by Barbara Metzger, Connie Brockway, Casey Claybourne; Catherine Anderson
After winning the bet, Hugh had insisted they all celebrate his great good fortune—and by tacit implication Alex’s misfortune—with rounds of port. One round had turned into two and then three before the bottle was finished. If Hugh had been drunk before, he was well and truly blistered by the time he’d stumbled down the staircase from the attic in the wake of Alex’s lace and satin train. Now, the only thing keeping him from sinking to the floor was Penworthy and Davidson, who stood, one on either side, propping him up.
Poor Hugh, Alex thought. He’d set up the hunt, loosed the hounds, loaded the gun, fired the shot, and here the poor bastard wasn’t even in on the kill. Alex felt a little sorry for him. Until he looked down and realized that some of his chest hairs was poking through the lace bodice.
“Hugh!” With an angry swoosh of her belling skirts, Lucy charged into the hall. Davidson, deciding discretion would be his best course, dropped Hugh’s arm and fled. Wise man.
At the sharp sound of Lucy’s voice, Hugh roused himself enough to open his eyes and stare at her groggily. “Wha—Hm? Tha’ you, Lucy, old girl?”
“Hugh!” Her lips pursed, and a small pointed toe peeped out from under her flounced hem to commence an angry tapping. “Hugh, what have you done? Why is Alex Thorpe dressed in that ridiculous manner? More importantly, what has it to do with you?”
His foolish grin faded, replaced by a sharper rendition, as he struggled to push himself off the wall. Penworthy, the disloyal dog, helped him. “I have recovered the family honor.”
“What family honor? What the blazes are you talking about, Hugh?” Lucy asked, but from the slight paling of her smooth cheeks it was clear to Alex that she at least had a suspicion of what was afoot.
Hugh’s unfocused blue gaze wandered around the crowd choking the entrance to the ballroom until it fell on Alex. “Him! In the dress! He intuned—” He realized his mispronunciation at once and broke off, screwing his face up and studying the ceiling thoughtfully for a full ten seconds. “No, that ain’t right. He impugned your honor. Cast aspirin. Aspirations. No, that ain’t right, either.”
He shook his head mournfully. “Damn it, Lucy, me words won’t come out proper.” He grinned winsomely at his baby sister. She glowered. “Oh, Luce. Come on now . . .” His face suddenly lit with inspiration. “Aspersions! He cast aspersions on your womanhood!” he crowed.
“I’m delighted you’re delighted,” Lucy said dryly, taking hold of his forearm and pulling him away from Penworthy’s support. “Now, enough of this nonsense—”
“No!” Hugh shook her from his arm and stumbled back into Penworthy’s waiting arms. “You don’t understand. I have repaid the insult he gave you.”
“Thank you,” Lucy said, looking anything but grateful. “I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you that by involving yourself in any manner with him you do far more to ensure that the rumor mill keeps grinding merrily away than simply ignoring him would have done?”
“Is that what you’ve been doing?” Alex could not help but ask. She was talking as if he were absent, not five feet away and dressed in a bloody bridal gown. “Ignoring me?”
She glanced at him over her shoulder and turned back to her brother, who was regarding her with wounded eyes. “Can’t ignore an insult such as he gave,” Hugh said sullenly. “Especially what with all the repercussions of his infamy.”
By God, Alex realized, Hugh, drunk as a lord and belligerent as an owl at high noon, was ignoring him, too! He was unused to being ignored. It was unsettling.
“And what repercussions do you think those are, dear brother?” Lucy asked in a silky voice.
Alex knew that voice. It brooked no good for whomever it was addressed to.
Apparently Hugh, even in his drunken state, was not unfamiliar with that tone, either. He reached over, and snagged a cup of spiked punch from the nearest goggle-eyed spectator, and drained it. He replaced the empty cup in its stunned owner’s hand and faced his sister.
“Well, Hugh?”
“Don’t think I don’t know why you ain’t married with a passel of brats clinging to your skirts, Lucy.”
