“Love doesn’t enter into the calculation. I’ve presented a lady whom they want to marry: obedient, demure, quiet.” Her voice had an edge. “Well-bred on one side, if not the other.”
He made a noise, somewhere between a laugh and a snort. “You’re wrong, Bess. They aren’t in love with you, but damn, they are in lust. You walk across the ballroom, looking like the perfect embodiment of a future duchess—and at the same time, the most sensual woman in England.”
Betsy gasped, and ice went down her spine. She lost all inclination to pat his chest and glared at him, stepping back until she bumped the table. “No, I do not! You are absolutely incorrect.”
He frowned. “It was a compliment of a sort, Bess. I can assure you that gentlemen watch you with your duchess airs, your touch-me-not innocence, and the main thing that comes to mind is a violent wish to have you. To be the one to break that ice and set free the fire inside you.”
Betsy gasped, horror welling up in her chest. If he was right, all those proposals she’d received were because of her mother, rather than despite her.
What if those men thought they saw the shadow of her mother’s debauched behavior? The kind of lust that drove a woman to throw away the best match in the land? To leave her children?
Acid burned up her throat from her stomach, and for a moment she thought she’d vomit.
Jeremy’s eyes sharpened with puzzlement, and he wrapped his large hands around her upper arms. “I meant it as a compliment.”
He had no idea that he was making her heart burn with disgust, and she certainly wasn’t going to explain.
Her mother, Yvette, was her burden, and the last thing she’d do was reveal that weakness to one of the few men in the world who had always told her the truth. A shudder ran through her body, and Jeremy’s hands tightened on her arms.
“What’s the matter, Bess? It doesn’t make sense that you’d fall for the idea that men view ladies like delicate angels. You don’t turn up your nose at a bawdy joke. Hell, you were the one who called me ‘flaccid’!”
“Excuse me,” Betsy said, marshaling all her strength to remain calm. “But any man who thinks about me that way is quite mistaken. I am not a loose woman, puns or no, and there is nothing about me that might suggest I would readily fall into bed with a man.”
That included her future husband, but she kept that to herself.
She’d decided years ago that she had to get through the bedding part of marriage without giving her husband even the faintest suspicion that she enjoyed the act—if indeed she did. Enjoyment would be fatal.
If she expressed pleasure, he would watch her like a hawk. And rightly so. Just look at her mother, giving birth to four children in five years, before fleeing with the count. The evidence of her enjoyment of men’s favors had been written on Yvette’s body in language that anyone could understand.
“That is exactly why you and I cannot make a five-day journey in which you are dressed as a boy,” Jeremy said, his voice patient, as if he were instructing a slow student.
Betsy opened her mouth and stopped, floundering. He was right, of course. She rarely accompanied a man out of a ballroom without a chaperone. She zealously guarded her reputation.
And yet—
“It wouldn’t be me,” she said, looking back up at his eyes. “You could call me by a boy’s name. Fred or Pete. Don’t you see, Jeremy? It wouldn’t be me, so how could I lose my reputation?”
“Are you planning to bed down in the stables with the grooms and other male servants?” His eyes were sympathetic, but his voice was unrelenting. “It would still be you, albeit in breeches, and if you were discovered—which is likely—the consequences would be terrible.”
“How would I be discovered?”
“London is five days’ journey from here. Anything could betray you. Did you know that men whip out their cocks and piss against the wall?”
She blinked.
“You want to masquerade as a man,” he said. “What are you going to do if someone wagers that they can pee farther than you?”
“Is that likely?”
“It’s not unlikely. Men like to measure their prowess in ways that are related to the performance of their private parts, ridiculous though it seems.”
“I needn’t be disguised as a stableboy,” she pointed out. “I could pose as a young relative of yours.”
“If I travel from Lindow Castle to London with a well-dressed young lad, almost all will wonder if you are one of the Wildes. Everyone knows the duke has thirteen or fourteen children. They would stare at you.”
“Oh.”
“On the other hand, if I am merely part of a group that includes Lady Knowe, or North, or even one of your younger brothers, you simply become a young Wilde, traveling with an older relative. Nothing interesting to see . . . move along, if you please.”
“What?”
“Constables say that during street riots,” Jeremy explained. “My point is that if I travel to London with you, you would be a subject of interest. But if we brought along one of the older Wildes, that person would absorb the attention. People are fascinated by your family, in case you haven’t noticed.”
She harrumphed. “I’ve lived with their attention my entire life, so yes, I have noticed.”
“They would focus on Lady Knowe, or North, or Leonidas, not on a mere boy.”
“I think your argument is a weak one, Lord Jeremy.”
“We agreed on first names.”
“We didn’t really.”
“You have already addressed me as Jeremy. And I’m calling you Bess, or in extremis, Boadicea. Frankly, this breeches play you’re suggesting is not far from the warrior queen who took on the Romans. I don’t suppose she was wearing skirts, let alone panniers, when she led the charge.”
“I still don’t think a chaperone is necessary.”
“I suggest Lady Knowe.”
“This is ridiculous!” The words burst past her lips. “Yes, I see the danger if I pretend to be a stableboy, if I’m alone with a group of men. But I could be a stray young cousin of yours whom you were escorting to London.”
He shook his head. “You have the Wilde profile and eyebrows, Bess. There’s no mistaking the look. Every Wilde has it, except—”
“Except for my sister Joan,” Betsy said resignedly. “You needn’t elaborate. We all know that Joan’s hair is the precise shade of the infamous Prussian’s.”
“More to the point, the Wildes are well-known for eyebrows, high cheekbones, blue eyes with a tilt at the edges . . . Anyone in the south of England and most people in the north are able to identify a Wilde even from the worst-drawn prints.”
Betsy groaned.
She hated to admit that he was right. She did look like her father and her aunt. Joan stood out in the midst of them like a rose in a bunch of lilacs. Even the three younger children, Ophelia’s brood, had the Wilde eyebrows. And the Wilde cheekbones as well.
“Right,” she said. Her mouth drooped. “I suppose it was a stupid idea.”
“Yes, it was,” Jeremy stated, not softening the blow.
She straightened and forced a blithe smile on her lips. “It was a happy dream while it lasted, so thank you for indulging me.”