"I think we should discuss Rees," Helene added, without waiting for a response. The brandy was giving her a lovely warm feeling of confidence.

"If it is quite all right with you, I would like to borrow him once a day."

Tom was scolding his brother in an undertone. Helene heard him say, "Well, why didn't you tell me that she never drinks spirits?"

"From what I remember, I only need around five minutes of Rees's time,"

she told Miss McKenna. "That truly is a lovely gown, by the way." It was an odd color of orange that gave Lina's skin a tawny glow.

"Sometimes Rees is good for seven minutes," Miss McKenna said with just a hint of laughter in her voice. "I would give him the benefit of the doubt."

"Seven minutes!" Helene exclaimed. "How nice to know that one's husband has matured a whole two minutes in the past nine years."

"I like a man to have ambition, don't you?" Miss McKenna said, taking a sip of wine.

Suddenly Helene's eyes met those of her husband's mistress and they broke into laughter. Tom made a gulping noise. Rees looked up from his paper for a moment and shrugged.

"It shouldn't discompose your day at all," Helene said.

"I doubt that it will," Miss McKenna replied. "Your gown is also very lovely. Is it from Madame Rocque?"

"Indeed," Helene said. She decided not to nod again because it made her head feel quite dizzy. "I think I may have tried on your gown, but I looked a veritable scarecrow in it."

Miss McKenna's eyes had lost the sharp edge they had when Helene first entered the room. Helene found that now that she was used to Miss McKenna's startling beauty, she was taken aback by her composure. She was almost ladylike in her demeanor. If she hadn't known to the contrary, Helene would have assumed she was a rather formidable, if young, member of the ton. How very peculiar.

"How is your mother, Lady Godwin?" Tom said.

"Oh, she's very well," Helene said, with just the tiniest, ladylike hiccup. "But you might as well call me Helene. I am your sister-in-law, and after this, no one can say that we're not on intimate terms!"

Leke arrived at that moment. "Dinner is served," he said, in a voice of deep gloom. He had rather enjoyed the martyrdom of remaining in Earl Godwin's employ when the rest of the servants fled a house of sin. But even he was wondering whether this situation was too much for his sense of propriety. It just didn't suit his nerves to find a mistress and a wife sitting next to each other and chatting, for all the world as if they were bosom friends.

Chapter Twenty.

Inebriation Is Sometimes a Wise Choice.

Helene sobered up slightly during the meal. But only slightly. At some point she realized that even another sip of red wine was going to leave her with a pounding headache in the morning, but she ignored the thought. Best to get through the evening, and let the morning worry about itself.

Rees sat at the top of the table, scowling at a score he had carried into the room. The conversation, such as it was, was carried by Lina, Tom, and Helene. After Leke had removed the pudding, even that chatter seemed to finally wilt. Helene took a deep breath and turned to Lina.

"If you will excuse us," she said politely, "I shall return him in five minutes."

"Please, take seven," Lina said with a twinkle.

A little smile wobbled on Helene's lips. Was it too, too odd to feel respect for her husband's mistress?

"Rees!" she said, standing up.

He stuffed the paper into his pocket. "Right," he replied. He showed no sign whatsoever of giving a damn about Lina's and Helene's remarks about the brevity of his bedroom activities.

But instead of heading up the stairs, he walked across the hall into the music room-well, the room that used to be their sitting room and was now occupied by three pianos.

"Rees," Helene said, trailing after him, "what on earth are you doing?"

"I need to show you this score," he said impatiently, running a hand through his hair. "We'll get to the rest of it in a few minutes."

"I would rather do the rest, as you put it, now," Helene insisted. She certainly didn't want to lose the little curtain of inebriation that was making the whole evening seem rather funny. And she particularly wanted to blunt the experience of bedding Rees, even if it was only a matter of seven minutes.

But Rees had strode to the piano and was leafing through sheets of paper. Helene walked cautiously into the room. Paper swirled around her feet with the same dancing motion as the hem of her skirt. She tried kicking a few in the air. "How do you live with all this mess?" she asked.

"It only appears messy," Rees said with an obvious disregard for the truth.

Helene laughed. "There's no method in this madness." She kicked a few more papers into the air.

"Don't do that!" he said sharply. "And it is organized. Drafts are on the floor. The various acts of the opera are arranged on the sofa."

