When the Duke Returns by Eloisa James Page B

when the original contracts were drawn up.
    Simeon had readily approved the proxy wedding when he was eighteen and far away in India. He had just begun studying with Valamksepa, and he refused to come home merely so that his father could draw down the second half of a dowry attached to a bride whom he’d never met. He spent the next three years in rigorous solitude, learning endurance, manliness, the Middle Way. He had learned to create an oasis of calm around himself, no matter what happened on his right or his left.
    But now that he was back in England, it all seemed complicated. One look at Isidore had dispelled his image of a sweet-faced child bride.
    She was like a Renaissance princess. Or a queen like Cleopatra.
    She was the most sensual woman he’d ever seen in his life, and he had the women of the Sultan of Illa’s harem for comparison.
    If Isidore put on a gauzy dress and a couple of bracelets, she would have thrown the sultan’s first wife intothe shade. She was ravishing, with a mouth like a ripe cherry and a body that would make a eunuch weep. She was not what he expected in a wife.
    In truth, she was not what he wanted in a wife.
    Wandering the East for years had taught him a few things about women and men, and all his conclusions led in one direction: it was much easier for a man if he had a docile wife.
    Somehow, without even noticing it, he’d fashioned Isidore into the picture of that wife. Shy, sweet, veiled. Of course he’d been offered women—and women had offered themselves—numerous times over his adult life.
    But they had never been tempting enough to overcome the teachings of Valamksepa. Lust, he had said repeatedly, is at the heart of many evils. Simeon had to admit that he probably would have brushed aside the question of evil, except for his inherent dislike of disease. For all he told Isidore that it was a moral decision, he didn’t bother with fooling himself.
    He liked to be healthy. Very healthy. And a man has only to be in the East for a day before he becomes aware of just what a syphilitic face looks like without a nose. Or he hears a joke about a private member dropping off the body.
    He decided early that it wasn’t worth it. The women he was offered were members of harems. The women who offered themselves were regularly partaking in all sorts of interesting bedroom activities, with a variety of partners.
    He could wait.
    And he had waited.
    Imagining, all the time, his cool, docile wife…the one who would have to be coaxed into kissing him, the one who would scream faintly at the sight of his body. In themonth after he decided to return to England, he ran miles across the desert at night, curbing his body, preparing himself for careful, delicate advances to a terrified woman.
    Idiot that he was.
    His wife burned with sensuality. When he first met her she was wearing a gown that fit like a glove. It was the color of rain in the summer, and it sparkled with tiny diamonds. She had them in her hair too, and on her slippers. Everything about her said, I am delicious. I am expensive. I am a duchess .
    And everything about her face said, I don’t want to be a virgin .
    The front door to the Duke of Beaumont’s house opened and a footman trotted down the steps. Simeon’s groomsmen had already leapt down and were surrounding the carriage, rigidly at attention, like tin soldiers.
    Isidore greeted him at the door to the sitting room. She wasn’t the kind to wait sedately in a chair for a man’s arrival. She was dressed in a gown that resembled a man’s military costume. Huge flaps at the shoulders narrowed to a point at her waist before the skirts belled out again, over panniers, he supposed. He’d seen a few women wearing those in the last few years—mostly missionaries’ wives, trying to preserve a ridiculous way of life while living in the wilds.
    But on Isidore he suddenly understood the fashion. It was made to draw a