The Earl of Downe leaned casually back against the door of the club, effectively blocking the entrance and resting his good arm on his injured one, which he wore in a sling. After eyeing Alec he reached into his pocket and tossed the hag a half crown. “Best to listen to her,” Downe said with a cynical smile. “Don’t want to bring any bad luck down on the esteemed Belmore name.”
Alec gave his friend a cool look, crossed his arms, and stood there as if he did not give a brass farthing about all the idiotic things the woman said. But even he had trouble looking bored when the woman started prattling on about his love life. Downe, however, was doing a poor job of repressing his mirth, and Neil appeared to be hanging on the hag’s every word.
“Ye won’t be marryin’ the girl ye think ye will, Yer Grace.”
Foolish woman, Alec thought. The announcement was to hit the papers the next morning. Lady Juliet Elizabeth Spencer, daughter of the Earl and Countess of Worth, would wed Alec Gerald Castlemaine, Duke of Belmore. He had made his marriage proposal. Lady Juliet had accepted it, and the business details of their marriage were being negotiated at that very moment. After that, Alec’s courtship ordeal would end.
“Who will he marry?” Seymour asked, glancing back and forth between Alec and the old woman with a worried expression.
“The next girl ye meet,” she said with an odd glint in her eyes. She held up one finger and added, “She’ll ‘ave some surprises fer ye, that she will.”
“I am not going to listen to any more of this.” Alec pushed past Richard, who was laughing, and jerked open the door. Yet over his shoulder he heard the woman’s parting words.
“Ye’ll ne’er be bored again, Yer Grace! Ne’er again.”
Striding across the parquet floor of the foyer, his boots making a series of sharp clicks, Alec pulled off his calfskin gloves with a distinct snap and handed them and his hat to Burke, the majordomo of the club, who in turn handed them to one of the ten footmen waiting to take the patrons’ coats to the valet room where it would be dried and cleaned.
“Good evening, Your Grace,” Burke said, helping Alec out of his greatcoat and handing it to the next footman. “And how are you?”
“He’s annoyed,” quipped Downe, who shrugged his coat off his injured arm and allowed Burke to remove the other.
“I see.” Burke replied in a tone that said he never saw anything, but said the proper thing anyway because that was his job. He took the other men’s garments, according them the same fastidious treatment all the club’s aristocratic members received.
“Somehow I don’t think you do,” Downe said quietly, trying to follow Alec as he strode with athletic ease up the Florentine marble staircase to the main salon.
Seymour caught up with Downe. Eyeing Alec’s broad back he whispered, “What do you think he’s going to do about Lady Juliet?”
Downe stopped and looked at Seymour as if he had left his mind along with his coat at the club’s entrance. “What the devil are you talking about?”
“The announcement. You know as well as I what a stickler he is for propriety. What’s he going to do when the wedding does not take place, especially after his plans have been plastered all over the newspapers?”
“Don’t be more of an ass than you already are.”
“You heard the old woman. She said Belmore wasn’t going to marry Juliet. I tell you I’ve had a bad feeling about that match ever since yesterday when Alec told us the arrangements had been made. Something is not right. I can feel it.” Seymour paused and tapped his fist against his lean chest. “Right here.” He gave Downe a look of pure conviction.
“You need to stop eating that pickled eel.”
Grumbling, the viscount continued up the stairs, stopping when they reached the rose marble columns at the top. He turned and faced his friend. “I don’t give a fig if you believe me or not. You wait and see. Whenever I have this feeling, something odd happens.”
“No girl, let alone one as intelligent as Juliet Spencer, is going to let the Duke of Belmore slip through her fingers. Trust me, Seymour, what that old woman said was folly,” Downe said as the two men entered the grand salon, where Alec sat at his usual table, a steward at his side watching while he tasted a vintage wine.
One quick but subtle nod of approval by the Duke of Belmore and the steward discreetly disappeared.
