Private Arrangements, page 26
Gigi felt herself petrify. Camden lived ten blocks south of the Waldorf Hotel. She'd counted it this morning. And hadn't the former Miss von Schweppenburg married a Russian grand duke?
She fumbled with the veil of her own hat as the automobile came to a quiet stop before the hotel. The passengers alit. The driver opened the boot and retrieved a heavy-looking bucket, which the children immediately took from him, causing their mother to issue a string of safety warnings in French.
The driver bowed. “I'll bring the carriage around at eleven, Your Highness.”
“Thank you,” said Her Highness.
And it was her, the former Miss von Schweppenburg. Who was going back to Camden's house at eleven o'clock at night, after the dinner crowd would have departed, for purposes that needed no clarification.
The bucket was passed to a doorman with instructions for the kitchen. Grand Duchess Theodora and her children entered the hotel and disappeared into a lift.
Gigi slowly walked to a corner of the lobby and sat down. She'd expected to fight for him, given that he might have already taken a lover, to physically remove the other woman, or women—she'd had far too much time to ponder it on the crossing—from his bed and his life, if necessary.
Any other woman.
What was she to do now?
Chapter Twenty-nine
If you do not mind my forwardness, Lord Tremaine, I think my Consuelo would make you a splendid marchioness,” said Mrs. William Vanderbilt, née Alva Erskine Smith.
“I do not mind at all,” said Camden. “I've been known to be exceedingly fond of forward women. But I am, however, almost twice Miss Vanderbilt's age and still very much married, last time I checked.”
“My, sir, you are such a gentleman,” cooed Mrs. Vanderbilt. Her Southern-belle manners, however, did not quite disguise her flinty determination. “But I have heard from numerous trustworthy sources, on both sides of the Atlantic, that you may not remain married for much longer.”
It's because you are young and you used to be a bit of an impoverished nobody. Expect the proposals to fly fast and thick now. After nearly eleven years, that prediction was coming true. This wasn't the first time Mrs. Vanderbilt had broached the issue in recent weeks. Nor was she the first, second, or even third matron with a marriageable daughter to suggest that her precious girl was just the perfect candidate for him.
All throughout the dinner, the first he'd held since his return from England, he'd felt on display, like a fattened goose about to be turned into foie gras. The smiles on the women were too bright, too ingratiating. Even the men with whom he'd shared cigars, whiskey, and business ventures for the past ten years regarded him differently, with the sort of hearty approval better reserved for sixteen-year-old mistresses.
“Well, then, milord, you will come for dinner next Wednesday?” drawled Mrs. Vanderbilt. “I don't think you've seen Consuelo for a good six months, and she has become ever so much more beautiful and swanlike and—”
The doors to the drawing room swung open—burst open, in fact, as if blown apart by a passing cyclone. In the doorway loomed a woman and a dog. The dog was small, well-behaved, and sleepy, snuggled in the crook of the woman's arm. The woman was tall, haughty, and ravishing, her voluptuous figure poured into a sheath of carmine velvet, her throat and breast glistening with a maharaja's cache of rubies and diamonds. And, ever so incongruously, she also sported a very humble sapphire ring on her left hand.
“Now, who is that?” demanded Mrs. Vanderbilt, at once peeved and fascinated.
“That, my dear Mrs. Vanderbilt,” replied Camden, with a glee he couldn't and didn't hide, “is my lady wife.”
* * *
Never in her entire life had Gigi felt so vulnerable, standing before a roomful of strangers—and a husband who had another lover arriving in an hour.
She'd already ordered a suite for her return voyage on the Lucania and telegraphed Goodman to have the house on Park Lane readied. A cable for Mrs. Rowland lay on the bureau in her hotel chamber—Tremaine has taken up with the Grand Duchess Theodora, née von Schweppenburg—but somehow she couldn't send it, couldn't admit that final defeat, not without one last gallant and largely foredoomed charge down the hill.
