He’d been pretending.
That’s what she’d told herself there in the Townshends’ library, Peter before her, his eyes intent upon her own. He was pretending, he was practicing, he was making it all up because she’d lost her mind and told him to act like he wanted her.
The worst part was, she’d wanted to believe him. She’d wanted to think he meant it, meant every word as he searched her face. She could almost let herself imagine it was true—until he’d called her sweet.
No one, in her entire life, had ever called her sweet. He must have been imagining someone else.
Except then he’d said her name. And then he’d kissed her.
It was not the first time she had kissed another person. But it was the first time she had done so and felt—all of that. Everything in her liquid, her mind cloudy with need.
Marry me, he’d said to her. And he had not been pretending then.
Something dangerous had lit the air between them. In that moment, Selina could name the feeling that had twisted in her chest these last weeks as she’d watched him dance and laugh with Lydia and Iris and Georgiana.
Wanting. She wanted him for herself with a possessiveness she had never before known. She had looked up at him and tasted it on her lips—heryesand the kiss that would follow, his hands in her hair, his mouth on her own.
And then reality had cut through the haze of desire.
She had meant to help him, for heaven’s sake. She’d meant to fix things, to make it so his family could be together.
He needed a perfectly English, perfectly scandal-free wife so that he could convince the courts to give him Freddie and Lu. And Selina was always, on any given day, a hairbreadth from social ruin. She couldn’t do this to him. She couldn’t have him.
Oh, but shewanted.
She wanted his hands on her skin and his body pressing into hers. She wanted the sweet warmth of his brown eyes, his intense focus as he listened to her speak. She wanted him. She wanted everything.
It was some wild, impulsive, uncontrollable part of her that had made her decide to buy Belvoir’s and start the Venus catalog. She had been so angry with the deceptions and hypocrisies of thebeau monde, the different rules for men and women designed to keep her sex ignorant. Men seemed to do as they pleased—to press their advantages in finances and politics and sexual relations—and Selina had no longer been able to tolerate it. She had taken the privilege that was hers as a wealthy duke’s sister, gathered it up in her hands, and thrust herself into reckless action to try to make a difference for naive young women like she herself had once been.
And somehow that same irrepressible fire seemed to come out when she was around Peter. Swimming in the Serpentine, dragging him into the library and locking the door. Telling him to pretend that he wanted her.
He’d frustrated and unsettled her—but in a way that challenged her carefully controlled life. He respected her, more than any man she’d known except perhaps her twin. He asked her questions and really listened to her answers, his gaze so steady and absorbed upon her that she felt like the center of his world.
He made her laugh. He made her burn.
She gritted her teeth, smothering the memory, and turned her attention to the books on her escritoire.
She could not think about Peter like that. She could not let herself feel all that wanting.
The Belvoir’s books were bound in emerald-colored cloth—Selina liked how recognizable it made the books, and cloth was far cheaper than the calfskin used for bindings in her brother’slibrary here at Rowland House. But these samples weren’t bound at all, merely sewn together, their edges still uncut. The books she chose would be covered in the Belvoir’s style and added to the catalog.
Sometimes she made rapid selections at her publisher’s office, but she had the Venus catalog options sent to her directly, ever since the memorable afternoon in which she’d flipped open an illustrated text in front of Jean Laventille that had turned out to contain cartoons comparing women’s breasts to various pieces of fruit.
Ridiculous. Her readers knew perfectly well what their own breasts looked like. A pamphlet onmalesexual organs—now, that was something she might have considered.
There seemed some viable fruit candidates. Bananas, certainly. Cucumber—was that a fruit? Perhaps an aubergine.
She sliced neatly through the pages with a penknife and wondered if she were completely cracked.
The first text was another Covent Garden memoir. She chewed on her lower lip and flipped the pages. She appreciated the frank humor of the memoirs of ladies of the night, but in truth the Venus catalog already held quite a few. She liked having them, though—it made a useful contrast with the romantic novels that fairly flew off the shelves. No declarations of love here. In fact, this one featured a wildly unflattering comparison of the phalluses of the pleasure worker’s most frequent customers.
Perhaps she’d add this one to the list.
She sliced through the second set of pages and then glanced at the title.The Use of Flogging in…She blinked and stuffed the pages back into her escritoire. Absolutely not. She was after a gentle introduction to sexual matters for sheltered women of theton. Definitely no flogging.
Where did Laventillefindthese books? She’d had to send him a tersely worded note the third time he’d sent herLady Bumtickler’s Revels.
The last set was a translation of erotic Greek poetry. These, too, were popular, and she turned the pages slowly, her eyes catching on the words.Whence is this, she read.What strange tumultuous throbs of bliss? What raptures seize my fainting frame?
