Lauren Willig - [Pink Carnation 04]

by The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

  I touched a hand lightly to his forearm. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” he said lightly. He didn’t make any effort to pretend that he didn’t know what I was talking about. “It was a long time ago.”

  Two years ago. Not that long, in the grander scheme of things. I wondered if that had to do with why he was so inexplicably single—and why his sister was so painfully thin. Had there been a woman in the picture two years ago, back when he had the flat at Crouch End?

  I couldn’t even begin to imagine what sort of impact the death of a parent might have. Mine were both alive and well, back in New York, to be argued with over the phone, commiserated over with my little sister, and called whenever I needed reassurance, money, or both. I made a mental note to call them when I got home. Not because I needed money or reassurance. Just because.

  “What did you do in the city before you moved?”

  “I was in the City.”

  Hmm. I thought we’d already established that I knew he was in the city. “But what did you do there?”

  “I worked in the City,” Colin repeated. Then, as I stared blankly at him, his eyes crinkled at the corners in comprehension. “Not the city, as in London,” he clarified. “I meant the City. The financial district. Like your Wall Street.”

  Who was it who said that Americans and Brits are divided by a common language? Well, whoever it was, they got it spot on.

  “Oh,” I said, feeling like an idiot. “Right. I knew that.”

  And I did—at least, I’d seen the term before, in books and magazines. The papers were always going on about scandals in the City. It’s just that it’s very hard to realize the difference when you don’t have that convenient capital letter to clue you in.

  “I never realized just how American I was till I got to England,” I confessed. “So you did financial stuff?”

  “Stuff was my specialty,” teased Colin.

  “Come on. That’s not fair. How much do you ever really know about what other peoples’ jobs are?” Warming to my theme, I waved my free hand in the air for emphasis. “I mean, my best friend’s a lawyer, but I have no idea what she actually does, other than that she’s always stuck in the office late, and her desk looks like it was eaten by a giant paper monster.”

  Colin looked bemusedly down at me. “A paper monster?”

  “You know, big piles of paper.” I sketched them out with one hand, like a mime with a nontraditional box.

  “You have a very vivid way of putting things.”

  “Thank you. I think.”

  My compliment fishing went unrewarded. Instead of assuring me that I was the most amusing raconteuse he’d ever met, Colin said, “I know what you do.”

  I shook my hair back and said, just as archly. “Not all of it.”

  “Your secret life of crime?” speculated Colin. “Or are you undercover for the CIA?”

  Considering that it’s what I’d been wondering about him, it made me go redder than I’d otherwise have gone. I did notice that he had very cleverly routed the conversation away from his putative job in the City, and whatever it was he had done since. I’d have to get back to that once we’d had something to drink.

  “Double-O Eloise? I don’t think so. I’m just a humble Ph.D. student, trying to cobble together a dissertation before my committee kicks me out.”

  “Do you enjoy it?” he asked. He sounded like he meant it, like he really wanted to know.

  “Sometimes more than others,” I admitted.

  We had been meandering quite slowly, along a quiet residential street lined with identical white-fronted town houses. Now, Colin slowed entirely to a stop, turning so that he was facing me.

  He smiled right down at me in a way that made my graduate career seem like a purely academic topic. “And right now?”

  “Right now I’m enjoying myself quite a lot,” I murmured.

  Anything louder than a murmur might have broken the fragile shell that surrounded us, that edged out the houses and the parked cars and the bustle of Bond Street just a few blocks away. We stood alone in the glow of a streetlamp, in a moment as round and perfect as the interior of a snow globe. It seemed perfectly natural when Colin reached out a hand to brush a strand of hair away from my eyes and tuck it behind my ear, and even more natural for his hand to linger against my cheek after the hair was safely tucked.

  “Weren’t we going to get dinner?” I asked breathlessly, shoving my hands into my pockets just to make sure I didn’t do something stupid like fling them around his neck. “I mean, if you’re hungry, that is.”

