Almost Heaven Read online

  “Is that how it’s done?” he asked, his eyes beginning to glint with amusement. “Somehow I didn’t quite imagine you allowed convention to dictate your every move.”

  To a gambler without ties or responsibility, the rules of social etiquette and convention must be tiresome in the extreme, and Elizabeth realized it was imperative to convince him he must yield to her viewpoint. “Oh, but I am,” she prevaricated. “The Camerons are the most conventional people in the world! As you know from last night, I believe in death before dishonor. We also believe in God and country, motherhood and the king, and . . . and all the proprieties. We’re quite intolerably boring on the subject, actually.”

  “I see,” he said, his lips twitching. “Tell me something,” he asked mildly, “why would such a conventional person as yourself have crossed swords with a roomful of men last night in order to protect a stranger’s reputation?”

  “Oh, that,” Elizabeth said. “That was just—well, my conventional notion of justice. Besides,” she said, her ire coming to the fore as she recalled the scene in the card room last night, “it made me excessively angry when I realized that the only reason none of them would try to dissuade Lord Everly from shooting you was because you were not their social equal, while Everly is.”

  “Social equality?” he teased with a lazy, devastating smile. “What an unusual notion to spring from such a conventional person as yourself.”

  Elizabeth was trapped, and she knew it. “The truth is,” she said shakily, “that I am scared to death of being here.”

  “I know you are,” he said, sobering, “but I am the last person in the world you’ll ever have to fear.”

  His words and his tone made the quaking in her limbs, the hammering of her heart, begin again, and Elizabeth hastily drank a liberal amount of her wine, praying it would calm her rioting nerves. As if he saw her distress, he smoothly changed the topic. “Have you given any more thought to the injustice done Galileo?”

  She shook her head. “I must have sounded very silly last night, going on about how wrong it was to bring him up before the Inquisition. It was an absurd thing to discuss with anyone, especially a gentleman.”

  “I thought it was a refreshing alternative to the usual insipid trivialities.”

  “Did you really?” Elizabeth asked, her eyes searching his with a mixture of disbelief and hope, unaware that she was being neatly distracted from her woes and drawn into a discussion she’d find easier.

  “I did.”

  “I wish society felt that way.”

  He grinned sympathetically. “How long have you been required to hide the fact that you have a mind?”

  “Four weeks,” she admitted, chuckling at his phrasing. “You cannot imagine how awful it is to mouth platitudes to people when you’re longing to ask them about things they’ve seen and things they know. If they’re male, they wouldn’t tell you, of course, even if you did ask.”

  “What would they say?” he teased.

  “They would say,” she said wryly, “that the answer would be beyond a female’s comprehension—or that they fear offending my tender sensibilities.”

  “What sorts of questions have you been asking?”

  Her eyes lit up with a mixture of laughter and frustration. “I asked Sir Elston Greeley, who had just returned from extensive travels, if he had happened to journey to the colonies, and he said that he had. But when I asked him to describe to me how the natives looked and how they lived, he coughed and sputtered and told me it wasn’t at all ‘the thing’ to discuss ‘savages’ with a female, and that I’d swoon if he did.”

  “Their appearance and living habits depend upon their tribe,” Ian told her, beginning to answer her questions. “Some of the tribes are ‘savage’ by our standards, not theirs, and some of the tribes are peaceful by any standards. . . .”

  Two hours flew by as Elizabeth asked him questions and listened in fascination to stories of places he had seen, and not once in all that time did he refuse to answer or treat her comments lightly. He spoke to her like an equal and seemed to enjoy it whenever she debated an opinion with him. They’d eaten lunch and returned to the sofa; she knew it was past time for her to leave, and yet she was loath to end their stolen afternoon.

  “I can’t help thinking,” she confided when he finished answering a question about women in India who covered their faces and hair in public, “that it is grossly unfair that I was born a female and so must never know such adventures, or see but a few of those places. Even if I were to journey there, I’d only be allowed to go where everything was as civilized as—as London!”

  “There does seem to be a case of extreme disparity between the privileges accorded the sexes,” Ian agreed.

  “Still, we each have our duty to perform,” she informed him with sham solemnity. “And there’s said to be great satisfaction in that.”

  “How do you view your—er—duty?” he countered, responding to her teasing tone with a lazy white smile.

  “That’s easy. It is a female’s duty to be a wife who is an asset to her husband in every way. It is a male’s duty to do whatever he wishes, whenever he wishes, so long as he is prepared to defend his country should the occasion demand it in his lifetime—which it very likely won’t Men,” she informed him, “gain honor by sacrificing themselves on the field of battle while we sacrifice ourselves on the altar of matrimony.”

  He laughed aloud then, and Elizabeth smiled back at him, enjoying herself hugely. “Which, when one considers it, only proves that our sacrifice is by far the greater and more noble.”

  “How is that?” he asked, still chuckling.

  “It’s perfectly obvious—battles last mere days or weeks, months at the very most While matrimony lasts a lifetime! Which brings to mind something else I’ve often wondered about,” she continued gaily, giving full rein to her innermost thoughts.

  “And that is?” he prompted, grinning, watching her as if he never wanted to stop.

  “Why do you suppose, after all that, they call us the weaker sex?” Their laughing gazes held, and then Elizabeth realized bow outrageous he must be finding some of her remarks. “I don’t usually go off on such tangents,” she said ruefully. “You must think I’m dreadfully ill-bred.”

  “I think,” he softly said, “that you are magnificent”

  The husky sincerity in his deep voice snatched her breath away. She opened her mouth, thinking frantically for some light reply that could restore the easy camaraderie of a minute before, but instead of speaking she could only draw a long, shaky breath.

  “And,” he continued quietly, “I think you know it”

  This was not not the sort of foolish, flirtatious repartee she was accustomed to from her London beaux, and it terrified her as much as the sensual look in those golden eyes. Pressing imperceptibly back against the arm of the sofa, she told herself she was only overreacting to what was nothing more than empty flattery. “I think,” she managed with a light laugh that stuck in her throat, “that you must find whatever female you’re with ‘magnificent.’ ”

  “Why would you say a thing like that?”

  Elizabeth shrugged. “Last night at supper, for one thing.” When he frowned at her as if she were speaking in a foreign language, she prodded, “You remember Lady Charise Dumont, our hostess, the same lovely brunette on whose every word you were hanging at supper last night?”

  His frown became a grin. “Jealous?”

  Elizabeth lifted her elegant little chin and shook her head. “No more than you were of Lord Howard.”

  She felt a small bit of satisfaction as his amusement vanished. “The fellow who couldn’t seem to talk to you without touching your arm?” he inquired in a silky-soft voice. “That Lord Howard? As a matter of fact, my love, I spent most of my meal trying to decide whether I wanted to shove his nose under his right ear or his left.”

  Startled, musical laughter erupted from her before she could stop it. “You did nothing of the sort,” she chuckled. “Besi