Elinor drove herself hard, writing her book set in America. She felt as if she didn’t come up for air. She needed the money, needed to care for Clayton, needed to spend time with her girls before they went away to their boarding schools again—if they could afford that.
But she forced herself to take a break and eat lunch with them.
Mother presided now at the table. Perhaps because she had suffered through a dreadful second marriage with a tightfisted, irascible husband, she thought Clayton, with his apparent easygoing nature and generous spending habits, was an ideal son-in-law. Besides, he’d given her this house and taken her on trips.
“Grandmama, remember how pretty the pagodas on our trip were?” sixteen-year-old Margot asked, dawdling with her spoon in her strawberry pudding. “I’ve drawn some pictures I want you to see.”
Elinor crumpled her napkin in her lap. Why, she fumed, did Margot not want to show her own mother the drawings? The girls knew she used to sketch people and places. And why didn’t Margot explain what a pagoda was, especially since she hadn’t been along on their trip to Japan? She hated to feel stupid and left out. It seemed no one included her in their conversations, and when she tried to start a topic, it quickly petered out.
Ten-year-old Juliet piped up, “And, Grandmama, I hope you’ll have time to help me hang the hem that ripped out. We can pretend we are Auntie Lucile—ha!” Juliet added with a little laugh. “That is, if you and Father aren’t going to play piquet all afternoon again.”
“Oh, you know how your father loves card games,” Mother told her with a wink.
“Excuse me, please,” Elinor said and rose from the table, tossing her linen napkin—a torn and mended one, no less—in her chair. She was afraid she would burst into tears. “Someone has to go to work here.”
Juliet’s simple request galled worse than Margot’s. And her mother used to hate cards after all the hands she’d had to play with her own husband.
“Ta, ta, Mother,” Margot said, then turned immediately back to those at the table. “And I hope you have time to look over my letter to the headmistress.”
Elinor turned back, thinking finally she was to be included, but the girl was still talking to her grandmother. Drat! She was only half-finished with her novel, and the middle of the book was always what she considered the muddle of the book: too many plot lines and characters to juggle, like real life here lately. It made her as crazy as this skewed family did.
And that last comment was the nail in the coffin. Who was the famous authoress here, who knew about writing, and who would be paying for a finishing school abroad for their eldest child and a boarding school for the other? Yet her own mother had supplanted her in her children’s interest and affections. Some of it was her own fault, of course, for being busy or away, but now, more than ever, she had to write to put so much as pudding in their mouths!
Elinor bit her lip hard and blinked back tears as she hurried from the room, feeling as if she were running from her daughters instead of just Clayton this time. All of this was his doing, and there he sat, stuffing his face with food they could hardly afford and with his third lunchtime imported, expensive glass of brandy as if he ruled his world, when—as far as she was concerned—he had ruined it.
Although Elinor had spent more time with her daughters before they went off to school again, she had tried to avoid Clayton. She couldn’t help it. She was working herself to the bone and needed to get out of little Lamberts before she went quite mad. She needed outside stimulation, ideas. How could she write deep, emotional, fulfilling stories when her own heart was starved for affection and love?
This autumn evening in London, where she was staying at Lucile’s for the night so she could see her publisher tomorrow—to ask him to help her find some fast money somehow, somewhere—she had accepted an invitation to a ball given by her friend Consuelo, Duchess of Manchester. She hadn’t seen her since their voyage to and time together in America. Fortunately, the duchess was also back in London, and the timing was perfect.
This was also a reception for Russian royalty Elinor had met once before in London, the Grand Duchess Kiril, a client of Lucile’s. But while she thought this evening would be so relaxing, two men in attendance were making her more anxious. One was a Marlborough relation, a young man named Winston Churchill, who kept chattering and hanging on. And the other, the object of her secret affections for several years, Lord Nathaniel George Curzon, was just across the crowded room.
This clever Winston had an American mother too, but Elinor wasn’t sure if she was a dollar princess or not and she wasn’t about to ask him. He could go off on tangents on absolutely any subject. Though she’d heard he was a climber, she thought the comment was intended to mean in career ambitions, for anyone related to the Duke of Marlborough must be well set in society.
She finally managed to move past young Winston and head for Lord Curzon’s group when the grand duchess herself, with a small entourage, blocked her path.
“Dearest Mrs. Glyn,” she said. “My mother-in-law and I so did like your novel. I meant to write, but I will ask. This winter, we would be honored to host you in St. Petersburg. Perhaps a new setting for a novel? We have a small society there, to compare to this,” she added with a gloved sweep of the room, “but we would count it an honor.”
Elinor was stunned. “I—the honor would be all mine.”
“New people, new stories,” the dear woman said with a smile and tapped her arm with a fan she expertly flipped open, then closed again.
“I will write a formal invitation,” the grand duchess assured her. “My people will write about arrangements. Think now of the possibilities,” she concluded as she swept off with her coterie of friends again.
“Think now of the possibilities,” Elinor whispered to herself as she saw Lord Curzon smoothly detach himself from the cluster of people where he seemed to be the center of attention.
She studied him again, a luxury after her memories and all her daydreams of him. Actually, she’d heard that he had taken an interest in and corresponded with other writers, even a woman, but had he sent a letter to anyone else, saying he understood her book? And had he sent anyone else a tiger skin when that was obviously a symbol of passion and love—and seduction—in the story?
The man most people addressed as Lord Curzon or simply George, if they were of his intimate circle, looked a bit exotic, however staunch his English roots. She knew he was about five years older than she. His skin was slightly olive hued, and his dark hair, frosted with silver, accented his high forehead. He had a narrow nose and an expressive, sensuous mouth. His bearing was strictly military, ramrod straight, but she’d heard that might be from the metal brace he’d worn for years due to a back injury in his youth. Strange, she thought, but Lucile had mentioned that Dr. Morell Mackenzie she’d been so attached to had worn a brace. Perhaps such instruments put out a magnetic pull to any Sutherland sisters in the area.
