Some of the champagne bubbles went up her nose and she started spluttering. Lord Deben swiftly produced a pristine white-silk handkerchief from somewhere and handed it to her, so that she could at least cover her mouth and chin with it while the coughing fit lasted.
‘Not for some time, though,’ he said, once she’d regained her composure. ‘For the next few nights, our courtship will be carried out in full view of the public.’
‘Will it? I mean, of course!’ She dabbed at several spots of champagne that sprinkled her lap. ‘We ought never to be private together. I was not intimating that I wished to do anything so very shocking, Lord Deben, I—’
He placed one gloved finger upon her lips, silencing her.
‘Do not fear, little one. The next few times I make love to you, it shall be entirely verbal. We shall not need to withdraw behind locked doors.’
Chapter Eight
‘M-make love to me? Verbally? I’m not sure I understand what you mean.’
As she glanced up at him warily, he reached out and twined one of her ringlets round his gloved finger.
‘I can say how much I admire your hair, for example,’ he said in a sultry voice before allowing it to fall back on to her neck.
Then she understood. The tone of his voice, combined with that gesture, was so stimulating that he might just as well have trailed that finger all the way down her throat.
‘Which is the truth, by the way. I never pay compliments if I don’t mean them. Which you know, don’t you, my sweet?’
‘D-do I?’ Yes, actually, she supposed she did, if that horrible outing to the park was anything to go by. For had he not told her that he thought her nose was too big for her to ever be considered a beauty? Not that it wasn’t true. It was just that he need not have mentioned it.
‘Why do you look so cross?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said mendaciously. She was not going to admit that his brutal honesty still rankled. ‘It is just that my hair is nothing special. It’s just brown.’
‘It curls naturally, though. Which leads a man to imagine it rioting across his pillow first thing in the morning.’
She blushed fierily, but protested, ‘You cannot possibly tell if my curls are natural. Let alone know what they would look like when I wake up in the morning.’
‘On the contrary. By the end of the evening, false curls unwind, particularly when the atmosphere is damp. But that night on the terrace, that first night we met, yours were a positive riot of energy.’
‘My hair was a frizzy mess, you mean.’
He sat back, leaned one arm along the back of her chair and tilted his head to one side as he scrutinised her.
‘Why do you always turn a compliment on its head, so that it becomes a criticism? You should accept flattery as your due, not squirm in your seat as though I have said something obscene.’
That was supposed to be flattery?
‘I am just not used to receiving compliments, I suppose,’ she admitted grudgingly.
‘I cannot believe that no man has paid compliments to the glorious natural energy and lush bounty of your hair.’
Oh, that was much better. ‘You really think my hair is glorious?’ Immediately she wished she had not said that out loud, but she had not been able to help herself. At last, at last he’d said something unequivocally positive about her appearance.
‘Well, nobody else has ever said so.’ She frowned, robbed utterly of the pleasure of knowing he liked her hair. He might think it glorious, but her inability to respond as he thought she should was just one more proof that she was lacking as a woman.
‘Are the men of Much Wakering blind?’
She darted him a shy glance and saw that he was looking completely baffled. Which, in its turn, baffled her.
‘What do you mean?’
‘How can you have reached your age without having had at least a dozen admirers?’
He thought she ought to have had admirers? That observation cheered her up no end.
‘Well...’ she mused, wondering if there really wasn’t so very much wrong with her after all. ‘I suppose...’ now she came to consider it ‘...that I haven’t really mixed with many men before. Not ones to whom I am not related, anyway. Except schoolboy friends of my brothers, or scholarly acquaintances of my father’s. All of whom treated me as though I were either a sister, or an honorary niece.’