The duchess cocked her head and said thoughtfully, “I think you look like a fancy chicken that I once saw at the Tower of London.”
“I shall wear it home to the castle and directly pay a visit to the nursery,” Otis said airily. “I don’t want to deny anyone the pleasure of seeing the fanciest chicken who ever pranced through Drabblefield Fair.”
They were walking back to the carriage, laden down with everything from pears to a baby rattle for Viola’s unborn child, six cutwork handkerchiefs, and a great quantity of gingerbread, when Thaddeus said to Joan, “To return to our previous subject of conversation, I am not melancholy.”
“Then why do I feel as if I should mark on a calendar every time you laugh?” she asked. “On the rare occasions when you do laugh, I mean.”
She had the hang of striding now. Swinging one’s arms was important too. In fact, being a man was an all-body endeavor.
“I suppose you laugh many times a day?” There wasn’t anything wistful about Thaddeus’s voice; it had the same pleasant, courtly timbre as always.
“Of course,” Joan said.
“Joan is a great laugher,” Aunt Knowe said from behind them. “The boys used to adore making her giggle long before she could speak a word. The nursery would have been much less jolly without her.”
“As polite society will be if anyone catches sight of you in that coat,” Otis said, poking Joan in the back. “I don’t think it’s appropriate. I hadn’t caught sight of you from the rear before.”
Joan felt herself turning pink. “Lord Greywick has already expressed his opinion of my coat. I know it’s too short.”
“He’s right,” Otis said firmly. “Just think of that scene in which you have to wave a dagger about. Is this a dagger that I see before me?”
“Wrong play!” Joan cried, turning around and walking backward because she felt so self-conscious. “That’s Macbeth.”
“Hamlet waves around a rapier in Act Five, when he’s dueling everyone, right? My point is that the audience is going to be watching your arse instead of the dagger,” Otis said.
“You shouldn’t mention private parts in front of ladies!” Aunt Knowe exclaimed.
Thaddeus mumbled something.
Joan looked up. “What did you say?”
Their eyes met, and she felt herself growing even pinker.
Aunt Knowe was bickering with Otis and not listening.
“I don’t read much Shakespeare,” Thaddeus said, a shade of apology in his voice.
Joan waved her hand. “Most of my family agrees with your poor opinion of the Bard.”
“I said that your arse might make that wretched play palatable,” he said, his voice low but perfectly clear.
Joan’s mouth fell open.
“Not that you will ever wear that coat in public again,” the viscount decreed.
Chapter Seven
On return from the fair, Thaddeus stripped, tossing his garments on a chair and stepping into the bath his valet had prepared.
“Your clothes are filthy,” Pitcher said with distaste. “If you’ll forgive me, my lord, I’ll take them directly to the laundry.” He bundled them and then wielded a feather duster on the chair.
Thaddeus relaxed into the steaming tub with a sigh of relief, tipping his head back to stare at the ceiling. He had eaten many meals in company with the Duke of Lindow’s family. He had played billiards with the duke’s sons in the middle of the night; he had gone sledding with the children and trounced the duchess at archery. He had attended balls and country house parties.
Lindow wasn’t home, but it wasn’t foreign to him either. He’d always been comfortable there, knowing his place and feeling among friends.
No longer.
Now he felt as if he were in the grip of emotion—a condition he detested—and what’s worse, he wasn’t even certain what the emotion was. One moment he was angry, and the next he found himself with a cockstand such as he had scarcely experienced in his life, which would not go away, no matter how hard he contemplated the plight of the poor or the hairy wart on his late grandmother’s chin.
Joan was the obvious catalyst.
She kept looking into his eyes, as if she guessed the feelings he had hidden from everyone, including himself.
Not to mention that kiss.
Bloody hell.
He had looked down at Joan and realized that she’d taken his refusal to answer her question as confirmation that he disliked her—and completely lost his head. Even the memory of that kiss made a rush of lust overcome him with the ferocity of a wildfire.
Given another half hour, he would have propped her against that wretched fence and lost his head entirely.
God help him, when she was trying on a hat with that impudent smile, he actually glanced at the thicket and contemplated ducking behind it accompanied by a lady dressed as a man and kissing that lady to a standstill.
It was even worse after Joan peered at her bottom and then turned to him with a flush in her cheeks. All he could think about was what she would look like after coming in his arms.
He wasn’t the sort of man who was ever taken by surprise by lust. Desire had its place; he enjoyed respectful exchanges with women who cheerfully welcomed him into their beds with no expectation of money or a future.
Picturing intimacies with one of them had never caused him to shudder so deeply that he felt it in his backbone.
He felt unmoored.
It took an effort of will to admit that he had fallen under the spell of a woman who had been practicing her wiles on London society for three years. He had watched Joan do it. He knew what an amazing performance she put on.
That poor dupe, Anthony Froude, had told him months after Joan kissed him at the ball that he’d never be happy with another woman.
Succumbing to her, kissing her, made him as foolish as Anthony.
He shook his head and reached for a ball of lemon soap—which put him in a direct eye line with a glass that hung over the dressing table. He watched himself run the ball over his arms and chest, soapy water sliding over his muscles.
He’d never given any thought to whether his future wife would dislike his burly frame. It hadn’t mattered, to be frank. But now he wondered what Joan would think. Several times he’d caught her peeking at his chest.
Irritatingly, his veins were on fire, unable to stop imagining her as a lover. He had a feeling she’d be nothing like the women he’d made love to over the years.
He could imagine her: sweaty, bossy, sparkling, requesting more than he wanted to give, and getting it. She would demand more of him than any woman had before. Not that he’d left a woman unsatisfied.
But it would be different with her.
He rubbed soap in his hair, watching his biceps bulge in the glass. He hadn’t realized how muscled he’d become, even given Lady Bumtrinket’s unwelcome comments about his supposedly padded frame.
The pinnacle of gentlemanly form was a slender man, graceful in the ballroom, willowy and aristocratic.
In the last two years, he’d repeatedly taken out deep frustration in the boxing salon, and his body had changed, growing thicker and more masculine, for want of a better word. More rugged, as befit someone who walked in the door of the salon six days of the week and paid for the privilege of pummeling the strongest men in London.