by Evie Dunmore
It occurred to her then that saving the cat could, potentially, kill two birds with one stone: returning it wouldn’t make Lady Hampshire like her, but the marchioness would have to restrain her attempts to undermine her, lest she wanted to risk looking ungrateful.
She eyed the ladder. It looked fairly sturdy. She had certainly scaled worse as a girl. Against her better judgment, she began to climb.
She had not worn fashionable skirts as a girl. She had to climb sideways, and her progress was slow and awkward. Halfway up, a step creaked loudly under her right foot.
She paused and glanced back down, and her hands instinctively gripped the ladder more tightly. She was up quite high now. But still not near the cat. In fact, the Maine Coon began edging backward. By the time Lucie’s head was level with the rafter, the animal was at least three feet out of reach.
“Come now,” Lucie coaxed, stretching out her arm, or trying to. The snug silk detained her like a lovely-looking straightjacket. Her next effort produced the suspiciously crunching sound of straining seams. “Blast. It.”
She tried flattery instead. “Goodness, you are huge, aren’t you,” she cooed. “Fifteen pounds, I reckon?”
The animal didn’t budge. Its tail, thick as a fox’s, batted softly, angrily, against the beam as she fixed Lucie with distrustful yellow eyes.
Silly creature didn’t know what was good for her.
“Come now,” she wiggled her fingers. “Come now, what a pretty kitty.”
“I say,” drawled a dreadfully familiar male voice from below. “Montgomery’s stable boasts some lovely, unexpected views.”
She froze, her arm awkwardly extended.
Tristan.
She peered back over her shoulder. He was on the other side of the low wall and made to enter the alcove. Of course he would be at the house party—his snob of a father would have never made a show himself. And now he was standing right beneath her, pretending to look up her skirts. No. Not pretending. His gaze was brushing over her ankles, noticeable on her skin like a physical touch.
She closed her eyes and silently counted to five.
It was the moment the cat decided to accept her person as the bridge to freedom and make a dash for it. Lucie opened her eyes to fifteen pounds of determined-looking cat hurtling toward her face, ears flat, tail crooked. Ginger fur muffled her shriek; claws dug into her neck sharp like needles. Her hands closed over thin air, and, with a hissing cat wrapped around her head, she fell backward into a void.
Chapter 16
It would hurt. Her body curled and prepared for hurt.
The pain never came.
She crashed into something solid, but it gave; she went down yet again, and it was over.
For a moment, she lay prone and motionless, the hammering beat of her heart in her ears.
One by one, she accounted for her limbs. They all felt intact. A negligible ache in her ribs. White stars still flashed behind her closed eyelids. Her eyes snapped open when realization dawned that she was lying atop a man. Her nose was pressed into the V of starched shirt above his waistcoat, breathing in the warm scent of his skin.
Grand. She was draped over Tristan’s supine form, no part of her touching the ground. He had caught her and the cat, and his body had taken the full brunt of the flagstone floor.
He would mock her ruthlessly about it, forever.
It was tempting to close her eyes again and feign unconsciousness.
But he just lay still, suspiciously so. Not a breath moved his broad torso.
She raised herself up on his chest and peered down at him.
His eyes were closed, his lashes sooty crescents against his cheeks. His hair was spread around his head on the stable floor. He had lost his hat. It lay on its side, a good five feet away.
Lord. His head must have taken a hit on the stones.
“Ballentine.”
No reaction.
Her chest turned cold inside out. She gave his cheek a firm pat. “This is not funny.”
No reaction.
Had she killed him? No one would believe that it was an accident.
Nonsense. There was no blood—none she could see.
She peeled off her gloves and tossed them aside. Leaning over him, she sank her fingers into his hair. It slid through her fingers, slippery and cool, as she swiftly searched his temples, then the sides and back of his skull with urgent fingertips. No lumps, no blood.
“Don’t be dead,” she murmured, “or permanently damaged.” He was a rogue, a scoundrel, but . . .
