At their hotel in the commune of Bellagio, they kept separate rooms, just as they did at home. He was considerate and companionable, just as he was at home. And just as it was at home, his nights belonged to himself.
Millie suspected him of having a lover. Her suspicions were confirmed one night when a pretty dark-haired woman, her throat sparkling with diamonds, winked at him during dinner, which they took on the hotel’s large terrace overlooking the lake.
“You are sleeping with her,” she said.
“I am not,” he answered, smiling down at his plate. “I pay her a visit, if you must know, before I go to sleep in my own bed.”
“Is she staying at this hotel?”
“My dear, I would never be so crass as to have my mistress under the same roof as my lady wife.”
“Hmm, doesn’t the Prince of Wales always have his mistress present when he goes to a country house party, even when the princess is also in attendance?”
“I am far more respectable than the Prince of Wales, I will have you know. The House of Hanover was nothing but a gaggle of middle-class Germans before we ran out of royals to put on our throne.”
A waiter came and served their next course, filets of lake fish in sage butter.
“Tell me how it works,” she heard herself say, “finding a paramour. I’m curious.”
He shot her a look of surprise: She’d never before been so forward. There was something in his eyes—a new awareness perhaps, or an existing one that had suddenly expanded. “Every man is different. Hastings, for example, walks into a room, sees a woman he wants, and approaches her immediately.”
It was just like him to shift the discussion onto someone else. Reticent about his private life, this man. But she wasn’t about to let him off the hook so easily. “And you?”
“I am not so industrious.”
“And yet you are no less successful than Hastings.”
He shrugged good-naturedly, but the gesture also indicated that he was not about to discuss the specifics of his moves any further.
“I know how you do it,” she said.
He raised a brow.
“When you walk into a room of mixed company, you never head for the prettiest ladies right away. You will talk to the gentlemen for some time, or maybe one of the dowagers. But at the same time, you are perfectly aware of where the candidates are, and you know which ones are looking at you.”
He smiled very slightly, and took a sip of his mineral water. “Go on.”
She was abruptly aware that what he was listening for was not her analysis of the mechanics of his seduction, but an account of just how much she’d observed him, closely, while pretending not to. She could not, however, bring herself to stop.
“You are not that different from Hastings: You know exactly which woman you want. And you are no less a predator than he; but you are like the spider, content to wait for your prey to come to you.
“So the ladies take note of you, young, gleaming, and assured. With their fans, they beckon you to approach. You never oblige them immediately. You speak with the hostess. Share another joke with the gentlemen. Only then do you pretend to notice the ladies signaling you.
“You start with the one in whom you have the least interest and end the night chatting with the one you’d decided on in the first place, when you walked into the room. And then a few days later the gossip will get around to me—but I already know.”
He drank some more of his mineral water, then some more. The sun had set, the sky was indigo, the torches on the terrace cast a muted golden light upon him.
“It’s quite possible,” he said, “that you know me better than anyone else.”
She certainly paid the most minute, constant attention.
“I don’t know you half as well,” he continued.
“There is not much to know about me.”
“I beg to differ. There is not much you wish to be known about you—and that is not the same thing at all.”
Sometimes she wondered whether he studied her as she studied him. Now she had her answer: He did. And she had no idea what to do with that knowledge.
Tamping down the fluttering in her stomach, she went after the fish on her plate. “Why, this is delicious. Don’t you agree?”
They left Lake Como two days later, spent a week in Milan, then traveled east to Lombardy for more mountains and more lakes—Lake Iseo, this time, arriving at their destination late in the day.
The innkeeper was full of apologies. A large wedding party had descended and he had only one room left—a very nice room, but only one.
“We’ll take it,” said Fitz.
“Did you not hear him?” Millie said when they were out of the innkeeper’s hearing. “It’s only one room.”
“I heard him. But it’s late. We haven’t had our supper and I’d rather look for another inn tomorrow.”
“But—”
“I remember exactly what our pact entails. You are in no danger from me.”
And why, exactly, was she in no danger from him? Why didn’t he want her with the fervor of a thousand over-heating engines? She ought to be constantly ogled and groped, having to beat him off with her parasol, her fan, and maybe one of her walking boots.