  “I’m always hungry,” said Colin cheerfully, taking the change of subject in stride. “What do you fancy?”

  Him, but that was beside the point. “There’s a little Greek place near my flat if you don’t mind a bit of a walk.”

  I wondered if he’d notice that crucial detail, “near my flat.” Not that I was necessarily planning anything, but…just in case.

  “Lead the way,” he said.

  “I would,” I hedged. “Only I’m not quite sure where we are.”

  Colin gave me one of those “you’ve got to be kidding” looks. “We’re three blocks from Bond Street.”

  “Which way is Bond Street?”

  Colin pointed.

  “I have no sense of direction,” I confessed. “If it were up to me, we’d probably wind up in Edinburgh by accident.”

  “That’s a long walk,” said Colin, completely deadpan, except for the flicker of a dimple in one cheek that gave him away.

  “Trust me, I’ve done worse. Actually, I got lost in Edinburgh once. It’s a good thing it’s not a large city.”

  “Where were you trying to go?”

  “I meant to go to Holyrood House, but somehow I wound up by Arthur’s Seat.”

  “You didn’t climb Arthur’s Seat, did you?” Colin was watching with amused fascination.

  “Noooo. Not then, anyway. That was another night.” I wafted that aside. “On the plus side, I find all sorts of interesting things that way. I stumbled on the Tollgate Museum when I was looking for the National Library.”

  “Aren’t those in opposite directions?”

  “It depends on where you’re coming from,” I lied cheerfully. In fact, they had been in opposite directions from the dorm where I’d been staying in Edinburgh. I’d just gotten entirely turned around and gone the wrong way. But, as I’d said, the Tollgate Museum had been more than worth it.

  “Right.” Colin settled back in the classic pose of the lecturer, weight evenly balanced on both feet, hands up and slightly parted. “This”—he pointed to the right—“is the way to Bond Street. If we walked that way”—he pointed straight up—“we would land on Oxford Street.”

  I rather liked the sound of that we.

  “And there,” he finished up, pointing left, “is Belliston Square. Grosvenor Square is just one over from that. If we keep going this way, we’ll be at Hyde Park.”

  He’d lost me well before Hyde Park, partly because I was too busy admiring the strong shape of his hands as he gesticulated. They were awfully nice hands, broad without being beefy, permanently tanned from a lifetime spent in outdoor pursuits. I’d bet he was a brilliant skier. I already knew he was a rider; I’d seen a picture of him with a horse on his great-aunt’s mantelpiece, looking sunburned, wind-blown, and utterly at ease. It was all my knight-in-shining-armor fantasies rolled into one very human package, minus the armor.

  In order to hide the fact that I’d been so busy drooling over him that I’d paid no attention at all to what he’d been saying, I seized on the bit I did know.

  “Belliston Square!” I exclaimed, with far more enthusiasm than the location warranted. “I was just there today. For the Vaughn Collection,” I explained, pointing it out as we strolled into the square. “Have you been there?”

  “Not for years,” Colin admitted. “I seem to recall being dragged there by my mother as a small child, but I haven’t been since. Serena tried to get me
to go last year, but—” His lips closed very tightly over whatever it is he had been about to say.

  “But what?” I asked, genuinely curious. Museums seldom elicit such violent reactions, unless they’re the sort of museums that have installations of crosses suspended upside down in jars of urine, or photos of men in unnatural poses, which the Vaughn Collection decidedly was not. Gainsborough tended not to go in for that sort of thing.

  Colin shook his head dismissively. “There was a chap—” he began, but before he could get any further into it, his attention was distracted by a man popping up out of the service entrance of the Vaughn Collection, practically under our noses.

  The man was coming up the stairs of the sunken entrance known in the nineteenth century as “the area,” the short flight of stairs that led down to the kitchen, scullery, and servants’ hall. Or, in these days, the bathrooms, the reference room, and assorted offices and storage areas. He was a tall man, with an umbrella clamped beneath one arm and a briefcase in his hand, looking more like a City stockbroker than an employee of an art museum.

