A Secret Affair

aversion to being a wallflower. Do say you will make up a fourth.”

“Oh, indeed I will,” she said. “How delightful! Constantine, will you excuse me?”

“Only with the greatest reluctance,” he said, winking at her, and he watched as the four of them climbed into a recently vacated boat and one of the men took the oars and pushed out into the river.

“All alone, Mr. Huxtable?” a familiar voice asked from behind his shoulder. “What a waste of a perfectly available gentleman.”

“I have been sitting here waiting for you to take notice and have pity on me,” he said, getting to his feet. “Do join me, Duchess.”

“I am neither hungry nor thirsty nor in need of rest,” she said. “Take me into the greenhouses. I wish to see the orchids.”

Did anyone ever say no to her, he wondered as he offered his arm. When she had announced at the Heaton concert that she would sit with him in the music room, had she even considered how embarrassed she might have been if he had refused to sit with her? But why should she fear rejection when even the crusty, crabby old Duke of Dunbarton had been unable to resist her after resisting every other woman for more than seventy years?

“I have been feeling dreadfully slighted,” she said as she took his arm. “You did not come to greet me when you arrived.”

“I believe,” he said, “I arrived before you did, Duchess. And you did not come to greet me.”

“Is it the woman’s part,” she said, “to go out of her way to greet the man?”

“As you have done now?”

He looked down at her. She was not wearing a bonnet today. Instead she was wearing an absurd little hat, which sat at a jaunty angle over her right eyebrow and looked—of course—quite perfect. Her blond curls rioted about it in an artless style that had probably taken her maid an hour or more to create. The white muslin of her dress, he could see now that he was close, was dotted with tiny rosebuds of a very pale pink.

“That is unkind repartee, Mr. Huxtable,” she said. “What choice did you leave me? It would have been too, too tedious to have gone home without speaking with you.”

He led her diagonally up the lawn in the direction of the greenhouses. And he gave in to a feeling of inevitability. She was clearly determined to have him. And for all his misgivings, he could not deny the fact that he was not at all averse to being had. Being in bed with her was going to be something of a wild adventure, he did not doubt. A struggle for mastery, perhaps? And mutual and enormous pleasure while they fought it out?

Sometimes, he thought, the prospect of extraordinary sensual pleasure was enough to ask of a liaison. The mysteries of a character that had some depths worth exploring could wait until another year and another mistress.

He really was capitulating with very little struggle, he thought. Which meant that she was very good at seduction. No surprise there. And he would not begrudge her that since it was beginning to feel rather pleasant to be seduced.

“Where is Miss Leavensworth this afternoon?” he asked.

“Mr. and Mrs. Park invited her to accompany them on a visit to some museum or other,” she said, “and she preferred to go there than to come here with me. Can you imagine such a thing, Mr. Huxtable? And they are to take her to dinner afterward and then to the opera.”

She shuddered delicately.

“You have never been to the opera, Duchess?” he asked. “Or to a museum?”

“But of course I have,” she said. “One must not appear an utter rustic in the eyes of one’s peers, you know. One must show some interest in matters of superior culture.”

“But you have never enjoyed either?” he asked.

“I really did enjoy looking at Napoleon Bonaparte’s carriage at … Oh, in some museum,” she said, waving the hand that held her parasol in a dismissive gesture. “The one in which he rode to the Battle of Waterloo, I mean. He could not ride his horse because he was suffering with piles. Did you know that? The duke told me and explained what piles are. They sound like dreadfully painful things. Perhaps the Duke of Wellington won the battle on the strength of Napoleon Bonaparte’s piles. I wonder if the history books will reflect that fact.”

“Probably not,” he said, feeling vastly amused. “History will doubtless prefer to perpetuate the modern eagerness to see Wellington as a grand, invincible hero, who won the battle on the strength of his grandness and invincibility.”

“I suppose so,” she agreed. “That is what the duke said too. My duke, that is. And he took me once to see the Elgin marbles and I was not at all shocked to see all those naked figures. I was not even vastly impressed by them. They were pale marble. I would far rather see the real flesh-and-blood man. Greek, that is. With sun-bronzed skin instead of cold stone. Not that a real-life man could ever be quite so perfectly beautiful, of course.”

She sighed, and her parasol twirled again.

The minx, Constantine thought.

“And the opera?” he said.

“I never understand the Italian,” she said. “It would all be very tedious if it were not for all the passion and the tragedy of everyone dying all over the stage. Have you noticed how all those dying characters sing the most glorious music just before they expire? What a waste. I would far prefer to see such passion expended upon life.”

“But since opera is written for a living singer and an audience of living persons rather than for a dying character,” he said, “then surely that is exactly what is happening. Passion being expended upon life, that is.”

“I shall never see opera the same way again,” she said, giving her parasol one more twirl before lowering it as they came to the first greenhouse. “Or hear it the same way. Thank you, Mr. Huxtable, for your insight. You must take me one evening so that I may hear it correctly in your presence. I will make up a party.”

It was humid and very warm inside the greenhouse. It was filled with large banks of ferns down the center and orange trees around the glass walls. It was also deserted.

“How very lovely,” she said, standing still behind the central bank and tipping back her head to breathe in the scent of the foliage. “Do you think it would be eternally lovely to live in a tropical land, Mr. Huxtable?”

“Unrelenting heat,” he said. “Bugs. Diseases.”

“Ah.” She lowered her head to look at him. “The ugliness at the heart of beauty. Is there always ugliness, do you suppose? Even when the object is very, very beautiful?”

Her eyes were suddenly huge and fathomless. And sad.

“Not always,” he said. “I prefer to believe the opposite—that there is always an indestructible beauty at the heart of darkness.”

“Indestructible,” she said softly. “You are an optimist, then.”

“There is nothing else to be,” he said, “if one’s human existence is to be bearable.”

“It is,” she said, “very easy to despair. We always live on the cliff edge of tragedy, do we not?”

“Yes,” he said. “The secret is never to give in to the urge to jump off voluntarily.”

She continued to gaze into his eyes. Her eyelids did not droop, he noticed. Her lips did not smile. But they were slightly parted.

She looked … different.

The purely objective part of his mind informed him that there was no one else in this particular greenhouse, and that they were hidden from view where they stood.

He lowered his head and touched his lips lightly to hers. They were soft and warm, slightly moist, and yielding. He touched his tongue to the opening between them, traced the outline of the upper lip and then the lower, and then slid his tongue into her mouth. Her teeth did not bar the way. He curled his tongue and drew the tip slowly over the roof of her mouth before withdrawing it and lifting his head away from hers.

She tasted of wine and of warm, enticing woman.

He looked deeply into her eyes, and she gazed back for a few moments until there was a very subtle change in her expression. Her eyelids drooped again, her lips turned upward at the corners, and she was herself once more. It had seemed as if she were replacing a mask.