Darius: Lord of Pleasures

Fourteen

“This is an unexpected pleasure.” Blanche eyed Darius up and down, the way she’d look at a decadent dessert or expensive pair of new shoes. Darius’s flesh crawled at her inspection, but no more than it had a week previous, when he’d barely been able to leave Gunter’s without ripping her to shreds in public.

And then pelting after Vivian for all the world to see.

“Unexpected, perhaps, a pleasure, most definitely not.” He handed his hat and gloves to one of the handsome footmen Blanche insisted on employing and met his hostess’s gaze. “You will want to hear me out in private.”

“I want you in private,” she agreed, “but as for listening to you carp and bark, I think not. You have more worthy attributes than your speaking voice.”

Darius let her shut the parlor door behind them, but when she moved to embrace him, he stepped back.

“Playing hard to get has limited charm between well-acquainted lovers.” Her tone was reproving, and again Darius felt a spike of nausea.

“We are not,” Darius said softly, “nor will we ever be, nor have we ever been, lovers. I accommodated you for a price. Your usefulness is at an end, and I am doing you the courtesy of informing you of this in private. I will do likewise with Lucy Templeton.”

“This straining at the leash is ill-mannered, Darius,” Blanche said, smiling as if anticipating a rousing argument. “You will continue to accommodate me and Lucy, and whomever else we choose to direct you to. Have you no sense of what Wilton would do to you were he to learn of your nocturnal schemes? Cease your nonsense, or there will be consequences.”

Darius crossed the room, his back to her for a long moment while he marshaled his temper and tried to calm the turmoil in his gut. This was what hatred felt like, corrosive, heavy, and lethal.

When he turned to face her, he saw the first flicker of real fear on her face, but it gave him no satisfaction.

“For all intents and purposes, Blanche, I have whored for you, but it is a whore’s prerogative to accept or decline the customer or the encounter. Even those rules you’ve disrespected in your dealings with me. I went to my own kind, to the streetwalkers and courtesans and prostitutes, and found what I needed to enforce the rules.”

And not once in the past three days of scouring the city’s most depraved haunts had Darius been judged, ridiculed, or scorned. The soiled doves and molly boys hadn’t hesitated to share their resources. They hadn’t even taken his coin in exchange for what he so desperately needed.

“You have a fourteen-year-old daughter,” Darius said, “growing up in Ireland in the home of your cousin’s steward. Most of your jewels are paste, though I made sure the ones you tossed to me were real enough. You’re dying your hair—the hair on your head—and I know this because you’ve made the mistake of keeping the candles lit when I pleasured you.”

Her jaw dropped, and Darius felt the surging satisfaction of a well-executed ambush. “Shall I go on?”

“You would not dare.”

“I would dare. I dared to take coin for that which no gentleman should, and I would dare to cheerfully ruin you not for taking advantage of me—for I was taking some advantage of you as well—but taking unfair advantage, backed up by unconscionable threats to innocents who owe you nothing. We can part without further hostilities, or we can declare war. It’s your choice.”

He held her gaze a moment longer, making sure she read the resolve in his eyes.

“Lucy was the one who suggested we take your sister,” Blanche said, her expression becoming desperate. “I had nothing to do with that. She said the girl was already ruined, and you were getting too difficult.”

Darius went still, while he heard a roaring in his ears and his vision dimmed. His hands fisted, his jaw clenched, and he held himself back from throttling the miserable female before him only because he’d kill her if he laid a finger on her.

And he’d enjoy it.

“She came to no harm,” Lady Cowell babbled on. “Really, there was no harm done. Reston saw to that. We were just going have her drink a bit of absinthe, set her down in a gambling hell. There’s no real harm in that.”

Merciful God. Drugged and disoriented, Leah would have ended up in a brothel before dawn.

“You say there was no harm,” Darius growled, stalking across the room, “when my sister will never feel safe in the park again.” He loomed over her, his voice lethally soft. “You say leaving an innocent woman to the mercy of the pimps, drunks, and bounders would have been no harm? I should tell your husband what you’ve been up to and send word to The Times as well.”

“Please.” Blanche dropped her gaze. “Please. You don’t know what it’s like.”

