‘You cannot afford to overstep the line – you know this. Your chances of a respectable marriage depend on it.’
‘This sudden concern for my reputation is most touching and unexpected, coming from you,’ she said drily, the tiniest of catches in her voice all that betrayed her agitation. She recovered quickly and aimed straight, even in distress; he had to allow her that.
‘Ididn’t bring you out here.’
‘But you profited by my imprudence.’ That stung, as it was meant to, for it was the truth.
‘If I did, I wasn’t the only one,’ he shot back.
‘Oh, you are the most provoking… As a gentleman, you should admit you took wicked advantage of me,’ she hissed.
‘It would have been I or another.’ He shrugged. ‘It makes no matter, really. At least I have the sense not to allow you to run inside and make a spectacle of yourself. You really should thank me, Miss Constantine. I’m waiting…’
She slapped him.
8
Allegra lay in bed and seethed. No part of her wished to admit that Mr Severin had been right, and that he had by his intervention, even if at the time it had felt like a bucket of cold water thrown over her, prevented her from bringing disaster on herself and – as a bonus – on her innocent family. Her sisters might be excessively irritating, but their lives would be hard enough without her wrecking them before they’d properly started by turning herself into a public scandal.
It was deeply offensive for Severin to say that she should thank him for keeping a cool head when she had not – but then, so was a great deal else in his behaviour. Offensive, and disingenuous too. He’d surely been thinking of himself as much as of her. If she had run inside dishevelled, and cried out to the first person she’d encountered that he, a man she’d never even been introduced to, had come upon her when she was taking air and… and gravely insulted her, she’d not have been the only one ruined. It would have been hard indeed for him to avoid a huge scandal and the matrimonial trap then, suitor or not. Since he had no doubt been acting chiefly in his own interests rather than in hers, he did not deserve a scrap of gratitude. Gratitude!
She snorted and rolled over, seeking and failing to find a cooler spot on her pillow. But it just wasn’t true that he had assaulted her, was it? She couldn’t lie to herself on such a serious matter. She’d been a willing participant, with several excellent chances to pull away which she had not taken nor even wanted to take. When she remembered just how willing she had been, she groaned. He was not a suitor, so she had not even that excuse to comfort her. What had she turned into, or what had he unleashed in her? She’d behaved like some desperate, heedless wild creature. That he had too was little consolation. They’d devoured each other with tongues and teeth and clutching hands. The clutching hands, as she recalled very well, had mostly been hers, deep in his glossy hair, though his thumb, right at the end, had very shockingly… She didn’t even want to think about that, or rather she did, very much, but wouldn’t. Her body still tingled at the memory of his caress, from her head to the tips of her toes. Her body had wanted, and still did want, much more.
He had put a stop to it in the end – though she still had no idea why – not she. Allegra had not the least wish to know what might have happened if he hadn’t. Fleeting pleasure and then disaster, she presumed. She couldn’t even thinkHow far might she have allowed him to go?becauseallowedwasn’t at all the correct word. So perhaps he had been horribly correct in what he had said. Perhaps she’d been panting to be kissed – at the very least – by any man who had happened along. That sort of pitiless insight into another person’s behaviour and the deep nature that underlay it truly was unforgivable. Indecent. Society could not contain such openness. She’d been right to slap his face.
He hadn’t reacted to that, had barely even blinked. He’d just released her at last and stepped back without making any referenceto what she’d just done. ‘Go in by the hall – the furthest window on the left – so you can make yourself respectable before you return to the ballroom,’ he’d said dispassionately, as though he’d been making a light comment about the weather or something else equally trivial, not a woman’s precious reputation.
She hadn’t stayed to tell him that he had not the least right in the world to order her about so cavalierly. She’d taken his excellent advice and left. And she’d forced herself to walk slowly, not run away in a panic that would have been obvious to anyone who laid eyes on her. Damn him for being so cool, she’d been thinking as she went, when he’d been so passionate a moment earlier. She was not made in such an inhuman fashion. Hence the slap, she supposed.