A sound rumbled in his chest.
Her hands stilled. It had sounded . . . like a laugh.
His eyes opened, bright pools of mischief looking up at her.
The blast of mixed emotions stunned her. She glared down at his indolent face, panting, unable to move.
He slowly shook his head. “I cannot believe you fell for that.”
Her fingers tightened reflexively in his hair. “I hate pranks,” she whispered.
His smile widened. “I know,” he whispered back.
She felt his hands on her hips.
Everything slowed. Tristan went still beneath her, the amusement fading from his eyes. Heat bloomed on her skin, aware that she was laying on him, hip against hip, her skirt on his legs like an exotic wing. . . . She tried not to move, not press more closely against him, but she felt him so well: his chest, hard and solid as flagstone beneath her. The sensuous sleekness of his hair between her fingers. The dull beat of a needy pulse between her legs. Tristan’s breathing turned ragged, and his gaze was hot, molten gold, as if he felt what feeling him did to her. Her hands began to tremble, and he felt that, too. His mouth softened, and she gazed at it, entranced. He lightly slid the tip of his tongue over his bottom lip, leaving it damp, and a tiny noise escaped her. She wanted to feel his mouth against hers, and in this slow, warm haze, it made sense. Her head dipped.
A subtle movement brought his thigh up between hers, right where it ached. She gasped. Too much. The harsh, earthly smells and sounds of a stable flooded back.
She was, in fact, on a stable floor, in a most compromising position.
She arched up. “Release me.”
“Lucie.” His voice was unsteady.
“Now.”
What a disaster. They were embracing on a stable floor, barely shielded by half a wall.
His grip on her hips eased, and he slowly raised his arms over his head and lay under her in a pose of mock-surrender. It still took her a moment to move, to roll off him and struggle to her feet. The tension in her limbs did not ease; she was fair aching with it.
Tristan unhurriedly drew himself up in a sitting position and braced an arm on his bent knee. Straw stuck from his hair. He looked indecent, and his mouth was edged with a knowing arrogance. She had very nearly kissed this mouth. Her lips were burning, angrily, because she hadn’t.
She turned and strode from the stable, her head held high, not knowing whether she was more put out with him or with herself.
* * *
Tristan watched her go, breathing hard and aware that he was slipping. He could not recall ever losing control to the point of grinding himself against a lady on a stable floor. Appalling, and yet his blood still rushed with ecstasy. Ecstasy from a near kiss.
He had seen Lucie cross the courtyard, because he had arrived late at Claremont, and he had made the spontaneous decision to follow her. When a terrified groom had all but rushed toward him from the stables, yammering about a formidable lady and a cat, he had sent the lad to the other end of the courtyard. A good foresight. His hands had not obeyed him at first when he had willed them to let go of her skirts. He had been fighting the urge to roll with her in his arms, to pull her body beneath his. It would have taken another second or two to drag up her skirts. On a stable floor. He had, until today, fancied himself a somewhat sophistic
ated hedonist. Apparently, it wasn’t so.
He closed his eyes, waiting for the heat to fade from his limbs. The look in her eyes, such a clash of want and fury. When they would finally come together, it would shake foundations, or, at the very least, break the bed.
He felt a watchful gaze on him, and a quick glance around located the source: the large orange menace Lucie had tried to save earlier. It had crammed itself backward into a nook in the wall opposite. Cats. The smaller the box, the more attractive they found it. He came to his feet and winced and adjusted the front of his trousers.
The daft animal purred when he approached. It didn’t resist as he carefully extracted it from the nook and lifted it into his arms.
He couldn’t have bolstered his reputation among the respectable matrons any better than by strolling into the reception room holding a grousing cat. The Marchioness of Hampshire sailed at him through the crowd with the force of a schooner, exclaiming incoherently while taking the animal off him and pressing it to her bosom. A growing ring of spectators circled them, murmuring praise.
