The Dangerous Mr. Ryder

There was a knock on the door and she hopped out of bed to open it, remembering at the last minute to ask who it was before she unlocked the door. Feeling wonderful was no excuse for laying them open to attack.

The chambermaid staggered in with two steaming ewers, set them both down beside the screen and went out, sped on her way by Eva’s insistence on a large breakfast as soon as possible.

‘Are we really going shopping?’ She climbed back into bed and sat up, her arms round her knees, listening to the sounds of splashing. She had never listened to a man’s morning rituals. Louis had always retreated to his own suite after visiting hers. He had never, after their wedding night, slept with her until morning.

‘Of course. You need a travelling wardrobe.’ There was a pause and a sound she guessed was a razor being stropped. ‘They won’t be the sort of shops you are used to,’ he warned.

‘I do not care.’ Eva flopped back against the pillows. ‘I don’t get to see many shops, everything comes to me. It is so boring—I love window shopping and looking for bargains.’ The noises from behind the screen were muffled. ‘Do you hate shopping, or are you shaving?’

‘Shaving.’ He sounded as though he had a mouthful of foam. She waited a few minutes, then, more clearly, ‘I have very little experience of shopping with women.’

‘Oh. No—what is the phrase—no barques of frailty you wish to indulge?’

‘What do you know of your weaker sisters, your Serene Highness?’

‘Nothing at all, except that my husband kept a great many of them, if you add them all up over the years.’

Silence. Had she shocked him? ‘I am about to emerge, ma’am, if you would be so good as to close your eyes or otherwise avert your gaze.’ Eva obediently closed her eyes and pressed her hands across them, as well, for good measure. Something was bubbling inside her, some ridiculously youthful feeling. There was the pad of bare feet on the boards. ‘Did you mind the other women?’ Jack asked from somewhere on the other side of the room. ‘My back is turned, if you want to get dressed.’

‘Mind? Not really. I was ridiculously shocked at first, but then, I was ridiculously young to have married a man like that.’ She slid out of bed and risked a glance in Jack’s direction. He was standing in front of the open window, his back to her, pulling on his shirt. The sunlight shone through, throwing the silhouette of his body against the fine fabric as he stretched his arms above his head. Eva bit back a sigh, dropped her eyes, found she was staring at the admirable tautness of his buttocks and the elegant line of his legs in the tight breeches and hastened to get behind the screen before her imagination got the better of her. Friends, she reminded herself fiercely. My friend—don’t spoil it.

‘You surprise me.’ She followed Jack’s movements about the room by ear as she washed. ‘I would have expected that to have upset you greatly.’

‘He never pretended to love me,’ Eva explained, shaking out the remnants of her clean linen and making mental shopping lists while she talked. ‘And I was too young to have formed a real attachment. It was my pride that was hurt more than anything, once I had got over my shock. Then, by the time I realised that he was not the sort of man to devote himself to one woman, I had Freddie and I was beginning to carry out my duties. It wasn’t so bad, and there were some benefits to being married to one of the most accomplished lovers in Europe.’

In the crashing silence that followed this remark, Eva thought she could have heard a pin drop. The handful of underwear fell back into the trunk from her lax grip. How tactless was it possible to be? She had just intimated to a man who had kissed her—with such skill and feeling that her knees still felt weak when she thought of it—that she would have been mentally comparing his technique with the legendary erotic skills of her late husband.

Worse. This was a man who she was quite certain wanted her. Eva grimaced, wondering what she could possibly say to make things better. Nothing, probably, unless she wanted to dig the hole even deeper. To say anything acknowledged the attraction between them.

‘Do you have grounds for comparison?’ Jack asked coolly into the aching silence.

‘Only Louis’s own assessment,’ she replied, then came to a decision. She could not leave this. ‘Personally I have had no basis for comparison—only one kiss. On the basis of that Louis need not have been so confident.’

‘Nothing? In all that time?’ Jack sounded as though he was just the other side of the screen. She should step out, have this exchange face to face, but somehow Eva guessed it would be more truthful like this. ‘No one?’

‘No one,’ she affirmed. ‘No one while he was alive, no one since.’

From that, she supposed, he could conclude she was a love-starved widow, ready to turn to any personable man once she was away from the close scrutiny of the Grand Ducal court, or that she was cold and had not felt the lack of love and of loving.

‘The man was a fool,’ Jack said abruptly. It wasn’t until she heard the snick of the latch that she realised he had walked out and left her. Eva stood for a moment, filtering the few words through her mind, listening to the emotion behind the curt statement. Her friend was angry on her behalf. Her eyes filled; no one had ever understood what it must have been like being married to Louis, and yet a man she had just tactlessly insulted grasped it immediately with warmth and empathy.

‘Thank you, Jack,’ she whispered to the empty room.

Shopping with a woman was a new experience. At the age of twenty-nine one did not have many of those, and certainly few that were so entertaining. If his sister, Bel, had asked him to accompany her through the fashionable lounges and shops of London, he would have pretended an attack of mumps sooner than oblige her, but Eva’s delight at being let loose in the bourgeois shops of Grenoble was infectious.

In her travel-worn gown and cloak she darted from shop window to shop window, ruthlessly dragging Jack with her. ‘I must have a hat,’ she declared. ‘I feel positively indecent without one. Which do you think? The amber straw with the ruffle or the chip straw with the satin ribbons?’

‘Have both,’ he suggested, ignoring the inner warning that a carriage stuffed with hatboxes was not the efficient vehicle for clandestine travel he had designed it to be.

‘Reall

y? May I?’ He was still looking into the window as she glanced up at him. Something about the reflected image of himself standing there with this lovely woman on his arm, her head tilted to look up at him with delight in her eyes, hit him over the solar plexus like a blow from a fist. They looked right together, and the sight gave him an entirely unfamiliar sensation of possessiveness. Jack tried to analyse it, but Eva was still talking.

‘Only I haven’t bought a gown yet, and I ought to buy that first and match the hat.’

‘Really? Is that how it is done?’

‘I think so—when I have new ensembles made they all come together with a selection of hats and shoes and so forth. I’m not used to shopping like this.’ Her nose wrinkled in doubt and Jack grinned. That was an expression far from the grand duchess he was used to.