn’t notice the way they probed, searching for the answer to the question she’d been asked her whole adult life. “If she’s lucky, yes.”
He nodded, and they walked farther. “Fair enough. But that is all for Caroline. What of you?”
“Me?”
“The meat of it is right there in the question, Georgiana, why do you wish to marry?”
The wind blew once more, and it carried the scent of him to her – sandalwood and something else, something clean and entirely masculine. Later, she would tell herself that it was the scent that made her tell
the truth. “Because I haven’t any other choice.”
The truth of the words shocked her, and she wished she could take them back. She wished she’d said something else, something bolder and more brazen. But she hadn’t. Instead, he’d asked his questions and stripped her bare. Exposed her vulnerabilities. Even as she was the most powerful man in Britain, one who ruled the night, here, in the day, she was still just a woman, with a woman’s rights. And a woman’s insignificant power.
By day, as a mother with a daughter, she needed help.
He didn’t know all of that, of course. He knew she was ruined, but not the extent to which she could be destroyed. And even as he heard the truth in her words, he did not fully understand them. He did not press the issue, however, instead asking, “And why now?”
He’d asked her the question before. The night they’d met on the balcony at the Worthington Ball. The night he’d met Georgiana. She hadn’t answered then. But now, she spoke without hesitation, her gaze finding Caroline ahead. “She needs more than I can give her.”
He raised a brow. “She lives with your brother. I imagine she does not want for much.”
She watched her daughter for a long moment, a memory coming thick and nearly overwhelming. “Not like that. She deserves a family of her own.”
“Tell me,” he said, the words soft and warm and tempting, making her wish they were somewhere else, where she could curl into his heat and do precisely as he asked.
She answered. “Just after the New Year, I visited her on my brother’s estate.” Those assembled had barely given her a look, each more interested in the rare warm winter’s day than in their eccentric aunt, who often turned up at strange times wearing breeches and boots.
But Caroline had noticed.
“She was surprised to see me.”
“You don’t see her often?”
Georgiana hesitated, guilt flooding through her. “The estate… it is far from Mayfair.”
“The opposite end of the world from where you live.” Precisely. She simultaneously adored and hated the understanding in the words. “What happened?”
She tried to explain, realizing that the story might seem simple. Unimportant. “Nothing of particular note.”
He didn’t accept the answer. “What happened?”
She lifted a shoulder. Let it drop, hoping the movement would cover her shame at the memory. “I thought she would be happy to see me. But instead, she was confused. Instead of smiling and rushing to me, she blinked up at me and asked, ‘What are you doing here?’”
He exhaled, and she thought she heard understanding in the sound, but she didn’t dare look at him. Didn’t dare ask. “I was so shocked by the question. After all, I am her mother. Shouldn’t I be there? Isn’t that my place? With her?” She shook her head. “I was furious. Not with her, but with myself.” She stopped, lost in the memory, in the way Caroline had smiled, as though Georgiana were a welcome stranger.
And that was what she had been. Not a mother. Not in the way a woman should be. She’d been so concerned with sullying her daughter with her reputation that she’d become a secondary player in Caroline’s life.
No more.
Not if she could help it.
“I never —” she started. Stopped. He did not speak, infinitely patient. No doubt it was that patience that made him such a remarkable reporter. She filled his silence. “I never feel quite as though I belong there.”
Because she did not belong there.
They walked for a bit longer. “But that does not mean that you cannot belong there.”
“First I have to wish to belong there.”
He understood. “The devastating battle between what one wants, and what one should want.”
“She deserves a family,” she said. “A respectable one. With a home. And a —” She stopped, considering the rest of the sentence. “I don’t know.” She cast about for something that would provide normalcy, finally settled on: “A cat. Or whatever normal girls have.”
As though that did not sound positively idiotic.
He did not seem to think so. “She is not a normal girl.”
“But she could be.” If not for me. She left the last unsaid.
“And you think Langley’s title will make her so.”
The title was a means to an end. Couldn’t he see that? “I do,” she said.
“Because Chase won’t have you.” The words were a shock, unexpected and unpleasant. Filled with anger, she realized, on her behalf.
“Even if Chase did want me.”
He raised a hand, and she sensed the irritation in the gesture. “You cannot tell me he is not an aristocrat. A wealthy and powerful one at that. Why else keep his identity such a secret?”
