He lifted his glass and held it up to hers. “To the future, Josie?”
“Why do you call me Josie, and I call you Mayne?” she asked, taking a deep draught of champagne. It was making her feel brave and reckless.
“You can call me whatever you like,” he said with a shrug.
“Then I’ll call you Garret. We are friends, after all, and I think that a gentleman who has the gall to question a lady about her undergarments should be on intimate terms with her, don’t you think?” A thought struck her and she plunged straight into another question. “Do all those women whom you slept with address you as Garret, or Mayne?”
He was grinning at her, a lazy, beautiful grin with a touch of the devil in it. He looked like nothing in the world so much as a slightly wicked Bacchus crafted by a master sculptor. It made her feel audacious. After all, it wasn’t Lady Lorkin in this chair. It was she, Josie, the most scorned debutante of the year. “I love champagne!” she added.
“I begin to think I should ring for a sobering cup of tea,” Mayne said. And then: “No, you little witch, I have never asked the women with whom I had affaires to address me by my first name. It isn’t done.”
“Why not? If I were going to—to unclothe myself in front of a person, I would certainly wish to be familiar enough to call him by his first name!”
He laughed at that. “There’s more intimacy involved than unclothing,” he pointed out. And then looked a bit appalled at himself. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“We’re talking about bedding,” Josie said impatiently. “You can pretend I’m your younger brother, if you wish.”
He eyed her. “I don’t wish.”
“Well, my point is that if I were ever to take my clothing off before someone, I certainly wouldn’t do so in an atmosphere of such formality.”
Mayne was staring at the bubbles in his champagne, turning the glass so the golden wine caught the light. “Most ladies undress with the help of their maids and then slip under the covers.”
Josie thought about that. It sounded like a very good plan to her. That way one’s husband would never be unnerved by the sight of one’s flesh. “Where does the gentleman undress?”
“Of course, ladies and gentlemen never share a bedchamber,” he said, looking through his glass at her now. “No one could imagine such a thing; that sort of intimacy is left for the lower classes. No, the squire strides into his wife’s bedchamber, admirably covered in a striped dressing gown of sturdy linsey-woolsey. Then he drops his dressing gown…”
Josie had a sudden vivid image of what Mayne would look like without a dressing gown, or anything else.
“…but not before he turns down the lamp,” Mayne finished. “No promiscuous looking among the aristocracy. Absolutely not.”
“And she never uses his first name?” Josie said, wrenching her mind away from the gutter.
“Never. In fact, she says little, in my experience.” Mayne rested his head on the back of his chair and gazed at the ceiling. “And this is truly something you should never repeat to your intimates,” he said. “I should not tell you, but I will anyway. The truth is that I can’t imagine why women go to such lengths to anger their husbands by having affaires, when most of them don’t particularly enjoy the intimacies themselves.”
“Then you,” Josie said, thrilling with the daring of this desperately improper conversation, “must not be very good at bedding women. Perhaps Imogen had a lucky escape.” She grinned at the low growl that came from his throat. “Tess and Annabel gave Imogen a wedding night talk,” she told him. “And this time they finally allowed me to stay because I was supposed to be getting married this season.”
Mayne’s jaw clenched. “And they said something about me?” There was stark disbelief in his voice.
“Why on earth would they be interested in you? You should be careful that all this adoration from foolish women like Letitia Lorkin doesn’t go to your head.”
“Josie, you witch”—and it didn’t sound like an endearment anymore—“can you kindly inform me precisely how my name came up during this oh-so-delicate conversation?”
“As I said, you didn’t come up. But the fact that many men are unable to make women happy in bed did.”
“Don’t tell me your sisters were worried about Rafe.” He sounded horrified; it was likely a question of insult my friend, insult me.
“No. But—” Josie stopped. It was one thing to be indiscreet with Mayne, and it was another to reveal that Imogen’s first marriage had not been entirely satisfactory in that respect.
He didn’t say anything, just stared at his glass. “I seem to have no problem providing a suitable experience.”
Josie sipped her glass a bit more cautiously. She was feeling definitely tipsy. It was agreeable, but a native cautionary streak was advising her to stop drinking.
“Bravo for you,” she said.
He looked at her, and she felt the impact of his wild black eyes to the bottom of her toes. “’Twas I who found it unsatisfactory,” he said to her. “And I can’t tell you in what respect, because it’s not the kind of thing you talk about with virgins.” Saying the word seemed to startle him and he snatched up the bottle. “Damn it. I’m three sheets to the wind,” he growled. His voice had darkened to a champagne-drenched growl. Josie thought it was the most sensual thing she’d heard in her life.
“Why’d you keep doing it, then?” she asked, watching him through her lashes so he wouldn’t know how curious she was.
But he didn’t even glance at her. “I haven’t,” he said. “Haven’t had a woman, if you’ll excuse the vulgarity, since Lady Godwin, and—” He stopped.
Josie knew who Lady Godwin was. She was a brilliant musician who wrote waltzes with her husband. Lady Godwin had created that bewitching waltz that she had danced around and around Rafe’s ballroom, in the days before this horrible season started. Now Josie couldn’t dance a waltz because she didn’t want anyone putting a hand on her corset. A man could feel every spike through the thin silk of her gowns.
“You mean,” she said carefully, “the countess?” Was that misery in Mayne’s eyes?
“The very one. If you’ll believe the foolishness of this, I fancied myself in love with her. Hell, I was in love with her.”
“How dare she reject you?” Josie cried. “I shall never think well of her again.”
He grinned at that. “She stayed with her husband, you little witch. She loved him, more than she loved me, and since she didn’t love me even an iota, that was easily done.”
“Sylvie is far more beautiful,” Josie said stoutly.
“Yes.” And, after a while: “Sylvie is a painter, did I tell you that? Both of them artists.”
“I wish I had a talent for something like that.”
“What do you have a talent for?”
Josie shrugged. “Nothing ladylike, nor artistic either. I can’t even embroider, and all I really like to do is read.”
“Reading is an estimable pursuit.”