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  "You have to taste this sauce, Etienne," Daisy said some few moments later after the servants had departed and after she'd tasted each of the marvels on the silver platter: the warm sweet succulent baba; the sugared grapes; the dainty delicate violets; the creme chantilly, and of course the Lunéville sauce7.

  She was currently licking her finger, dipped for the third time into the luscious sauce.

  "I'd love to; are you finished?" He had in fact, checked the tall case clock in the corner several times during Daisy's discourse with the chefs who'd delivered the baba. His peach was discarded, his wineglass set aside. Even a man of his patience had definable limits.

  "Yes." She softly breathed, stretching. "Finally. Now try this." And rising from her chair, she leaned across the small table, offering the Duc her finger glazed with the baba sauce.

  He held her hand for a moment before taking her finger into his mouth and Daisy felt for a brief rushing second as she had the first time she'd met the Duc de Vec—mesmerized by an urgency to touch him.

  "You indulge me." Her quiet declaration ended on a hushed indrawn breath for his mouth had closed on her finger and his tongue slowly glided down its length.

  "With enormous pleasure," he said in hushed reply, kissing the tip of her finger, "and occasionally with a certain degree of impatience," he added, releasing her hand.

  "I did make you wait," she declared, pleased he wanted her enough for impatience.

  "Oh yes." He leisurely rose and she saw stark evidence of his arousal, till then hidden. The scarlet brocade, tied at his waist with tasseled silk, stood prominently forward. "If you're finished," he said in a husky low tone, "now it's my turn for dessert."

  The lazy contentment, the sybaritic pleasure of leisurely eating and drinking the exquisite food and wines, the proximity of Etienne's fascinated interest, the ambiance of Bernini's genius in architectural design, the boat whistles on the Seine outside, all contributed to a sensation of enchantment, enhanced now by a scorching blaze of sensual heat. As if she were the recipient of another thousand degrees of pleasure—as if she were being offered sensation beyond the refinements of human language to describe.

  And she knew what he could give her. She could see. She knew in only moments she'd forget that reason guided human behavior, she'd forget without a qualm.

  He took two steps to round the table spread with food and offered her his hand. "Bring the sauce," he said. "I thought I'd try some in bed."

  She felt the tremor in her fingertips as she reached for the small silver vessel. He turned to steady her hand, as if he could sense her arousal.

  "I'll carry it. So it doesn't spill… here."

  He set the sauceboat down on the bedside table amidst a hodgepodge of bibelots added to over the generations by other de Vecs: a framed miniature on a small gold easel of a young lady from the date of the palace—her midseventeenth-century fashionable pallor framed by delicate golden-red curls; a pre-Revolution diamond-studded snuffbox as glittering as the era of its provenance; two porcelain ocelots brought back from Napoleon's Egyptian campaign by the de Vec progressive enough to have joined Napoleon's faction and survived the Revolution; a silver-framed photo of a young boy at his mother's knee with a tentative smile and Etienne's eyes.

  The bed complemented the eclectic decor of the room: a combination of original gilded furniture, exotic Russian pieces in inlay and bronze and stone, comfortable Biedermeier chairs and sofas fringed and tasseled and heavily brocaded. But no trace of a woman anywhere—it was essentially a man's room. The bed was pure Louis Quatorze—heavy, solid, ornately carved and gilded, curtained in a dark masculine chocolate cut-velvet, faded over the centuries to the dusty rose of its underweave.

  Daisy stood completely still for a moment, struck by the impersonal nature of the room. With the exception of his childhood photo, this room belonged more to past generations of de Vecs than to Etienne. Etienne seemed immune to the sensations of former lives, to the weight of history pervading the chamber.

  He slipped off his robe and dropped it on the floor.

  "Do you ever think of how many other people have slept in this bed?" Daisy softly breathed.

  His fingers stopped for a second in his untying of her sash.

  "The sheets are new."

  "Etienne, I'm serious."

  "You're almost always serious, darling," he said with a smile, sliding his robe from her shoulders, "but I adore you anyway."

