LITMIR.BIZ

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widow was neither of those things. The difficulty was that it was Joanna Ware he wanted, not some Covent Garden light skirt. He doubted that bedding a Cyprian would even take the edge off his hunger, for he did not want a whore. He could pretend that this lust was no more than the natural consequence of being away from female company for months on end, but if he told himself that he would know that he was a liar.

      Joanna Ware. She was temptation incarnate. She was infuriating. She was forbidden to him. He disliked her.

      He would go to the rout and see if she had the temerity to dismiss him as her lover to his face, in full public view.

      He remembered that when David Ware had slipped the lawyer’s letter into his hand on his deathbed there had been a most peculiar, triumphant smile on Ware’s face and he had whispered:

      “Joanna likes surprises, damn her.” Alex doubted that Lady Joanna would be very pleased with this particular surprise. She had not expected to see him again. She disliked him equally as much as he disliked her.

      Devlin was still waiting for his reply.

      “Very well,” he said slowly. “Yes, I will be there.”

       Chapter 2

      “WHAT IS LORD GRANT LIKE?” Mrs. Lottie Cummings, ton hostess extraordinaire, scandalous matron and one of Lady Joanna Ware’s dearest friends, ignored the guests piling into her reception rooms in favor of quizzing her friend on the shocking news of her affaire. “You know I have only ever heard tell of him, Jo darling, and have not even seen a portrait.”

      “Well,” Joanna said, “he is tall.”

      “So is my aunt Dorothea.” Lottie gave an impatient wiggle. “Dearest, you are going to have to do better than that.”

      He is not really my lover … Why on earth had she let this go on for as long as it had? Why not simply say: “We are not lovers. It is all a hum …”

      Joanna was not sure. Anger at Alex’s high-handed behavior, and what she acknowledged was a rather childish pettiness because he disapproved of her and disliked her, had made her want to punish him. It was a foolish game of tit for tat and unworthy of her. The trouble was that if she denied the liaison now it would cause almost as much of a sensation as the original announcement. Such were the rather superficial obsessions of society. And a deeper, more disturbing truth was that she actually liked the idea of Alex Grant as her lover, liked it all too well as she imagined what it might be like to take him to her bed, to feel his hands on her body, to give herself to him with all the abandoned desire she had never actually felt for a man before. She had loved David passionately when they had wed, but the intensity of her infatuation had never been matched by physical desire. When David had touched her she had felt vaguely anticipatory, as though something more exciting should be happening. Unfortunately it never did. And then the relationship had turned so hideously sour that she had never wanted David to touch her ever again.

      In recent years-in most years, actually-her marriage bed had resembled the snowy wastes of the Arctic, pristine, empty and untouched, and having lost her illusions about David Ware, that was exactly how she had wanted it. She had been horribly lonely through the years of her marriage, a wife and yet no true wife, but even when David had died she had not trusted any man sufficiently to allow him close. And Alex Grant could not be that man. He was not for her. David had poisoned him against her, she was sure, and most importantly he was cut from the same cloth as David, an adventurer, an explorer, a man who would forsake his home and his family, and walk out into the unknown, leaving everything that should have been most precious and valuable to him behind.

      “Well?” Lottie prompted impatiently.

      “He is dark,” Jo said.

      Lottie sighed. “Again, my aunt Dorothea can give him a run for his money on that.” She threw up her hands. “Darling … you know I lead such a boring life! A little more vicarious excitement, if you please.”

      “That’s the best I can do, Lottie,” Joanna said. “Lord Grant and I are not really lovers. The gossip is not true.”

      Lottie was looking at her pityingly. “Jo, darling, you don’t have to explain or excuse yourself to me. Nobody blames you for taking a lover! Why, it is an age since David died. And I hear that lovely Lord Grant is very, very luscious. Is it true—” Lottie’s dark eyes sparkled suddenly “—that he has the most fearsome scars on his chest from wrestling a polar bear?”

      “I have no notion,” Joanna said. “Why would anyone want to wrestle a bear? It sounds highly dangerous.” She remembered the slight limp that characterized Alex’s gait. She had a vague memory that David had mentioned that Alex had been badly injured on some expedition some years before. Unlike her late husband, however, he did not seem inclined to make capital out of it.

      “Lottie,” she repeated, “you aren’t listening to me. Lord Grant and I are no more than acquaintances and pray don’t talk like this-you are shocking Merryn.” She looked at her younger sister, who had been sitting quietly by whilst Lottie chattered. Merryn was as restrained as Lottie was loud, her serenity an antidote to Mrs. Cummings’s staggeringly indiscreet personality. Merryn had the habit of silence, a habit she had fostered throughout their uncle’s long and difficult last illness. It was bad luck for the youngest, unmarried daughter, Joanna thought, that convention dictated that nursing duties always fell to them. Sometimes she felt just a little guilty at having left Merryn to cope with their uncle alone. She had escaped the stultifying atmosphere of the vicarage years before and had never returned. As far as she knew, neither had their middle sister, Tess. Merryn was the one who had borne the brunt of the Reverend Dixon’s choleric nature.

      “Don’t mind me,” Merryn said, her pansy-blue eyes lighting with amusement. “Oh, and I think that the polar bear story was an invention, Lottie.”

      Lottie was pouting. “Well, if Jo has not seen Lord Grant’s chest, we cannot know for sure, can we? Do you make love in the dark, Jo darling? You are even more prim and proper than I had imagined!”

      “I am exceptionally straitlaced,” Joanna agreed truthfully. “Lottie, I know I may seem flighty, but it is all show and no substance.”

      Lottie opened her dark eyes very wide. “Oh, I know that, darling! All the gentlemen say you have a heart of ice! So clever of you to be so beautiful and heartless and unobtainable, for it keeps them panting after you!”

      “I don’t do it to encourage them,” Joanna said a little uncomfortably, for Lottie’s words held an undercurrent of envy as well as being close to the truth. “It is simply that I do not trust men very much.”

      “Oh, well, darling—” Lottie planted a consoling hand on her arm “—neither do I, but what is that to the purpose? I seduce them and cast them aside and that keeps me happy.”

      Joanna wondered if it was true. She knew the conquest bit was-Lottie’s discreet affaires were well-known in ton circles, but whether her infidelities made her happy or not, Joanna had never been able to tell. They both lived in a world of mirrors where artifice and superficiality were highly prized and depth and sincerity mocked to scorn. Lottie never ever broached serious subjects with her and after ten years in the ton Joanna never confided in anyone either, having discovered early on that secrets were not respected. What was meant for private discussion quickly became the on dit.

      “Well, if you wish to set your cap for Lord Grant, pray do not worry about cutting me out,” she said now. “I am not having an affaire with him.” She sighed. “And I cannot believe that you invited him this evening, Lottie, nor laid on this rather extravagant display in his honor.”

      When she had arrived at Lottie’s rout and discovered that Alex Grant was promised for the evening, she had been appalled and incredulous. That Alex, with his apparent contempt for the adulation of society, should be such a hypocrite as to accept this ball in his honor had disappointed Joanna in some obscure way, reinforcing as it did that he was just another self-aggrandizing adventurer after all. And there

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