Poppy had never visited Vauxhall Gardens except as a performer, and for a few hours of indecision on the day of the masked ball, she considered taking back her acceptance of Leo’s invitation. Would the gardens disappoint when seen at eye level? And what would be the purpose of spending time with someone she would soon have to leave behind?
In the end, her heart had won out over her head. The purpose, she decided, was to fill one’s time in joyful ways. And she would not be disappointed in Leo’s company—or at least, she never had been before.
Her only bit of fancy dress was her performance costume, so she shrugged into it. After donning her much-used black cloak and a blue half mask, she met Leo at their appointed place. They had planned an unfashionable early arrival, hoping to avoid the worst of the crowds this way, but already the whole city seemed to be out and about and celebrating. Before Poppy and Leo had cast off across the Thames in a barge, full-crammed with other costumed Vauxhall visitors, a crowd of other masked and laughing people had gathered on the north bank for the barge’s next trip across.
Alas, the long-awaited Vauxhall Bridge wasn’t yet completed, so the crush of traffic along the Thames was dreadful. But being boated across the river to the pleasure gardens was, Poppy decided, part of the charm of arriving—when one didn’t have to prepare for a high-wire performance. She could enjoy the flickers and twinkles of the thousand blazing lamps, enticing through the trees surrounding the gardens, and soak up the merry mood of those around her.
As soon as they threaded into the park itself, she heard the familiar strains of the orchestra. From the ground, the music was much clearer than it was at sixty feet in the air. Woodwinds and strings, percussion and singers, they wove a tune that roiled the crowd into a rhythmic press forward along the brightly lit central arcade.
Poppy was garbed similarly to Leo, who wore a black domino over his clothing and a mask over his eyes. Compared to others around them, their fancy dress was plain indeed. A laughing king of hearts passed by, arm in arm with a mustachioed man dressed as a stout fishwife, and more than one Highlander in a long kilt was pressing at the spirit gum holding on a false beard. A Grecian maiden strolled in white and gold elegance; a half-dozen Lord Nelsons were scattered about, recognizable by their wigs and eye patches.
Leo and Poppy had each received a ticket for a single glass of champagne with admission, but as they edged their way toward the park’s central quadrangle, the crowd seemed far tipsier than those single tickets would warrant. Shepherdesses showed their bosoms; queens flirted their skirts. The price of admission to the Grand Gala was far more than usual, but the crowd was heavier.
All of London wanted to wear a mask, it seemed, to fling off the ordinary and become someone else. And all of those someone elses wanted sparkling wine and seduction. Torches and lamps blazed, further heating a summer night already heavy with the scents of lamp oil and perfume. Poppy breathed it in deeply. Far from making her feel sick, she found it pleasant.
“What do you want to see?” Leo bent to ask in Poppy’s ear, nimbly dodging a thin woman reeling with drink who had accentuated her height with a plume of peacock feathers identical to those adorning her skirted derriere. “There is a pretty grotto, I’ve heard.”
“It doesn’t feel like a grotto sort of evening to me,” Poppy decided. “Not exciting enough.” As if in agreement, a passing military band played a mournful slide of brassy notes.
“Shall we find a juggler or an acrobat to watch?”
“How could we tell the performers from the others in the crowd?” For this very reason, she had wheedled this night off from the Barretts when arranging her performing schedule.
“You are unfailingly logical.” Leo drew Poppy aside, avoiding the flailing arms of a strolling player with a tambourine. “How exciting. That fellow is dressed as an octopus, and he surely has mastered the movements.”
Poppy laughed. “We should have been more ambitious with our costumes.”
“I’m willing to sacrifice ambition for comfort,” Leo said. “Where would you like to go next? Shall we pace up and down one of the famous dark walks? Not that there’s much to see there since they are, you know, dark.”
“True, they aren’t the prettiest places.” Poppy coughed; her throat had gone dry. “But people visit those for…other reasons.”
“That they do,” Leo agreed. “And very good reasons those are. Here, don’t get separated from me in the crowd.” He hooked a finger inside her glove, pulling her out of reach of a domino-clad man with outstretched hands.
