Well, then. So much for Lord Argosy missing the warm words and advice of his sainted mother. Imagine a wealthy young lord missing his favorite toy. More charitably, she considered that the toy might represent a lost fragment of his childhood, something of his mother to remember.
“It’s a wooden duck one pulls about on a string,” he continued. “Family lore has it a fortune in rubies is stuffed inside.” He said this pragmatically. “I think not—I think they were stolen long ago by an unscrupulous guest of my uncle’s—but wouldn’t it be better to know?”
So much for maternal longings.
“Goodness. I can see how you might like to have the duck, if that’s the case. Do you know, Lord Argosy…this may strike you as a frivolous or unusual idea, but…oh, I cannot say.”
“Please do feel free to share your idea with me, Miss Brightly. I have had many of my own unusual ideas in my day.” He gave her one of his secret little smiles.
Cynthia was suddenly both curious and a little worried about Lord Argosy’s unusual ideas, but she stopped herself just in time from encouraging him to launch into a series of innuendos regarding them. It was imperative she remain single-minded about her own agenda.
Single-mindedness reminded her of a large, bespectacled man who at this moment was dancing with a small blond girl with every appearance of deference and pleasure.
Did he put Lady Georgina under the lens of his questions? Perhaps the very fact that the girl didn’t seem to have acquired any real faults as of yet—no angles of character under which hid secrets, nothing interesting to expose, for that matter, as far as anyone could discern—made her as soothing to Miles Redmond as that spreading green surrounding Redmond House.
She was certainly pretty. If tremendously, monochromatically blond.
Cynthia inhaled deeply and jerked her head away.
“Well, here is my idea, sir,” she confided to Argosy. “I have learned of a Gypsy encampment on the outside of Pennyroyal Green. And as I have longed for some time to—” She stopped; the dance drew them apart briefly. When they were together again she said, “Oh, I cannot say. You’ll think me foolish.”
She ducked her head again shyly, and turned it away from him again just in time to see Jonathan dart an arm out, tap his sister Violet on the shoulder, and dart it back to his side again. He remained straight-faced. Violet swiveled her head to and fro, puzzled, started to frown and stopped herself, as Violet lived in dread of frown lines encroaching.
Cynthia bit back a smile. She would have loved to have brothers to look after and torment her.
“Nonsense!” Lord Argosy was saying eagerly. “I think I know what you’re about to say, Miss Brightly. You would like your fortune told!” He presented this conclusion to her with a patronizing triumph: Feel free to bask in the rays of my insight.
She rewarded him with awe. “Oh! How did you guess?”
“You see, I, too, have always wondered what the future might hold. And the Gypsies—they read tea leaves and the like, and see portents in the shapes of them, and I’ve heard many of their predictions are eerily accurate. My dear friend Mr. Geoffrey Woolsey once visited a Gypsy who saw a wheel in the tea leaves. Three days later, Woolsey lost a wheel from his barouche!”
“You don’t say!” Cynthia breathed.
Argosy nodded his own awe. “And the Gypsies will throw the tarot—fortune-telling cards, you know, with symbols upon them that tell a story about your future—and look at your palm and read things in it about ocean voyages and marriages and children and the gaining and loss of fortunes.”
She knew this much about Gypsies, but she allowed Argosy the thrill of informing her. “Gypsies sound quite accomplished. Do they do all of this out of charity?”
“Good Lord, no. We shall need to pay them. Do you know whether these are the kind of Gypsies who tell fortunes? Or do they paint sorry horses and try to sell them as good ones? Unsavory lot, on the whole, Gypsies are, but they excel as entertainers. We must be careful. I shall protect you.”
“You are too kind, sir. I’m not certain what manner of Gypsies these are, these Gypsies in Pennyroyal Green. That is, if they are the fortune-telling variety. Perhaps—”
“I’ll ask Miles,” Argosy proclaimed. “He knows everything about these parts. He’ll be able to tell us.”
