“But you said the dukes and marquesses would not come to us,” said Zoe.
“I’m afraid to imagine what will be said about this,” said Priscilla.
“You said I could not hope to meet such men,” said Zoe. “But here is one.” And she wasn’t about to let him get away if she could help it.
“Ooooh,” said Mama. She fell back upon the pillows.
“Look what you’ve done to Mama!”
“The girl is hopeless.”
“Of course he’ll tell all his friends.”
“Papa, do something!” Gertrude cried as she flung herself into her chair.
Papa only looked briefly over his shoulder, his glance going from Zoe to the tall, fair-haired, shockingly handsome man with the decanter and glass in his long-fingered hands. The Duke of Marchmont’s beautifully shaped mouth had fallen open. His eyes had widened slightly.
As she watched, he closed his mouth and shuttered his eyes again.
She’d seen those stunningly green eyes wide open, for one dizzying heartbeat in time, when they’d first lit on her. The impact had nearly toppled her from her chair. She’d felt for a moment like the little girl spinning helplessly until landing on her bottom on a muddy patch of grass.
“I cannot wait,” she said. “Marchmont, you are the highest of rank here. Tell them to be silent and let me speak.”
“We shall never live this down,” Augusta said. “What a tale he’ll have for his friends at White’s.”
Marchmont slowly filled his glass. When that was done, he said, “I must have heard aright, else your sisters would not be shrieking at quite that pitch. You have asked me to marry you. Is that correct, Miss Lexham?”
The last time her heart had pounded so hard was on the day she’d fled the palace of Yusri Pasha and found the gates of the European quarter closed to her. Then she’d been terrified of what would happen to her if she was caught.
Yet she’d been exhilarated, too, to risk everything in one desperate bid for freedom.
This appeared to be her only chance to live the life for which she’d taken that desperate risk.
However grand his rank or handsome his face or splendid his physique, this was still a man, she told herself. Though he hid his eyes, she knew he was mentally taking off her clothes and liked what he saw. She felt, rather than saw, the slight tension in his posture: the alertness of the predator when it marks its prey.
A harem slave would be tearing off her garments about now.
Zoe knew she could not entice him in that way. Not here, at any rate. Not now. She must appeal to him from mind to mind. It must be business. The way men did it.
Or at least it must seem so.
She adjusted her shawl and her own posture, making herself as alluring as she could without being too obvious about it, while she filled her mind with the ritual formulae employed on similar occasions.
In a logical and orderly fashion, she summarized for the duke her sisters’ and absent brothers’ assessment of the situation and their reasons for wanting to send her away.
“They say the only other solution is for me to marry a man of the highest rank,” she went on. “They say others must defer to him. They say that a man so highly placed will want an innocent girl of eighteen. I am not truly innocent, and I am not eighteen, but I am a virgin.”
“Ooooh,” said Mama.
Zoe went on determinedly, “Yusri Pasha gave me as a second wife to Karim, who was his eldest son by his first wife. But Karim could not make his…his…”—though Marchmont kept his eyes half closed, she knew the duke regarded her intently—“his instrument of delight. The limb a man uses for pleasure and to make children. What is it called?”
Shrieks from the sisters.
Zoe ignored them. “No one will tell me what it is in English,” she said. “If I ever learned the word, I have forgotten it.”
He made an odd sound in his throat. Then he said, “Membrum virilewill do.”
The two older sisters put their heads in their hands.
