“Well, Sylvie does play a fragile womanhood role very well.”
Josie pushed away the sick, churning jealousy in her stomach. What could she do? Her husband was in love with Sylvie. But he was married to her, and there was nothing worse than a woman who sat about moaning about things that couldn’t be helped.
Mayne didn’t seem to be on the edge of tears at the thought of his former fiancée. In fact, he had managed to eat the last cucumber square while she wasn’t watching. His face was carved, degenerate, just like one would imagine a man named Hellgate to look.
But then he flipped back the lock of hair over his eyes and smiled at her, and Josie forgot everything she was thinking. Hellgate or not, when he smiled, she would do anything for him.
Yet he was a fool. All men were fools.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, watching her so intently that she felt as if he were undressing her.
“That men are fools,” she told him.
He reached out and took her hand.
“True,” he said, and with a twist of his wrist, she ended up on his lap, so he said it into her ear. His palm spread across her breasts, spanning her. “Alas, so true. Tell me, do you think I am particularly foolish, or is it a general characteristic?”
“I don’t know very many men well enough to categorize them,” Josie said, thinking about it. “I think you are certainly remarkably foolish to have—well—” She shrugged.
“Wasted my life?”
“Not your life, your substance.”
“As a matter of fact,” Mayne drawled lazily, “my estate is about the only thing I haven’t wasted.”
“I didn’t mean that. Your—Your spirit. Like that Shakepeare poem, about spending his spirit in a waste of shame.”
He was smiling at her. “I always thought he was talking about semen. Nothing spiritual about it.”
“I know that,” she said tartly. “He’s talking about spending spirit in a waste of shame. Frankly, I can’t help but think that someone as tedious as that Mustardseed is a waste of shame. Or a shameful waste.”
He was nuzzling her neck. “You’re right.”
“What?”
“You’re right,” he repeated. “It was a waste of spirit and a shameful waste, and anything else you want to call it.”
Josie felt that kind of queer urge, as if one of her teeth was aching and she couldn’t stop touching it with her finger. “And when Hellgate fell in love? Was that a waste?”
“Falling in love is never a waste,” Mayne said. His hands were straying now, making her squirm in his lap. But she couldn’t not ask.
“Do you still love Mustardseed, then?” she asked.
“Who?” He raised his head. His hair was disheveled, falling around his face, and his eyes had that intense blackness she was coming to love.
“Is love a feeling that just disappears, like desire?” she persisted.
For a moment he looked confused and then he said, “Love, no. Love stays. Don’t you agree?”
She stroked his hair. “Yes. Love stays with you. It’s irritating but persistent.”
“Are you in love?”
She couldn’t see his eyes and so for a moment she toyed with the idea of telling him she had a hopeless passion for someone. It would even the scale so he didn’t feel sorry for her. Being as she was in love with her husband, she meant. The husband who was in love with someone else. “Absolutely not,” she said, steadying her voice. “I’m not the sort to fall in love.”
He grinned at her. “All honey-sweet wives are in love with their husbands.”
“No, they’re not.” The more she thought about it, the more annoyed she felt. What had he been doing, scrambling from bed to bed like some sort of tomcat on the prowl? Didn’t he have anything better to do with the last twenty years of his life?
“Why not?” he asked. His voice was a little guarded now, though.
She didn’t feel like anyone’s honey-sweet bride. She felt like a woman stupid enough to fall in love with a man who was in love with a Frenchwoman. Everyone knew that Frenchwomen were perfect—and Sylvie was a prime example—so she had no chance of shaking that image free from his heart. “I just wish that you had made some better choices.”
His jaw tightened. “Hellgate’s life is not mine, for all there may be resemblances.”
Josie stood up and looked out the window, her back to him. “Did you or did you not trot from the bed of one married woman to the bed of another, for all the world like a child looking for sweets?”
“That seems unnecessarily critical,” he said.
“I don’t think so.” She turned around again. “I married a man whose inability to stay in one bed is notorious enough that a version of it becomes a best seller. I think it’s quite a fair, if not gentle, description. A mean description would—” She stopped.
“Would be what?” he snapped.
“Would describe you like some sort of untamed dog, hopping onto one woman for a sniff and then wandering off to another!”
“Truly vulgar,” he said slowly.
She slapped the red leather book. “And this isn’t? Vulgar?” She couldn’t read his eyes at all, but her blood was racing through her veins. “You know what I think the most vulgar thing of all is?”
“Do inform me.”
“That when you fell in love, you fell in love with such angelic women, to use Hellgate’s words. Chaste. Nothing like yourself.”
“True.”
“It makes it worse, somehow.”
“Because they were so chaste that I shouldn’t have touched their palms with my debauched kiss?” His voice sounded perfectly even but he was obviously angry.
“That’s not it exactly,” she said. “It’s that you liked bedding women enough that you—you had your hundred women. But when you decided to fall in love, you fell for women who weren’t even interested in the act.”
“Chaste doesn’t mean—”
“I don’t know about Lady Godwin,” Josie cried recklessly, “but I do know about Sylvie. I know that she didn’t feel desire for you. All the women who did feel desire for you were only good enough for a week, and then you left them. You saved your emotion for the women who never wanted you at all.”
He just stared at her.
“You told me that about Lady Godwin. You said that she wanted her husband, not you.” She was beginning to feel bitterly ashamed; sweet wasn’t a word she could ever apply to herself.
Mayne cleared his throat. “I suppose you could be right.”
“I am right,” Josie snapped. “I suppose you played the voluptuary’s role because you enjoyed it.”
“One does.”
“According to Hellgate’s Memoirs, all those women lusted after you. Why did you fall in love with a chaste angel figure? Why didn’t you just marry one of those hurly-burly Jezebels?”
“I rather think I did,” he said silkily.
She looked away. If he didn’t know that she wasn’t akin to those married woman who played their debauched games with him…there was nothing more to be said. She couldn’t think how to begin the conversation over, to stop what had started, to take back her own words.