“Bugger off, Percy,” Grey said, not unkindly, and went to fetch Mrs. Fleury’s tea.
The sense of warmth and faint sexual excitement remained with him, though, along with a disturbingly exhilarating sensation of Percy’s eyes on his back. It had been a good many years since he’d felt Percy’s touch, but he remembered it. Vividly.
He pushed the feeling firmly away. He wasn’t likely to succumb to Percy’s physical charms nor yet his clumsy blackmail. What if Percy did decide to go round telling the world that he thought William’s resemblance to a Scottish rebel general rather striking? It might stimulate gossip for a brief time, but William had left the army and remained an earl. His position couldn’t really be endangered. All William would need to do, should any question be asked of him, was to give the querent an icy stare and ignore them.
He was going to have to find out what Percy was up to, though, and why. A thread of heat ran down his back again, as though someone had poured hot coffee down his neckband.
Across the room, he saw Amaranthus’s long forefinger come to rest gently on William’s chest, pointing out something obvious.
HER FINGER RESTED—JUST barely—on the largest of the beetles on his waistcoat, a two-and-a-half-inch monster in brilliant-yellow silk with black-tipped horns. And, of course, tiny red eyes.
“Dynastes tityus,” she said, with approval. “The eastern Hercules beetle.”
“Really?” William said, laughing. “Dynastes tityus means, if I’m not mistaken, Tithean rebel. Was Hercules a Tithean?”
“A Titan, was he not?” Amaranthus tilted her head, lifting one brow. Her brows were soft but well marked, a darker blond than her hair.
“Yes. Perhaps that’s what the person who named this thing meant—but why rebel? Is this fellow known to be rebellious?” He looked down his nose at his chest—and Amaranthus’s long, slim index finger. Her wedding band glimmered on the fourth finger, and he took a deep breath that made her pointing finger sink slightly into the ochre silk. She smiled up at him, and slowly withdrew the finger.
“As to the beetle, I wouldn’t know. But you are, aren’t you?”
“Me? How do you mean?”
“I mean that you don’t intend to live your life to please other people’s expectations. Do you?”
That was a lot more direct than he’d expected—but then, she was startlingly direct.
“Your expectations?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” she said, dimpling. “I expect nothing, William. From you or anyone else.” She paused for an instant, and her eyes fixed with his. They were gray now that she wore violet satin, and translucent as rain on a windowpane. “Unless you refer to the modest proposal I made you?”
In spite of the internal struggle going on inside him, he smiled at her reference to Jonathan Swift—though in truth, her own proposal had been nearly as shocking as Swift’s satirical essay advocating infant cannibalism as a remedy for poverty.
“That was what I had in mind, yes.”
“I’m pleased to know that you’re considering it,” she said, and though the dimple had left her cheek, it was plainly audible in her voice.
He opened his mouth to deny that he was doing any such thing—but while he had firmly refused to think about her outrageous suggestion, he was aware that his body had already accomplished its considerations and was making its equally firm conclusions known to him.
He coughed and glanced casually around the room. Papa was talking to the French diplomat and not looking in his direction, thank God.
“Well.” He cleared his throat and folded his hands behind his back. “I don’t know that ‘consideration’ is the right word, precisely—but the matter is irrelevant for the moment. I came this afternoon to see you—”
“Indeed?” She looked pleased.
“In order to tell you that I am leaving in the morning and don’t know how long it may be until I return.”
She ceased looking pleased, and he regretted that, but there was nothing to be done about it.
“Come,” he said, and touched her hand, nodding toward the French doors, open to the garden. “I’ll tell you why.”
She caught his mood at once and gave a slight nod.
“Not together,” she said. “I’ll go first. Go and have a drink, then take your leave through the front door and walk round.”
HE FOUND HER, at length, at the far end of Mrs. Fleury’s enormous garden, contemplating a small grotto, in which a stone putto was urinating on a toad that sat in the middle of a carved stone basin, its round eyes gleaming black beneath the stream.