This revelation startled the duke again, in a way that felt more complicated than simply a man's surprise that a woman would know something in his field of expertise. He inclined his head in Mrs. Rowland's direction. “My compliments, madam. You must tell me how you came to develop a passion for my arcane subjects.”
Mrs. Rowland's response was a high castle wall of a smile. Camden glanced Gigi's way. Apparently she wasn't the only one to have noticed something highly irregular.
Hollis announced that dinner awaited. Mrs. Rowland, with almost obvious relief, suggested that they pair off and proceed to the dining room.
For Victoria, about the only silver lining to the cumbersome evening was that the duke didn't immediately succumb to Gigi's charms.
She'd fretted about Gigi's looks throughout her daughter's girlhood, as the child stubbornly refused to blossom into the kind of flawless beauty Victoria had been but instead grew unfashionably tall, with wide shoulders and a challenging gaze that was Victoria's despair. Then, a few years ago, after Victoria at last realized she no longer needed to train her eyes on the girl's gown and coiffure for signs of imperfection, she noticed something quite confounding.
Men stared at Gigi. Some of them gawked. At balls and soirées, they had their eyes glued to her as she walked, talked, and occasionally—largely with indifference—glanced their way. When Victoria mentally distanced herself and studied her daughter as a stranger would, she was shocked to realize just how obscenely attractive Gigi might be to the masculine sex.
She had no words to describe the kind of primal allure Gigi exuded, an incandescent sensuality that surely didn't come from Victoria. It made Victoria feel old, past her prime, her vaunted beauty a distant second place to Gigi's youth, luminosity, and glamour.
Gigi looked as well as she ever did in a dinner gown of vermilion velvet, the skin of her throat and arms glowing in the lambent light like that of a Bouguereau nymph. The duke spoke to Gigi as he ought to, making the obligatory grunts concerning the relative proportion of precipitation to sunshine in recent days in both London and Devon. But unlike Gigi's husband, who glanced at her over his wineglass with every other forkful, Perrin kept most of his attention on the plate before him, gravely tasting the successive courses of soupe d'oseille, filet de sole à la Normandie, and duck à la Rouennaise.
“Allow me to compliment you, madam, on your chef,” the duke suddenly looked up and said. “The food is nowhere near as terrible as I expected.”
Victoria was absurdly pleased. Ever since the night when they'd gambled over chocolates and she'd practically told him to drag her upstairs and ravish her lonely old bones, she'd been on pins and needles.
She could repeat to herself only so many times that, in desperate embarrassment at being found out, she'd made up the whole thing on the spot. The only problem was that she was a terrible impromptu liar. Without hours and days of prior preparation, she either blurted out the truth or bungled so badly the odor of her mendacity could be scented a furlong away.
Had she told the inadvertent truth instead? Was this whole exercise in folly simply an opening for her to grab the duke by his lapels and make him take notice of her at long last? He hadn't entirely believed her, but he didn't disbelieve her enough. There was something about truth, the visceral ferocity of it, that seeped under and around incredulity, no mattter how well-founded and watertight.
“Thank you,” she said, “though I cannot return the compliment on your tact.”
“Tact is for others, madam.” As if to underscore his point, he glanced at Gigi and Camden and said, “Forgive the curiosity of a dotard who retired from Society many years ago, but is it commonplace nowadays for a couple about to divorce to be on such apparently friendly terms?”
“Quite so,” answered Camden, his tone as smooth and creamy as a dish of flan. He looked at Gigi. “Wouldn't you say, my dear?”
“Without a doubt,” said Gigi dryly. “We do loathe scenes, don't we, Tremaine?”
Even the duke was left momentarily speechless by this bravura performance. He moved on to a safer topic. “I understand you've quite the Midas touch, Lord Tremaine.”
“Hardly, sir. It's Lady Tremaine who has the head for business. I but try my best to reach financial parity with her.”
Victoria glanced at Gigi, hoping she'd heard the admiration in Camden's words. But the quick shadow of confusion in Gigi's eyes suggested that she heard something else instead.
“I'd always thought it otherwise,” said Victoria. “Lady Tremaine builds upon the success of her forefathers. But you started with nothing.”
“I wouldn't say so, madam. I'm no Horatio Alger, hero beloved of the American imagination,” replied Camden. “My first acquisitions were made with substantial loans obtained against Lady Tremaine's inheritance.”
Gigi choked on her wine. She coughed into her napkin as Hollis rushed to her side with a fresh napkin and a goblet of water. She took a long draft of water and promptly resumed her ingestion of the slices of duck on her plate.