by Barbara Metzger, Connie Brockway, Casey Claybourne; Catherine Anderson
“Whether you want to be involved or not, you are,” he returned calmly. “And as my two former aides-decamp, Davidson and Penworthy, have bolted and your brother is in no condition to be able to successfully gauge whether I have fulfilled my part of the bargain, I insist you stand in as his witness.”
“You don’t need to bring your own witness,” she said. “I am certain there will be any number of people willing to attest to your appearance in Pall Mall. I shouldn’t be surprised if it makes the morning papers.”
“I beg to disagree.” He shook his head, a tutor attempting to practice patience with a dull-witted student. “Your brother holds a rather substantial grudge against me. Had you not noted it? If there is the smallest chance he can call me to task, he will take it. What he will not take is my word that I did as I promised. Nor will he be satisfied with a few reports, especially if they cannot verify the fact that I walked the entire length of the street. No, I will need a witness.”
He had her there. Hugh did bear Alex a great deal of antipathy, thinking Alex had betrayed not only her but their friendship. She’d tried to tell her brother that she had been complicit in the events of that fateful night, but he would have none of it. As far as he was concerned, Alex Thorpe should have just taken her out of that ballroom and told her that he’d had enough of her foolishness and married her.
She sighed. That had been exactly what she’d wanted.
They were siblings, all right. Perhaps they shared one mind. That might explain the half-witted plan she had thought would force Alex’s hand. She should have known better. But she’d been desperate.
He’d been due to leave for Russia within a few weeks.
She had told him that it mattered not a whit if he should come back whole or in pieces. So long as the pieces were breathing and labeled “Alexander Thorpe,” she would be happy. It was as close to a proposal as she could make, and he understood it as that, too. He’d been most apologetic, very tender, but in the end too damned proud to allow the possibility that he would bind her to him only to make her a widow or, worse, return to her as a cripple.
So, desperate, angry, passionately aware of the clock ticking away, she had reverted to the time-honored ploy of trying to make him jealous. Instead, she’d only disgusted him.
Yes, she’d had a role bringing about that final scene. But Alexander Thorpe had not been entirely blameless, either. He had publicly denounced her as unfeminine and manipulative.
“Besides, Lucy, as you are the injured party and the bet was made on your behalf, you really ought to be there to enjoy it.” A flash of flint in the slate-colored eyes. Apparently, he held a similar thought about her accountability for that night. Hm.
On second thought, she wasn’t entirely sure she was ready to forgive all, either. Besides, there were now other insults to consider.
In laying the blame for her continued maidenhood on Alex, her wretched brother had gotten it all wrong. Just because he assumed that since Alexander Thorpe deemed her unfit to wed no one would have her didn’t make it so. Plenty of men would have been willing to wed her. She’d had three proposals this season alone. It was she who wouldn’t have them.
But this great towering giant in a dress, looming over her and studying her face with such wolfish intensity, didn’t realize that. Oh, no. She had read it in his guilt-stricken face. He actually thought her unwed state was a result of his comments. The vanity of the man! The hubris!
And right at that moment she decided she did indeed want to go along and watch him stride down Pall Mall in his wedding dress. Not that she had much hope it would damage his enormous ego, but a few well-placed rotten tomatoes hurled by some jeering guttersnipes might make a pleasing sound hitting him upside the head. She might even bring a few herself, to hand out to the crowd.
“All right, Alex. I will go along as your witness.”
“Thank you.”
“But I don’t know who we shall ask to play chaperone . . .” She felt ridiculous as she realized she was blushing.
She hadn’t wanted a chaperone to tend her since her twentieth birthday. She and Alex had always somehow circumvented the rules and done as they pleased, without much concern for Society’s displeasure. But then, she had always assumed that she and Alex would wed. Now, her reputation was a bit more important to her.
“You’re jesting,” he said with a flat look of disbelief.
“Not at all,” she said in an unnaturally prim voice. “I know a woman of my advanced years must seem not to have much to protect, but I would have you know—”
“Don’t be an idiot, Lucy. It isn’t your desirability I doubt. It is my, or any man’s, ability to reach you across that contraption you are wearing. Believe me, my dear, that thing was invented by a suspicious father.”
She had never thought of her crinoline as a chaperone, but now that Alex mentioned it, she could not remember any man ever making any, er, untoward advances when she wore one, and that was odd. Perhaps they needn’t drag some poor woman with them just to appease a few gossips . . .
“All right, Alex, we’ll go, just the two of us. But we will take my coach.”
And her heart, for two years so still, pattered impatiently.