To those who chanced a look at him, Alec epitomized the English aristocracy. His coat was cut of gray superfine, and the breadth of his shoulders had nothing to do with padding. His stark white cravat was tied with casual elegance that bespoke the precise hand of the best valet on English soil, and his buff breeches clung to the hard thighs of an expert horseman and the long legs of a man whose stature matched the quality of his breeding.
As usual, his square jaw was set, which hinted at a stubborn English nature. His face was handsome, his cheekbones Norman-high, and his nose hawkish. His lips quirked into a hard sensual line that said this man had no softness in his life; his was a heart untouched. His hair, though it had once been black, was now generously streaked with silver gray, a fact that had nothing to do with age but instead with the strength of the Castlemaine blood.
For the last seven generations, the Dukes of Belmore had gray hair before they were thirty. Also, all of them had married in their twenty-eighth year, a Belmore tradition, and sired their first child—always male and the heir—with great dispatch. It had been said that fate seemed to cater to the Belmore Dukes. And Alec, it seemed, was no different.
The Earl of Downe slumped into his own seat. Seymour sat too, fidgeting with an empty wineglass while his boot tapped an aggravating tune on the table leg. He muttered something about fate and destiny and Alec, not necessarily in that order.
Alec signaled the servant to fill Seymour’s wineglass. “Here, drink some wine so you’ll stop that infernal mumbling.”
“What’s wrong, Belmore?” Downe asked, innocently staring into his glass. “Worried about the future?”
He looked up at Alec, his real concern for his friend tinged with a bit of amusement.
Alec slowly sipped his wine.
“He should be worried,” Seymour said. “I am.”
“You worry enough for all of us,” Alec replied nonchalantly. “I’m not worried, because there is no reason to be. Our solicitors met this morning to agree on the marriage settlement. The newspaper will carry the announcement tomorrow morning, and in a month I’ll be leg-shackled.”
“The arrangements, then, are clean, precise, executed without a hitch. Exactly the way you prefer things done.” Downe lowered his glass and shook his blond head. “I don’t know how you manage it. Lady Juliet Spencer is the perfect future Duchess of Belmore. You come to town, attend one ball, and in two minutes you find the ideal woman. I’d say you had fine luck, but then, you generally do have all the luck.”
Alec shrugged. “Luck had nothing to do with it.”
“What did? Divine intervention?” Downe gave a sarcastic laugh. “Did God talk to you, Belmore, as he does to Seymour?”
Seymour took immediate offense. “I never said God talked to me.”
“Then I was right. It was the pickled eel.”
“I hired someone,” Alec admitted, deftly putting an end to another of Downe and Seymour’s petty arguments.
Downe sipped his wine and set it down. “Hired someone to do what?”
“To find the perfect woman.”
Both men stared at Alec in disbelief.
He set his glass down and leaned back against the tufted chair. “I contacted the firm that handles most of my London business. They did some investigating and then sent me Juliet’s name. It made perfect sense.”
There was a long pause before either of the other men spoke. Then Downe said quietly, “I wondered how you found her so quickly that first night. For months now I’ve been telling myself it was just the Belmore luck. Now I understand. You paid someone to find you a wife.” The earl stared into his glass for a quiet moment. “Efficient, Belmore, but col
d.”
“One should think with one’s mind, not one’s gut.” Alec calmly sipped his wine. “Cold or not, I couldn’t care less. I need a wife, and this seemed like the simplest way to acquire one. It was good business.”
“Good thing she’s easy on the eye,” Seymour commented. “You could have ended up with Letitia Hornsby.”
As if uttering the chit’s name would conjure her up, Richard suddenly looked ill.
“I’ll leave her for Downe,” Alec said, knowing that Richard was not comfortable discussing Letitia Hornsby, a girl who was so enamored with Downe that she was forever following in his shadow. Taunting his friend about the Hornsby girl was a bit of gentle revenge for the episode with the old woman outside.
Taking Alec’s lead, Seymour smiled broadly and added, “That’s right. Seems everywhere you go, that Hornsby brat is hovering nearby.”
“ Hovering is not the word I’d use.” Downe rubbed his injured arm and scowled.
