How to Impress a Marquess Read online

  He really did have to squelch a smile. “Miss Dahlgren, I am not devoid of proper emotions. But unlike you I temper them with sense, you know, that mental faculty you are woefully missing, darling,” he said, splashing her own words in her face.

  “What would I do with something as horrid as sense? I want wild, overpowering feeling, passion, zest. ‘More happy love! more happy, happy love! / For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, / For ever panting, and for ever young; / All breathing human passion far above…’ That’s Keats, dearest,” she said. “I know you wouldn’t recognize it.”

  “But I recognize what you are doing.”

  “Oh, but I do many things.” She fluttered her eyelashes, sending a heated tremor through him. “What particular thing is this?”

  “Last week, you came to me with a sob tale of not having enough funds to buy clothes or pay the grocer. I advanced you ten pounds. And here you are in indecent rags, pretending to be a ridiculous muse, and throwing a party—”

  “Exhibit opening, not a party.”

  “Don’t try to distract me from the matter at hand. Ever since you were a child, you have teased and danced around the matter of your atrocious behavior.”

  “And you know so much about my childhood from those few days I was allowed to leave school and visit Tyburn at Christmas.” Fire flashed in her eyes, but her voice remained creamy. “Such special times. They were like a beautiful illustration in Town and Country.”

  “I would hardly call it that.”

  “I would.” She waved her hand as if she could conjure the scene in the air. “The children are gathered around the adorned tree, speculating about the gifts Mama and Papa have given them this year. Maybe it’s a bicycle or that lovely china doll from the shop window. An enormous Yule log roars in the fireplace while the adults, their cheeks and noses reddened from spiced wassail, laugh over old stories of Great-Aunt Millicent and the recalcitrant poodle, Lord Bertie and the silly hat, or such.” Her chuckle, at first light and musical, turned bitter. “Only I wasn’t in that lovely picture like you, the golden boy, and my adored, precious half-siblings. I was ten pages over in the tiny article ‘Ways to Hide the Child Who Doesn’t Fit into Your Shiny New Debrett’s-Worthy Family.’” She spun on her heel, putting her back to him.

  She had the smallest toehold on his family, having issued from the unfortunate elopement of his aunt by marriage and her first husband, the roguish John Dahlgren. When Lilith was five, her father had died in a duel after cheating at cards. By then, he had already lost his wife’s substantial dowry on poor business investments. When her mother married George’s uncle, Lilith, the human embodiment of a bad memory, had been sent away and fair-headed, beautiful babies created in her place.

  Her shoulders now drooped as she pressed her hand to her mouth. Several beats of silence passed. He had never seen her serious. She was always scheming, teasing, or flying into a rage. He hadn’t witnessed one of her famous tantrums, though, since her youth. The last he could recall was when he was a young man and she was being physically forced by his uncle and his manservant onto the train back to school, after she called her young half-siblings vicious names and marked up her chamber walls with shoe polish. “Too wild to handle,” his uncle would say of his stepdaughter as the men watched the train chug off and her, finally inside, screaming “I hate you” and banging her hands against the train-carriage windows.

  After her mother and stepfather had passed away, her grandfather, fearing for the welfare of his estranged and unruly eighteen-year-old granddaughter, set up a trust for her. He named George as the trustee, thereby keeping her under the Maryle mantle.

  “What do you want?” he asked quietly. “What will make you happy?”

  “What will make me happy?” She turned and gazed at him with large liquid eyes that reflected the hurt in her voice. He had the absurd urge to draw her into his arms.

  “A world without war,” she said. “Where every child is tucked into bed with a full tummy and a kiss from his mama and papa, where artists have respect and can earn a living. To visit the moon in a hot air balloon. To time travel and have tea with Leonardo da Vinci and Sappho. To live in the Sistine Chapel. But on a more realistic scale, I’ll just take five hundred pounds of my own money and then you can leave me alone. Forever.” Her lush lips gave a tiny good-bye kiss to the air.

  The low lamplight deepened the contours of her high, full cheekbones and the tiny cleft in her chin.