Darius forced himself to breathe evenly. She had bullied him unmercifully, for her entertainment, for her pleasure. He would not bully her. “Do we understand each other, Lady Cowell?” His voice was even and yet laden with menace. “Answer me.”

“We understand each other, and I will make sure Lucy understands as well.” She met his gaze long enough to nod once.

“That will not be necessary.” Darius sketched an ironic bow. “The pleasure of enlightening your sorry friend and familiar will be entirely mine.” He cleared the room so quickly he didn’t see the look of stunned horror on Lady Cowell’s face, or the way she dropped into a chair and sat staring into space long after he’d gone.

His interview with Lucy Templeton was even more to the point, though he also allowed her the courtesy of closeting herself with him before he threatened the future she’d assumed was secure.

“You accepted payments from French sympathizers to keep certain contraband from coming to the attention of excise men quartered near your husband’s seat. The punishment for treason is hanging.”

“I would never do such a thing! You lie, Darius, and poorly.”

“Now, Lucy,” Darius nearly purred as he came to stand too close to her, “I have no reason to lie. I’ve been a naughty man, true, but I’ve never paid for the pleasure of whipping children nigh to death. What would your husband think, did he learn of such an excess of temper?”

“My husband is devoted,” Lucy said, her eyes venomous.

“Devoted, indeed, to the mistress who bore him two sons, for whom he provides well. He apparently had no trouble functioning with his mistress, unlike his situation with you. All he’d need is an excuse to have you sent to one of those pleasant, walled estates for women with nervous constitutions.”

Color drained from her face, and Darius observed with curious dispassion that the woman might have once been pretty, had not vice and bitterness twisted her expression.

But he hadn’t yet finished with her.

“And if you truly dispute the charges of treason”—he nailed her with a frigid look—“then charges of attempted kidnapping of my sister might still see you in jail, my lady. Your footmen can be bribed as easily as any, and Reston—Earl of Bellefonte, now—would do anything to see those who threatened his countess brought to justice.”

She sank onto the sofa, his words landing with more gratification than well-aimed blows.

“I’ll leave you to contemplate your sins, but be warned that Bellefonte’s brothers are yet at university, and they will be admonishing their entire forms to avoid the likes of you, and making sure their younger brothers are warned as well. Do we understand each other?”

“We do.” Her answering croak was in the voice of a woman who knew when she was… beaten.

“I suggest you and Lady Cowell take a repairing lease somewhere as distant as, say, the Italian coast. Latin men are notably solicitous toward older women. Good day.”

Casting off the pall of association with Blanche and Lucy should have left Darius euphoric. Mightily relieved, in any case. Instead, it was overshadowed by four things that deflated positive feelings considerably.

First, Darius had bid good-bye to the only family member to share his household, the only bright spot in much of his recent years.

Saying good-bye to John when the boy left for Belle Maison had hurt, but not Leah, not Trent, not even John himself seemed to comprehend Darius’s loss. Nicholas, oddly enough, had pulled Darius aside for a fierce hug and promised him the child would come to no harm and visit Darius often. That assurance had been so desperately needed Darius had found himself blinking back tears.

Crying, for God’s sake, and on another man’s shoulder. What did Darius have to cry about?

The second development of great proportions in Darius’s life was that Nick had confronted Wilton with evidence of the earl’s mishandling of funds—and worse—earlier in Leah’s life. Wilton was effectively banished to Wilton Acres out in Hampshire, and the maternal inheritance Darius’s father had pilfered from him was being repaid, with interest.

When a man learned to live on next to nothing, a sudden and deserved influx of capital created challenges: What to do with it, how much to invest, where, on what…? It all took time, concentration, and a focus Darius had to force himself to maintain.

The third development was more alarming still, in that Trent, drifting along into a shambling sort of widowerhood, had to be taken in hand. Darius escorted his brother bodily to Crossbridge, the estate Trent owned free of any entail, and set his brother down a considerable distance from the brandy decanter. Trent’s children were sent out to Nick and Leah in Kent, and Darius was left to pace and fret and pray that his brother pulled out of whatever malaise had him in its grip.

The fourth development was the worst: Vivian left Town.