“The stable, you say?” the marchioness cried. “She could have been trampled. Why, you could have been trampled, Lord Ballentine.”
“It was a risk, but I persevered,” he said modestly, eliciting a soft chorus of appreciative sighs.
Lady Hampshire sniffed. “I daresay, mayhem was to be expected over the course of this party, given the nature of our hostess,” she muttered under her breath, shooting an indignant glance in the direction of the new duchess, who had kept a tactful distance during the reunion. “But the loss of a pet is going decidedly too far,” her ladyship continued. “This is a highly delicate animal! Anything could have happened.”
The moment Lady Hampshire took herself and her growling pet to her rooms to recuperate, the Duchess of Montgomery started toward him. He dipped his head to acknowledge her superior station with a wry smile. During their last encounter, she had been Annabelle Archer, a country bumpkin from Kent, and he had approached her, out of sheer ennui. She was also a remarkably beautiful woman: tall and radiant with a latent sensuality that was vigorously bred out of the ladies in his own class. . . .
An icy glare positively skewered him. When he looked up, his eyes locked with those of Montgomery, who stood at the very opposite end of the room. Bother her and I shall kill you, said that look, and so he dipped his head at His overly protective Grace, too.
The duchess assessed him with cautious appreciation. “Thank you for bringing the cat back, my lord.”
“I did what anyone would do.”
“She has reportedly mauled several footmen and a groom, but it appears you are uninjured?”
“Of course. I have a vested interest in keeping my looks as they are.”
“Of course,” she murmured. If she weren’t a duchess now, she would have rolled her eyes.
Welcome to the world of petty constraints, Your Grace. Her stakes in this house party running smoothly had to be exceedingly high—and society matrons like Lady Hampshire could make or break a woman’s standing.
“My lord,” she said. “I shall have to impose on you once more, I’m afraid.”
He obligingly inclined his head. “Impose on me, duchess.”
Her gaze strayed to the group of ladies nearby, watching them from behind erratically fluttering fans. “Due to popular demand, I must ask whether you would read us one of your poems in the drawing room this evening.”
A flicker of resistance licked through him. His days of writing pieces that held meaning, fueled by the now irretrievably lost Sturm und Drang of his youth, had cumulated in A Pocketful of Poems years ago. Selling the works was one matter, reciting them quite another— it reminded him of the florid fellows who held forth about their three-decade-old adventures in Crimea because they had not done anything worth mentioning since. But soirees and recitals had been inevitable the moment he had revealed himself as an author.
“If it pleases the hostess, I’m keen to oblige,” he said.
This gained him a grateful nod. “The request is specifically for ‘The Ballad of the Shieldmaiden.’”
“Naturally.”
Just then, the duchess’s gaze slid past him, and he sensed someone approaching.
“Lord Ballentine.” The sweet voice made him go still.
He stood with his eyes fixed on the duchess.
The last time he had spoken to the young woman now hovering by his arm, she had been nothing but an acquaintance. She was considered a diamond of the first water, and he had to be the only man in the kingdom who’d rather not make conversation with her. But the moment had been inevitable. He plastered on a smile and lowered his gaze to meet the sky-blue eyes of his would-be fiancée.
Chapter 17
Lady Cecily.”
She was gazing up at him, long enough that he couldn’t miss the admiration in her eyes, and then she shyly looked away. Then she peeped back at him from beneath lowered lashes.
She had grown into a lovely thing since he had last seen her, with a healthy glow on her cheeks and charming curves that would fill his big hands nicely. Her nose was sprinkled with pale golden freckles, which she had not taken the pain to bleach as was the custom. If she weren’t a lamblike, gently bred virgin, and his intended at that, he could probably muster some interest. A lot of ifs, that.
“Lord Ballentine,” came a reserved voice. Lucie’s mother was flanking Cecily like a thin, cool counterpoint to her niece’s golden sweetness.
“Lady Wycliffe. A pleasure to see you.”
