“No. You’re either fully aflame or out cold.”
“That sounds more like your temperament than mine. I’m merely being polite.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Yes, but why?”
“Someone told me it was the proper thing to do.” He motioned her toward the door again. “If you don’t mind. Parliament will be in session tomorrow, and I have a few papers to review.”
Alexandra hesitated, then climbed the shallow steps. With her back turned, he allowed his gaze to longingly travel the curves of her slender body. This plan had best work, because keeping his hands and mouth and mind and body off her was already killing him.
Rose twirled in a circle while Shakespeare tried to catch the hem of her dress in his teeth. As the girl plopped onto the couch, Alexandra scooped up her dog and gave him an old knotted sock to play with instead.
“So you enjoyed yourself,” she said with a smile, enduring her pupil’s high spirits with a small twinge of jealousy. She hadn’t felt like spinning since Lucien had last kissed her.
“We went out in a rowboat, and we fed bread to the ducks. By the time we left the lake there must have been fifty ducks quacking behind us. Robert said they looked like Admiral Nelson’s fleet.”
“Oh, Robert, is it now?” Fiona said from her nest by the tea cakes. “Did he give you permission to call him that?”
“He insisted. And I said he should call me Rose.” She giggled, covering her mouth with both hands. “He said he might just as well call me Sunshine, but Rose would do.”
“That’s wonderful, my darling. Miss Gallant said that Lucien saw you off this morning.”
“Yes, he did. He was quite nice, Mama.”
Fiona dusted cake crumbs off her ample front. “Nice in what way?”
“He told me that seeing me almost made him want to go on a picnic himself.”
Rose’s mother beamed. “I knew having his family here would do him good. Don’t you think so, Miss Gallant?”
Alexandra shook herself out of a daydream in which Lucien said nice things to her. Had it only been yesterday? “Yes. I would have to say I’ve seen a definite change in him.”
“Why don’t you go find him, Miss Gallant, and ask him to join us?”
“To join us?” she repeated dubiously.
“Yes. Rose will play for him.”
“He said he had some papers to review.”
“Miss Gallant, if you please,” Fiona said, annoyance touching her already shrill voice.
“Of course.” Tossing Shakespeare’s sock into the corner to keep him occupied, Alexandra left the room. This had all been complicated enough to begin with. Now that she’d fallen in love with a man who looked to be quite possibly the world’s worst husband after Henry VIII, it was impossible.
He had a compassionate side; she’d seen it. With the horrid example of his own parents and his own lifestyle, though, he didn’t seem to have any idea of what made a marriage. If he did know, it didn’t seem to be anything he wanted. She could not and would not be anyone’s “convenience,” whatever she felt for him in her heart.
His office door was closed, and she hesitated before she knocked. “My lord?”
“Come in.”
Lucien sat at his desk, with what looked like several contracts and agreements open before him. He raised a hand at her, indicating that she should wait a moment, and finished scrawling something in the margin of one of the pages.
“Yes?” He lifted his head and looked at her.
From his expression, she might have been nothing more than a footman to him. “Mrs. Delacroix sent me to ask if you’d care to join us in the sitting room. Miss Delacroix wishes to play for you. I told her you were busy, but she insisted.”
“So you’ve blown out your candle, as well?”
She wanted to respond to his cynicism, and sternly stopped herself. “Please, my lord. I don’t wish to argue.”
