bold, calculating American heiress is going to disrupt my family.”
“Your Grace, my arrangement will help your family. But it’ll be a pleasure to disrupt you.”
He glowered. “You are exactly what I expected of an American woman. Americans set my teeth on edge with their explosive, vulgar emotion. You gush, you flaunt and you have no idea of proper restraint. Your behavior in this is both vulgar and repugnant, madam.”
She yearned to slap him. But with his scars, she could not bring herself to smack her palm against his face. Apparently, she’d been misled on another aspect of the British. They were more blunt and straightforward than she’d expected.
Taking a step closer to him—her eyes were on level with his lips—Zoe lifted her chin with pride. “You set my teeth on edge. You are the most irritating and prejudiced man I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet. I’m visiting my fiancé’s home. It’s unfortunate you happen to be in it. And I suppose you don’t intend to send a car for my mother and me now.”
He bent toward her. A warm, exotic aroma clung to the duke—sandalwood, she believed it was, and he smelled of leather. For a moment, they traded breaths, his scented with tooth powder and smoke.
“I will, Miss Gifford. What sort of host leaves guests stranded in the countryside?”
She almost laughed. “Good.” She flung back her arms and stretched, as if thoroughly bored with the whole conversation. “I am looking forward to a long, luscious, hot soak.”
“A what?” the duke asked sharply. His boot twisted in a rut on the road and he fell forward an inch, his mouth almost bumping against hers. Up close his lips were full and sensual, and she was suddenly, breathlessly waiting for their mouths to collide. But before it happened, he jerked back and she did, too, and in a heartbeat they were two awkward steps apart, each standing at the edge of the cart track that was called a road.
Her stomach felt as it did when her airplane hit wind shear and suddenly dropped.
She had to be out of her mind. She hadn’t let a man kiss her since Richmond had, just before he took off on his flight over the Atlantic. She hadn’t even done it with Sebastian. She was hardly going to let it happen with an obnoxious, insulting duke.
Zoe jutted out her hip. “What I meant was a bath. You know: turn on the tap and fill a nice big tub with a lot of hot water and then soak in it. You do have baths over here, don’t you?”
Abruptly she was looking at the duke’s back. Without a word, he had swung away from her. Then he stopped and motioned for her to follow. “We do, indeed, have baths, madam. What we do not have are taps.”
DRESSING FOR DINNER
The first dinner gong sounded.
Nigel Hazelton, the seventh Duke of Langford, stood in front of the mirror of his dressing room as his valet adjusted his collar and white bow tie, then gave one final tug to the shoulders of his coat.
“Very good, Your Grace,” Higgins said.
Even dressing for dinner had become a battle—a clash between the old ways and modernity. He wore full dress for dinner, which meant a tailcoat, white waistcoat and white tie. Sebastian usually appeared for dinner in the style of the Prince of Wales: a tuxedo jacket, once considered too vulgar for female sensibilities, and a black tie...and he slouched around with his hands stuck in his pockets.
Sebastian would look effortlessly elegant and laugh at his brother for being overdressed.
“A relic of an antique age,” Nigel muttered.
“Not at all, Your Grace,” Higgins assured him. “Such classic attire is always correct.”
Since Higgins had been his father’s valet, and now approached eighty, Nigel merely said, “That will be all, Higgins.”
With a bow and another respectfully murmured “Very good,” Higgins disappeared through a connecting door like a shadow into darkness. Nigel ran his hand over his now-smooth jaw, having been shaved within an inch of his life in preparation for dinner.
He believed in formality. He believed in the old ways, the old standards, in showing respect to one’s class and position.
But facing the mirror, he had no doubt Miss Gifford thought like Sebastian, considering the fashionable hat crammed on her short, sleek blond hair, the bright red mouth that smirked at him, the astoundingly short skirt she wore. When she’d swung her leg over the wall, the skimpy skirt had flown up, showing the entire length of her shapely legs, right up to the garters securing her stockings at her suntanned thighs.
He’d done the gentlemanly thing and looked away—at everything but those stunning legs. As a result, he’d jerked on Beelzebub’s reins and almost unseated himself.
He had almost embarrassed himself again when she’d stretched like a seductive houri and he’d stumbled and almost fallen against her vibrant, scarlet-painted mouth.
It had been a misstep, not an attempt at a kiss. With his scars, he wouldn’t think to kiss any woman.
“I should have known I would find you skulking in here,” chided a soft female voice, “when you should be in the drawing room.”
No American accent flattened the words and drew out the vowels, and he smelled the subdued scent of ladylike lavender. Not Miss Gifford. Nigel knew it was Julia, even before he saw his sister’s reflection in the mirror.
“I am not skulking, I am dressing.” He turned, and his eyes almost popped out of his head.
Julia had his silver cigarette case open in her hand. She took out a Turkish cigarette and put it between her lips.
“What are you doing?” He stalked toward her.
His sister picked up his lighter. “Attempting to smoke. Miss Gifford does it. She claims that smoking calms nerves. She also claims it keeps a woman thi—”
He relieved Julia of her unlit cigarette, plucking it from her lips. “Smoking is a man’s habit. A lit gasper has no place near a delicate lady’s mouth.”
“Really, Nigel?” Julia crossed her arms in front of her chest. “So? What do you think of her?”
Julia was never so direct or blunt. Nor had she ever considered raiding his cigarette case before. Good God, were American ways contagious?
At least their manner of dress was not. His sister wore a demure gown of dark blue silk and it reached the middle of her calves. Her hair was long and rolled into a chignon. She was very like their mother, though her hair was jet-black, not gold, but she was just as beautiful with her oval face, her curling dark lashes and her wide pale pink mouth that she never touched with paint.
“Since you have seen her, I don’t think I need to say more.”
“Nigel, you can be hopelessly stuffy.” Julia sighed and walked to the windows of his dressing room, pulling back the faded velvet curtains.
He