Now all eyes were on her, including Camden's. There was surprise on his face, a measure of amusement, and then a nonchalance that did not bode well for her chances. She waited for him to acknowledge her, to toss her at least a line of greeting. But other than a few inaudible words to the woman next to him, he said nothing, leaving her to jump off the cliff entirely by herself.
She let her eyes travel the drawing room. “Truly, Tremaine, I expected better from you. The decor is obvious to the point of atrociousness.”
A collective gasp reverberated from the high ceiling.
He smiled, a cool smile that nevertheless ignited her hopes anew. “My lady Tremaine, I distinctly remember informing you dinner was at half past seven. Your punctuality leaves much to be desired.”
“We will discuss my punctuality or the lack thereof later, in private,” she said, her heart pounding. “You may present your friends to me now.”
* * *
Lady Tremaine couldn't quite keep straight who was an Astor, who a Vanderbilt, and who a Morgan. But it didn't matter. She had fortune, which they admired, and title, which they coveted. Her temperament fitted in perfectly with the energetic, purposeful, ambitious upper crust of the American aristocracy; her independence earned her the approval of the wives, several of whom were sympathetic toward the suffragists.
The men gawked, alongside Camden.
There'd been much surreptitious necktie-loosening when she—later, in private—unmistakably commanded him to shag her blind. The sexual energy she exuded was palpable; the response it provoked in him was downright atrocious. No other women came anywhere near him for the remainder of the evening; even the unsighted could see that he was hanging on to civilized behavior by the skin of his teeth, that if they didn't make themselves scarce, he'd commit public coitus right before their eyes—with his own wife.
In the end she did something almost as shocking. At precisely eleven o'clock, she disengaged from the guests and placed herself at the center of the drawing room. “It has been lovely meeting the very best society of New York, I'm sure. But if you will forgive me, it's been a long journey, and I feel myself no longer quite equal to company. Ladies and gentlemen, my repose beckons. Good night.”
And with that, she left, the intricate train of her gown swaying majestically, leaving behind a speechless crowd, the ladies fanning themselves much too vigorously, the men looking as if they'd sign away half of their companies if only they could follow her out on the heels of her black suede evening slippers.
“Alas,” said Camden, keeping his tone light. “It seems I have utterly failed in my husbandly duties of guidance and discipline. I shall henceforth devote the greater part of my time and energy to that eminently noble endeavor.”
Half of the women blushed. Three-quarters of the men cleared their throats. The leave-taking began in the next minute, and the drawing room emptied at record speed.
Camden raced up the stairs, charged into his apartment, and threw open the door to his bedchamber. She lay prone across his bed, her cheeks in her palms, studying his copy of the Wall Street Journal—completely naked. Those legs, that sumptuous bottom, the curvature of her breast squeezed round and tight against the underside of her arm, and all that beautiful hair spilled across her back. Carnal desire, already simmering, exploded in him.
She tilted her head and smiled. “Hullo, Camden.”
He closed the door behind him. “Hullo, Gigi. Fancy seeing you here.”
“Well, you know how it is. Investment opportunities, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Took you long enough,” he growled. “I was about to hire dognappers.”
She licked her teeth. “Am I worth the wait?”
God above! He could barely remain standing. “You were unspeakably brazen before my guests. I'm afraid you have laid waste to my staid, upstanding reputation.”
“Have I? I'm terribly sorry. I must learn to be a better wife. If only you'd give me a little more practice . . .” She turned onto her back and slid a knuckle across her lower lip. “Won't you come to bed and make me pregnant?”
He was on that bed and inside her in a fraction of a second. She was all hellfire and heavenly suppleness, clutching at him, her legs wrapped tight about him, her unabashed gasps and moans driving him mad with desire.
He shook, shuddered, and convulsed, his vaunted control in pieces as he came endlessly, well on his way to making her pregnant.
“Will you remonstrate me for my lack of punctuality now?” Gigi said later, still mostly breathless, lying with her head on his arm.
