Almsbury, sitting astride a low chair with his arms folded across the back, gave a low appreciative hum. “Sounds mighty pretty. Where is it?”
“Oh, Rex has it. I gave it to him for his birthday and he’s carried it ever since—over his heart.” She grinned mischievously and began untying the bows down the front of her gown. “He’s mad in love with me. Lord, he even wants to marry me now.”
“And are you going to?”
“No.” She shook her head vigorously, indicating that she did not care to discuss the matter. “I don’t want to get married.”
Picking up her dressing-gown, she went behind the screen to put it on. Just her head and shoulders showed over the top of it, and as she took off her garments, tossing them out one by one, she kept up a merry chatter with the Earl.
Finally the waiter arrived and they went into the dining-room to eat. Rex had sent her a message that he would be on duty at the Palace until late, or she would never have dared eat her supper with a man, wearing only a satin dressing-gown. For she had discovered long ago that Rex was not joking when he said that if he took her into keeping he would expect a monopoly of her time and person. He kept the beaus from crowding her too closely or impudently at the theatre and discouraged them from visiting her—though all the actresses held their levees at home just as the Court ladies did and entertained numbers of gentlemen while they were dressing. The result was that during the last few months they had quite given up Mrs. St. Clare. Rex had a formidable reputation as a swordsman, and most of the tiring-room fops would rather see an apothecary for a clap, than a surgeon for a flesh-wound.
Throughout the meal Amber and the Earl talked with all the animation of old friends who have not met for a long while and who have a great deal to say to each other. She told him about her successes, but not her failures, her triumphs but not her defeats. He heard nothing of Luke Channell or of Newgate, Mother Red-Cap or Whitefriars. She pretended that she still had left a good deal of Lord Carlton’s five hundred pounds, deposited with her goldsmith, and he admitted that she had been far more clever than most young country girls left to shift for themselves in London.
It was two hours later as they sat on her long green velvet-cushioned settle, empty wine-glasses in their hands and staring into the last glow of the sea-coal fire, that Almsbury drew her into his arms and kissed her. For a moment she hesitated, her body tense, thinking of Rex and how furious he would be if another man kissed her, and then—because she liked Almsbury and because he meant Bruce Carlton to her—she relaxed against him and made no protest until, at last, he asked her to go into the bedroom.
Then suddenly she shook back her hair and pulled the front of her gown together. “Oh, Lord, Almsbury! I can’t! I should never have even let you think I would!” She got up, feeling a little dizzy from the wine, and leaned her head against the mantelpiece.
“Good God, Amber! I thought you were grown up now!” He sounded exasperated and more than a little angry.
“Oh, it isn’t that, Almsbury. It isn’t because I’m still—” She was about to say “waiting for Bruce,” but stopped. “It’s Rex. You don’t know him. He’s jealous as an Italian uncle. He’d murder you in a trice—and turn me out of keeping.”
“He wouldn’t if he didn’t know anything about it.”
She smiled, skeptically, turning her head to look at him, though her hair fell forward over her face. “Was there ever a man yet who could lie with a woman and not tell all his acquaintance within the hour? The gallants say that’s half the pleasure of fornication—telling about it afterwards.”
“Well, I’m no gallant, and you damned well know it. I’m just a man who’s in love with you. Oh, maybe I shouldn’t say that. I don’t know whether I’m in love with you or not. But I’ve wanted you since the first day I saw you. You know now that what I told you that night is true, so don’t put me off any longer. How much do you want? I’ll give you two hundred pound—put it with your goldsmith, toward the day when you’ll need it.”
The money was a convincing argument, but the thought that someday Bruce Carlton might hear about it—and be hurt—was even more so.
It was true, as Amber had told Almsbury, that Rex Morgan wanted to marry her. During the past seven months they had been happy and content, leading a life of merry companionable domesticity. They took an instinctive pleasure in doing the same things, and it was heightened always by a warm suffusing glow of happiness at the mere fact of being together.