She knew she’d had the luck of the Devil, though, afterwards. Perhaps he had been looking after his own, whether that might be her or – more likely – Mr Severin. There had been nobody in the hall when she’d entered it, not even a hovering servant, and she’d been able to gain the relative safety of the ladies’ cloakroom entirely unobserved. Her over-dress was a little dishevelled, which was easily set to rights; her dark ringlets too were in slight disorder. Beyond that, her eyes were bright and her cheeks flushed, but there was nothing at all in her appearance that might not have resulted from vigorous country dancing in an excessively warm and crowded room. She peered in the looking glass that had been thoughtfully provided by her hosts, seeking the guilty knowledge that should surely be written on her face. She had just allowed a complete stranger – she knew his name, but almost nothing else about him – shocking liberties. Should not her lip, which he had bitten, been swollen? The thought had done nothing to reduce the colour surging in her face, but as far as she could see it wasn’t. She looked exactly the same, outwardly.
When she slipped back from the hall to join the throng, hermother pounced on her almost immediately, which was only to be expected. Allegra did not give her any opportunity to ask where she had been; attack was the best form of defence. ‘I was in the ladies’ retiring chamber all this time, Mama,’ she said hastily. ‘Mr Englishby wanted me to go outside to take the air with him, and I did not know how to say no without causing a scene.’ Liar, liar, but what else could she do? ‘I said I must go to the ladies’ cloakroom first, and then I stayed inside there for an age until I could be sure he’d given up and left.’
Leontina seemed satisfied by this explanation. She let out a little snort and said, ‘That one is dangerous. I had suspected as much. I am not entirely sure that it is marriage he has in his mind, and even if it is, he is not the man for you, or any decent girl. His fortune is not reputed to be large, though he seems to spend it rashly enough, and I do not believe he would treat you at all well once he had won you. It’s all a matter of the chase, with his kind. I distrust that type of flashy good looks, and so should you. Do not risk being alone with him again.’
‘I promise you I won’t,’ Allegra said shortly. She must have sounded as though she meant it, since she emphatically did. She had no trouble at all in putting Mr Englishby from her thoughts. If only it were as easy to dismiss Mr Severin, and those damnably unforgettable moments in his arms.
9
Maximilian, a mile or two away in his own luxurious silk-hung bedchamber, wasn’t sleeping any better than Allegra. He’d left the ball a short while after Miss Constantine had so emphatically chastised him for his insolence; he’d had no wish to lay eyes on her in company with any other man. Her slap had not served to cool his ardour; rather the reverse. She had revealed herself to be a creature of passion and impulse. He had suspected as much before, but in moments of self-doubt he had paused to wonder if he might perhaps have been projecting his own unruly and unwelcome emotions onto her. After tonight, he knew he wasn’t.
Now his desire for her was raging so strongly, like a river in full flood carrying away trees and houses, everything in its path, that he would have suffered the acutest of torments if he’d seen her dancing with someone else. Laughing, flirting. She had a perfect right to do whatever she wanted with whatever partner she chose, and his brain knew as much; the blood pounding in his veins paid no heed to rationality and would not, it seemed, be so easily checked.
It had been a long while since physical desire had come soclose to overmastering him, and he had good cause to know how violently destructive such a force could be. Did he not owe his very existence with all its complications to a few heedless moments of passion on a Caribbean beach some six or seven and twenty years ago? Ten more minutes in that garden, and he’d have been caught very neatly in the parson’s mousetrap he’d so carelessly described to her. And it would have been entirely his own fault, not hers.Hehad gone to her, had sent the foolish boy away so that he could be alone with her, knowing where it was likely to lead, which she probably had not. It was nothing less than sheer reckless madness and he had every reason in the world to know better. He’d made his way slowly inside, shaking his head at his own folly, and yet still unable really to regret it because it had felt so wonderful, and so damn right.