“That and your utter want of respect toward the beauty and splendor of the public rooms of my house.”
“I like them. They quite suit my parvenu tastes.” The private quarter, which housed his Impressionist collection, was by contrast cool and serene. “I was looking for something to say that would immediately establish my English eccentricity.”
“I think you've succeeded beyond all hope,” he said. “They will prattle of this night for years to come, especially if you go into confinement nine months from today.”
She smiled to herself. “You think you are so virile.”
“I know I'm so virile.” He kissed her earlobe. “Let's just hope the second time's the charm.”
She didn't immediately catch the significance of his words. When she did, she found herself scrambling to a sitting position. He'd obliquely referred to her first pregnancy, which had ended in a miscarriage. But she had never spoken of it, not even to her mother. Had hidden it, along with her ravenous love, in the deepest recesses of her heart, a secret prisoner in the dungeon, whose clanking chains and whimpers of despair only she heard in the witching hours of the night.
“You knew,” she whispered.
She shouldn't be so surprised. It was silly to believe her mother wouldn't have found out about it—and that once she did, she wouldn't have told Camden in the hope of forcing a reaction from him.
“Only years after the fact. I got quite drunk the day I learned of it. I believe I smashed my entire model ship collection.” He sighed, smoothing a strand of her hair between his fingers. “But perhaps that was out of jealousy, since your mother mentioned the miscarriage in the same breath she invoked Lord Wrenworth's name.”
She lay down again, facing him. “You? Jealous? You are with a different woman every time I turn around.”
“Guilty as charged in Copenhagen. But I didn't sleep with anyone in Paris.”
What she really wanted to know was what he'd been doing with the former Miss von Schweppenburg. But his extraordinary claim about Paris perked her ears nevertheless.
“Who was that woman calling on you late at night, then?”
“A rising actress at the Opéra. I hired her to knock on my door and sit in my apartment for a few hours, so that you'd assume the worst and hurt as much as I did. But I didn't touch her, or any other woman. I was faithful to you, for what that's worth, until I learned that you'd taken a lover already.”
That would make him celibate for at least two and a half years after he'd left her. “Why? Why were you faithful to me?” she marveled.
“Oh, I had no time. Within weeks after my arrival in America I'd taken on such astronomical loans I could scarcely eat or sleep for fear of defaulting. I was up at five every morning and never went to bed before one.” He grimaced a little at the memory, then smiled at her. “You could also say I had no intention. I wanted you. I wanted to stomp back into your life one day, twice as wealthy as you, if possible. I imagined decadent, histrionic reunions and wasted a river of sperm masturbating to these fantasies.”
She knew what the word meant—it was what the Muscular Christians were trying to prevent, through a regimen of rigorous sports that would leave English men and boys too exhausted for anything but dead slumber—though she was sure she'd never heard it spoken aloud before. She'd thought it a dirty word, but the way he said it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, made voluptuous images dance before her eyes.
If she weren't already naked, she'd rip off her clothes and throw herself at him. She took one of his hands and rubbed the moist inside of her lower lip against the calluses of his palm. “Tell me one of those fantasies.”
He leveled a dirty look at her. “Only if you promise to act your part in it.”
She bowed her head with becoming humility. “Well, I did tell myself that I would be the most obliging wife who ever lived.”
He smiled wickedly, pulling her to him. “Oh, this is getting better and better.”
In between fulfillment of his inventive—at times highly unorthodox—fantasies, Gigi and Camden talked about the children they would have and all the things they couldn't wait to do together. At Christmas they'd visit his grandfather in Bavaria. Come spring she would show him the gorgeous West Country of England and Wales. And in summer, if she wasn't already too far gone in her pregnancy, they'd sail the Aegean and the Adriatic on the Mistress.
“Take me somewhere to ride,” she said. “I haven't been on a horse since you walked out on me the first time.”
“I've a country house in Connecticut, on a pretty piece of land. We'll sail up tomorrow.”