  "Don't you feel it?"

  He lowered his head so their eyes were parallel and his mouth quirked in a faint smile. "At the risk of making a nonserious remark, I've been feeling it ever since you ate the lobster with such seductive languor."

  She grinned. "You've drunk too much."

  "Or not enough if you're feeling ghosts in the air."

  "Are you never serious?"

  "I try not to be. One of the few maxims I recall from my mostly absent father was his judgment on serious people. 'Serious people,' he would say, 'are dangerous. When you're climbing, they're forever jerking on the rope when you least expect it.' The correlation, however obtuse, has seemed to carry over into my life as well."

  Daisy pursed her mouth primly.

  "It killed him actually," Etienne bluntly stated. "Bunny Claridge, who everyone knew shouldn't have left the environs of his fishing pond in Kent, was climbing fourth man and he killed them all. Now," he continued with a grin, tumbling Daisy into the bed and following her down with a lithe grace, "all maxims aside except my own purely selfish carpe diem ones, let us pass on to more pleasant subjects. For instance, where would you like the Lunéville sauce first?"

  His face was inches from hers, his smile magical, his heavy-lidded eyes amused.

  "Meaning?" Her own answering smile was provocative.

  "Meaning, if you have any particular areas of stimulation you most prefer—you see how accommodating I can be."

  "And if I don't?"

  "You do of course. I keep notes."

  And his memory for detail was superb.

  He trailed a drizzle of sweet wine sauce over the lush fullness of her bottom lip first and licked it away with slow deliberate care. "You taste…" he murmured against the warm resiliency of her mouth.

  "Good enough to eat?" Daisy suggested, her pulse accelerating, the touch of his lips on hers a prelude to paradise, the silk sheets warm against her skin, the faded curtains of a bygone age enclosing them in a shadowed hermitage.

  He nodded the smallest movement, his dark hair brushing her cheek, his smile not practiced now but touched with a prodigal impetuosity. "I save my appetite for you and I'm very hungry."

  She could feel the words caress her body as if his thoughts had taken corporeal form and a flush of arousal heated her flesh.

  The sauce was still luxuriously warm as it dropped in tingling dollops on her peaked nipples and ran in small diminishing rivulets over the mounded fullness of her breasts. He caught the running sweetness before it passed beyond the opulent curve of her breasts, the lazy gliding journey of his tongue terminating in soft suckling possession of each of her nipples.

  Her eyes shut against the surging flood of intemperate sensation racing through her body. "Don't stop," she whispered, voicing her voluptuous need. And he didn't, sucking and nibbling and softly biting for infinite moments until she expired in a breathless, trembling orgasm.

  He didn't wait, although she pushed him away when she felt the liquid warmth trickle into her still-throbbing cleft. He only brushed her hands aside, whispered, "trust me," and bent his head to taste the melding of her orgasmic fluid and the scented Lunéville sauce.

  Her pleasure sound started deep in her throat and rose from her parted lips to drift in a sighing moan across the candlelit room—a keening soft accompainment to the licking, nibbling passage of Etienne's lips and tongue. With gratifying finesse and languor, he appeased his appetite, the flickering journey of his tongue bringing Daisy to a quivering, shuddering frenzy.

  He entered her as her climax b
egan pulsing again, his hard length taking her breath away as he drove in so deeply she felt the resulting explosion melt her very limbs.

  "I can't move," she whispered when she had breath enough to speak.

  "You don't have to," he whispered back, gliding slowly in again, the velvety friction so exquisite even had she been able to move she wouldn't have risked losing the sensation.

  For a man who'd considered no sensation untried, the Duc found himself affected by a passionate need so acute and ardent and glowing, he understood at last the true meaning of delirium.

  Had the hot fires of hell been waiting upon consummation, he would have had her, had Cupid's bow been aimed at his gullet, he would have had her, had his wife had a gun poised at his temple, he would have had her. And for a man of the Duc's jaded experience, he realized this was miles and leagues and oceans beyond delirium. It was love, a kind of love he hadn't known existed, a kind of love he'd always despised as emasculating and unnatural, a kind of love he knew now was providential. And he was lucky.

