“My, sir, you are such a gentleman,” cooed Mrs. Vanderbilt. Her Southern-belle manners, however, did not quite disguise her flinty determination. “But I have heard from numerous trustworthy sources, on both sides of the Atlantic, that you may not remain married for much longer.”
It's because you are young and you used to be a bit of an impoverished nobody. Expect the proposals to fly fast and thick now. After nearly eleven years, that prediction was coming true. This wasn't the first time Mrs. Vanderbilt had broached the issue in recent weeks. Nor was she the first, second, or even third matron with a marriageable daughter to suggest that her precious girl was just the perfect candidate for him.
All throughout the dinner, the first he'd held since his return from England, he'd felt on display, like a fattened goose about to be turned into foie gras. The smiles on the women were too bright, too ingratiating. Even the men with whom he'd shared cigars, whiskey, and business ventures for the past ten years regarded him differently, with the sort of hearty approval better reserved for sixteen-year-old mistresses.
“Well, then, milord, you will come for dinner next Wednesday?” drawled Mrs. Vanderbilt. “I don't think you've seen Consuelo for a good six months, and she has become ever so much more beautiful and swanlike and—”
The doors to the drawing room swung open—burst open, in fact, as if blown apart by a passing cyclone. In the doorway loomed a woman and a dog. The dog was small, well-behaved, and sleepy, snuggled in the crook of the woman's arm. The woman was tall, haughty, and ravishing, her voluptuous figure poured into a sheath of carmine velvet, her throat and breast glistening with a maharaja's cache of rubies and diamonds. And, ever so incongruously, she also sported a very humble sapphire ring on her left hand.
“Now, who is that?” demanded Mrs. Vanderbilt, at once peeved and fascinated.
“That, my dear Mrs. Vanderbilt,” replied Camden, with a glee he couldn't and didn't hide, “is my lady wife.”
*
Never in her entire life had Gigi felt so vulnerable, standing before a roomful of strangers—and a husband who had another lover arriving in an hour.
She'd already ordered a suite for her return voyage on the Lucania and telegraphed Goodman to have the house on Park Lane readied. A cable for Mrs. Rowland lay on the bureau in her hotel chamber—Tremaine has taken up with the Grand Duchess Theodora, née von Schweppenburg—but somehow she couldn't send it, couldn't admit that final defeat, not without one last gallant and largely foredoomed charge down the hill.
Now all eyes were on her, including Camden's. There was surprise on his face, a measure of amusement, and then a nonchalance that did not bode well for her chances. She waited for him to acknowledge her, to toss her at least a line of greeting. But other than a few inaudible words to the woman next to him, he said nothing, leaving her to jump off the cliff entirely by herself.
She let her eyes travel the drawing room. “Truly, Tremaine, I expected better from you. The decor is obvious to the point of atrociousness.”
A collective gasp reverberated from the high ceiling.
He smiled, a cool smile that nevertheless ignited her hopes anew. “My lady Tremaine, I distinctly remember informing you dinner was at half past seven. Your punctuality leaves much to be desired.”
“We will discuss my punctuality or the lack thereof later, in private,” she said, her heart pounding. “You may present your friends to me now.”
*
Lady Tremaine couldn't quite keep straight who was an Astor, who a Vanderbilt, and who a Morgan. But it didn't matter. She had fortune, which they admired, and title, which they coveted. Her temperament fitted in perfectly with the energetic, purposeful, ambitious upper crust of the American aristocracy; her independence earned her the approval of the wives, several of whom were sympathetic toward the suffragists.
The men gawked, alongside Camden.
There'd been much surreptitious necktie-loosening when she—later, in private—unmistakably commanded him to shag her blind. The sexual energy she exuded was palpable; the response it provoked in him was downright atrocious. No other women came anywhere near him for the remainder of the evening; even the unsighted could see that he was hanging on to civilized behavior by the skin of his teeth, that if they didn't make themselves scarce, he'd commit public coitus right before their eyes—with his own wife.
In the end she did something almost as shocking. At precisely eleven o'clock, she disengaged from the guests and placed herself at the center of the drawing room. “It has been lovely meeting the very best society of New York, I'm sure. But if you will forgive me, it's been a long journey, and I feel myself no longer quite equal to company. Ladies and gentlemen, my repose beckons. Good night.”