  He cleared his tight throat, stepping back. “You would run through the money in a year giving it to this and that poor artist whose parents couldn’t afford to tuck him into a comfortable asylum. Impressions of water lilies, indeed! Your grandfather entrusted me with his monies, earned from decades of brewing.”

  She released a put-upon sigh and flicked her eyes toward the heavens. No doubt old-fashioned hard work and responsibility was a bit dull for her taste.

  “I will not be accountable for losing it.” He waggled a finger before her nose. “If you want that money, my lady, then follow the terms your grandfather laid out in his trust: find a responsible, well-situated husband of whom I will approve. A man who will not destroy your so-called gentle yearning but temper your wild spirits and provide you a respectable home. At which time I will thankfully leave you alone forever. Until then, you will dance to my tune.”

  Anger flashed in those dark eyes. She raised the edge of her mouth, the side adorned with that teasing mole.

  “Dance to your tune?” She began to sway her hips and wave her hands like an exotic belly dancer. “Like this?” She lifted the sides of her hair high over her head and then let the glossy curls fall around her breasts. All the while, she kept her head low, watching him from under her lashes. “Is this your tune?”

  George swallowed. The courtesans dancing in the gentlemen’s clubs weren’t half so wanton…or entrancing. “Stop that,” he choked.

  She only sashayed closer, picking up an orange pillow from the sofa. She held it just below her glittery eyes. She continued to sway in steady rhythm, like a hypnotist’s swinging watch. His tongue moistened as blood pooled in his male apparatus. She let the pillow drop lower, revealing moist, gleaming, open lips. The cushion continued its progress over her creamy throat and then down, down, down to her exquisite, ample, succulent br— “Ouch!” In a quick, unforeseen move, she had whacked his chin with that cursed pillow. “Lilith!”

  “I don’t dance to your tune or anyone else’s.” She whapped him again, this time on his chest, displacing the white rose in his lapel.

  “You little devil.” He lunged at her.

  She shrieked and ran around the sofa, her wild laughter streaming behind her.

  He snatched up his own pillow.

  “Oh no!” she cried, those eyes now alight with mischief.

  “Oh yes!” He smacked her nimbly but gently on the shoulder, giving her a little taste of her own medicine. They commenced a childish swordplay game of lunge and parry with pillows.

  Her laughter was infectious. He knew he should stop, but then the white feathers would no longer billow in the air and fall around her lovely face and that weight that had lifted from his chest would settle back to its usual position. And before he could stifle it, a chuckle escaped his mouth.

  “I heard that!” she cried and raised her pillow high. “You can’t deny it. It was mirth. You laughed.”

  “I deny everything.” In a swift move, he gained the strategic upper hand by knocking the pillow from her grip. Unarmed, she attempted to flee. He leaped over the sofa’s back, halting her retreat.

  “Surrender, Lilith. You know you can never defeat me.” He threatened both his cushiony weapons over her.

  “Never! I’ll fight you to the death!”

  “So be it.” He lunged forward for the deathblow, trapping her in the pillows. She laughed and fell back onto the sofa, almost taking him with her. He balance
d his knee on the cushion and studied her. She lay with her dark hair splayed wildly around her head, flower petals and little white feathers trapped in the locks. Her shoulders shook with silent laughter, causing her breasts to jiggle beneath the thin fabric of her costume. She was doing something he had never seen her do before: smile. A true, unguarded, non-manipulative or -malicious, luscious smile. It heightened the color in her cheeks and softened her eyes. They now gazed at him with an expression he wouldn’t have associated with Lilith: tenderness.

  It seemed the most natural thing in the world to lean down and kiss her, as if he had done it a hundred times before. Her skin was warm silk and her lips were like tasting honey, leaving him wanting more of their sweetness. The peaks of her full breasts rubbed against his chest as she shifted beneath him when his tongue slipped inside her. She met the pressure of his mouth and released a hum as her fingers tangled in his hair, pulling him even closer. Her scent of citrus and vanilla overpowered his senses and erased any rational thoughts from his mind. His cock hardened, straining against his pantaloons. He hadn’t felt this hunger for a woman in months. All those days of endless parliamentary sessions, lines and lines of estate accounts, and dull musical evenings. He suddenly felt sick of it all. He released her mouth long enough to murmur, “Sweet Lilith.”