“I wouldn’t begin to doubt your discernment. But, just out of curiosity, exactly why do you think I dwell in my current pitiable unwed and childless state?”
“Him.” Hugh flung a hand out, pointing blindly in the general direction of where Alex stood, apparently no longer an integral part of this little drama. Though how anyone over six feet tall dressed as he was could be overlooked was something of a miracle. A miracle that owed much to the fascination the inimitable and lovely Lucy St. James held over Society.
When Lucy did not reply, Hugh seized yet another nearby cup of courage and finished that off, too. Then, squaring his shoulders, he blinked and plowed on. Poor fool.
“He said that wretched thing about you always having to lead in every dance and him not dancing to your tune anymore and now every likely male in Society thinks you’re some sort of termagant who will strip them of their masculinity if they wed you.” Alex shifted uneasily, not for the first time in the evening uncomfortably aware of the justice of the charges laid at his door.
The poor girl. The poor valiant, dashing girl, he thought wretchedly. He would do right by her. Indeed, it was long past time—
Lucy burst into laughter. Thereby effectively quenching the impulse Alex had been about to heed.
“I see,” she finally managed between bouts of laughter. “Seeing how Alex refused to marry me thereby denying me the pleasure of henpecking him”—another stifled giggle—“you decided to strip him of his masculinity for me?”
Hugh, uncertain why but cannily intuiting that he had just dodged a bullet, grinned delightedly.
“Just so,” he said and toppled forward, unconscious.
Chapter Four
“Hugh did not convince me to put on a dress,” Alex explained stiffly. “We were playing poker. He wagered an enormous sum of money on his hand, but as he had already cleaned me out, I was unable to match it. I offered to write an IOU, but he did not want my money. He wanted my word that should I lose I would put on a dress and appear in public in it.”
Lucy regarded him stonily.
“It was a wager. An enormous sum of money, and the way the cards stood on the table, I couldn’t lose.”
“Huge,” Penworthy confirmed, his hitherto divided loyalties no longer pulling him apart, since one of those commanding them was presently snoozing it off in the Carrolls’ morning room. “He couldn’t lose.”
“But you did.”
“As if I needed anything besides this,” Alex lifted a fold of lace, “to remind me.”
The marchioness of Carroll having finally emerged from the drawing room, made her way across the ballroom to find out what held her guests so riveted. Upon seeing her favorite godson garbed in such a remarkable manner and receiving not a whit of explanation from him at the same time as her great-niece began making loud disclaimers of having nothing to do with it, (and being a St. James and thus knowing this to be highly improbable), she at once insisted that all those involved retire to the library to “sort things out.”
Then, with a loudly intoned, “You disappoint me, Thorpe, you really do,” she had turned and clapped her hands. Once. And because she was as autocratic a lady as ever had been bred, as well as one of the few who still knew how to set a table, the company obeyed her unvoiced command at once and returned to their dancing, leaving Alex, Lucy, and Penworthy to follow her orders.
So they had arrived here, and here is where Lucy had demanded to know how her brother had convinced Alex to don a dress.
“The odds against Hugh winning were staggering,” Penworthy avowed.
“I see. So you colluded to take advantage of my brother when he was so foxed he could not make an informed decision.”
Alex felt his jaw muscles bunch. The entire evening had been a nightmare of reliving his past culpabilities, and she had just added another dollop of guilt to the heap he’d been carrying. One w
ould think that wearing a dress in public ought to buy a little expiation for one’s sins. He knew he shouldn’t have made that bet. It was just that Hugh had made him so damn mad!
“It wasn’t like that at all, Miss Lucy,” Penworthy said.
“How was it, then?”
“Hugh goaded Alex into accepting his bet.”
Oh, God.
“Go and check on Hugh, Penworthy,” Alex suggested. “If you don’t roll him over he’s like to suffocate under all his self-satisfaction.”
“Huh?”
“Go!”
