He hadn't lied to Mrs. Rowland. He'd indeed lived in some of the Continent's most glamorous locales. He'd simply omitted the less than glamorous reasons behind this peripatetic life: because his parents hadn't an ounce of money sense between them and could never afford a permanent residence.
So they moved in counterrhythm to the wealthier elites. In summer, when everyone was off to Biarritz and Aix-les-Bains, they occupied some relative's winter villa in Nice. In winter, the reverse. Occasionally, they stayed in one place for a while, when a house stood vacant because its owners had gone off on some wild adventure, such as when Cousin Konstantin left Athens for schemes in Argentina. Or when Cousin Nikolai went to China for two years.
At age thirteen, Camden had taken over the management of the household. By then he was already accustomed to dealing with creditors, handling servants, and learning new languages in an instant so he could haggle with local merchants in order to stretch his family's meager coins further. He didn't mind being poor, but he hated having to lie about it, to dissemble and feign, as he did tonight, so that his parents could continue on in their blissful ignorance of their financial precariousness.
It had been a relief to be with Theodora. They'd met in St. Petersburg, where their mothers shared the use of a troika. He'd been fifteen then, she sixteen. She was as poor as he and, like him, lived in fashionable places in unfashionable seasons. They understood each other's plight without ever needing to speak a word of it.
But it was not thoughts of Theodora that kept him awake. It was Miss Rowland.
Even before their accidental meeting, he had more or less expected Miss Rowland to propose a merger between his future title and her fortune. He had also expected a great deal of regret over turning down those sweet stacks of pounds sterling, after having lived in want of them his entire life.
What he emphatically did not expect was Miss Rowland herself. She was unsentimental, hardened, and cynical beyond her years—but her greatest cruelty was reserved for herself, in her insistence that she would be perfectly fine, thank you, if she could only cosh a duke senseless with his own ledgers and haul him to the altar.
For someone who was otherwise levelheaded and manipulative, there'd been an odd, poignant transparency to her this evening. She liked him. She liked him enough to be not just disappointed over his unavailability, but unhappy.
He liked her too, surprisingly. How could he not like a girl who called him an “impoverished nobody” to his face? Her frankness was refreshing and welcome after the nuanced subtlety and selective narratives that had characterized his exchanges, all his life, with people outside his immediate family.
But what caused his fidgeting at this witching hour was not her overly simplistic approach to things and people, but her brooding sexuality.
She'd wanted to touch him. That desire had been there in every full-on stare and every sideways glance all throughout the evening. Once our marriage is consummated, you need only to come back to me when you need heirs. The girl might be a virgin, but she was neither pure nor innocent. She knew about these things.
What she probably didn't know yet, but he already did, was that with her single-mindedness she would be a force of nature in bed. No man could roll out of her bed and walk away. His overriding objective, despite his exhaustion, would be how he could get her to lie with him again.
*
Camden dozed fitfully. Then suddenly he was awake. He had left the curtains and shutters open, out of years of habit, so that he could look out and recall in which country, which city he found himself. The blizzard must have passed; a shaft of silvery moonlight drifted through the window and lit the way clear to the door. A woman stood just inside, in a long nightgown, her back against the door. He couldn't see her face but he knew instinctively that it was Miss Rowland, she of the entirely unfitting, too-childish pet name Gigi.
The Rowland manse, while not a cumbersome behemoth like the ducal manor at Twelve Pillars, still had some eighty, ninety rooms. He had been put to bed in a different wing from where his hosts had their bedchambers. She had not accidentally returned to the wrong room after using the water closet. She had to have walked a good two hundred feet to visit him.
And he was naked beneath the covers. The late Mr. Rowland's nightshirt, kindly supplied at bedtime, had been too restricting.
She stayed in that spot, unmoving, for a long time, until he was tempted to tell her either to get on with whatever in the blazes she had planned or leave him to his tossing and turning in peace. Abruptly, she moved, coming toward the bed in long, determined strides, her feet silent on the Persian carpet.