And best of all, George Curzon seemed somehow above the common man, a lord of destiny, somewhat cynical, a wry observer, yet—
Dear heavens, he was looking her way and had caught her stare. Their gazes held. She was so startled that she was slow to smile. Hopefully a friendly smile, not come-hither, though that’s how she felt.
She stood rooted to the spot, feeling almost as if she were waltzing with him, spun round and round. As he nodded in recognition and began to walk toward her, she almost felt the floor give way.
Never, never, not even with Seymour Finch had she felt like this. Admiration, passion—destiny?
“Dearest Elinor,” he said, his voice steady, somehow both sharp and sweet. “I’ve been wondering how your trip to America was, for I intend to go myself when duties and single fatherhood let up a bit. We must meet for lunch so that I can hear all about it.”
“The tiger skin you kindly sent me—as I wrote to you—amazing.”
“I appreciated your letter—and the sensual scene in the book with the tiger skin.”
He still held her hand. Tingles shot up her arm to her breasts, the tops of which peeked over the top of a low Lucile neckline. She tried to control her breathing and her voice. She almost blurted out that she used to think of herself as Belle Tigress.
“Yes, amazing, that tiger,” he said as he studied her face. “Beautiful. One-of-a-kind stripes and vibrant colors in the tiger fur. I stalked and hunted it myself in India.”
“I—you said that. It made me cherish it the more.”
Surely she wasn’t going to be tongue-tied, she thought. But she could not have created better dialogue in her novel that said so much below the surface.
“Luncheon, how kind,” she managed.
“Tomorrow then? There’s a hotel on Jermyn Street with excellent food, if you are here for a few days in London.”
She had to see her publisher tomorrow. Then she had to head back to work on her book in the country. She’d told them she’d be back.
“That would be lovely,” she said.
“Tell me where you’re staying, and I will send my carriage for you.”
“Oh yes.” Heavens, she sounded like an idiot who couldn’t put more than a few words together.
“I must admit,” he told her, loosing her hand at last, “I heard there were some—some family financial arrears.”
What if he was making an assignation, expecting to pay somehow. But everything aside, her schedule, her sullied reputation for Three Weeks, or the Glyn bankruptcy, this was her chance. She had long admired this man from afar. Surely she could control this.
“Yes, but everyone has ups and downs,” she told him with a smile. “It would be lovely to have some time to hear more of India, and I shall tell you of the wild, wild American West.”
He nodded and smiled, showing his teeth. “Then we shall plan exactly that, and who knows where our talk may take us?”
She might be forty-four years old, but, in the middle of a crowded ballroom, she nearly fell at his feet.
“I love the mingled hues of the heather and the gorse, especially on a windswept, sunny day like this one,” Lucile told Cosmo as they sat on a woolen blanket with their picnic lunch not far from Maryculter mansion. “I shall use those colors in a collection soon.”
Now and then their nearby horses nickered, but they were content eating grass. And despite all that filled her head, Lucile was content today too.
Cosmo wore a kilt and, despite the brisk wind and his knee-high woolen socks, didn’t seem a bit cold. Beneath their view stretched bonnie braes he owned above the river Dee. Hawks sailed above in circles, and three kinds of clouds fought to rule the Scottish sky.
“I love it all too, especially when we are here together,” he said, leaning back on his elbows. “You are so busy and famous now, my bonnie lass, but I know those looks when your head is spinning with ideas again. Ambitious, far-off ones. When will enough be enough?”
“Conquering Paris will be enough. I know most of the French look down their Gallic noses at the English—our food, our sense of style. But I’ll show them.”
He pulled her down beside him on the blanket with one arm under her head and one hand on her waist. As they stared up into the restless heavens, he told her, “With Lady Duff-Gordon, is even the sky the limit?”
She turned on her side to face him. “You will go with me this time, won’t you? France is just across the channel, and the Scots have always had closer relations to the French than the English have. Cosmo, I need you in Paris to navigate things, at least to get started. We could lease a little house and enjoy the City of Lights even if I have to work hard for a while.”
“You always work hard. But today and this week, I cherish. Yes, I’ll go too. You’ll take a staff, and I’ll take our menagerie of dogs. But despite your stakes in London, New York, and Paris, here is the home of my heart and I pray—for sometimes, at least—of yours. I’ll go with you to New York sooner or later too, at least when that new big liner is completed. I hear they’ve decided to name it the Titanic, for its massive size.”
“Wherever we go, you are the home of my heart, my dearest,” she vowed and ran her finger along his lower lip under his mustache. It needed trimming. It made him look so rakish, like the pirate he had mentioned when she’d sailed to New York without him.
In his rich voice, low and musical with that touch of Scottish burr, he said, “I hope the warmth you feel for me will keep the braw, chill wind from your legs and mine, because I want to seal that promise here and now. We have always sealed our vows well, have we not? People sometimes ask why we Scots wear the kilt. My love, you are about to find out one reason.”
His gaze was so intense it heated her all over. How brazen that he lifted her cloak and skirts out here and fumbled with her lingerie. “Is that all there is to this?” he asked, looking annoyed, as his fingers snagged in her silk panties. “I don’t mean to ruin it.”
“Let me do that.”
“That’s the story of my life, my love, letting you do whatever. But I will always be along for the ride.”
She reveled in the ride. When he possessed her body, her beloved Cosmo was like this land, strong and wild and brave.