Her gaze snagged meaningfully on his cravat pin—a large lapis lazuli from Kabul. Rochester’s list hadn’t specified anything about cravat pins.
“You are the hero of the hour again, it appears,” she said without inflection.
“I was in the right place at the right time.”
“A useful habit every man should acquire,” she remarked.
Impossible to tell from her expression whether she approved of her husband’s ward being betrothed to him of all people. She had once been his mother’s closest friend, but her fine-boned attractiveness was permanently marred by a vague, deep-seated antagonism she must have cultivated for decades. Not unlike her daughter, except that Lucie’s antagonism was lovingly honed like an arrow and had a clear target.
“I’m so glad you saved the poor creature,” Cecily said softly, “all the ladies here are.”
He suspected she knew about their arrangement—there was something in her eyes that struck him as . . . conspiring. Grand. She shouldn’t be in favor of a match that was never going to be. Had she not been a parentless ward but Wycliffe’s daughter, he doubted the man would have offered her up as his bride. Wards, as a rule, were more easily passed on to a reprobate than an earl’s direct blood.
“Come, Cecily,” said Lady Wycliffe. “We are going to take another turn around the room. Lord Ballentine, you will surely be so kind to regale Cecily with the heroic tale at dinner. She is your table partner.”
“Splendid,” he said reflexively, his gaze shifting to the duchess, who quietly stood by. She was in charge of the seating order. Had she been informed about the whole betrothal business?
Did Lucie know? was the next logical question.
His body tightened with an acute sense of alarm.
Lucie must not know. She would never come near his bed if she thought he was going to marry her cousin.
As he searched the crowd for her icy-blond head, he spotted Lord Arthur’s sulky visage near the Rembrandt on the east wall. Slouching next to the Marquess of Doncaster himself.
He felt Cecily’s intrigue, though she was not really looking at him, and he excused himself to go and have Avi brush the cat hair off his jacket.
Two hours later, he found himself boxed in between Lady Wycliffe and Cecily, and Lucie was three tables away, neatly out of sight in the sea of head
s between them.
Every one of those heads was slightly tilted to the head of the main table, where His Royal Highness Albert Edward, Prince of Wales and future king of England, was seated next to the duke as the guest of honor. The air of the vast dining room was quietly vibrating with hushed excitement as every interaction between Bertie and Montgomery was noted with Argus eyes.
Only Cecily was wholly uninterested in the prince. “It was such a surprise to read that you were behind A Pocketful of Poems,” she said, her big eyes seeking his.
“I imagine.”
She looked like a polished doubloon in a white and gold evening gown, occasionally making a dainty pick at the piece of venison on her plate. Her aunt was unnaturally distracted by her own table partner. Giving the love birds some time to engage in conversation, wasn’t she?
“I don’t remember ever seeing you write anything during those summers at Wycliffe Hall,” Cecily prodded gently.
Had she noticed him at all, then? She had still been a girl during the last holiday he had spent at Wycliffe’s, no older than twelve, all gangly legs and braids.
“Writers often work at night,” he said absently.
He had gleaned that Lucie was seated between the Greenfield heir, Zachary, and Lord Melvin, an outsider in the House of Lords thanks to his overt support of women’s suffrage. Melvin was Lucie’s age and still unattached. They were probably going to flirt outrageously under the pretense of a policy debate or some such. A twinge in his right hand drew his attention to the fact that he was gripping his fork as though he meant to strangle it.
Vaguely appalled by his unnatural preoccupation, he relaxed his grip and forced his gaze back onto Cecily.
“And what do you enjoy doing for a pastime nowadays, Ceci?”
She blushed at being addressed with her old pet name. She sipped her wine and cast him a coy glance over the rim of her glass. “I’m afraid you shall think me forward if I tell you.”
Darling, there is nothing you could do in your lifetime that I would consider forward, he wanted to say. He gave her a smile that came out wolfish. “Try me.”