The other matters—losing John, maybe losing Trent, being inundated with business decisions—Darius could manage those, relatively. He could not manage losing all contact with Vivian. She would be approaching her confinement, and likely concerned about it, and he…

He had no right to offer her reassurances, no right to comfort her, no right to look forward to the birth with her, and yet, she’d been right: in this regard, they’d been cheated.

He couldn’t help himself. When Lord Valentine Windham offered an invitation to rusticate in Oxfordshire just a few miles from Longchamps, Darius leapt at the chance.

Pregnancy scrambled a woman’s brains.

Vivian reached this profound conclusion within days of returning to Longchamps. True, London was miserable in summer, but she and William traditionally stayed in the city until Parliament adjourned in August. And William had stayed there, which only proved to Vivian that her wits had gone begging.

William was… failing. Dying. She’d admitted it to herself only as he’d deposited her into their traveling coach and she’d seen the way his shoulders were more stooped, his gaze less clear, his gait slower. She was losing him, and now of all times, she didn’t want to lose the closest thing she had to an ally.

Still, she’d been so intent on putting distance between herself and a certain Darius Lindsey that she’d left William in Town with no one but Dilquin to fuss over him, and hied herself back to Longchamps.

Where Portia’s hovering presence was going to move Vivian to murder. The woman was an atrocity, and Vivian’s sympathy for Able grew with each hour. Portia suggested changes to the house, as if she knew William’s health were precarious and she planned to take over as lady of the manor when William was gone. Able brushed off her plans and schemes and shared the occasional sympathetic look with Vivian.

But worst of all for Vivian was that distance, which she’d intended to help her get some perspective on Darius Lindsey, was only making his presence in her imagination harder to eradicate.

Would the child look like him? Would Darius come to the christening? Was he thinking of her, or was he sauntering around with one of those horrid women on his arm, in his bed, at his side? Had “very soon” come to pass that he’d parted company with them, or were they still commanding his escort when Vivian could not?

That last question hurt. He’d been honest with her, told her exactly who and what he was, but it still… hurt. If Darius were nothing but a cicisbeo, bought and paid for, what did that make Vivian?

She tortured herself with questions like that, even as she took long walks all over the ripening countryside. To see the crops growing, even as she grew, was a comfort, though her ambling became more and more deliberate.

Darius had told her to walk, to resist the urge to become sedentary as well as gravid.

To escape Portia, Vivian frequently took a blanket and a book—Byron was her most frequent choice—out to the stream running behind the orchard a half mile from the house. The roll of the land protected her from the view of the manor and its outbuildings, and the distance was just right to give her a sense of peace.

Which was disturbed past all recall when she felt something tickling her nose. She batted at it, not quite ready to be done with her late-morning nap, but it returned.

“Shall I kiss you awake?”

She opened her eyes, and her mind told her Darius Lindsey, whom she had not seen for weeks, was on the blanket with her, but she refused to accept such a reality.

Pregnancy scrambled a woman’s wits that badly.

“Go away.”

“Soon.” He did ease away, but not before Vivian saw a light dimming in his eyes. This was a good thing, lest he think he was still welcome to kiss her or hold her or take her hand in his.

But what he did was worse. He shifted to sit a foot away from her.

“How are you, Vivvie?”

Vivvie. His name for her, delivered with unmistakable concern. Unmistakable caring.

“I’m fat,” she huffed, making it as far as her elbows, but anything approximating lying on her back was no longer comfortable, so she flailed around until Darius boosted her to sitting, smiling at her shamelessly.

“You’re glorious,” he said. “Your face looks thinner. How are you feeling?”

She glared at him, arranged her skirts, and felt tears welling. She loved his eyes, loved the way he could communicate intimacy without saying a word, and right now, those eyes were tormenting her with the tenderness they offered.

“I feel pregnant. Ungainly, a little worried. What are you doing here?”

“William is taking good care of you?”

“William is doing his best.”

“Vivvie?” He was closer, though she hadn’t seen him move. “What aren’t you telling me?”

She scooted a little away, the better to see him and avoid his scent, because as pregnant as she was, she wanted to make herself drunk on his fragrance.

“You have no business showing up here and accosting me.”