"Sofa?" Helene wandered over and discovered that the hideous sofa given to them by her Aunt Margaret was actually still in the room, although buried under high stacks of paper. "You must have most of the opera here, Rees. I don't know why you can't be ready on time."

"Namby-pamby stuff," he said, hunching his shoulder. "I haven't written a decent line in the last year." He played a few bars. "What do you think of this?" he said.

Even tipsy, Helene retained full musical capability. "I can't say I like it over much," she said, wandering over and putting her elbows inelegantly on the top of the piano.

"That's because you're hearing it out of context," Rees said. "Actually, it's one of the better pieces I have. Here, I'll play from the beginning."

He poised his hands over the keyboard and then let them fall. Helene allowed the music to pour through her and watched his hands. They were extraordinarily large and yet wondrously delicate in playing. Each finger tapered gracefully.

But when he stopped and looked up at her, Helene shook her head. "It sounds like a country ballad," she said frankly, "but not very interesting as pastoral music goes. Is it to be sung by a young girl?" Rees always wrote operas about young girls.

He nodded. "She's a princess who's run away and disguised herself as a Quaker girl."

Helene had long since learned to ignore the fragile plots that made up Rees's operas. "What's she supposed to be singing about at the moment?"

"She misses her lover, Captain Charteris. I'll play it again with the words, shall I? Fen did a good job on the libretto."

Rees had a dark, liquid singing voice as much at odds with his growling speaking voice as his elegant fingers were to his muscled body. "While I'm waiting here in eager expectation, Always waiting for my lover to appear," he sang, "In my fond and fanciful imagination, Every moment seems a year."

"Florid Fen," Helene said with some amusement. "Move over, Rees." She sat down, nudging him slightly with her hip. "What would happen if you used an ascending scale when she was always waiting, and then dropped when it seems a year?" She tried it out on the keyboard.

Rees was frowning. "That doesn't sound very wistful."

"She needs to sound as if she's yearning, not as if she's counting the linens. Try this," and Helene started singing as she played.

Rees moved over enough to allow her plenty of room for her elbows, but not so much that he wasn't touching her hip. He liked Helene's hips, he had discovered. In fact, he rather liked her new style of dressing for that very reason. Who would have thought that Helene had such a delicate yet sensual curve to her? He remembered her as angular and almost bony. But she wasn't, not at all. She made other women seem over-fleshy.

She had stopped singing. "Sorry," Rees said. "Could you sing it again?" She turned and looked at him. That was another interesting thing about Helene. She was tall enough to look right into his eye when they sat together. And her eyes were a very curious color, a kind of gray that shaded into green. Like a cat's.

"Pay attention, Rees," she said, looking rather amused.

She sang again. "It's better," Rees said, his attention now back to the music. "But I don't think the ascending scale works."

"You need to give her a sense of longing," Helene said again. "There has to be something to mark the fact she's desperate to see her captain."

"Perhaps she's not desperate," he growled, scribbling in the notes she had suggested.

"Then why bother writing about her?" Helene said with a shrug.

Rees's hand slowed. Why indeed? That was the problem with the whole opera. The piece was set to open the opera season next year, and he didn't have more than five measures of decent melody.

"Because she's my heroine," he said, crossing out his line so violently that the foolscap tore.

"I guessed that. You always write about princesses, young ones in love."

"I have two heroines, and one is a Quaker girl, not a princess. But princesses are in fashion," he said. "Damn it, Helene, do you always have to be so critical?"

She blinked at him. She did have lovely eyes. They were rather like the surface of a stream, deep with a gold-greeny quietness.

"I didn't mean to be disparaging," she said. "I'm sorry, Rees. You speak so lightly of your own work that I'm afraid I took license."

"If anyone's going to criticize, it might as well be you," he said gloomily. "I know this is paltry stuff."

"Shall we look at it again tomorrow?"

"I expect. But it's like trying to turn horse manure into gold."

"It's not that bad!" Helene exclaimed. "There's a very sweet bit of melody here," and she played the phrase.

"Don't you recognize it?" Rees asked. "That's from Mozart's Apollo and Hyacinth. Stolen. There's not a bit of music in here that's worth the paper it's written on," he said savagely, pointing to the stack on top of the piano. "It's all claptrap."

Helene put a hand on his arm. He looked down. She had the delicate, pink-tipped fingers of a real musician, not a charlatan like himself.

"I doubt that very much," she said.