His Oxford friends Tom Ivory and Gil Glasscock had hailed him with pleasure when they’d seen him in the hall of the mansion. Was not this the dullest of dull affairs, Sev? they’d cried. Doing the pretty to young ladies on the Season’s marriage mart was poor sport, after all: a great deal of danger for very little reward. They had just this moment decided to seek far less decorous entertainment elsewhere – not that his evening had been notably decorous so far, but of course they didn’t know that. They’d pressed him to go with them, to make a night of it, but he’d turned them off with some excuse, and they had shrugged and gone on their way to some disreputable destination. There was a discreet house just off Tavistock Place… but no use to think of that now. He needn’t be alone and frustrated tonight, but he was, by his own deliberate choice.
The plain fact was, he didn’t think another woman – any other woman – would truly satisfy him when he had had Allegra Constantine warm in his arms for that brief, unforgettable moment. No doubt he could easily have achieved much-neededrelease, and his generously paid and skilfully professional companion would not have cared that all his thoughts might be of another. It must be a common enough occurrence, after all. But… he hadn’t wanted that. The idea of putting someone else inherplace was unaccountably repugnant to him.
He was in the Devil of a coil. He could not be seen to seduce a debutante – say rather, he had no intention of seducing a debutante. No doubt debutantes had been seduced before and would be again, every day of the week including Sunday, but not by him. Not this time. But he had no wish to marry, not when the other tangled circumstances of his life made it highly inadvisable. Therefore, she was not for him. Therefore, he must cease playing with fire by watching her all the time like a mooncalf, and seek safety, which would only come from entirely letting her be. Probably he should leave London, go back to his estate in Kent, or anywhere a good long distance away – Scotland? Ireland? – and not return until he heard she was safely married to Milton, or Eager, or even Englishby. What could it matter who, since it would not be him?
Perhaps, he thought cynically, if she did in fact marry one of them – maybe Milton, who didn’t appear to have hot blood in his veins, but some other, more lukewarm and sluggish fluid – she might one day look kindly on him as a lover.Hewas not lukewarm, and nor was she. She might welcome him discreetly to her bed in a year or two, in an arrangement that happened every day in the haut ton. Then he could have her, enjoy her, but not, of course, possess her fully, because she would always belong to another man.
There was a great deal wrong with this statement, he was aware. The smallest part of it was the fact that she had slapped him, he’d richly deserved it for the way he’d egregiously insultedher, and she was therefore very unlikely ever to look kindly on him in any capacity again, least of all that of clandestine lover.
But that was as nothing beside the uncomfortable truth that, even if she did prove herself one day willing to play her hypothetical husband false – which she’d only do if she was unhappy in her match, was he really wishing misery on her? – it was not, in fact, possible to possess another person, nor should it be. He of all people should not be thinking like that. Other men might use such words carelessly, out loud or in their own heads, but he could not. Other men, and women too, here in England and in France, still owned slaves, built their vast fortunes on them and yet thought themselves the pinnacle of civilisation. His face, his very existence gave that the lie. He was the descendant of such wealthy, heartless people, yes, but also of the human beings they called property. He didn’t suppose they’d ever let him forget that, even ifhecould for a second. But this was a road he didn’t want to go down in his thoughts just now, if he hoped for any rest at all tonight. He shifted uneasily in his luxurious and lonely bed.
All-consuming passion could only have any chance of a happy outcome if it was mutual and fully consensual, he believed. Desire and duress did not belong together. A man whose ancestors – whose paternal grandmother, for one – had had no say at all in the direction of her own life, would not contemplate taking that precious freedom away from another. And even then, even if it was entirely shared, uncontrolled passion seemed more likely to destroy lives than anything else. Every adult knew that. Setting aside the cloudy, undeniably illicit circumstances of his own conception, history and literature held thousands of examples to teach him of the danger of unfettered lust. Perhaps he could begin listing them in date order, if sleep still proved elusive.
