Sherry Thomas - Beguiling the Beauty

Her hotel. What was he doing here?

Her first instinct was to run. She would lodge elsewhere—she didn’t need seventeen stories or a telephone receiver in her room. She had not escaped to New York to be under the same roof as her nemesis.

But a perverse pride refused to let her make the request to Barnes. She squared her shoulders. “Very impressive. I’m sure I will enjoy my stay.”

If anyone ought to run in the opposite direction, it was he, not she. She had not slandered anyone. She had not spread malicious rumors. She had not spoken without regard to consequences.

A doorman materialized to help her down. The hotel’s porters came to receive her luggage. She declined Barnes’s offer to speak for a room for her, tipped him, and bid him good day.

Not until she was crossing the onyx-and-marble rotunda of the hotel did she realize she was still fully veiled. The dim interior made it more difficult to see, but she was far from blind. She arrived at the hotel clerk’s station without mishap.

The hotel clerk blinked once at her appearance. “Good afternoon, ma’am. May I help you?”

Before she could reply, another clerk several feet down the counter offered a greeting of his own. “Good afternoon, Your Grace.”

She froze again.

“Any news on my passage?” came Lexington’s cool voice.

“Indeed, sir. We have secured you a Victoria suite on the Rhodesia. There are only two such suites on the liner, and you will be assured of the greatest comfort, privacy, and luxury for your crossing.”

“Departure time?”

“Tomorrow morning at ten, sir.”

“Very good,” said Lexington.

“Ma’am, may I help you?” Venetia’s clerk asked again.

Unless she abruptly abandoned the counter, she must speak and, at some point, give her name. She cleared her throat—and out came a string of German. “Ich hätte gerne Ihre besten Zimmer.”

She was running away after all. She balled her fingers, the chaos inside her igniting into anger.

“Beg your pardon, ma’am?”

Through gritted teeth, she repeated herself.

The clerk looked flustered. Without turning, without ever having appeared to pay attention, Lexington said, “The lady would like your best rooms.”

“Ah yes, of course. Your name, please, ma’am.”

She swallowed and reached randomly. “Baronesse von Seidlitz-Hardenberg.”

“And how many nights will you be staying with us, ma’am?”

She held out two fingers. The clerk wrote something in his ledger. Venetia signed the register with her new alias.

“Here is your key, baroness. And a walking map of Central Park, which you will find just outside our doors. We hope you enjoy your stay.”

A hotel attendant ushered her toward the lift, which came promptly, the metallic cage shunting into place with a soft ding. An accordion door folded into the wall; the inner door slid open.

“Good afternoon, ma’am,” said the lift attendant. “Good afternoon, Your Grace.”

Him again. She turned her head a few surreptitious degrees. Lexington stood to the side, slightly behind her, waiting for her to enter the lift. Move, she ordered herself. Move.

Somehow her feet carried her forward. Lexington followed her inside. He glanced her way, but did not acknowledge her. Instead, he turned his attention to the gilded panels that adorned the elevator’s interior.

“Which floor, ma’am?” asked the lift attendant.

“Fünfzehnter Stock,” she said.

“Pardon, ma’am?”

“The lady wishes to go to the fifteenth floor,” said the duke.

“Ah, thank you, sir.”

The lift was leisurely, almost sluggish, in its ascent. She began to suffocate under her veil. Yet she dared not breathe with any vigor, for fear she’d betray her agitation. The duke, on the other hand, was at his ease. His jaw carried no tension. His posture was straight but not rigid. His hands, folded over the top of his walking stick, were perfectly relaxed.

Her anger blazed to a firestorm. It roared in her ears. Her fingertips were hot with a desire for violence.

How dare he? How dare he use her to illustrate his stupid, misogynistic points? How dare he destroy her hard-won peace of mind? And how dare he ooze such cool smugness, such insufferable satisfaction with his own life?

When the lift dinged into place on the fifteenth floor, she charged out.

“Gnädige Frau.”

It took her a moment to recognize his voice, speaking in German.

She walked faster. She did not want to hear his voice. She did not want to further perceive his presence. She wanted only that he should fall into a pit of vipers on his next expedition and suffer the painful effects of their venom for the remainder of his life.

“Your map, madam,” he said, still in German. “You left it in the lift.”

“I don’t need it anymore,” she answered curtly in the same language, without turning around. “Keep it.”

Christian tossed the baroness’s map on the console table just inside his suite. He pulled off his coat, dropped it on the back of a chair, and deposited himself in the chair opposite.

Ten days after the fact, he remained astonished by his own conduct. What had possessed him? As a man plagued by a chronic condition, he’d learned to live with it. He carried on. He kept busy. And he never spoke of it.

Until he did, luridly, at length, in a theater full of strangers.

He wanted to never think of this gross misstep again, but he kept revisiting his confession—the defiant pleasures of at last acknowledging, however obliquely, his fixation upon Mrs. Easterbrook, the bottomless mortification once he realized what he’d done.

Perhaps he’d made a strategic mistake by avoiding the London Season and the possibilities of running into her. By staying away, he also deprived himself of a large pool of young women. Who was to say he would not find among them someone who could take his mind permanently off her?

