Notorious Pleasures (Maiden Lane #2)(31)

She turned as he advanced on her. “Thomas?”

He took her arm, too ridiculously angry to correct her. Where the hell was his brother? He pulled, but she dug in her heels, just as blue and yellow lights burst overhead.

“Why the hurry, my lord?” She tilted her face up to his, her eyes mocking behind the feathered half-mask she wore. “Don’t you think this romantic?”

Suddenly the explosions were in his head. Griffin stared into those innocently seductive eyes and realized very simply that he couldn’t stand it any longer.

He kissed her.

Chapter Six

What a spectacle there was when the three dignitaries arrived in the kingdom! Prince Westmoon came in a carriage made of gold and diamonds and drawn by twelve snow-white horses. Prince Eastsun rode in a palanquin encrusted with rubies and emeralds and hung draperies made of silk. And Prince Northwind arrived in a great gilded ship with sails of crimson and gold. All three men were haughty, commanding, and handsome beyond belief. But only the little brown bird and the stable master knew that the queen retired to her bed that night with a heavy heart….

—from Queen Ravenhair

It was stupid and irrational, but Thomas found he couldn’t stop himself from searching out Lavinia Tate. Not even the difficulty of finding her in the near dark in a maze of paths and side-paths deterred him. Three men? Had she become a sybarite? A woman controlled entirely by her physical desires? Thoughts such as these did not improve his mood, so when he did eventually run Lavinia—and her three beaus—to ground, his temper was perilously on edge.

“Dismiss them,” he barked at her. He eyed the men. Two were barely old enough to shave, but the third was a big fellow with broad shoulders.

Thomas flexed his hands. In his current mood, he was of a mind to take on all three.

“My lord,” Lavinia drawled. She was wearing another flame-colored dress that should’ve clashed horribly with her outlandishly red hair, but somehow didn’t. In fact, the amount of creamy bosom the décolletage displayed was enough to make a man drool.

Thomas scowled. “Tell them to leave, Lavinia.”

She arched an eyebrow at the use of her given name, and for a moment Thomas thought he really would have to choose between retreat and fisticuffs. Then she whispered something to the big fellow, and with a last nasty look, all three turned heel and left.

“Now, then.” She folded her arms across her chest as if bracing herself for an unpleasant confrontation with a bill collector. “What is it, Thomas?”

“Three, Lavinia?” His hands clenched by his sides. “And all merely boys.”

She threw back her head and laughed. “As it happens, my lord, two of those boys are my nephews. And I doubt Samuel would like you calling him a boy.”

So the big man was her lover. Thomas wanted to drive his fist into something. “He’s younger than you.”

“As are you,” she replied softly. “Yet it didn’t keep you from my bed.”

For a moment he merely stared at her hungrily, remembering her bed and what they’d done there.

Then she looked away. “What do you want?”

“What do I want?” He advanced toward her, confused by his own need to be near her. “You’re the one following me.”

“Following you?”

He didn’t know what reaction he’d expected from his accusation—perhaps protestations or even tears—but it wasn’t this. This looked perilously close to pity, her eyebrows drawing together, her lush mouth turning down.

“Thomas, I am not following you.”

“Explain, then, how you happened to be here on the very night I attend with my fiancée?”

She shrugged—actually shrugged!—at his angry words. “Coincidence, I suppose.”

“And your Samuel?” He was close enough to touch her now, but he daren’t. “Deny, if you will, that you brought him here in a pathetic effort to make me jealous.”

He sneered his words, but she looked at him wonderingly. “Are you jealous, Thomas? I can’t think why, since you’re the one who broke it off when you decided to marry Lady Hero.”

He looked away from her too-perceptive face. “I never said we had to quit, only that we wait a decent amount of time after the wedding. A year at most. I could’ve bought you a bigger house if you wanted it. A carriage and team.”

“The money never had anything to do with it.”

“Then what did?”

She sighed. “However provincial it might seem to you, I don’t wish to carry on a liaison with a married man. It’s rather sordid, don’t you think? Besides, I’ve seen your Lady Hero and she seems a nice girl. I shouldn’t like to hurt her.”

He grit his teeth, feeling the beginnings of a headache. “Are you saying you care more for my fiancée than me?”

She stared back, that wretched look of pity in her eyes again. “Are you saying you don’t?”

“What do you want of me?” he demanded. “I cannot marry you—you know that, Lavinia. Even if we were a suitable match, even if you weren’t past the age of childbearing, I simply cannot marry one such as you.”

“How chivalrous of you to point out my advanced age to me—yet again,” she drawled. “But as it happens, there is no need for such drama. I know we cannot marry, and I refuse to conduct a liaison with you when you are otherwise promised. There really isn’t anything more to say.”