Page 27 of Ravishing Camille
“But you, old man, are often not here.”
“Right. Well, in her ‘Lonelies’ she cannot think of marrying this man!”
“Agreed!”
“But he comes to dinner next Thursday.”
“Oh, god.” Victor laughed in resigned horror.
“You’ll be there? You’d better. He can be cowed. I’ve seen him. He knows he’s not good enough for her.”
“I do believe we are invited, yes. And yes, he can beinformed—shall we say—that he’d not fit.”
“Superb. If he dares to ask for her hand, I don’t want to be the only one shooting him where he stands.”
Chapter 7
Dinner that evening was the four of them. He was grateful, knowing it would be just his father and Liv, Camille and him in private conversation. He’d planned all afternoon to have a word with her. When she had not appeared until after five, he decided he’d catch her after dinner.
But right after dessert, Camille had announced her decision to retire. “I must go up.”
Neither his father nor Liv made any objections. So how could he, eh? But he was too concerned to let her go without making plain to her his opinion of the man she thought of fondly.
He wandered onto the patio facing the sea, seeking a calmness he required if he were to make a successful point.
And so, after a few minutes in which he pined for a meditative moment, he resigned himself to what peace he’d garnered and took the stairs. Instead of going left to his own suite, he went right to knock on the door to hers.
“Yes?” She flung open the door and blinked at the sight of him. “Oh! I thought you were Ivy. Is…something wrong?”
“No. Yes, actually.” He noted her confusion and the fact that her hair flowed over her shoulders in a cape of gold. And she was dressed—or rather not, in a pale pink charmeuse silk robe that clung to her plush figure like a second skin. She’d even removed her corset because he detected the large round outline of her nipples beneath the supple caress of the silk. He swallowed back his unbrotherly observations. “May I come in?”
Unusual as it was for a man who was not a woman’s husband to ask for admission to her boudoir, he and she had always had a casual approach to their status as step-siblings. Since their very introduction, they’d been freer with each other and free of many dictums proscribed for interactions of single men with unmarried women. She’d come to his rooms to talk about novels or the theatre and he’d often gone to talk in her sitting room about sights and experiences abroad. She was, he had to say, the most gracious listener, rapt in her attentions to his descriptions of the impressions of sights and sounds of any place in the world. She had no preferences but wanted his impressions of anywhere he’d been. Lisbon, Aden or Yokohama, she cared to learn about them all. She was also curious, eloquent in her questions, insightful in her comments.
“I want to go,” she’d often told him in that rapturous whisper of one who makes promises to oneself. The Ming dragons of Peking. The church in Jerusalem where Christ’s tomb lay. The Doge’s Palace in Venice. “I must see all the wonders of the world.”
He’d long since given up telling her she must wait and take care. “So much of the world is unsafe.”
“You go!” she’d object. “I must too.”
Now for him to warn her off this man seemed a similar attempt, doomed to fail. She was headstrong. Once decided, difficult to dissuade.
Tonight might be the same. He had to try.
“Come in.” She pulled wide the door and stepped aside. She tipped her head, curious, as he paused. Her gaze went down his black dinner attire. “Well? Do you sit? Or are you just here for a moment?”
“A few minutes,” he said, her easy acceptance unsettling and putting him adrift in his own intentions.
“Well, then. I will sit.” She did, taking the huge pink and yellow flowered chintz beside the darkened fireplace. She had turned the gas lamps in the room low and the pink aura from the sconces fell over her in shades of summer sun. And in the clinging silk with her long waves of dark red-gold curls about her shoulders and curving around her pointed breasts, she seemed to glow like a Renaissance painting of Venus on the half shell.
He cleared his throat.
“Pierce?”
He could not continue to look at her…and allow her to see how inappropriately he appreciated her figure. Flustered like a boy, he strode to the fireplace and braced himself, two hands to the mantel.
“What is it?”
“I enjoyed your reading today.”