  Daisy felt his embrace abruptly tighten and as if sensing his mood, her palms drifted across the breadth of his shoulders. "Mine," she said with a smile in her voice. "And don't forget it."

  "Forever," he murmured.

  "Forever," she agreed, too blissfully happy to allow even a twinge of reality to intrude.

  They belonged to each other that night with carefree disregard for what tomorrow would bring. Only the two people sheltered in the velvet-curtained bower of a two-hundred-year-old bed mattered. Only holding each other mattered. Only love mattered.

  And very late that night with Daisy half dozing in his arms, Etienne lazily murmured into the shadowed enclosure of their curtained bed, "Remind me to give the pastry chef a bonus."

  After she fell asleep, he held her in his arms and watched the barge lights on the river. A strange melancholy overcame him in the aftermath of such unalloyed bliss, as though his previous life had passed by without notice like the barges at night. With unaccountable speed, too, in an idle waste of precious days, weeks, and years—too often devoted to those pursuits of every generation before him… pleasure.

  His love for Daisy gave him pause to realize how much he'd missed. Time passed quickly, inexorably—his fortieth birthday was only months away. His father had died at forty-two. How transient and fleeting was life, he suddenly thought, another chugging barge sliding past his windows. Daisy's sleeping presence warmed him, body and soul, her breath a soft rhythm across his chest, her love essential to his happiness.

  He didn't want to be told he was selfish for wanting—after twenty years of duty—some happiness for himself. An intimacy with a woman he loved.

  His dynastic marriage seemed shabby and tarnished in comparison. As did his wife's superficial requirements for a husband. He was simply a convenience for her—someone to contribute to her lavish way of life, a consort with an appropriately prominent title and position.

  It was suddenly no longer enough to fill the void of his life with amusements.

  Not enough.

  Life was too short.

  And happiness too elusive.

  He had found at last the vital woman who touched his soul and spirit, and he would keep her.

  Against every Montigny and magistrate and social dictum in the world.

  * * *

  The Duc was startled to see his valet when he opened his eyes. He wondered how long Louis had been standing there, silent and respectful.

  "Visitors, Monsieur le Duc, in the antechamber."

  His voice was so hushed Etienne debated for a moment whether he had misunderstood. Louis knew better than he how to deal with visitors. "Why are they in the antechamber?" he asked then because obviously if they'd gotten past his butler Burns and Louis both, an explanation was required.

  "They insisted on seeing you, Monsieur le Duc."

  "They?"

  "The Archbishop, sir, and the Dowager Comtesse Montigny.'"

  His consternation must have showed because Louis went on in a swift, hushed recital of the events preceding their present occupancy of the antechamber, only two rooms removed from the Duc's bedroom. Louis's expression and tone even more than his staccato explosion of words conveyed the extent of the struggle to keep them contained in their present position. "They were determined to enter your bedroom, sir. I'm sorry, sir. Should I have them carried out?"

  Etienne appreciated Louis's loyalty and for a moment he relished the notion of having the hypocritical prig of an Archbishop ejected from his home. Isabelle's mother, however, could not be handled so cavalierly. Glancing down at Daisy, still asleep in his arms, he said in a murmur, "Give them tea and tell them I'll be out presently," then added in gratitude, "And thank you, Louis, for keeping them at bay."

  His valet's distress was still evident. "I wish, Your Grace, I could have checked them at the door, but Burns said the Archbishop quite literally pushed him out of the way. An Archbishop, sir. One considers the possible repercussions of opposing an Archbishop."

  "There was nothing you could do, of course."

  "Burns and two footmen are guarding the door to the antechamber. It's locked, Sire."

  Etienne couldn't help but smile at the picture of his two guests locked into his waiting room. He hoped they didn't try to open the door.

  He was dressed five minutes later, Daisy still sleeping peacefully in his bed. They'd been up until very late and had not his internal clock reminded him of his normal waking time for his ride in the park, he too might not have wakened. How long would Louis have silently stood here? he wondered.

