Mary Balogh - A Secret Affair

She wanted a lover. She wanted it all. Everything that the world of sensual pleasures had to offer even if she had to descend to the underworld with the devil himself to find it.

She was thirty years old. Why did that seem so very much older than twenty-nine?

What would Barbara have to say if she were here now, Hannah wondered as she turned from the glass and took up her cloak, which had been set over the back of a chair. She drew it on and clasped it at the neck and settled the wide hood carefully over her head. She picked up her small reticule. No fan tonight. She would have no need of one.

Barbara would probably not say anything. She would not need to. She would look with reproachful, slightly wounded eyes. Barbara would think she was about to do something dreadfully immoral. Hannah disagreed with her. She was no longer married. And Barbara would think she was about to set her feet on the road to heartbreak. Hannah disagreed again. She was merely going to sleep with a very, very attractive, experienced man. Almost every part of her body was going to be involved except her heart.

Very happily involved.

She was not making a mistake. This was all happening faster than she had intended, it was true. She was not quite sure she should have capitulated quite so easily this afternoon. He had probably not really meant that he would have nothing more to do with her if she refused to go to him tonight. And if he had meant it, so what? There were other men. But she had capitulated. She had wanted a masterful man, after all, one who was not going to be a mere lapdog, as Barbara had phrased it.

No, she was not making a mistake.

She glanced one more time at her image. There. She was all white again.

The carriage he had sent for her had already been waiting at the door when Adèle had been sent in search of the emeralds. It had arrived right on time.

Which meant that she was now about fifteen minutes late.

Just right.

She swept from the room and down the stairs to the hall, where a smartly liveried footman waited to open the door for her.

CONSTANTINE HUXTABLE did not take bachelor rooms in the area of St. James’s and all the gentlemen’s clubs, as many gentlemen did when they were in town alone. Instead, he leased a house each year in an area quite respectable enough for his status in society, but not quite fashionable enough to impinge upon his privacy.

Or so Hannah guessed as the coachman handed her down onto the pavement outside his door and she looked curiously up and down the street. It was still daylight. They were to dine relatively early.

A servant had already opened the door of the house. Hannah lifted the hems of her cloak and dress, climbed the steps, and swept past him into a square, spacious hall with a black and white tiled floor and landscapes in heavy gilded frames hanging on the walls.

Constantine Huxtable was standing in the middle of the hall, all in black, as usual, and looking really very satanic indeed.

“Duchess?” He made her an elegant bow. “Welcome to my home.”

“I hope,” she said, “your chef has excelled himself this evening. I have not eaten since the garden party, and I am famished.”

“He will be dismissed without a reference tomorrow morning if he has not,” he said, stepping forward to take her cloak.

“How very ruthless you are,” she said and stood where she was, a few steps inside the door.

He pursed his lips slightly and came even closer in order to lower her hood and then undo the clasp that held her cloak closed at the throat. He removed the garment and handed it to the silent servant without taking his eyes off her. They moved very deliberately down her body and back up to her head and down to her eyes.

There was not a flicker of surprise in his eyes. But there was something there. Some suggestion of heat, perhaps. He had been taken by surprise.

Hannah wished that after all she had brought a fan.

“You are looking particularly lovely this evening, Duchess,” he said and offered her his arm.

He led her to a room that was small and square and cozy. Heavy draperies drawn across the window shut out the last vestiges of the daylight. The only light came from the fire crackling in the hearth and two long tapers in crystal holders set on a smallish table in the middle of the room. The table was set for two.

This was not the dining room, Hannah guessed.

He had chosen a more intimate setting.

He crossed to a sideboard and poured two glasses of wine before pulling on a bell rope. He handed one of the glasses to Hannah.

“On an empty stomach, Mr. Huxtable?” she asked. “Do you wish to see me dancing on the table?”

“Not on the table, Duchess,” he said, clinking his glass against hers in a silent toast.

She sipped her wine.

“But I need no encouragement to dance elsewhere,” she told him. “The wine will be wasted on me.”

“Then I hope that at least it tastes good,” he said.

It did, of course.

The butler and a footman entered with their food, and they took their places at the table.

The chef was excellent, Hannah soon discovered. They ate in near-silence for a while.

“Tell me,” she said at last, “about your home, Mr. Huxtable.”

“About Warren Hall?” he said.

“That was your home,” she said. “It is the Earl of Merton’s now. Do you have a good relationship with him?”

But they had been riding in the park together.

“An excellent one,” he said.

“And where do you live now?” she asked.

He indicated the room with one hand.

“Here,” he said.

“But not all year,” she said. “Where do you live when you are not in town?”

“I have a home in Gloucestershire,” he told her.

She stared at him while their soup bowls were removed and the fish course was set before them.

“You are not going to tell me about it, are you?” she said. “How tiresome of you. Another secret to add to the one concerning your quarrel with the Duke of Moreland. And to add to the mystery of why you have an excellent relationship with the Earl of Merton when he stole the title that should rightfully be yours.”

He set his knife and fork down quietly across his plate. He looked into her eyes across the table. His looked very black.

“You have been misinformed, Duchess,” he said. “The title was never to be mine. There was never any question that it might be. It was my father’s and then my younger brother’s, and now it is my cousin’s. I have no reason to resent any of them. I loved my father and brother. I am fond of Stephen. They are all family. One is meant to love family.”

Ah, she had rubbed him on the raw. His voice and manner were perfectly controlled, but …

Too controlled?

“Except the Duke of Moreland,” she said.

He continued to look at her and neglect his food.

Their plates were borne away and another course brought on.

“And what about your family, Duchess?” he asked.

She shrugged.

“There is the duke,” she said. “The current duke, that is. He is blameless and harmless and about as interesting as the corn and the sheep upon which he dotes. And the duke, my husband, had an army of other relatives, with none of whom he was remotely close.”

“And your family?” he asked.

She picked up her glass, twirled it slowly for the pleasure of seeing the light of the candle refracted off the crystal, and sipped the wine.

“None,” she said. “And so there is nothing to say. No secrets to hide or divulge. Let me tell you about my home in Kent—Copeland. The duke bought it for me five years ago. He always referred to it as my quaint little country box, but it is neither quaint nor little nor a box. It is a manor, even a mansion. And it has a park that rolls away in all four directions from the house in a rural splendor that is half cultivated, half not. At least, it is all well kept, but it is all natural woodland and natural grassland and a natural lake. There are no arbors or parterres or wilderness walks. It really is quite … rustic. That is something the duke might have called it without any sacrifice of accuracy.”

She cut into her beef, which looked and felt as if it had been cooked to perfection.

“It is all perhaps a little too natural for you, Duchess?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I fear it is. I feel that I ought to impose my human will upon it all, that it ought to look pretty, as the garden this afternoon looked pretty.”

“And yet?” He paused in his eating again.

“And yet,” she said, “I confess to liking it as it is. Nature needs to be tamed sometimes. It is only civilized. But ought we to force it to be something it is not meant to be just for the sake of beauty? What is beauty?”

“Now there,” he said, “is a question for the ages.”

“You must come and see for yourself,” she said, “and tell me what you think.”

“I must come?” He raised his eyebrows. “To Kent?”

“I shall arrange a brief house party a little later in the Season when everyone is starting to find the endless round of balls here tedious,” she said. “It will all be perfectly respectable, I assure you, though everyone will know by then, of course, that we are lovers. People always do know these things, even when they are not true. Which will not be the case with us. You will give me your opinion about the park.”