  His eyes went instantly to where I stood with Colin, the streetlamp lighting my hair like a flaming brand. It’s hard to inconspicuous when you’re one of the few true redheads in a city of blondes and brunettes.

  “Eloise!” Dempster exclaimed expansively. Umbrella sticking out from under his arm like a duck’s tail, he advanced on me with his free hand outstretched in greeting. “Is there any way I can be assistance? Did you leave something—”

  And then he saw who was standing beside me.

  Colin hadn’t said a word. He had just grown stiffer and stiffer until it was a bit like standing next to a barbershop Indian, a wooden cutout of a man painted to imitate life. His eyes were fixed on Nigel Dempster with a hostility that could only come from actual acquaintance.

  The light from the streetlamp glinted wetly off Dempster’s parted lips as he bared a full set of teeth in a broad smile.

  “Not only Eloise—but Colin Selwick! What a perfectly lovely surprise….”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The barge she sat in, like a burnisht throne,

  Burnt on the water: the poop was beaten gold;

  Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

  The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,

  Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

  The water which they beat to follow faster,

  As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,

  It beggar’d all description….

  —William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, II, ii

  Mary lounged like Cleopatra in the back of Lord Vaughn’s private barge. Reflected light from the lanterns hung on either side of the canopy unfurled across the dark waters of the Thames like silk ribbons as the prow pulled through the water, propelled by the efforts of half a dozen liveried oarsmen.

  In front of her, Letty perched uncomfortably on the edge of her own seat, looking as out of place in her warm red cloak as a plump red hen at a court fete. She and Geoffrey had come along as chaperones, having firmly refused to countenance the notion of Vauxhall without their own protective presence. Aunt Imogen, Letty had declared, would just not do. Mary had accepted their escort with a good grace that caused her sister and brother-in-law to exchange a surprised glance.

  Vaughn had added two others to the party, a widow and her daughter, both attired in shocking shades of purple that warred with the smooth black and silver of the barge. Between Miss Fustian’s exuberant lace flounces and the large, ruffled parasol that Mrs. Fustian inexplicably insisted on carrying, the small cabin felt inordinately crowded.

  The party was crammed beneath the tilt, or canopy, a half-cabin that the whimsy of Vaughn’s craftsmen had shaped in the form of a small Greek temple, with a triangular pediment and two long Corinthian columns fronting either side, their complex pattern of icanthus leaves chased with beaten silver. Above Mary’s head, the underside of the canopy had been painted in faithful reproduction of the night sky, the constellations reproduced in such painstaking detail that one could scarcely tell what was roof and what open sky, nature and artifice blended in brilliant illusion until the reproduction seemed the reality and the reality mere shadow. Rather, thought Mary, like Vaughn himself.

  Along the open sides of the tilt waved long banners of rich black silk, embroidered in silver with Vaughn’s own devise, a serpent contorted in an impossible spiral as it chased its own tail. Below it, on a curling sigil, rang out Vaughn’s chosen motto: Sic Semper Serpentibus.

  It wasn’t, Mary knew, the family crest of the Vaughns. That, immortalized in print in Debrett’s Peerage and in stone along the frontage of Vaughn House, consisted of a modified version of the lion of Scotland (a nice nod to their origins, another of the hangers-on who had followed James I from Scotland to England and been granted an earldom for their pains), demurely licking its paw among a field of gold balls, that the unkind claimed were meant to represent the coins that had come their way through the royal monopolies granted by the intemperate monarch. James I had always had a taste for handsome young men, and by all accounts, the first Lord Vaughn had been possessed of a particularly well-turned calf. The Vaughn motto was something equally mundane, the usual rot about perseverance and plenty, glorified by translation into Latin.

  The silver serpent was Lord Vaughn’s own private device, echoed in the livery of the oarsmen and rearing figure of a reptile at the prow, every scale outlined with painstaking artistry.