She did not speak. Could not risk revealing anything.
“He could give you everything you seek, but even now, as he hangs you in the wind, as he offers you as prey to Society’s wolves, you protect him.”
“It is not like that,” she said.
“So you love him. But do not for one moment believe that it is not his fault that your hands are tied. He should marry you himself. Throw his mighty weight behind you.”
“If he could…” She let the words trail off, hoping he would not hear their implicit deceit.
“Is he married?”
She did not answer. How could she?
“Of course, you won’t tell me that.” He smiled, but the expression lacked humor. “If he is, he’s an ass. And if he’s not…” He trailed off.
“What?” she prodded.
He looked away, out at the lake, still and silver in the March light. For a moment, she thought he would not answer. And then he said, “If he’s not, he’s a fool.” She caught her breath at the words, as he turned back toward her and met her gaze. “I find I tolerate him less and less these days.”
“Even if he were unmarried, I do not want him,” she said, hating the words. Hating the lie she perpetuated with them. That Chase was other. That Chase was some mysterious, powerful man to whom they were both beholden.
“No, you want Langley,” he said.
I want you. She bit back the words. Where had they come from? “He’s a good choice. Kind. Decent.” Safe.
“Titled,” he said.
“And that,” she agreed.
They walked for a long moment, and he said, “It’s not a choice if there’s only one man on the list, you know.” When she did not reply, he added, “You should have a choice.”
She should.
But she didn’t.
By the end of the season, she would be married. Whether Langley agreed to it on his own or with prodding, he would marry her. He’d been selected for his qualities. And his secret, which she wouldn’t hesitate to use if necessary.
It did not matter that somehow, something had upset the balance of Chase-Anna-Georgiana, and that, in this situation, blackmail made her squeamish. It was the only way.
Choice was a farce.
But here, in this moment, she had one. West wanted her. And she wanted him. And here, now, she had a choice.
She could have what she should have for a lifetime… or have what she wished for a moment.
Or perhaps she could have both.
Why not take a moment with West? He was the perfect partner – he knew her secrets – but not her whole truth. He knew she was Anna and Georgiana, knew why she was searching for a husband, was instrumental in the search. There was something tremendously freeing in the idea that he might be her choice. Now. Before she had no choice but to choose another.
It was tremendously clear all of a sudden.
“Do you have a mistress?”
She blurted out the question with a lack of finesse that appalled her. What had happened to Anna? Where was London’s greatest lightskirt? More importantly, where was all-powerful and ever-certain Chase?
She wanted to toss herself into the Serpentine.
Why did this man have such a horrifying effect on her?
His b
rows rose at her question, but he somehow, blessedly, resisted the no doubt overwhelming urge to mock her delivery. “I do not.”
She nodded once, and continued to walk along the edge of the lake. “I only ask because I would not wish to… overstep.”
Why were the words so difficult?
Because he was watching her. She could see him out of the corner of her eye. He would be watching her a great deal more if she got the damn words out.
The thought did not help.
“By all means, Lady Georgiana, I encourage you to overstep. As much as you’d like.”
She took a breath. Now or never. Forward, or forever here. “I propose an arrangement. Not a long-term arrangement. That would be silly. And disrespectful.”
And foolish, as anything long-term with Duncan West would surely end in her wishing it more than she should.
Those words again.
He did not respond except to say, “Go on.”
She stopped. Turned to him. Attempted to behave as though she ran one of London’s finest men’s clubs. “You said you wished to kiss me.”
“Was my desire unclear?”
She ignored the flood of heat that came at the words. “It was not. And you wished to do other things as well.”
His gaze turned dark. “A great number of other things.”
The words did strange things to her insides.
She nodded. “Then I propose we do those things.”
One of his golden brows rose. “Do you?”
Embarrassment flared, but she brazened it through. “I do. You haven’t a mistress. And neither have I.”
That did shock him. “I should hope not.”
She tilted her head to one side and spoke as Anna, feeling altogether more powerful now that the proposition had been made. “I see no reason why I shouldn’t until I’ve landed Langley. Discreetly, of course.”
“Of course.”
“I think you’ll do.”
“As mistress.”
“You cannot imagine I would choose the word master.”
His shock compounded. Obviously. She enjoyed the moment. Particularly when he said, “I feel certain I should be insulted.”