Page 11 of A Scandalous Kind of Duke

“Certainly no respectable man,” Hester sighed through the laughter.

Juno grinned at her impishly. “Just as well I do not aspire to respectability.”

Hadrian set his glass down with a thump. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “I recall when your art overflowed with romance. What have you become, sweet cousin—a jaded cynic, or a hopeless romantic who is difficult to please?”

“What I am is my own mistress,” Juno said defiantly, waving her truffle about as she spoke. “When I want quiet, I have it. When I want company, I have it. I can work all day without interruption, or sleep all day without judgment. I earn my own way, do as I please, and am beholden to no one. Where would a husband fit into that life? He will demand attention and pester me about his boots or his dinner, then take my money and disrupt my schedule and steal my time.”

She nibbled the edge off her chocolate truffle and swung one foot back and forth. Her scuffed slipper dangled from her toes, and her hem slipped back to reveal the flower motifs embroidered over the ankles of her darned stockings.

Daniel snorted. “We men are not so rotten. You haven’t a shred of evidence for these claims.”

“Oh, the young lawyer demands evidence, does he?” Juno said. “Very well: Consider the case of Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun. She painted portraits for Marie Antoinette and all of Versailles until… Well.”

“Well, indeed.” Hadrian chuckled darkly. “Beheadings must really put a damper on the portrait-painting business.”

This earned a round of groans and another walnut flung at his head, after which mayhem Juno continued.

“After fleeing Paris, Madame LeBrun moved around Europe, painting royals. She even had a studio here in London for three years, painted the Prince of Wales, as he then was. She earned a fortune from her paintings—and her husband gambled it all away. I earn considerably less than a fortune, so why should I give it all to some man?”

“But maybe she was in love,” Phoebe argued. “You used to proclaim the superiority of emotion and sensation over what you call our ‘thinking.’ Surely you’ve not changed so much. Do you never fall in love?”

For the length of a heartbeat, Juno’s foot stilled, as did Leo’s breath. But then she continued, her eyes elsewhere, her tone light.

“On the contrary. I make it a practice to fall in love at least three times every day. One must take love lightly and drift down into it, as a feather onto a cloud. Land too heavily in love and one will get stuck there, like a carriage in a bog.”

She swung her foot so hard her slipper flew right off, executed a somersault, and landed with a slap by Leo’s shoe. He herded the slipper back across the floor to her. She hooked it with her toes, shot him a bright smile, and went right back to swinging her leg, completely at peace with her free-spirited ways, her rakish views on love.

Her cousins were wrong: Juno’s carefree philosophies were not new at all. Leo had learned how she truly viewed love eight years earlier, when they walked together in the gardens in Vienna that crisp autumn day.

It had been the first time Leo saw her since that fiasco in the meadow. The moment was painted in his memory: the blue sky, the orange leaves, the way his chest had swelled at the sight of her after so long apart. He had endured two long years since their first kiss and her promising words of love, two painful years of waiting for the chance to fix his mistake and put matters right.

But she had spoken first, there among the bright colors of the dying leaves. How earnest her smile had been, as she squeezed Leo’s arm and assured him her youthful nonsense had passed. “I promise to never again importune you with kisses or protestations of love,” she had laughed, adding, “I was so young! I suppose every girl of seventeen must have a silly infatuation and you were mine. How awkward it must have been for you!”

A silly infatuation. Youthful nonsense. That was all their first sweet kiss had meant to her, while for him it had meant the world. Thus were Juno’s words of love: easily spoken, soon forgotten.

And that same night, in that red salon, with that older man, the Czech violinist…

The long-buried memory from Vienna suddenly shone in his mind like a freshly polished silver plate: the red brocade walls, the overwrought chandelier, the scented air, and in a corner, half obscured by velvet draperies, Juno and the violinist, sharing an intimate look.

Juno tilting her chin.

The violinist bending his head.

The violinist kissing Juno.

Juno kissing him back.

Leo shook his head and shoved the memories back down into the dank cellar of his mind where they belonged. Where everything from Vienna belonged.

Back in the present, Hadrian was cheering Juno’s sentiments, with a rowdy “Hear, hear!”

“May we all avoid getting stuck in the bog of love,” he said, raising his glass. “A toast to our parents for demonstrating the perfect marriage, so that none of us dare try it for ourselves.”

“Be brave, my son,” Sir Gordon said dryly. “You may know love yet.”

Hadrian laughed. “If I am to marry, Father, then I shall borrow Dammerton’s list of criteria for his next wife: well bred, well behaved, and well dowered. That sum it up, Dammerton?”

“Pretty much.”

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