  Vaughn had sensibly elected not to cram in with the others beneath the tilt. Standing just beyond the canopy, one jeweled hand resting against a Corinthian column, Vaughn looked every inch the Elizabethan grandee, lord of all he surveyed. While the fashion for swords had ended well over a decade ago, Lord Vaughn still carried himself as though he felt the weight of a hilt on his hip. He stood with a swordsman’s stance, balanced and alert beneath his carefully cultivated air of languor.

  Mary wondered what he had been like a decade ago, before his precipitate departure for the continent. A hot-headed young blood, eager to press his luck on the gaming table and the dueling field? A lace-frilled dandy with diamond buckles on his high-heeled shoes, all die-away sighs and languid airs?

  It was impossible to imagine him as either, as anything other than what he was now, unchangingly, agelessly…Vaughn. A creature of contrasts. Lightless black and flashing silver, heavy lids and alert eyes, seeming indifference and…Vaughn’s eyes caught Mary’s above the purple feathers of Mrs. Fustian’s headdress and something leapt between them that was anything but indifference.

  Mary reclined against the rich velvet cushions like a satisfied cat. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t come to sit beside her, or that he had chosen to stand at the far end of the ship. It didn’t matter that he had scarcely said more than good evening to her since she had climbed aboard. Vaughn, as well as she, knew how to bide his time.

  With smooth skill, the oarsmen drew the barge up beside the Vauxhall Stairs. With murmured thanks, Mary took the hand Geoffrey offered her to lift her up from her seat, but her eyes were on Vaughn, as he helped his guests out of the boat. Now, surely, he would say something, give her some sign. Take her arm, walk with her along Vauxhall’s shaded paths, as lovers had done for decades before them…

  Pleasantly aware of her own fashionable white muslin, she watched as Vaughn’s amused gaze skated over Miss Fustian’s yellow bows and purple net. “My commendations to your dressmaker, Miss Fustian. I have never seen anything quite so…original.”

  Mary watched the silly chit simper in response, too dull to realize she had been insulted.

  At last it was her turn to exit the boat, and she held out a gloved hand to Vaughn with her daintiest air, knowing that her shapely ankle in its fine silk stocking showed to good effect as she lifted her skirts a modest inch to effect her descent. As he handed her down, she glanced sideways up at him, the same sideways glance that had half the young bucks of the ton panting
to get her out onto the balcony. It was a glance she reserved for very special occasions—or very titled men.

  Lord Vaughn never noticed. His attention was unaccountably elsewhere. Not on her ankle—that, Mary could have understood; indeed, encouraged—but on the back of Mrs. Fustian’s feathered head. Two fine lines showed between his brows, like the goal posts in a game of Pall Mall.

  “You have a lovely barge, my lord,” Mary murmured in her huskiest voice, arching one slippered foot to hunt for the ground with exaggerated care.

  Vaughn’s eyes flicked ever so briefly sideways as he handed her over the last step. “Your approbation is, as always, the light of my existence.”

  Mary hit dry land with a thud that reverberated from the bottom of her thin slippers right up through her legs.

  When she turned her head back to Vaughn, to make some retort, something to make his eyes glisten silver with sardonic amusement, she found only the black wool of his back as he reached back to hand down her sister, exchanging snide comments with Pinchingdale about not caring to perform the same office for him.

  He couldn’t very well have simply walked away and left the last of his guests to fend for themselves, Mary reasoned with herself. It would have been bad form. Mary tried very hard to ignore the sharp little voice in her head that persisted in opining that Vaughn wasn’t the sort to let himself be deterred from his desires by social niceties. The logical conclusion to that line of thought—that Vaughn didn’t desire her, in any way at all—didn’t bear consideration. There was last night.

  Pasting a bright social smile on her face, Mary walked up to join the little group that clustered at the entrance to the gardens, as though that had been exactly what she had intended all along. After all, if he wanted her company, Lord Vaughn knew where she was.