"You might as well believe it, since it's true," he snapped, getting up. He walked one length of the room, but the papers swirling around his boots bothered him so much that he stopped. "I suppose we might as well get the tupping out of the way," he growled. "I'm going to have to be up all night rewriting that score."

Helene was biting her lip. She had a beautifully plump lower lip, he noticed, as if seeing it for the first time.

"Are you sure you want to?" she asked hesitantly. "We could wait a day."

Suddenly he was quite certain that he did want to. "It's best to start as we mean to go on," he growled, striding to the door. "My room?"

"Absolutely not!" Helene said, running after him. She wasn't going to engage in any such activities if there was even the slightest possibility that Lina could overhear. "We'll go to my room."

A moment later they were standing in her bedchamber staring at the bed. "It's no narrower than the sofa at Lady Hamilton's house," Helene said, rather uncertainly. It was one thing to make plans with Esme to bed her husband once a day. It was quite another when his large body was standing next to one. It gave her an odd zinging feeling in the pit of her stomach.

"It'll have to do," Rees growled, pulling off his cravat. A moment later he was down to a shirt. Helene watched with some fascination. His legs were just as muscled as she remembered from Lady Hamilton's music room. It was rather mesmerizing to see the powerful way his thighs flexed.

"How do you take exercise?" she asked.

"I walk between my pianos. Aren't you going to undress?"

"Well, you still have on your shirt," she retorted.

"I thought you'd prefer it."

"Why?" Helene asked, wondering whether there was something about shirts that she should know. Perhaps gentlemen always wore their shirt in the presence of ladies.

"You dislike the hair on my chest," Rees pointed out.

"Oh," Helene said weakly, "I'd forgotten." How extremely rude she had been, all those years ago. She was so hurt and desperate to injure him that she would have said anything. "I'm sorry if I made inappropriate comments," she added. "I believe I was quite rude."

He just stood in the middle of the room like some sort of big jungle cat, watching her intently. "It's quite all right. I'm not wedded to my chest hair. Aren't you going to undress, Helene?"

"I can't undo this gown by myself," she said, turning about and presenting him with an elegant row of pearl buttons.

Rees began unbuttoning. Helene's hair curled into little wisps just at the nape of her neck. She wasn't wearing a chemise. He would never have thought that Helene-his Helene-would wear a gown without a chemise and, underneath it, a sturdy corset. Every newly opened button revealed skin the color of snowflowers in the mountains, skin as clear and delicate as a baby's cheek.

His fingers, Rees noticed with a flash of objectivity, were trembling. It was absurd to be excited about the prospect of bedding one's wife. One's estranged wife, he corrected himself. And the bedding was merely for purposes of procreation. The gown parted far enough now so that he pushed it forward, making it fall forward off her shoulders.

"You have a beautiful back, Helene," he said, startled to hear the little rasp in his voice. He had obviously gone too long without visiting Lina, if he was getting excited over one slender back, albeit with an elegant curve that made a man long to run his hands down... down.

Helene didn't know what to think of Rees's compliment. Last week he had said she had beautiful legs, and now she had a beautiful back as well? She clutched the gown to her bosom. But she could hardly cover up her breasts forever.

So she turned around and let the gown drop to the floor. He might as well see it all, although surely he could remember for himself.

For a moment he didn't move at all, just drew in a breath. There was something about his eyes that made Helene feel a bit better. It was only Rees, after all. What was she so worried about? She walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed, crossing her legs. She felt rather wicked, sitting naked in the presence of a man. Back when they were first married, they had conducted all intimacies discreetly under the sheets, and here they were, estranged, and she naked in front of him.

"Do take off your shirt," she suggested. It hung past his hips. She didn't care about his chest either way, but she was very curious to see whether her memory of last week could possibly be accurate.

Her memory was absolutely accurate. Helene felt a stinging tingle between her legs; it was as if her body had its own memory.

He strode over and gestured at the bed. Helene lay back, trying to quell a heartbeat of anxiety. It hadn't hurt last time. She simply had to believe that it wouldn't hurt this time as well.

"I suppose," he said rather tentatively, and then seemed to make up his mind. His hand went straight down between her legs. Helene nearly jumped out of her skin.

"What are you doing?" she gasped, and then realized she sounded critical. Esme had told her that no matter what, she couldn't sound critical or she might cause him to be unable to perform. And since the only thing she wanted from Rees was performance, she was determined to be encouraging.