A knock came. Christian opened the door himself—he’d given his valet two weeks’ leave to visit his brother, who’d immigrated to New York. A very young porter bowed and handed him a note from Mrs. Winthrop, a fellow guest at the hotel who had been throwing herself at him for the past three days.

Christian badly needed a distraction, but he liked to uphold a minimum of standards in his dalliances. Mrs. Winthrop, unfortunately, was not only excessively vain, but more than a little stupid. Judging by her newest invitation, she also could not take a hint.

“Send Mrs. Winthrop some flowers with my regrets,” he said to the porter.

“Yes, sir.”

His gaze landed on the Central Park map on the console table. “And return the map to the Baroness von Seidlitz-Hardenberg.”

The porter bowed again and left.

Christian walked out onto the balcony of his suite and looked down. The height was perilous, the air abrupt and chill. The pedestrians were the size of drawing dolls, jointed mannequins milling about the pavement.

A woman emerged from the hotel: Baroness von Seidlitz-Hardenberg, as evidenced by her daft hat. The rest of her, however, was altogether shapely—a figure meant for reproduction. Product of evolution that he was, even though he had no intention of procreating with her, he was still coaxed out of his preoccupation to contemplate the obvious pleasures of her form.

In the confines of the lift, her attention had all but licked him from head to toe.

He was not unpopular either at home or abroad. Still, the baroness’s interest had been extraordinarily intense, all the more so for the fact that she never once directly gazed at him.

Now, however, she did. From sixteen stories below, she looked up over her shoulder and unerringly located him, a glance that he felt through the cream netting that concealed her face. Then she crossed the street and disappeared under the trees of Central Park.

Venetia was vaguely aware of the trees, the ponds and bridges, the young men and women zipping by on their safety bicycles. The sea lions at the menagerie barked; the children clamored to see the polar bears; a violin wailed the mournful notes of “Méditation” from Thaïs—yet all she heard was the duke’s inescapable voice.

The lady would like your best rooms.

The lady wishes to go to the fifteenth floor.

Your map, madam.

He had no right to appear helpful and gentlemanly, he who’d judged her as if he knew everything there was to know about her. When he knew nothing—nothing at all.

Yet she was the one who felt ashamed that her husband had despised her so much. She could have continued in her blissful ignorance had the duke had the decency to keep a private conversation private. But he hadn’t, and his revelation would haunt her always.

She wanted—needed—to do something to knock him off his arrogant, comfortable perch. Actions carried consequences. He would not decimate her good name and not pay a price for it.

But what could she do? She could not sue him on grounds of defamation, as he’d never named her. She knew no dirty secrets of his that she could spill in return. And even if she warned every woman under the age of sixty-five of his savageness of spirit, his title and wealth would still ensure he’d have the wife of his choice.

It was dark by the time she returned to the hotel, her feet sore, her head throbbing. The lift was empty save for the lift attendant, but as it ascended, the duke might as well have been there, taunting her with his invulnerability.

She smelled the lilies as soon as she opened the doors to her suite. A large peach bloom vase that hadn’t been there before occupied the center table of the sitting room. From the vase, aggressively tall stalks of white calla lilies and orange gladiolus shot toward the ceiling, their petals glaring in the electric light.

Her family would never send her calla lilies, a cascade of which she’d carried when she walked down the aisle to marry Tony. She plucked the card from the fronds that buttressed the flowers.

The Duke of Lexington regrets his departure from New York and hopes for the pleasure of your company another day, madam.

The gall of the man. The extravagant bouquet was nothing but an announcement that should they meet again, he’d like for her to be waiting in bed, already naked. So he despised Venetia Easterbrook’s soul, but liked her backside well enough when he didn’t know to whom it belonged.

She tore the card in two. In four. In eight. And kept tearing, choking on her impotence.

Helena’s words leaped to mind. Avenge yourself, Venetia. Make him fall in love with you, then give him the cut.

Why not?

What would it be to him? Merely a dalliance gone wrong. He’d hurt for a few short weeks—a few months, if she was lucky. But she, she would go through the rest of her life oppressed by the weight of his disclosure.

She telephoned the concierge and asked for a first-class stateroom on the Rhodesia, as close to the Victoria suites as possible. And then she sat down to write Helena and Millie a note concerning her sudden exit.

It was only as she sealed the note that she thought of the specifics of her seduction. How would she manage to breach his defenses when he had such entrenched preconceptions about her? When he’d take one look at her face, otherwise her greatest asset in a quest of such nature, and turn away?

No matter. She’d have to be creative, that was all. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And with every fiber of her being, she willed that the Duke of Lexington would regret the day he chose to stick a knife into her kidney.

Lexington stood at the rail and surveyed the hive of activity beneath him.

Carriages and heavy drays drove on and off the dock, their procession surprisingly speedy and orderly. Trunks and crates, hefted by stevedores with meaty shoulders and bulging upper arms, slid down open chutes into the cargo hold. Tugboats tooted at one another, readying themselves to nudge the great ocean liner’s nose around—for her to head toward the open sea.

Up the gangplank came the ship’s passengers: giggling young women who had never before crossed the pond; indifferent men of business on their third trip of the year; children pointing excitedly at the ship’s smokestacks; immigrant workers—largely Irish—returning to the old country for a brief visit.