Cynthia wasn’t eager to see the mirth on Miles Redmond’s face when he learned they were on a quest to have their fortunes told. He would know precisely how that had come about. And Cynthia had no real illusions about the Gypsy ability to tell her future.
She would, however, be willing to pay one of her remaining five pounds to a Gypsy to ensure that Lord Argosy’s future included her.
“Perhaps we can arrange a visit to the camp, if they will tell our fortunes,” she said. Arriving, at long last, at her objective.
“I would very much enjoy embarking upon an excursion with you, Miss Brightly.” He smiled again. He had the kind of smile that turned everything into an innuendo. She wondered if perhaps it was something he was born with and couldn’t help.
She returned his smile. She would need to be warm, but not too warm, with Argosy.
She did wonder why he should be concerned about the future. But perhaps his future struck him as so endlessly certain, he would have liked to know if anything at all of interest could ever occur.
“I do marvel that we have a certain amount of serendipity in our favor, sir. Imagine the two of us meeting here unexpectedly at Redmond House, the two of us longing to know the future! Only to discover that the keys to the future may lie but a few miles away, hidden in tea leaves or in our own palms. It’s as though it was meant to be.”
These last words suffused Argosy’s face with a celestial light.
“Meant to be,” he repeated dreamily.
When Lady Georgina curtsied as part of the dance, it was clear to Miles that her modiste had shamelessly glorified her finest assets: her low, silver-trimmed neckline bisected a bosom as plump as two loaves of unrisen bread, and her stays lifted most of it up out of her dress. A man could happily lose himself in there for days.
And yet he wanted to go somewhere to hoard the lingering sensation of Cynthia’s hand upon his arm.
He began to move in the reel, reflexively. Cynthia seemed happily immersed in her conversation with the lordling; she was smiling. Argosy’s laugh could be heard over the music. A pleasant enough laugh. Certainly not like Milthorpe’s.
Nevertheless, it grated over Miles’s sense like a hoe dragged over cobblestones.
“You dance very well, Mr. Redmond,” Georgina said. As he’d forgotten to speak.
“And you lie very prettily,” he said. “I dance passably at best. I’m much too large.”
“Oh!” Georgina colored adorably, and he was momentarily charmed and distracted. “Forgive me. I only meant to compliment you. I am no expert on dancing.”
“Forgive me. I should not have teased you. And I was teasing you.”
Oh, for heaven’s sake. And he’d told his father he could make himself agreeable to a young woman. He could, in fact, given fertile ground for flirting: a sparkle in the eye, a tilted head, a clever word—tinder to his match, if you will. And yet he’d felt less like a suitor than a tutor today as they strolled through the grounds of his home.
A girl with her handsome face and appealing bosom ought to be able to flirt, for God’s sake.
He heard Argosy laugh again.
For some reason it made him want to rush over and kick the man.
Pulled like a compass needle, his head turned. He saw Cynthia’s back as she rotated with Argosy touching her. Her dress fell in fluted Doric folds. Her hair was swept up high, leaving a rectangle of luminous bare skin exposed above the line of her dress, which was closed in the back with tiny buttons. He imagined what it would be like to touch his tongue to each pearl of her spine, to touch his lips to the nape of her neck and see the gooseflesh rise, to know her nipples were peaking—
Mother of God. He su
cked in a breath.
“Your home is very beautiful, Mr. Redmond. I’d forgotten just how beautiful.”
With a Herculean effort, he returned his eyes to Georgina. He stared at her. It seemed impossible that someone should be saying something so politely banal to him while Lord Argosy was touching Cynthia Brightly. “How long has it been since you’ve last visited Redmond House?”
“Five years, three days last spring.” She added with unconvincing nonchalance, “I believe.”
“Ah. I remember now. Your hair was in a braid down your back.” Not wound up like a henge.
“You remember!” She went pinker. “You raced your brothers across the park on horses. You came in second. Lyon was first. Your horse was brown with white stockings.”