Seymour burst into laughter, and Alec’s eyes glittered with amusement, for they both had been at the Seftons’ Christmas ball when Letitia Hornsby fell out of a tree in the garden and landed on Downe and his mistress, Lady Caroline Wentworth, who were in the process of doing that which they did best. The silly chit had dislocated the earl’s shoulder.
“Actually, Letitia Hornsby ain’t a bit hard on the eyes,” Seymour said with a laugh. “She’s just hard on your body, Downe.”
After a more of Seymour’s teasing, Downe pointedly changed the subject back to Lady Juliet’s fine looks.
Alec set his wineglass down. “Beauty was one of the requirements on my list.”
“Just what else was on that list?” Downe asked.
“Excellent bloodlines, good health, gentle ways but also a bit of spirit—the usual things a man wants in a wife.”
“Sounds like you’re buying a horse.” Downe poured himself another glass of wine.
“I’ve always thought English courtship ritual wasn’t much different from horse trading—just longer and more tedious,” Alec replied, remembering the rides in the park, the balls and fetes he’d had to attend while courting Juliet. In his opinion it was just a nuisance, a way of announcing to the nosy world of the ton exactly what one had planned. “Is Almack’s or some chit’s presentation ball any different from the Newmarket auction? Each season’s new batch of females is paraded in front of prospective buyers, and you check the bloodlines, the gait, the color, and you look for enough spirit to keep you from getting bored—just as you’d do before buying a horse. Once you’ve found a suitable one, you buy it and ride it.”
Seymour choked on his wine and Downe laughed out loud then asked, “Did you check her teeth?”
“Yes, and her withers and hocks,” Alec added, never cracking a smile as he picked up a deck of cards. Downe and Seymour were still chuckling when he deftly dealt the cards.
An hour later the note came.
A footman stood at Alec’s left holding a silver tray with a vellum note in its center. As Downe dealt, Alec casually opened the note, noticing that Juliet’s initials were pressed into the wax seal. He unfolded the paper and began to read:
Dear Alec,
I thought I could do it, but I cannot. I had thought I could live without love, for you are basically a good man. I thought I could trade joy for a title. I thought I could be practical and pick fortune over happiness.
I cannot.
I realize I could not bear the boredom of life as the Duchess of Belmore. For while you are, as I have said, a good man, with all to offer, there is no life in you, Alec.
You are predictable. You do that which is expected of you because of your own consequence as the Duke of Belmore. The precious Belmore name is first and foremost in your life. I want more, Alec.
I want love. I’ve found it. Although he is only a second son and a soldier, he loves me. As you read this I will be marrying the man who has given me those things.
Regretfully,
Juliet
Slowly, with quiet precision, Alec tore the note to pieces and dropped the scraps onto the silver tray. He stared at his friends for a moment, absently rubbing his coat pocket, then stopped abruptly, as if he’d suddenly realized what he was doing, and let his hand slowly slide up and down the stem of the wineglass. He told the servant, “No reply.”
Raising the glass, he sipped his wine, as if the message held nothing of importance, then picked up his cards and stared at his hand, his blue eyes darker and a bit narrower than usual, his jaw a little tighter than before.
He played through that hand and three more in stony silence. When the deal passed to Seymour, Alec requested pen and paper. When it arrived, he scribbled a quick note, sealed it with wax and stamped it with his ring. Then, he quietly instructed the footman to send the note to the newspaper.
His friends watched him curiously.
Alec leaned back in his chair, his hands steepled in speculation near the hard line of his mouth. After a minute, his hands moved beneath his jaw. “It seems the filly has more spirit than I thought. She’s bolted. I am no longer betrothed.”
“I knew it!” Seymour slammed his fist on the table. “I knew this would happen. The old woman was right.”
“Why?” All evidence of cynicism had disappeared from Downe’s face, replaced by a flash of surprise.
“Nothing important. Whims of a woman.” He said no more, yet both of his companions waited and watched. The Duke of Belmore showed no emotion. “Deal the cards.”
For the next hour, Alec methodically and ruthlessly played his hands, winning every game with the calm and composed determination of a Belmore Duke.