“I’ve done a great deal more than accost you.” The humor was back in his tone. “That gives me the right to at least inquire about your well-being. William stayed back in London, didn’t he?”

She nodded, glancing away.

“What can he be about?” Darius eyed her searchingly. “Leaving you out here among the servants to go into your confinement?”

“You think he meant for you to come and inspect his broodmare?” Even Vivian was shocked by the bitterness in her tone.

“Perhaps.” Darius’s tone gave nothing away. “I was more concerned for the mother of my child. You’re cranky, and that’s to be expected. Shall I hold you?”

“No.”

He shifted, sitting behind her, a leg on either side of her, and drew her against his chest. “I went through this with John’s mother.”

Vivian felt his chin resting on her crown, and the tears constricted her throat. She should fight him off, but it had been so long, and she was weak with longing for just this.

“She was weepy and grouchy, and so worried for her child she could hardly carry on a civil conversation for the last few weeks. Fortunately, Gracie was on hand, and little moods and snits didn’t alarm her in the least.”

“You loved John’s mother?”

“I pitied her. I do not pity you, much.”

“Damn you.” Vivian did try to shove him off, but he held her gently.

“Vivvie, calm yourself.” He propped his cheek against her temple and kept both arms around her. “John resides with Leah and her husband, Bellefonte.”

“You miss him.” Vivian sighed against Darius’s chest. “You miss John, and you can’t pester him to write to you because you want him to be happy.”

“Hush.” He stroked her back in slow circles, and Vivian felt her eyes grow heavy.

“I’m angry with you.”

“I know, love.” He brushed a kiss to her hair. “You’re furious and disappointed. You have every reason to be.”

She dozed off, and he held her, and when she woke up, he was still there, and when she’d managed not to cry for weeks, that made Vivian cry.

Had God in all His wisdom created a sweeter experience than to allow a man to simply hold the mother of his child? Darius hoped Vivian would sleep for hours, but in fact she dozed only for a few minutes.

She was angry with him, but all trust hadn’t been destroyed, or she would never have let down her guard to rest in his arms this way. He assured himself this was true, and assured himself she was in blooming good health as he took a cautious inventory of her appearance.

Her face was thinner, more mature, and more lovely than ever.

Her pregnancy was advancing visibly, and the sight was dear and erotic and amazing to him. He locked the eroticism away behind high walls of respect and guilt.

Her breasts were magnificent, her hips voluptuous, and her shape… Slowly, Darius slid a hand over her belly, his patience rewarded when the child shifted slightly, causing Vivian to move in his arms.

Ye gods, ye gods. A child, their child, alive and safe under his hand, under her heart. He had to blink and swallow and blink some more as he prayed Vivian didn’t choose that moment to wake up.

He wasn’t going to rush his fences this time. Vivian had been hurt enough by all his vacillation, and she wasn’t going to give up ground easily. But just to hold her… to hold her and know she was confiding in him and at least allowing herself the comfort of his embrace, it was enough.

It would have to be enough.

Vivian stirred, rubbed her cheek against his chest, then sat up and speared him with a look.

“You have to leave, Darius.” She tried to wiggle away. “I can’t tolerate any more of your hot-and-cold, here-and-gone treatment. It’s good of you to inquire about the child, but I’d appreciate it if you’d take yourself off now.”

“Able, not now.” Portia shoved him away and slid the letter she’d been writing off to the side—since coming home from London, Portia was doing a prodigious amount of letter writing. “You smell like a stable.”

“And here I thought breeding women were supposed to be affectionate.” Able obligingly withdrew, but he’d bothered to wash thoroughly before presuming to kiss his wife’s cheek, and the rebuke disappointed.

Portia gave him an exasperated look as she recapped the inkwell. “What do you mean, breeding women? Go maul Vivian if you’re attracted to breeding heifers.”

Able lowered himself into one of the chairs facing the desk, since Portia appeared unwilling to yield his proper place to him. “I’m not talking about Vivian. How far along are you, Portia?”

Her mouth opened as if to deliver another broadside then snapped shut with a click, and Able realized his wife hadn’t been being coy about her condition; she simply hadn’t known.

And now that she did, she wasn’t pleased.

“This is your fault.”

At least she was predictable. “I certainly hope so. The date of the child’s arrival will likely shed light on those particulars.”