  “Lord Marylewick!” She shoved him away and bolted to her feet. Her eyes were dilated with horror.

  Reality hit like freezing hailstones pelting from the sky.

  “I’m sorry!” he gasped. What had he done? Where was his brain? “I’m truly, honestly sorry. Forgive me.”

  “Oh God!” She rubbed her lips with the back of her hand. “It was just a game. What have I d—You’re the…” She fled the room.

  He raked his fingers through his hair and paced, his heart thundering. He had never lost control like that before. What had come over him?

  Black shame wormed in his gut. He hadn’t been a gentleman. In a matter of seconds, he had managed to breach his code of honor, his integrity, all the things around which he ordered his life.

  He snatched up his hat and cane, and opened the door. Lilith wasn’t in sight, thank heavens. He couldn’t face her. He needed…he needed air. He couldn’t breathe. He ripped opened his tie and yanked at his collar buttons as he pushed through the raucous crowd.

  The cool air outside offered no relief. The two gentlemen, Byronesque locks and scarlet cravat, were still engaged in their drunken philosophical debate.

  “Art is about finding meaning in the gaping chasm of meaninglessness.”

  “Death, my friend. It’s all death and dying and—”

  “For God’s sake, lads,” George bellowed. “It’s about coitus. Every bit of it. Coitus, copulation, fornication, shagging.” He jogged down to meet his approaching carriage. “Take me home,” he ordered his groom.

  Two

  Lilith tore through the guests, murmuring her apologies to the people beckoning her to join them. Her body quaked. What had happened? How could that man, after disparaging her manners and her person, dare to kiss her?

  More to the disturbing point, how could she have kissed him back? Why did his body feel so safe and snug atop hers? Something was very wrong with her. For God’s sake, he was the Sultan Murada in flesh and blood.

  She had to get to the sanctuary of her bedchamber. Words, sentences, and phrases of vitriol burned in her mind. She had to commit them to paper before they incinerated her.

  She closed the door to her garret bedchamber, shutting out the party raging below. She patted about until she found her matches and then lit her lamp. Light illuminated her walls adorned with copies of paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and French Impressionists.

  Her writing desk remained in the disheveled state in which she had left it. A drained pot of oolong tea and an empty box of toffee sat atop her beloved volumes of Keats, the Brontë sisters, and Christina Rossetti. Telltale signs of a fruitless morning and afternoon spent staring at the page as a deadline loomed, and her mind was incapable of none but the most uninspired and tepid of words. When her unreliable muse failed to make an appearance, Lilith had decided to dress like the one in the painting. It was supposed to have been a fun joke.

  The joke didn’t seem so funny when only a thin layer of silk had separated her body from Marylewick’s muscled, aroused one.

  Her fingers were shaking as she fished her portfolio and key from her desk drawer. She unlocked the portfolio’s tiny latch and slipped out her latest pages. Only her cousins, Frances and Edgar, knew she was the author of Colette and the Sultan. Heaven forbid that George would find out she wrote the sensational stories. Since she was too old to be hidden conveniently in another boarding or finishing school, he would tuck her away in an asylum. He was painfully old-fashioned in his views on women. And by old-fashioned, she meant Roman. In his mind, women should never venture from their homes, much less have their names venture into journals.

  She grabbed her pen, jammed it into the inkwell, and under where she had written: Colette’s tale was abruptly ended when in her confused state (and much to the dismay of her publisher, a character heretofore unmentioned but always looming in the background) she accidentally stepped in front of a herd of angry camels and was trampled to death, she now penned:

  Lord Marylewick’s powerful body trapped Colette beneath him. His caftan was of the finest silk and gold embroidery. Its delicate beauty was wasted on his hard, brutish face and body. Colette refused to give in to fear. She would not give him the pleasure of her terror.