“Oh. Oh! Right!” Without further prompting, Penworthy sprang to his feet and hurried out of the room, leaving Lucy standing in front of Alex, regarding him with unfriendly eyes.
“So, Hugh goaded you into accepting his wager, did he?” she asked.
He nodded. He should be able to handle one fey-looking female. He was a mature adult male, a captain of the cavalry, battle seasoned and capable of cool thought under the most extenuating circumstance. “Don’t you believe me?”
“Of course I do. Just as I am sure you put up a manful resistance to his overwhelming provocation. What did Hugh do that finally tipped you over the edge, shattering your self-restraint?”
Silently, he recited to himself all the names of the battlefields upon which he’d led his men with cool-headed deliberation. Balaklava . . . Sevastopol . . . Inkerman . . .
“Call you naughty names?”
No battleground in the Crimea had ever had Lucy St. James on it. If it had, he would have been lost. He seized her arms and dragged her close to him.
“Yes! I accepted his bloody wager!” he admitted furiously. “Hugh got under my skin. It seems that the St. Jameses have a veritable talent for it!”
Her eyes went wide in surprise, more, he suspected, at the sight of him losing his temper than out of fear. Then he was trapped in her gaze, reliving the past—moments of laughter, heated arguments spiked with passionate rejoinders, the sweet hours of accord, the quality and intensity of being alive that came with being with Lucy. How could he remember and let her go?
But he had to. His fingers were still wrapped around her slender upper arms. She’d made him forget himself, take hold of her person without her leave. Aye, she’d always had the knack for that, too.
He dropped his hands and stepped back. “Forgive me. That was unnecessary. Unworthy of my name.”
A carmine stain rode high in her cheeks, and her gaze slewed sideways, avoiding his. She turned away . . . Disconcerted? Distracted? Had he offended her so greatly? Once she would have laughed at him and told him he thought too much of his name.
“It’s all right,” she said in an oddly flustered voice. He ached to turn her around so that he could read her expression, but he had forfeited that right. No, he had never had it. He’d never laid claim to any rights regarding her, fool that he was!
“No, it’s not,” he said softly. After this evening, everything between them would revert to cool, rife nothingness. Words unspoken, accusations never made, a future left to fade like morning mist. He could barely tolerate the thought.
“Well, you’ve fulfilled your part of the bargain,” she said in that strained, uneasy tone, “and I know that you must be eager to get out of that dress.” Her gaze darted toward him, a hint of her former humor finding its way back into the dark blue eyes. “Fetching as it is.”
She looked away again, her hand uncharacteristically busy pleating and unpleating one of the tulle flounces. “I’m sorry.”
Lord. She’d trumped him as neatly as her brother. He was the one who should be apologizing. He should be on his bloody knees. Begging her forgiveness for how he’d treated her and for whatever ways that treatment had adversely affected her matrimonial prospects. But if he apologized now she would only suspect he did so to reciprocate her good manners. So, instead, he said, “That must have been painful.”
Again, the minx in her made a brief appearance. She grinned. “You have no idea.” Her expression grew remote. “Just as you have no idea how humiliating I find this.”
“I might have some small notion,” he answered, with a telling glance down at the bride’s dress.
At that she laughed. “Well, perhaps we march in step in that matter,” she allowed. “Now, do get out of it. The human eye can withstand only so much dazzling.”
And that was when it came to him, full blown, a battle plan designed to secure once again the lost territory known as Lucy St. James.
“Would that I could,” he said. “Unfortunately, I haven’t yet finished paying my debt.”
Chapter Five
She wasn’t really paying his words much attention; she was too busy filling her eyes with the sight of him. She hadn’t been this close to him since he’d greeted her in that coffee shop five months ago.
Her heart had stopped in her throat when he’d approached. It was probably just as well. She’d been torn between throwing herself into his arms to kiss his hard, unsmiling mouth and weeping for all the pain he’d suffered in Russia, pain attested to by the terrible scar he bore. Instead, she sat as still as a statue, a gargoyle-like smile frozen on her face as she answered his brief queries as to her health and the health of her brother.