She tidied a stack of green ledgers that needed no tidying. “And just what do you mean by that?”

“We’ve been married for years, Portia, and you’ve never caught before. A little trip up to Town, and there’s a blessed event in the offing. You don’t know how far along you are, do you?”

“I’m not… regular,” she hedged. “It’s hard to tell.”

She wasn’t ir-regular, but Able saw she was worried, and knew a moment of exasperation with the Almighty. Managing, scheming, grasping Portia might be, but she wasn’t enough of a steward’s wife to have timed her indiscretion so there was at least some possibility the child was Able’s.

“It’s all right, Portia,” he said tiredly. “Children are easy to love, and Vivian’s baby will have someone to call family. That’s for the best.”

“Vivian’s…” Portia’s hand went to her throat, then her expression shuttered. “This is for the best, you’re right, and the child is yours, Able.”

He considered her and recalled she’d permitted him intimacies just before they’d left for London, but not since. If the child were his, she’d be better than three months along, and the signs Able had seen were as much behavioral as visible. She was rounder, in certain places particularly, but that was hardly conclusive.

This child was not likely his. In his life, in his marriage, with his Portia, such a happy occasion was improbable.

“You’ll want to warn whomever you dallied with,” he said, rising and moving toward the door. “If the child were mine, I’d want to know, even if some other man would have the raising of it.”

He left her sitting at his desk, for once silent, the expression on her face detached and calculating. Disappointingly so.

“What if I said I’m not going to leave you?” Darius let Vivian go and shifted to sit beside her. The question was only half in jest. “Would you have William summon the King’s man to take me off your property?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Vivian glared at him but ruined the effect entirely when she reached out to brush his hair off his forehead. “You’ve been in the sun.”

Her touch, freely given, eased something miserable and desperate in Darius’s chest. “I’m spending the summer at the Markham estate, which Valentine Windham is hell-bent on restoring to its former glory.”

“Markham?” Vivian’s brow puckered. “I thought nobody lived there.”

“Bats live there. When we started it was barely habitable, but it’s coming along.”

She plucked clover from the grass and began threading a chain. “So you thought you’d just pop over and see how I’m doing?”

“No.” He’d thought he’d lose his mind if he had to face never seeing her again. “I thought I’d beg a berth with Windham so I could make amends for how I treated you this spring.”

“I’m a married woman,” Vivian reminded him, staring at her clover. “And I love my husband.”

They needed to air this linen, of course, but not at length. “I am not seeking favors from you, Vivvie.”

“You’re not?” The little note of wistfulness in her voice had him smiling again, though he was gentleman enough to try to hide it.

White clover was for promises, so he’d give her a promise and revel in the pleasure of that small token. “You love your husband,” Darius said slowly. “I promise to respect that. You would be upset if I sought to dally with you now. It would upset me not to offer you my sincere friendship.”

Vivian smiled too and tossed the chain of clover flowers at him. “Everything upsets me. Tell me about Windham’s estate.”

He spent an hour with her on that blanket, not touching, but talking, and by the end of it, she was talking too. Talking, Darius hoped, as she might have talked to a trusted friend.

“William tries to hide it, but he’s not doing well,” she finally admitted.

“What does that mean, Vivvie?”

“He’s fading.” She said it softly, as if it were a relief to share the reality with someone. “He’s tired of living, and now that I’m to have a child, he can assure himself my welfare is taken care of.”

“You’ll miss him.” Darius said it for her.

“Terribly. When there was nobody between me and Ainsworthy’s vile schemes, William shook off his mourning and married me, facing down scandal and talk and possible political repercussions. I’m grateful to him, but I love him too, and when I asked him to come down here with me early, he shook his head and told me to run along and enjoy being in the country.”

She sounded bewildered and forlorn, and in this, at least, Darius could offer a male perspective.

“He has a kind of courage,” Darius said. “Not simply the courage of his religious faith, which assures him an honorable life will find a reward in the hereafter, but a courage for living in this life, without you, without his first wife, without the faculties he had as a younger man.”

Vivian studied him for a moment, while the breeze riffled the branches of the ripening orchard above them and a fat bumblebee went lazily about its business.