  As always, she would change Marylewick’s name to Sultan Murada before she gave the clean copy to her publisher. She would remove any incriminating vestiges of Marylewick’s annoying mannerisms and alter his handsome features to a better reflection of his true ugly personality. Marylewick’s pale gray eyes were changed to vacuous, cold black. The graceful arch in his brows flattened to severe slashes. His lips, which she now knew to be as lusciously soft as they looked, were reduced to a cruel line. However, the sultan sported Marylewick’s unyielding jaw.

  For now, she didn’t need to think of the trifling details of appearance. She was a mere scribe to her fast-flowing muse.

  He lifted her veil. The vivid sunlight burned her eyes.

  “Your father is dead,” he growled. “But my spies know you carry his secret. The formula for Greek Fire. Give it to me, woman.”

  “I would rather follow my father in death,” she answered in Persian.

  He drew the sword from his sash and held it above her thundering heart. The blade penetrated the thin fabric of Colette’s peasant caftan, in which she had disguised herself in her attempt to flee the sultan and his army. She could feel the sharp point poised on her skin.

  “Death is too merciful and does not achieve my aim,” Marylewick spat. “I will make you my slave. Your life is my possession.”

  “Do what you will.” Her voice remained steady despite the rapture in her breast.

  “Wait! What? Muse, did you say ‘rapture in her breast’?” Lilith asked. “No, no. For God’s sake, he’s making her his slave. She can’t feel anything but abhorrence for him.”

  But her muse continued on this dangerous path.

  “You’ve already taken my home, my books, my art, all I have known,” Colette cried. “But the contents of my mind cannot be possessed. You will never know the gardens of my heart.”

  “I won’t?” His voice was creamy and low. “My fair Colette, it’s not your lush, flowering heart I desire but the sweet nectar from your wet lips.”

  He dropped his sword.

  A hot, heady wave coursed through Colette’s body as his mouth descended upon hers—

  “What! No, no, Muse, you are wrong. Pick up the sword this instant and aim at her heart again.”

  Lilith’s mule-headed muse refused to listen.

  His rough fingers gently caressed her—

/>   “Dammit, Muse! You stop that!” Lilith leaped back from the desk and stared at her words as if they had come alive—ugly Frankensteins shocked to life. “Muse, you had better have a devious plan in mind, because Colette is far too intelligent and possesses too much taste to find Marylewick the least bit alluring.”

  “But, darling, Lord Marylewick is alluring,” a female voice said.

  Lilith wheeled around. Her cousin-in-law, Frances, had opened the door and ambled in. A tipsy smile played on her unnaturally cherry-red lips. “Terribly alluring,” Frances said. “Why, when he walks into the room, the heavens open and angels sing.” She waved her hand, jangling her paste diamond bracelets. “But then he insists on speaking and—”

  “Hell opens, choirs of demons sing, and Satan falls. Paradise lost.” Lilith began to quote from Milton’s masterpiece. “‘Me miserable! which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? / Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; / And, in—’”

  “Darling, darling, you know I get a headache when you become dramatic.”

  Frances’s blond curls were twisted around ostrich plumes. Pink fabric roses clustered at the bodice and down the bustle of her purple gown. She was vivid and vibrant, and Lilith worshipped her.

  After years of the Maryle family sending her from one boarding school to the next, Lilith had finally managed to escape to her paternal cousins, Edgar and Frances Dahlgren. They took her in and kept her safe from George’s controlling clutches. Lilith savored their exciting world of artists, musicians, and writers. Just being amid the stunning art was as close to heaven as she could get on Earth. She had always wanted to dwell in a story or painting. As if she could step out of her anxious life and into the paper and canvas and exist in a better world.

  She’d learned at a tender age that books and art offered a kind of escape from the loneliness and fear she suffered amid the strict, uniform living of boarding school life. At seven, she taught herself to read while hiding behind the curtains in the alcove of the school’s study. She remembered laughing aloud when reading Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. So this is laughter, she had thought, reflecting on the rise and release in her chest and the peace that flooded her body. What the outside world couldn’t provide her—a true home, loving parents, kindness, companionship, and laughter—she had found in books.