“Ah. Did we race?” He was bemused. He’d been forever racing his brothers then. Coming in second sounded about right.
“Yes. You rode so well.”
She said this with such baffling fervor that he didn’t know what to say after that. It occurred to him that she was awkward because her father had ordered her to view him in a new context. Or perhaps she already viewed him in that context. This was an intriguing possibility.
He really ought to teach the girl to flirt.
Argosy laughed again.
Miles jerked his head in that direction as violently as if the man had struck him.
He blinked when he met a pair of brilliant blue eyes aimed straight at him. Held them for a second.
They both whipped their heads back to their partners.
Lady Middlebough worked out her impatience over the keyboards, thumping them soundly. Never had a reel been so very passionate and expressive.
He would go straight to her after this dance and be between her thighs before midnight. He felt his mood begin to ease.
“I find I am very interested in ledibopreta, Mr. Redmond.” Georgina sounded a trifle desperate.
Miles was startled into giving her the entirety of his attention. He’d never heard that particular word in his life.
Ah. Then he understood.
“Lepidoptera?” he guessed. Perhaps she’d had wine with her dinner? “Butterflies?”
“Yes. Lep-i-dop-te-ra.” She gave every syllable careful attention. “Butterflies.” Her eyes were aglow. “You spoke of them today at the picnic. A common blue came by.”
It was undeniably pleasant to be looked at by glowing eyes. If a little puzzling.
Certainly this was a place to begin flirting. “Oh, they’ve beautiful butterflies in the jungle, Georgina.” His voice acquired an intimate storytelling timbre. “Bigger than your fan. Brilliant as”—Miss Brightly’s eyes—“summer skies, or rampion in bloom.”
She giggled helplessly.
He almost sighed. If he could compare Georgina to a butterfly, which one would it be? Not a tropical butterfly: it would be an English one. A dingy skipper, or a brown argus. Uniform in shade, ideally designed to blend into their woodland surroundings.
“My father is terribly interested in all of these things, too,” she said.
Miles was acutely aware of this. “Your father is a man of great intellect and discerning tastes,” he said shamelessly. If only he could teach the man’s daughter to flirt.
“I saw a butterfly in our garden the other day and I could not identify it, and nor could Papa. I thought perhaps that you could.”
Argosy laughed again.
Miles’s vision focused on Argosy’s hand on Cynthia’s arm. An unpleasant sensation sizzled along his spine. Like a flame touched to a fuse. He felt a metallic taste in his mouth.
“Perhaps you could describe it to me?” Miles said, scrupulously polite.
Georgina opened her mouth to reply, but Lady Middlebough ended the reel with a great crash of passion then.
Miles didn’t even bow. He left a startled Georgina and strode across the room straight for Lady Middlebough.
And then, to his own astonishment and hers, and to anyone else who witnessed it, he walked right past her and kept walking until he was out of the front door of the house.
The dancing continued past midnight, and the neighboring guests boarded their carriages happy and rosy and disheveled. But given that Miles was the host of the event, his startling departure from the festivities had not gone entirely unremarked.
“He…might be feeling unwell,” Violet said quietly to the few who inquired discreetly. “The tropical fever returns now and again, you see. He’ll be right as rain soon, straight away.”
The fever hadn’t done anything of the sort in the entire time Miles had been home in England, but everyone nodded sagely and sympathetically. If one was to be unwell, one might as well have a glamorous complaint.
And then Cynthia and Violet went up to bed, and Jonathan, Argosy, and Milthorpe convened over billiards—Milthorpe having assured Cynthia that he’d discussed the target shooting party with Miles.
She hesitated on the threshold of her room. Then ventured over to the window and peered into the corner of it. She knew a peculiar relief that the web was still there and still intact.
Such a fragile way to sustain a whole life: on a web one weaves for oneself.
Then again, it wasn’t much more certain than the way she’d built her own.
She blew gently on the web; it fluttered. The spider scurried forward and then stopped and waved two arms at her, like a gentleman hailing a hackney or a shopkeeper railing at a thieving urchin.