And after he’d bowed and left, her friend had placed a glass of water in her shaking hands and applauded her for her aplomb and clucked her tongue over Alexander Thorpe’s audacity. Mary hadn’t any idea. No one did. She’d carefully maintained the manufactured fiction that she was heart-free and footloose.
She had her pride, after all. Oh, yes. The one thing she had without question was pride.
As did Alex.
But now . . . pleasure filled her, and gratitude for the opportunity simply to look at him. His mouth was just as unyielding, the well-shaped features a little sharper, the bones beneath the skin more apparent. His sable-colored hair was as thick, but a few silvery threads wove through its luxuriant darkness. And though his eyes were still that clear, compelling gray, somehow their color now seemed oblique, a little less translucent, as if some of the color had been robbed from shadows. He was only twenty-eight years old.
Had the war done that?
She longed to ask him. She longed to run her fingers through his hair, to cup his hard, beard-rough cheeks between her palms and press her mouth to his, to feel the moment when his restraint cracked a little and his arms pulled her to him and he opened his mouth over hers . . .
Only she had forfeited any chance of that happening.
He was leaner, too, but more muscled. She could see the carved quality in his arms whenever he moved, shifting and bunching in his forearms and across his chest. She glanced away, feeling a little warmth stealing into her cheeks as she suppressed a cynical smile. There were not many men who could rouse a heated response from a woman while wearing a dress.
Not that Alexander Thorpe seemed to be aware of the anomaly. He’d probably forgotten he was even wearing the dratted thing. She would have been tempted to say he was taking her brother’s ill-fated attempt to humiliate him like a good sport, but being a good sport didn’t really enter the equation. Alexander Thorpe couldn’t be humiliated by being made to don a dress. He was so supremely certain of himself, it would never occur to him that anyone would doubt his masculinity.
Poor Hugh, thinking that something as inconsequential as a dress was going to bring Alexander Thorpe low.
“Lucy?”
What had he been saying? She must pay better attention to his words instead of staring like some moonstruck girl every time he smiled. She couldn’t remember seeing him smile since his return. And she had watched for his smiles across the crowds during those concerts and public outings they both attended, where they both assiduously avoided one another. She had watched to see if any woman received the smiles that he had once so effortlessly given her.
She had been more relieved than she had any right to be to discover that none did. At least, not yet. But tonight, she’d won a few smiles from him—grudgi
ng, perhaps, but honest.
She missed making Alex smile. Truth be told, she missed a great deal about Alex. Everything, in fact.
If only they could go back in time and she could undue all those stupid dances with Walter Fitzhugh and in the process undue her even stupider ploys to make Alex so jealous he would finally bend his knee and ask her to marry him. She should have asked him to wed herself since she was so determined they do so before he left for the Russian War. But then, that would have meant unbending her own pride.
Two years ago that had mattered. She could no longer remember why.
“Lucy.” His voice was low, concerned. “Are you feeling quite the thing? You look a little strange.”
“I look a little strange, Alex?” she asked, forcing herself to attend to the present. “I must find you a mirror.”
“Please don’t.”
“I was thinking of something else, hard as that might be to believe of someone faced with such a fashion plate as yourself. Now, say again—why is it you are still in that abomination?”
“I haven’t yet fulfilled my part of the bargain.”
“And what might that be?” she asked.
“I am to walk down Pall Mall at the stroke of midnight when there is likely to be a goodly number of upstanding citizens on the boulevard.” Pall Mall was close to the center of one of London’s most fashionable neighborhoods, where her brother, Hugh, had his townhouse.
“Good God,” she said, growing even more annoyed with Hugh. “Pall Mall is all the way back into the city. That’s ridiculous.”
“I agree. But there it is. I lost the wager, and now I must pay the penalty. And you, I am afraid, must come with me,” he said.
“Me? Oh, no. Not me. I had no part of this, nor do I want any part of it.”