She stumbled, falling against his chest. “Sorry,” she mumbled, but then his arm came around her. She looked up at him; their eyes locked. Behind his mask, Leo’s green eyes asked a question.
“It’s all right,” she said.
Inadequate words. It was more than all right. But every word felt as heavy as the air, and she had to be careful lest she say too much for her own good.
How could you step aside for Richard when you wanted me for yourself? What does it mean that you are holding me now?
Maybe he was just protecting her in the crowd. Maybe it was no more than that. Certainly the gardens were full, and growing more crowded by the minute.
So. “Thank you,” was all she said next. Two words in place of so many others.
He released her from his embrace, but his forefinger was still hooked in her glove. Eyes never leaving hers, he extended his finger into her glove. He stroked the sensitive flesh of her forearm, then withdrew. A simple touch, yet its tenderness made her shiver.
“You choose, Poppy,” he said quietly, as if they were alone. “We will do whatever you want to do.”
“Whatever I want?” Enticing offer. The summer air, the cloak, the look in Leo’s eyes—all were warm enough to heat Poppy’s blood, to make her think…what if?
What if Leo had never left?
What if the Marquess of Nithsdale had never caught Poppy alone in her cousin’s conservatory, where no one could hear her scream?
What if there had been no baby as a result, and she was just Poppy, unfettered, and Leo was back in England for good?
Tonight, anything seemed possible. Tonight she could pretend any of it was true, had always been true, would always be true. Where others wore a mask to hide their true selves, tonight Poppy felt more real than she had in years. It seemed as if the years since Leo had left England had been a play, and now she could finally stop acting.
Deliberately, Poppy turned her arm and presented her hand, palm up. “I want you to touch me some more.”
Leo accepted at once. Again, his finger slipped beneath the kid of her own glove. The long glove was loose at the elbow, easily shaken down to reveal more and yet more of her arm, half the pale underside. Leo’s black-gloved finger on her skin was like ink painting paper. She caught her breath, wanting to see what shape it would paint next.
Then the painter hesitated. “Poppy, perhaps we’d better—”
“Dance?” she interrupted, forestalling what sounded like the beginning of a rejection.
“A dance?” He tilted his head. “Not quite what I was going to say, but yes. Perhaps we’d better dance.”
As they made their way toward the Grove that served as the heart of the park, Poppy allowed herself a secret smile. If he thought a dance would set a dutiful distance between them, he’d never seen a Vauxhall masquerade before.
The whole Grove was outlined by colonnades, festooned with lamps. The night sky above seemed far away. At the center of the quadrangle, the orchestra played on a rounded platform, supported a story above the ground and spangled all about the edges with tiny lamps. It was flanked by raised boxes for the wealthy and spendthrifts, while ordinary supper boxes bounded the Grove at ground level. Flocks of red-coated waiters served the boxes, bearing plates and platters and punchbowls and every manner of sweet.
In the area before the orchestra, normally threaded all through with strolling couples and Savoyards, a row of constables pressed the crowd back. The reason was soon apparent: The Prince Regent had mounted the steps to the orchestra, and he came to the fore of its platform to wave. He was dressed, alarmingly, as a heavily rouged Zeus draped in great swaths of cloth of gold. With a sloshing glass of champagne in each hand, he spoke a few words that Poppy could not understand over the continuing threads of sound: chatter, more tootles from the enthusiastic military band, a snatch of distant song from a soprano.
The orchestra was so well lit that Poppy could see the heavy prince’s face growing red. He raised his voice, waving a flute of champagne around, and bellowed the final words of his speech. “All in honor of our victory at Waterloo and of my birthday. So make yourselves merry!”
As if anyone needed to be told! But there were cheers and applause, which was likely all the Prince Regent had wanted.
“What a relief that he reminded us to be merry,” Leo murmured into Poppy’s ear as the applause died away. “I was planning to invite you to peel carrots in the kitchen of my town house, but now I’ve thought better of it.”
“It is not a bad idea. People often make merry with carrots,” Poppy replied. “And cucumbers. You know, all the long sorts of produce.”