“Sorry to disturb you, Susan.” It pleased her to give the spider a pretty name. “Good night.”
Susan the spider quieted and seemed to regard her for a moment. Then she backed up into her corner and perhaps nodded off. It was difficult to know, given that she was a spider.
Mr. Redmond would likely know.
Cynthia had watched him stride from the room that evening, and she’d felt it almost physically, as though he were pulling her along with him. She pictured him today, steering people away from that grand web.
And she went still, breathless with a rush of understanding: she suddenly saw that Miles Redmond saw the world as little worlds within worlds. Everything—spiders, people, plants that ate animals—were both separate and connected, living the intricacies and beauties and violence of life, woven together like a web.
And this, too, was why, even when he was quiet, when he was still, he seemed to contain worlds. To feel vast.
Because everything matters, he’d said.
Before he’d abruptly left her.
Cynthia gave her head a toss to scramble him from her thoughts. He’d no right to pry, no right to be angry, no right to touch her as though she was something precious and wondrous and aflame, and she couldn’t allow her body to long for him, for she was proud and that way lay disaster, the end of her dreams.
By way of disciplinary action, she went to the wardrobe and took out her reticule. She gave it a shake: it still, of course, scarcely jingled. She reached in her hand to finger her last few pounds.
It was a very effective way to strengthen her resolve.
She squared her shoulders, sat down upon the bed, and like a general reviewing plans for a campaign, trained her thoughts upon Argosy and his fortune and eagerness and flawless good looks and their plans for a visit to the Gypsies, and Milthorpe and his fortune and sincerity and his bray, and considered the shooting party she unfortunately had somehow managed to inspire.
They were scarcely a day into the house party, she thought optimistically. There were almost two entire weeks left. Surely she could captivate one of them. She’d captivated Courtland, after all. The richest prize of all.
And because she’d been good and strong, she surrendered to a moment of encroaching weakness.
She closed her eyes and savored for a moment a particular man’s hands on her in the dance this evening, angry and intimate, devastatingly gentle, precise and wondering. She suspected everything he was, everything he thought, everything he felt, was in the way he touched her. In the way he’d kissed her.<
br />
Oh, God.
She rested her hand on her own smooth shoulder, as if to recreate the warmth of his hand there. To feel what he might have felt. She felt her eyes burning with a want she’d never before known, and knew she could never, ever afford to indulge.
She took her hand away from her shoulder gently, as surely as if it were his.
Then got into her night rail and burrowed beneath the blankets.
She suspected she had no hope of sleeping the night through.
Miles was as surprised as everyone else that he’d left the party. He’d gone straight for Lady Middlebough with one very specific intent—had he bowed to Georgina first, or said thank-you, or anything of the sort? He couldn’t recall now—and moments later he’d found himself outside, at the mercy of another intent.
He’d crunched his way in the dark over the vast circular drive, generous enough to accommodate a battalion of carriages—his mother had visions of the ball to end all balls when Violet was finally wed, and in his youth he’d seen the drive filled before with all manner of conveyances: a ball held for his parent’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, a ball held in honor of Lyon’s majority. Coats of arms of the finest families lined up as far as the eye could see, carriages and cattle washed to a gleam for the occasion, a rainbow of livery on the attending footmen.
There would no doubt be another such ball when he wed Georgina.
He looked up: the rain clouds had dumped their contents and were now parting like curtains on a stage, revealing an achingly clear blue-black sky and a tipped saltcellar’s worth of stars. He thought instantly of brilliant blue eyes gone midnight dark with anger, and a net studded with tiny sparks laid over a dress, and a homely gray cloak and a curtain opening on a performance. Hers.
Every bloody thing made him think of her.
He gulped in the air, hoping it would be cold enough to hurt and to distract him. Whenever he thought of Cynthia Brightly, breathing became both a struggle and a piercing pleasure.
Like No Other Lover Page 11