“I’ve had enough.” Downe threw his worthless cards on the table, and Seymour followed, eyeing with envy the fifteen stacks of chips in front of Alec.
“Where to now?” Downe said.
Seymour stood, bracing his hands on the table and leaning closer to Alec as if in warning. “Remember what the old woman said? She said you will marry the next girl you meet.”
“That’s right. Why not pay a call on Letitia Hornsby, Belmore? Would save me further serious injury.”
“It is nothing to jest about,” Seymour said with indignation.
“Of course not, he’s the Duke of Belmore. He never jests about anything.”
Alec stood up abruptly. “I’m leaving. Are you two coming?”
“Where?” they asked in unison, then followed him downstairs where they donned their coats.
“To my hunting lodge.” Alec pulled on his gloves. “I need to shoot something.”
Following his long strides across the foyer, Downe turned to the viscount. “I don’t know why he intends to go to Glossop. There aren’t any women within fifty miles of his lodge.”
“Remember what the old crone told him?” Seymour said, rushing to keep up. “I’ll wager he’s going there because there aren’t any women within fifty miles. Doesn’t he know he can’t change destiny?”
And they followed Belmore out the door.
Joy stomped on the burning paper with a vengeance. “Beezle . . . Look what I’ve done!”
She bent down and picked up the charred piece of paper, then straightened up, dangling it between two fingers. It was still smoking, and the lower right corner was completely burned off.
“Oh, my goodness . . . ” Her words tapered off, and her voice cracked a bit as she stared at the burned paper.
Beezle lifted his head up from his black paws and peered at Joy. His eyes darted back and forth between the paper and her sad face.
She dropped the paper on the table and with a sigh of defeat sank onto the wobbly stool, shaking her head in self-disgust. “I’ve done it again.”
With a resigned sigh, Beezle stood and waddled across the table, then crawled onto her shoulder and wrapped himself around her neck. Once settled, he began to paw the loose brown curls that had escaped her chignon and now framed her delicate jaw.
“What shall I do now?” She looked at him as if e
xpecting advice. He stopped playing with her hair, dropped his chin to her shoulder, and wheezed. “So you have no answers either,” she said, absently scratching his neck while she stared at the paper. Luckily, her aunt had left a couple of hours ago—left with all the speed and elegance of a MacLean witch. It hadn’t taken Joy long to persuade the MacLean to accept the position in America. She had wanted to do so, and Joy wouldn’t have been able to live with herself if her aunt had been forced to miss this opportunity because she had to stay and play nursemaid to her niece. She was twenty-one—old enough to be on her own. And she had discovered that her aunt was right: when she concentrated— staring at the words on the paper helped —she was able to cast some effective spells.
Before her aunt left, she had stood over Joy as she copied the incantation that would send her to the cottage in Surrey. The MacLean had warned her that travel incantations needed particularly deep concentration. Her aunt listed a whole slew of techniques to use while Joy had conjured up a traveling outfit—the latest from a set of plates her aunt had picked up in Paris. Joy suspected that the clothing was the final test, but she’d passed, probably because she’d kept staring right at the color plates.
With little more than two snaps of her fingers she was wearing a lovely willow green cashmere traveling costume, a corbeau pelisse, and black calfskin half boots. In her hand was a forest green silk bonnet with pale green velvet ribbons and deep violet ostrich plumes. The ensemble had done the trick. Her aunt had smiled approvingly, kissed Joy good-bye, and left in a puff of sparkling golden smoke.
Then Joy’s trouble had started. To better see it, she had held the paper with her travel incantation just a bit too close to the candle. The next thing she knew, it was on fire. Now here she was, a short time later, with part of her travel spell gone up in flames.
“I think I can read some of it. Let me see . . . ” She smoothed the paper out on the table and squinted at the writing. “Snow . . . go. Speed . . . heed. Door . . . hmm. I can make out everything but the last line. I seem to remember that it had something to do with chimes . . . or was it bells?”
With This Kiss: A First-In Series Romance Collection Page 3