Yes, she was flirting with him in her own awkward botanical way. But from the look in his eye, he liked it. “Your views on vegetables are most fascinating. We must explore the subject in more detail.”
“In a bit.” She winked, delighted to see his eyes widen. “But right now, the music is beginning again.”
Once the Prince Regent had descended the stairs, the orchestra struck up a sprightly gigue, and the chain of constables broke and allowed dancers to rush back onto the open ground before the musicians’ platform.
“Do you know the steps?” Poppy caught Leo’s hand.
“Are there steps?”
No, not really. Costumed dancers had flooded the open space, packed nearly shoulder-to-shoulder. They swayed, they twirled, jostling however space permitted. Lust and laughter wove through the air in a sweet contagion.
“We can use whatever steps we wish to,” Poppy decided, then pulled him into the crowd.
He caught her about the waist from behind, a sensual echo of the surprising moment he’d caught her descending from the tightrope. The span of his broad hands made her feel slim and feminine, her body still familiar and unchanged—and, for this moment, entirely her own.
She wanted it to be his.
And again, she wondered…what if?
She stretched to her toes, tipping her head back to speak into his ear. “Come with me, Leo. I have an idea.”
As the orchestra sawed out a lively tune, step by step, Poppy and Leo made their way through the dance toward the raised pavilion. Progress was slow, delightfully so, as they became threads in a skein of weaving, leaping dancers with swirling capes and swift feet. The cool night grew warmer and warmer, starry lamps beating down on the Grove like tiny suns.
Then they were through, beneath the pavilion. The music of the orchestra rushed all around, muffled by the platform above but spilling clear like a waterfall down the open sides. A scatter of columns and arches and nooks supported the structure overhead, and a central table played host to wealthy gardengoers. Just now they were absent—dancing, perhaps, as the song fiddled and trilled to an energetic finale.
Poppy blew out the single lamp beside the table.
“What are you doing, Poppy?” Leo’s voice sounded tight.
“Seducing you? I hope?” Catching his hand, she pulled him into the darkest of nooks.
The sound he made was half laugh, half choke. “You can’t imagine how often I thought of such a thing over the years.”
“I have a fairly good imagination. I’ve imagined a few things myself.”
She had never imagined this, a seduction both public and secret at once, but it suited the mood of the night. Beneath the costume of Madame Haut, the borrowed mask, she could make a choice fully her own.
He trailed gentle fingers over her cheek. “Poppy. I ought to—that is, we aren’t really betrothed, and—”
“You said you would do what I want. I want you, Leo.” I always have. Laughing, she added, “All I need is you.” Clad in their black cloaks, there was no telling where the night ended and they began. She kept hold of Leo, her hand easing free from his to slide up the hard line of his forearm.
“Are you throwing my own words back at me? I seem to remember getting in trouble the last time I said that to a ropedancer.” His fingertips quested, brushing back a stray lock of hair from her forehead.
She hoped he could hear the smile in her voice. “Call it teasing, rather. For if we’re to be realistic—”
“No, please, no.”
“—then we also need air, and food, and—”
He stopped her with a kiss.
She had always expected a calm life, one in which walking fence rails turned into riding horses turned into waltzing at a neighborhood assembly. Having a kiss with the laughing younger son of a duke under the stars, then having another, until the stars laughed too and winked out for the night.
None of that had happened. Leo’s kiss, as bold and brutally lovely as it had been, had come in stark daylight, tinged in retrospect with good-bye.
This was the hello they’d never had, the kiss that ought to have become more. There was no good-bye in this kiss. It was a beginning, a sweet brush of lips parting to a deeper, more intimate caress. The memory of that first kiss was threadbare by now, but this one was a tapestry, all bright colors filling her, blurring her vision. She could see nothing of the past now; she didn’t care to look toward the future. There was only now.
“More,” she murmured. “Please.”
“Thank God you said that,” he growled, pushing against her until her back met firm stone. His mouth found the side of her neck, burning the sensitive skin with kisses, with nips of his teeth that made her toes clench.
