Page 13 of Better Love Next Time
Maybe London could wait. Georgiana played like the best of the boys and Kitty…
She was just a girl. He knew nothing about fate, but her smile, her giggle, her adoration felt like something ordained. Plus, with all those firsts in one day, if he stayed, who knew what other firsts she’d give him?
No, he couldn’t leave her just yet.
CHAPTER THREE
Present Day
31 May 1765
Il Ridotto, Palazzo Dandolo
The Republic of Venice
Anthony Philips swirledthe last of his grappa, shot it back clean, and smacked the bottom of his glass to his thigh. “A marriage in name only is a waste of a woman’s potential, wouldn’t you say?”
Kitty remained quiet where she stood apart from the fevered crowd. In the two years she had traipsed about the Continent with Julian and his friends—self-named The Stoics when there was no temperance amongst the lot of them—she had learned that drunk men asked many questions and wished for no answers. And when they were sober, men hardly spoke at all.
Breathing her fill of the darkly lit room, the perfumes and pomade, the singular scent of perspiration born of risking fortunes, Kitty moved farther from the crowd, to the balcony overlooking the Grand Canal.
The night was heavy with the scent of burning pitch and seawater. Gazing across the torchlit waters, she studied the brightly clad figures strolling the square where the domed Basilica rose up in glowing splendor. Through her mask, she watched a gilt gondola pass. One of the men in the boat toasted his champagne to her. She raised her own glass and watched the bubbles effervesce like the sorrow rising within her at the memory of Julian and a boat, when love had filled her sails. But like the bubbles, her memory reached its end, fizzled, and popped into nothing.
She looked down the steep but survivable descent to the lagoon below. Impatient with her unhappiness, she knew it had to end, one way or another.
Two years married, as of tonight. Two years of gracious indifference Kitty had suffered from Julian through Paris salons and French gardens, Viennese balls, Roman ruins, and always, always, gaming rooms. Wherever they could be found. Which was everywhere.
She removed her bauta, the mask required for anyone who partook in the rich stakes offered at the ridotto, and sipped her champagne.
Her husband of two years treated her well. Not like a wife, no, he had never as much as kissed her since rescuing her from Lord Staverton. She was an obligation. He ensured she had the best rooms, gowns of silk and velvet. Lace fichus and sleeves. Silk stockings and shoes. Every month, from his winnings, he bought her a piece of jewelry and left it on her dressing table, unwrapped, without a note.
Her cold fingers traced the triple strand of pearls about her neck as she turned back to thesalone centralewhere the ridotto’s patrons mingled and gambled in black dominoes and white bautas under frescoes of exotic creatures and frolicking cherubs.
His bauta tucked under an arm, Julian leaned a shoulder to a frescoed wall near a basetta table.
Kitty studied him as a man, not her husband, not the person she had known since she was seven. His profile was that of strength. His slightly hawkish nose and full, firm lips. A stubborn chin and square jaw. His black hair was queued. His white teeth flashed as he toasted to his friend, Jamie Fitzwilliam, who raked in a handful of markers at the table.
Was that what women adored about Julian? The strong man with the smile of a boy? It set Kitty’s heart pattering like a lovesick girl.
His dark eyes, deep-set beneath black brows flicked over the passing patrons, meeting a red-headed woman’s interested gaze. He shifted his long limbs, muscled from his habit of daily Grecian exercise. His elegant fingers wrapped around a crystal goblet of liquor as he sipped, looking away from the woman with an unsatisfied air.
Kitty was certain Julian hadn’t slept with another woman since they had married over the anvil in Scotland. But he never threw a female off his lap if she happened to land there. He seemed to have a limit as to how long a woman’s bottom could stay pressed against his hard thighs. A minute, Kitty had reckoned. Because she counted each time while women graced him with a view of their bountiful breasts and purred in his ear and wrapped their fingers in his black hair. And by the count of sixty, give or take how furiously Kitty counted, the women were on their feet and sent away.
That was Julian’s appeal. He did not appear to care one whit for a female’s attentions. It kept them coming back for more.
She acquired another glass of champagne amidst the strains of violins and repartee.
“Drowning your sorrows?” Anthony asked, too close to the truth for comfort. “Perhaps some opium to dull them?”
He tipped a few drops in his glass and offered her the blue bottle.
She looked at her friend, the one she might have married if not for her abiding love for Julian. How handsome he was. Charming. Alluring. And, she suspected, miserable.
“Are you regretting your decision to desert the lovely widow?” she asked. “I thought for certain she meant more to you than a conquest.”
His shoulder quirked. His grin vanished.
So he did regret it.