  By the time he had quickly thrown on his clothes, Louis had a steaming cup of coffee, pitch-black and heavily sweetened, waiting for him, and he stood at the window for a few brief moments to drink it. The river traffic was heavy this morning, the sun lush-golden, the new leaves the chartreuse-green of springtime. He was in love and loved; the day was shining new; his world was full of hope and expectation.

  "Show me in, Louis. After that coffee, I can even face the ass of an Archbishop, and… my pious mother-in-law."

  Etienne brushed aside Burns's apologies when he arrived at the locked door, thanked him and the two footmen for guarding his privacy, and, after the key was quietly turned in the well-oiled lock, he was announced.

  "We woke you," his mother-in-law said, casting a disapproving glance over his casual dress of shirtsleeves, trousers, and Moroccan slippers. Her words were a declarative statement, not an apology.

  "Yes, actually you did. Can I help you with something?" The Duc's voice was mild. Neither the Archbishop of Paris nor Isabelle's mother intimidated him. He wasn't pious, nor particularly religious; the Church in France had overstepped its spiritual arena as far as he was concerned, both in government and society, and its strictures concerned him little.

  Before he'd moved beyond the threshold, the Archbishop said in stern, forbidding tones, as if he were addressing a subservient cleric or reciting a prepared text, "The Church does not condone divorce."

  His courage had been bolstered since last night, apparently by his sister's dour-faced support, Etienne facetiously thought, remembering the Archbishop's pale complexion of the previous night. "I'm aware of the Church's position," Etienne mildly replied, walking over to a chair near the two Montignys who were glaring like the wrath of God from his Empire sofa. "The laws of France, however, establish the necessary procedures. I hope you didn't rise this early in the morning to debate secular versus clerical law with me. I'm not in the—"

  "There has never been a divorce in the Montigny family," Isabelle's mother interrupted, her slight form primly erect, her voice reminiscent of her daughter's; they both had the same cool precision of speech. Although widowed for almost a decade, she still sanctimoniously dressed in mourning—black bonnet modestly trimmed in braid, her black silk gown's only vanity a black diamond brooch; her black kid-gloved hands were clasped with symmetrical precision on her lap.

  "Nor has there been in the de Vecs'," t
he Duc said, his glance bland. Seated across from them in a chair large enough to accommodate him comfortably, he held a second cup of coffee in his hand, his man Louis standing at attention behind him like a Swiss halberdier. "Until now," he quietly added.

  "We can't allow it."

  Unyielding Church dogma arrogantly ignoring individual rights under the laws of France seemed anachronistic in the closing decade of the century. And irritating. More prosaically, the Archbishop was small like all the Montignys, and Etienne was tempted to say: Are you going to stop me? But he said instead, his voice mild, "Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, you have no control over my life. I am de Vec."

  "We can stop you in court."

  The Archbishop's voice was astonishingly resolute, Etienne mused. Had Isabelle's mother threatened him or promised him a lavish donation? "You can try to stop me in court," Etienne replied, his eyes taking on a sudden remoteness.

  "Bourges can't help you," Isabelle's mother said with a familiar contempt, his wife's voice echoing in his ears. "He's a peasant."

  "Letheve will find the circumstances of Bourges's birth of little consequence before the bar." Etienne crossed his tegs, handed his cup to Louis, and leaned back in his chair. "Is there more… advice… or can Burns show you out?" There were limits to his courtesy, there were limits to the usefulness of conversation with the Montignys; there was also a beautiful woman waiting for him in his bed, and perhaps that most of all induced him to curtail his early morning call.

  "You won't be sensible?" The Archbishop spoke with baleful disdain.

  "I am being sensible, for the first time in my life. I've discharged my duty to family in the past twenty years a thousand times over." The Duc's voice dropped in volume and he said very slowly so there was no mistaking his intentions, "My future belongs to me."

  "The children are still underage." The Archbishop's voice could have been that of an inquisitor in a Spanish torture chamber, so secure was he in gaining his listeners' attention: