Much Ado About You Read online

  Smiley prudently retired through the baize door, carrying their outer garments. Lucius raised an eyebrow. “Hasn’t there been enough revelation for one day?”

  Tess ignored this foolishness, opening the door to the drawing room and waiting for him to join her.

  “I would rather not discuss my parents,” he said, walking across the room away from her. “I am certain that you were able to gain a clear understanding of our relationship from our meeting this morning. I know that family is very important to you, Tess, and if you wish me to continue visiting them, I shall.”

  Tess watched his back. “But I would like to talk about your parents now,” she said, perfectly agreeably. She was counting on Lucius’s exquisite manners.

  “Very well.” He turned about and waited. He wasn’t going to make this easy; his face was as expressionless as she had ever seen it.

  “There are merely a few things that I would like to clarify,” she said, perching on the armrest of a settee. “Your mother has an extraordinary interest in titles and matters of consequence, does she not?”

  “Yes.”

  “I would guess that she owns a Debrett’s Peerage and reads it regularly?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then she already knew my father’s title is both English and ancient,” Tess said.

  He bent his head. “Your surmise is quite likely correct. I’m afraid that my mother takes some pleasure in baiting visitors.”

  “One more question…I just want to make certain that my understanding is correct. You returned from Oxford and made the necessary funds to save your family from immediate destitution.”

  “That is an exaggeration,” he said. “My mother is correct in that a gentleman’s family can continue for some time with crippling debt.”

  “But without your contribution, there would have been no escape from that debt. Your father said there was no longer any land nor any rents. You would have had to leave university, for example.”

  “That is true.”

  “You saved your family’s financial future, and in response, they disowned you publicly.”

  “Again, an exaggeration,” he remarked. He turned and stared out the window. “My parents are simply disappointed that I continued to invest in the market after the most immediate necessity had passed.”

  She rose and ran over to him, standing at his elbow. “Lucius, you paid your family’s debts, and then they threw you out because of it?”

  His jaw was tight. “That casts their actions in an unpleasant light.”

  She slipped her hand into his. “Yes, it does.”

  He was silent. Then: “You must understand that from my mother’s point of view, I could have done nothing more egregious. She lived with her parents’ disapproval of her own marriage, which became a fear that my father’s blood would show itself.”

  “So to her, it has,” Tess said softly. “And since that date, you have continued to pay for your parents’ maintenance?” No answer. “Lady Griselda mentioned that your family owned a large estate in the country.”

  She was shocked by the irritation in his eyes. “Does it matter where the estate came from, Tess? Of course they are happier with the land preserved.”

  She returned his gaze steadily. “Your mother’s diamonds?”

  He turned away again.

  She pulled him to face her. “It’s precisely the same thing you did for Imogen, and without even telling me. You saved Imogen’s reputation by paying for a special license, didn’t you?”

  “That was nothing,” he said, shrugging again.

  “You didn’t save merely Imogen’s reputation. It was all of us.”

  “I told you before, Tess, money is simply not something that I care about very much. Remember?”

  She did remember. He had told her that he would never care deeply for her, that he was incapable of strong feelings. Tess would—would spit before she believed that nonsense. He even loved his mother, for all she was a woman so obsessed with civility that she had discarded her only son like a worn garment. There was no other explanation for his buying a house on St. James’s Square. And there was no other explanation for the portraits he sprinkled about the house. Not unless he missed his own family, unpleasant though they were.

  “Lucius,” she asked, looking up at him, “I have a question, and then I promise that I’ll let you go back to work.”

  His eyes instantly lightened. “Anything you desire,” he said.

  “The morning when I was to marry Mayne,” she said, gathering all her courage into the question, “I heard him come down the stairs. And then you left the room.”

  He seemed to have stiffened.

  “What did you say to him?”

  He stared down at her. She counted the seconds with the beats of her heart.

  “I asked him to leave,” he said finally.

  Her heart leaped, but she still wanted to make certain. “Did you pay him to leave?”

  A shadow crossed his face. “Is that what you think? That I use money as a stick to force people into compliance with my wishes?”

  “No!” And: “Why did you ask Mayne to leave?”

  “I wanted you,” he said. “I wanted you myself.”

  “Then why didn’t you ask me?” she said, and it was the most important question of all. “Why didn’t you simply ask me?”

  “I did ask—”

  “Not then,” Tess said. “We barely knew each other when you asked me at the Roman ruin. Why didn’t you ask me again? Why did you allow Mayne to propose?”

  He just stared down at her. “You deserve better than I. I’m not capable—”

  But her eyes were glowing with some emotion that he couldn’t quite define, and the words died in his mouth. She had turned his life upside down, thrown his reliance on civility to the wind as if those rules were no more than straw.

  “I wanted you more than I could admit to myself,” he finally said. “So I asked Mayne to leave.”

  “You fixed the problem,” Tess said with satisfaction. “Just as you fixed the problem in your parents’ finances and Imogen’s elopement.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “It wasn’t the same, not at all.” He reached out and brushed a lock of hair from her face. “I never wanted to fix anything as much as I wanted to fix your life, Tess. That was the frightening part. It was easy to make the money my father needed; I gambled on the market, and because I don’t really care about money, it came easily. But I couldn’t pay to fix your life. I could never buy you.”

  Her eyes were a little teary, but he thought it was with joy. And she was holding him very tightly.

  “I care about you too much,” he whispered, pulling her against him so that he didn’t have to look in her eyes as he said it. “I fell in love with you, Tess. And now I love you more than—more than life itself. I know you’d rather be with Imogen, and that your family comes first in your heart—”

  But she was shaking her head and pulling away from him. “I thought that…I thought that I was marrying for my family, and I thought that my heart would break when Imogen cast me out. And I was worried that your heart was destroyed by a similar event. But it’s not, is it?”

  “No,” he said, searching her eyes.

  “My heart would break if you ever left me,” she whispered. “If you ever threw me out.”

  He pulled her back against his heart, into his arms. “I would never leave you,” he said. “Never. I could no more throw you from my life than I could take my heart from my chest.”

  She raised her eyes to see the love there, and it was so fierce that it burned into her heart, never to be doubted. Never to be questioned.

  The words, “I love you, I love you” came from one pair of lips to the other, a rough whisper from one heart to the other, a promise from one soul to the other.

  Epilogue

  They were sitting for a family portrait. They had been sitting for it for the greater part of eight months, since Benjami
n West was so old that his hands grew tired after an hour or so of wielding his brushes. But it seemed he was finally done. He lifted his head and nodded, signaling to his assistant to take his brushes. He was a delicate old gentleman, dressed in black velvet and high heels, wearing a powdered wig of the style of his youth.

  “I believe that I am finished,” he observed, standing up. He drifted away. “I shall leave you to contemplate yourselves in privacy.” And with a wave of a lace handkerchief, he was gone.

  “The only trouble,” Tess said to her husband as they stood before the portrait on its easel, “is that Phin walks now, and he’s pictured as a mere babe in white lace.”

  In Benjamin West’s portrait, Phin was an angelic infant with no more than a tuft of hair and a sweetly sleepy expression. In fact, they all looked rather indolent, if exquisite; it seemed to be a marker of Mr. West’s work.

  The contrast to the real Phin was startling. For one thing, Phin was wearing nothing more than a little jacket and a nappy listing inelegantly in the direction of his chubby knees. For another, he had a mophead full of curls that stood out in all directions. The inelegance of his appearance was not helped by the fact that Chloe had taken up her favorite post, on his shoulder. Phin talked constantly, although no one understood what he said; likewise, Chloe squawked without forming intelligible words. The two of them made a cacophonous noise together.

  Tess looked back at the portrait. Mr. West had depicted the three of them seated under a sycamore. Tess was the picture of slender elegance, dressed as if for a drawing room with the queen. Phineas was dozing in his mother’s arms, while Tess looked up at her husband, posed just behind her with his hand on her chair. Lucius gazed at the viewer, sleepy-eyed and powerful.

  “I like the way you’re looking at me,” Lucius said with some satisfaction.

  She smiled. “I appear to love you, don’t I? Or perhaps if I wasn’t quite so lazy, I might feel the emotion.”

  His arms wrapped around her, and a fierce voice said in her ear, “might?”

  “All right, do.” She laughed. And then, “Your arms won’t reach about me if I grow any larger.”

  “I’m not worried,” Lucius said, patting her belly with satisfaction.

  She laughed again and turned in the circle of his arms so that she could look at the portrait again. “We just look so—so idle!”

  “Love-in-idleness,” he said into her hair.

  “William’s flower?” she said, remembering. “Heartsease.”

  “You are an ease to my heart,” he told her.

  She laid her head back against his shoulder and smiled at the three of them…the perfect family portrait.

  Phin toddled by, swiping the leg of the pedestal as he did so. The portrait tottered, and the fate of the elegant, indolent family hung in the balance, until Lucius reached forward with a lightning grab and saved it.

  Of course.

  A Love Letter to Louisa May Alcott

  The inspiration for this book, and indeed for my entire Sisters quartet, of which Much Ado About You is the first, came from novels written by Louisa May Alcott. Alcott is most famous for Little Women; some of you undoubtedly picked up the ancestral relation between my four squabbling, loving sisters and Alcott’s little women. Yet a different Alcott novel served as a direct source for this particular book. Her Rose in Bloom, published in 1876, is a wonderful tale of a young orphan with eight male cousins. One of those cousins is very similar to my Draven, and Draven’s wild ride on Blue Peter is modeled, to some extent, on my memories of weeping over Rose in Bloom as a young girl.

  My husband is Italian, and we spend a great deal of time in that country. Last year we took our children to the island of Elba, where Napoleon was exiled after being tossed out of France. We dutifully toured Napoleon’s villa and, on the way back to the beach where we were staying, we stumbled across a sign for a “Roman ruin.” It was nothing more than that: a few tumbled rocks, a sunken room here or there. While the site was marked as such, no one was paying it much attention: apparently Romans loved Elba, and ruins of their various houses are to be found all over the island. So I just wanted to tell you that in case you wish to visit the ruined house that Lucius and Tess found so interesting, you’ll have to travel to Italy, and then take a boat to Elba, and then rent a car and wind up into the hills…and the trip will be worth every penny.

  Finally, the lovely poem by Catullus that both Tess and Lucius know by heart is called “How Many Kisses: For Lesbia.” The translation that I quote here is by A. S. Kline and can be found in his Catullus: The Poems, available on-line at www.tonykline.co.uk/ (Poetry in Translation). The translation is glorious, and worth quoting in full:

  Lesbia, you ask how many kisses of yours

  would be enough and more to satisfy me.

  As many as the grains of Libyan sand

  that lie between hot Jupiter’s oracle,

  at Ammon, in resin-producing Cyrene

  and old Battiades’ sacred tomb:

  or as many as the stars, when night is still,

  gazing down on secret human desires:

  as many of your kisses kissed

  are enough, and more, for mad Catullus,

  as can’t be counted by spies

  nor an evil tongue bewitch us.

  Why Every Heroine Needs a Sister

  Just as Much as She Needs a Husband

  (Ooops! Did I Say More Than

  She Needs a Man?)

  My editor says that I write romances that are partially about the heroine’s love for a man, and partially about her love for her girlfriends. Well, of course. Too many novels depict a heroine sitting alone when the new sheriff rides in and she barely has time to think, nice pecs, before her life changes. I don’t buy it. In real life, her best friend is propped on the barstool to her right, saying, “Honey, I never liked that fake tan look.” And her sister is drinking her third cosmo and saying, “Definitely not. Look how small his hands are. Do you suppose he wears that gun belt so low for a reason?” So, to the tune of wicked laughter, our heroine rolls her eyes at the sheriff and turns back to her friends. I have a sister and two best friends. In fact, it’s a wonder I ever got married, considering the amount of commentary I received!

  My little sister came along when I was one year old. It wasn’t an unmixed blessing. She went through high school with long blonde hair, runner’s legs, and a charming ability to get along with members of the opposite sex. I trotted through those same years in a plump body, with an afro perm of red curls (don’t ask), and no ability for small talk whatsoever. By the time I went to college, I’d given up my perm and had a modified Farrah Fawcett do. I met my best friends in my freshman year. One was from San Francisco and talked of bands I’d never heard of. Another was from Boston, and had won the Latin prize in high school. Some twenty years later, we still talk on the phone several times a week. And as for my sister…she lives right down the road, and we see each other almost every day.

  These three women have marked all the turning points, the afros, the perms, the summer of shaved head, great delights, and the seeming tragedies of my life and theirs. Together, we’ve had six children, several husbands, bad boyfriends and worse boyfriends, near death and illnesses. More to the point, we’ve saved one another from disaster more times than can be counted. Marion saved me from marrying a doctor by pointing out he discussed his mother more than his job. I saved Alissa from a fate worse than death by noting that the wonderful man she had just met had a pale circle around his finger. Bridget saved Marion from a drunken Bulgarian artist who threw fruit knives when enraged, by stressing his bald spot.

  My last series was structured around female friendships, and in review was always being called a Regency Sex and the City. With my new series, which begins with Much Ado About You, I decieded to write about sisters. Sisters who are girlfriends, best enemies, best friends, most beloved…all at one time. The heroine of Much Ado has three sisters: logical, plump Josie; sensual, witty Annabel; and pass
ionate Imogen. She feuds with them as she falls in love with the hero. And she falls in love to the tune of their commentary. If I had to describe the book, I’d point to a mix between two great products of pop culture: Sex and the City meets Little Women.

  About the Author

  Author of seven award-winning romances, Eloisa James is a professor of English literature who lives with her family in New Jersey. All her books must have been written in her sleep, because her days are taken up by caring for two children with advanced degrees in whining, a demanding guinea pig, a smelly frog, and a tumbledown house. Letters from readers provide a great escape! Write Eloisa at [email protected] or visit her website at www.eloisajames.com.

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  PRAISE FOR AWARD-WINNING,

  NEW YORK TIMES

  BESTSELLING AUTHOR

  ELOISA JAMES

  “[James] has taken the Regency to a new level.”

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  “She is one of the brightest lights in our genre…. Her writing is truly scrumptious.”

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  “[She] writes with a captivating blend of charm, style, and grace that never fails to leave the reader sighing and smiling and falling in love. Her style is exquisite, her prose pure magic.”

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  “Call her ‘the historical Jennifer Crusie’…James gives readers plenty of reasons to laugh.”

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  “[She’s] a gift every romance reader should give herself.”

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  By Eloisa James

  MUCH ADO ABOUT YOU

  YOUR WICKED WAYS

  A WILD PURSUIT

  FOOL FOR LOVE