Leo’s thigh slid between hers. She moaned at the intimate touch, letting her body sink onto the hard line of his leg. Her performing costume, with pantalettes under her shortened skirts, rubbed erotically against her sensitive skin.
The pantalettes had to go. With fumbling fingers and shortened breath, she rucked up her skirts and tugged at the ties holding up the garments that separated her from Leo. His fingers found her core, rubbing her wetness over her own sensitive skin. “God.” He sounded half strangled. “Poppy. I want you so much.”
“Take me,” she said. “Make me yours.”
With no fear of consequences, no worries about a baby, since one already grew in her belly. That baby had come from an act of violence. This, though—this was an act of love. Of complete control, complete choice…complete surrender.
Darkness hid them. There was nothing to do but feel his movement within her in slow, deliberate thrusts that pressed her between the stone of the wall and the heated strength of his body. Above them, the orchestra swept through a ballad, slow and languid and sweet. This was the best dance of all, an eager, winding desire that made her back arch, her hips work with his. Their bodies fit, familiar and rough and sweet and new at once. A play of strings overhead cloaked their gasps.
With a flourish of brass, the song built to a climax that had Leo thrusting more quickly, keeping pace. All she could do was follow along, letting him draw her to a peak—then leave her to tumble with a joyous cry.
The ballad ended with the orchestra in full harmony, sustaining a note longer than one would have thought possible. And then all fell silent. In the second between song and applause, Leo covered her mouth with a kiss, then came into her with a groan that seemed heart-deep.
“They are clapping for you,” Poppy whispered as he let his head fall forward to the wall. “Excellent performance.” She couldn’t muster breath to say any more than that. God. The man had taken her apart, and she hadn’t put herself back together yet.
“I’ve wanted to do that for years,” he murmured against the damp hollow of her collarbone. “Years, Poppy. We’re flint and tinder.”
“I always felt the sparks.” She drew in a deep breath, liking the blended scents of the lamps, the stone, their bodies. “But I wasn’t certain you did too. Especially when you left.”
“I hid many things that I thought I ought not to reveal.” With one more kiss, he eased from her.
Her feet touched the ground, but she hardly noticed. “I do not blame you for it,” she said softly. She too had kept her desires to herself.
Until tonight. Tonight, she hadn’t feared loss; she had taken what she wanted. Despite the changes inevitably ahead, she wasn’t alone in this moment of love. Not for now—and if she carried the spark of memory within, not ever.
No matter how my life changes, I will never lose this night.
The thought felt not like a burden, but like a gift.
Squinting through the near darkness, Poppy and Leo set themselves to rights. She whispered some sort of gleeful nonsense to him; he answered in kind. The words were irrelevant. The feeling was what mattered.
By the time they slipped from beneath the orchestra, a comic song had begun, all broad gestures and bawdy lyrics. And now there was dancing to do, a night to imbibe, champagne to bubble within one like stars. A single sip was enough for Poppy; she was already tipsy with the freedom of being with the one person, of all those on earth, she would have chosen to have at her side. Nothing could spoil this night, she was sure of it.
Until she saw the men.
Four men, obviously drunk, playing at sword fighting in front of the supper boxes at the edge of the Grove. Their swords were awkwardly long bars of wood painted in white and gold. Of a familiar pattern…
“No!” She gasped, tugging free from Leo and shoving through the crowd.
“Poppy, wait!” Leo caught her arm. “Wait! What happened? What do you see?”
“Those men! They have my balance pole, and they’ve snapped it into pieces.” Conscientious Lord Bexley had promised to store it after every performance, and he had never failed to do so. What the devil had happened?
Furiously, she yanked at her arm, but Leo wouldn’t let it go. “Leo, it’s mine. I need it.”
“Not on your own, Poppy. There are four of those men, and from the look of them, they’re brimful of rack punch. Let me find a constable.”
“No, now. I need it back now.” Her throat was closed, choking. She kept struggling through the crowd.
Didn’t he understand? It was her balance pole, the only thing that allowed her to walk sixty feet in the air without a care. To go up high, where nothing bad had ever happened to her. “I can’t perform without it,” she flung at Leo.
