“I love the way you smell,” she said. “It is always the same.”
“Mingled liberally with sweat on two recent occasions,” he said.
“Yes.” She laughed softly.
“And I love the sound of your laughter,” he said. And if he had met her for the first time today, he realized, or even yesterday, it would not even have occurred to him to think of her as the marble lady. He wondered if she was falling in love with him, or if it was just the sex.
It was not just the sex, though, was it? If it were, then they would be upstairs now, naked on her bed, going at it.
For a moment he felt almost dizzy with alarm. That was what they really ought to be doing.
“I am not much given to laughing,” she said.
“And that,” he said, “is why your laughter is so precious. No, correct that. It would be just as precious if you laughed frequently. You used to?”
She inhaled and exhaled, but she had not tensed up, he noticed.
“In another lifetime,” she said. “I like your friends.”
“They do not have two brain cells between them to rub together,” he said fondly.
“Oh, but of course they do,” she said. “I might have said that of you if I had seen you only with them. Sometimes we need friends with whom we can simply be silly. Silliness can be . . . healing.”
“Are you ever silly with your friends?” he asked her.
“Yes, sometimes.” He could feel her smiling against the side of his neck. “Friendship is a very, very precious thing, Percy.”
“Are we friends?” Now where the devil had that infantile question come from? He felt foolish.
She raised her head and looked into his face. She was not smiling.
“Oh, I believe we could be.” She sounded almost surprised. “We will not be, though. We will not know each other long enough. It will be enough that we are lovers, will it not? Just for a brief spell. That is all either of us wants. I shall not try to cling to you when it is over, and that is a very firm promise.”
He felt as though someone had dropped a very large iceberg down the chimney and doused the fire and all memory of it.
Yes, that was all either of them wanted. That was all he wanted—a vigorous and pleasurable sexual liaison while he was living out here in a social desert.
Why, then, were they sitting in her sitting room?
He drew her head back to his shoulder. “Would you be surprised to know,” he said, “that smuggling is still active in this area? Even on this land?”
There was a lengthy silence. “I would not be terribly shocked,” she said eventually, “though I know nothing of it.”
“Nothing of the involvement of any of the servants here?” he asked her. “Or whether their involvement is voluntary or forced? Nothing of the use of the cellar at the hall for the stowing of contraband?”
“Oh.” She paused. “Definitely not that. With Aunt Lavinia and Cousin Adelaide in the house? Is it true?”
“Both the inside and the outside doors leading into one half of the cellar are locked, and both keys are missing,” he told her. “No one is trying hard to find them, for apparently that area was shut off to keep the damp from the rest of the cellar.”
“Oh,” she said again. “I thought—I hoped—it had all ended with my father-in-law’s passing and even before that when I moved here.”
“I have been advised,” he said, “by everyone to whom I have spoken, to leave well enough alone, to turn a blind eye, to let sleeping dogs lie and so on. The trade will go on, I am told, and no one is really hurt by it.”
She was silent. What the devil had induced him to raise this topic of conversation to a lady, and at something close to one in the morning? He glanced at the clock. It was five to.
“Who is harmed by it, Imogen?”
“Colin Bains was,” she said.
“Yes.”
“He was such a bright, eager boy,” she told him. “He worshiped Dicky. He so much wanted to come to the Peninsula with us.”
“Your husband was quite vocally opposed to the smuggling?” he asked.
“He was,” she said. “But he could not persuade his father that there was anything so very wrong with it. On the surface there was not and is not. There is a little loss of revenue to the government and a lot of enjoyment of superior luxury goods—particularly brandy by the gentlemen, of course. But I think what we see and know is the veriest tip of the iceberg, and what we do not see is ugly and vicious. Even the visible tip can be nasty. He received threats before we went away.”
“Bains?”
“No, Dicky,” she said. “There were two letters, one threatening his life, one mine. They were written in a childish, nearly illiterate hand, and his father laughed at them. But Dicky was already in the process of purchasing his commission. We never knew if the threats were serious or not.”
Good God. What if they had been? What if they had been very serious indeed?
Good God.
“Oh,” she said, “I have been such a coward. I have known nothing lately because I have chosen to ask no questions and not to look out my windows late on dark nights.”
He lifted her chin with the hand that was about her shoulders. “I beg your pardon, Imogen,” he said. “I do beg your pardon for raising this topic with you. Forget I did. Keep on knowing nothing. Promise me? Promise.”
She nodded after a moment. “I promise,” she said, and he kissed her.