“You admire him.”

“Of course I admire him.” Though he was only now realizing it. “He’s put aside his own convenience to do what was necessary to protect you, Vivian. How could I not admire a man with that much practical honor?”

She frowned as she digested this description of her husband. “Practical honor is a good term. William would understand it.”

“Remind me who Ainsworthy is.”

“My former stepfather.”

Darius watched emotions play across her features. “Given your expression, Vivian, I do not care for the fellow.”

She retrieved the chain of clover and wound it through her fingers. “When my mother died, he took it upon himself to launch my sister, except I saw what he did to Angela, and I wasn’t about to allow him to do that to me.”

“I thought you said Angela was happy with her… publisher?”

Vivian stretched her feet out and regarded her bare toes. Darius kept his gaze on her face lest he recall too clearly the taste of those toes when Vivian had been fresh from her bath.

“Angela is married to Jared Ventnor,” Vivian said. “They are happy now, but Jared essentially outbid the titles competing for Angie’s hand. It wasn’t a love match on her part. Angela barely knew her husband when they wed, and Ainsworthy was willing to use any means to secure the match.”

“And you.” Darius tapped her nose. “You consider your sister resigned herself to her fate so she’d have a household for you to come to when your turn arose.”

She frowned at the clover wrapped around her fingers. “Except I crossed paths with Muriel, who saw what was what and offered me a position as her companion.”

The bumblebee came around again, a reminder that time spent on a blanket with Vivian was time bartered for the sustenance of Darius’s soul from other responsibilities. “I will remember Muriel in my prayers. Shall I escort you back to the house?”

To make that offer openly and to mean it was a small moment of grace.

“Gracious, everlasting God, no. Portia is likely spying out of windows and bribing the servants to report my every move. The last thing she needs is to find some basis for her suspicions that I’ve played William false.”

“You’re going to have to explain me somehow.” Darius rose and offered Vivian a hand. “I’ll show up at the christening, and thereafter, and that is at William’s request.”

“Then William can explain you,” Vivian retorted. She let Darius pick up her book, fold the blanket over his shoulder, and offer her his arm.

Vivian scowled—even her scowls were dear—and accepted his escort. “You can’t walk me back to the house.”

“Let me see you across the stream.” He wrapped the reins of his courage around his wrists, and ambled along beside her. “I’d like to meet you here again on Friday.”

“Friday? This is not wise, Darius.”

He paused and looked down at her. “Your welfare concerns me. I know you don’t trust me, I know you’ve been disappointed in me and hurt by me. I am sorry, more sorry than you can possibly know. But if you’d allow it, I’d like to be your friend.”

To be her friend, a man she could rely upon for kindness, honesty, and decency, was the highest aspiration he’d ever held.

“What do friends do?”

She hadn’t ordered him off the property for his presumption. He took heart. “They occasionally pass the time together,” Darius said, resuming their progress. “They care for each other, and keep each other’s confidences, and they acknowledge each other in social situations.”

“Like you didn’t acknowledge me. On several notable occasions.”

“It won’t happen again,” he said quietly. “And I am abjectly sorry.”

“I believe you, but I don’t understand you, Darius. If you detest those women so much, why are they in your life? William has compensated you, hasn’t he?”

“We can talk more about that on Friday,” he replied, reluctant to explain that he’d used dirty weapons on dirty opponents, and been shown a curious grace by unlikely angels. “Weather permitting. And if the weather doesn’t permit, I’ll try on Monday, and so forth.”

“You’re determined on this, aren’t you?”

Was she trying to hide a smile—or a frown? “Yes. I am determined to be your friend.”

More silence as they approached a little rill babbling happily along toward the sea. “Very well, but for pity’s sake be discreet.”

“I’ll be careful, but my attentions are not going to be of a nature you’ll need to hide,” he replied, swinging her up into his arms and carrying her over the stream bordering the trees. “You be well, Vivian, and know I’m thinking of you.” He brushed a kiss to her cheek before setting her down and kept his hands on her upper arms for a moment.

“You can leave the blanket here,” Vivian said. “I’ll send a footman for it.”

“Until Friday then.” He bowed and smiled at her again, a soft, remembering smile—but a determined smile too.