Thinking of the arrangements made her remember Beckett. “Your butler . . . do you know that—”
“I was the one who told him to go far away. We were both shocked when three years later he came for a position I'd advertised. He immediately begged pardon and turned to leave. I stopped him. To this day I don't really know why.” Camden shrugged. “By the end of the year, he'll have worked for me for seven years.”
Whatever his reasons, she was grateful. “It's a well-run house,” she murmured. “And what of his son?”
“He was in a Liverpool jail for a year or two, then went to South Africa when gold was discovered. He married last year.”
She breathed a further sigh of relief. It was most agreeably humbling to learn that her sins hadn't stopped the earth from spinning or other people from getting on tolerably with the rest of their lives.
He traced her spine from her neck down to her tailbone and back again. “Tell me about Lord Frederick. How did he take your decision not to marry him?”
“With much better grace than I deserved, to be sure. I only wish I could arrange for him to be happy always. But don't worry,” she added hastily. “I will leave him alone to live his own life. I've learned my lesson.”
“Hmm, have you?” He kissed her shoulder. “That's what you said the last time we were in bed together.”
She turned onto her back and placed his hand between her legs. “Feel for yourself. Nothing there anymore between you and me.”
She lost count of how many times they made love. Too much and still not quite enough. Some time in the small hours of the night, he ran her a bath and laundered her thoroughly, making her giggle and squeal with all the naughty things a playful man could do with a willing woman, a tub of hot water, and a piece of fragrant soap.
When it was his turn to wash, she looted the kitchen for food. He was in his dressing gown toweling his hair dry when she returned, carrying with her a haunch of roasted pheasant left over from the dinner, a half loaf of bread, and a bowl of morello cherries.
“My God,” he said, tossing aside the towel to take the tray from her. “I had no idea you did things other than turning profits and enslaving men.”
She laughed as he set the tray down atop the large cedar chest at the foot of the bed. “Allow me to shock you by knitting you a pair of socks this Christmas, then.”
He smiled, tearing off a chunk of bread. “Then I shall be forced to build you a rocking chair. Alas, my carpentry is quite rusty.”
Tenderness, that most alien and disconcerting of emotions, swelled and billowed in her. She picked up a cherry and stared down at the soft, bright-red fruit. “I love you.”
The last time she'd declared her love he'd thrown it right back in her face. She waited uncertainly for his response. She didn't even have to wait a second. He leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. “I love you more.”
All the sugar in Cuba couldn't compete with the sweetness in her heart. “More than you love the grand duchess?”
“Idiot.” He ruffled her already bedraggled hair. “I haven't loved her since the day I met you.”
“But I saw her today, in your automobile. The doormen at the hotel said she's been seen in your automobile every day. And your driver said he was coming back for her at eleven o'clock at night.”
“Incorrect. He is going to meet her and the children at eleven o'clock tomorrow morning, to take them to the train station. She has some relatives to visit in Washington, D.C.”
“Then you haven't been having an affair with her?”
“I last kissed her in 1881, and I don't miss it.” A sly smile curved his mouth. “So that explains your very delectable aggression. Perhaps I should keep her around, to always ensure your prompt ardor.”
“Only if you want Freddie to set up a canvas in our parlor.”
“Won't bother me, as long as I can still have you on the piano.” He grinned. “I can never look at the damned thing without seeing you draped over it in all kinds of lascivious ways, your sweet bum up in the—”
She threw the cherry at him. He caught the fruit and ate it. “I almost forgot,” he said, walking to a writing desk in the next room. “Look what news was delivered to my doorstep this afternoon.”
He brought back a telegram. She wiped her hands on a napkin and took the telegram from him.
dear sir stop his grace has persuaded me to the altar stop we wed yesterday stop will shortly depart for corfu stop yours most affectionately stop victoria perrin
Gigi covered her open mouth. Her mother. A duchess. The Duke of Perrin's duchess, no less. She'd suspected something, of course, but this—marriage— this was something else entirely.
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