When she finally shoved free from the dancers, she was able to shake off Leo’s hand. Yet she felt rooted to the spot, numbly watching the quartet of fools. As they staggered, laughed, banged the poles together, bits of wood splintered off. The crisp white and gold paint was marred. A few other pieces of the pole lay on the trodden ground, snapped again and again so the men could have just the sort of fake swords they wanted.
The orchestra music had gone silent in her ears. “I…can’t perform without it.”
She had forgotten Leo was still beside her until he caught her under the chin with a gentle fingertip. “Poppy, it’s all right. I promised you a thousand pounds. You don’t have to perform anymore if you don’t want to.”
His eyes caught hers. Held. I’ll buy you.
He didn’t mean it like that, she knew. Not in the way Lord Nithsdale had, taking what he wanted and leaving her in pieces. Leo wanted to help her, to show her she wasn’t alone.
But she was still in pieces. There were four, snapped apart, in the hands of drunken men, and more cast aside on the ground. There was a piece of a man who had forced himself on her, growing larger within her body by the day. And what was there of Poppy, friend and lover and ropedancer? She felt she had found herself tonight, but so quickly, she could be lost again.
She wasn’t ashamed to ask for help, but she couldn’t surrender to helplessness. She had a contract, all her own.
There was to be no touching.
She drew herself up straight, lifting her chin away from his fingertip. “Yes. Leo, I should like you to get a constable and retrieve the pieces of my balance pole.”
“It can be repaired, then?”
“No. It cannot.” It would never be strong and springy again. “But those men should not have it.”
“If you’re not going to perform again—”
“Of course I’m going to perform again. I have agreed.” And she wanted to. How could she explain? Nothing bad had ever happened to her as she walked a fence or a tightrope; she could not say the same for the earth.
“Contracts can be broken.” His green eyes looked dark, framed by the half mask.
“Yet we clasped hands on one,” she said. “Would you treat it so lightly?”
“Anything involving you? Never.”
“Nor would I you.”
“We can get you another, then,” Leo said. “Another pole, just like this one.”
She folded her arms tightly, catching the cloak about her like a cocoon. “There is no other. I had that made just for me. I begged a man at a lumberyard to let me choose just the wood I wanted, and I had it cut to size. I smoothed it myself, with sandpaper and my hands.”
This was the only thing she had, just for her, just the way she liked it, and drunken sots had destroyed it during the single moment of pleasure she’d dared take for herself.
“And someone broke it, just like that. Poppy. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.” His jaw was hard. He wasn’t talking about the pole alone, she thought.
She wasn’t either. “It’s done. I’ll sort matters out.” The crowd around her felt crushing, the music vulgar, the laughter too raucous. “I forgot myself. I shouldn’t have…”
“Shouldn’t have what, Poppy?” His tone was brittle.
Let it shatter, then. “I shouldn’t have gone off with you as I did. I’m sorry, Leo. I have…I cannot be thinking only of myself.”
He threw out an elbow, keeping a weaving masquerader away. “Were you not thinking of me?”
“Of course I was. Always. And I am thinking of you now.” Who he’d once been, and who he had become. If he hadn’t returned as the Duke of Westfair, then maybe…
But Leo Billingsley was now His Grace, and all the what-ifs fulfilled were rubbed away like chalk underfoot. She had thought she would be satisfied with their engagement as a brief farce. She had thought she could surrender her body without giving him her heart again.
She had been wrong. He had always had her heart, after all. But her body wasn’t her own anymore, and her life wasn’t either. And neither was his, was it? The Duke of Westfair was the king’s peer, wrapped in golden threads of tradition and expectation.
“I can’t—do this anymore,” she managed to say. “I have to take care of the baby. I…”
Through his mask, his green eyes were pleading. “Poppy, let me help you.”
What if I did…?
No, the time for what-ifs was past. “I wish you could.” She smiled, but her heart was so heavy, the expression fell away at once. “But some things can’t be helped.”
From the look on his face, he knew as well as she did that this was just another way of saying good-bye.