Chapter Six
The mist had grown heavier and the air cool by the time the coachman pulled the brougham carriage to the front of Carroll House. Already it was impossible to see more than a hundred yards down the street; closer to the river it would be thicker still. Not that Alex was disappointed. The fewer people who witnessed his little stroll down Pall Mall the better.
“How in God’s name do you travel in that thing?” Alex demanded as, with a great deal of fussing and maneuvering, Lucy finally managed to get herself and her crinoline inside the carriage. He ducked inside and took the seat opposite her as the coachman—Owen, Alex believed—shoved the block under the seat and, donning a slicker, retreated to his seat atop the carriage.
“I generally kneel in the center, between the seats,” she explained, collapsing the back of her crinoline against the rear wall and settling down beneath the resultant arch. She blew away a flounce hanging down over her face.
“That can’t be very comfortable.”
“Who expects comfort from their fashion?” A little dimple appeared in one of her cheeks. She’d never had that dimple before. But two years had pared the last remnants of girlhood from her face, leaving behind the cleaner and more refined beauty of womanhood. He regretted he’d not been there to see the birth of that small, telling indentation.
She turned up the flickering wick on the small interior lantern, flooding the carriage with soft light. It was a new carriage. Far more sumptuously appointed than the predecessor Alex recalled. The well-padded seats were deeper, upholstered in buttery-soft leather, the floor covered with a dense carpet. Polished brass fittings trimmed the mahogany wood paneling. Heavy doeskin-colored velvet drapes hung over the small glass windows.
With the manner of any good hostess, Lucy flipped up the lid on a box built into the corner, reached in, and withdrew a cut crystal traveling decanter. “Port?”
A nice stiff drink sounded like just the thing. “Please.”
With a gracious smile, she reached back into the box for a matching glass, poured him two fingers’ worth of liquor, and handed it to him. As soon as he’d accepted the drink she reached up and rapped on the ceiling. At once, a little trapdoor opened and Owen’s damp face appeared, pale and moonlike, in the rectangle of dark sky.
“Pall Mall, Owen, and hurry.”
“Yes, miss.” The trapdoor shut, and the carriage lurched as it pulled away from the curb.
She turned her attention to him. “Best get this done and over with, eh?” she said. “Like that bad-tasting elixir my nurse used to give me when I was a little girl.”
Outside, the mist had turned to a light but steady rain. Condensation gathered on the small windows in the chill. She took a deep breath. “I really feel I ought to apologize.”
“Fo
r what?”
“For my brother. I admit I can see Hugh’s making you appear in Great-aunt Sophie’s ballroom, but this does seem a little excessive, even for Hugh. But then,” she continued blithely on, “he took your public humiliation of me most poorly.”
He choked on the mouthful of port he’d just swallowed. “Humil—I did not humiliate you!”
Another smile, but this time the dimple did not appear. “Really? How strange that I have been so deceived. I could have sworn otherwise. Doubtless you know best.”
He waited, and just when he had begun to relax, thinking she would let the matter drop, she said, “Perhaps you would allow me to say, ‘Before you publicly disengaged yourself from me’?”
She was doing it too brown. Yes, he had a lot to answer for. Yes, he had been stupid. But he had not been wrong. She had been leading him a merry dance and he had been trying—and valiantly, he might add—to do the right thing by her.
“For someone who endured public humiliation,” he said, “you took it quite well.”
She tipped her head inquiringly. “Why is it I do not feel this is a compliment?”
“Oh, but it is,” he said. “You were magnificent. Your brother, emotional and overfond creature that he is, nearly called me out on your account. Your great-uncle did call me out . . . on the carpet. And a blistering interview that was, until Lady Carroll intervened and set forth the conjecture, ludicrous though your great-uncle found it, that perhaps I might not be entirely to blame for what happened.”
She flushed slightly. Good. He went on. “My mother swore to disown me and only relented a few days before I set sail for the Crimea. There was some talk of blackballing me from my club. Indeed, everyone was most upset.”
He smiled blandly. She shifted uneasily, avoiding meeting his gaze as a rumble of thunder broke in the distance, like some ancient god-child throwing a celestial tantrum. He could commiserate. The memory of her driving gaily in the park or sauntering past him in the street, meeting his gaze with no more than a haughtily raised brow or a silent laugh, still grated.
“But not you,” he said with dark admiration. “In fact, you seemed to get over your disappointment with unparalleled speed. Why, just four days later, you had only smiles for me when you arrived at the opera on Lord Benford’s arm. In fact, if one did not know otherwise, one might say you evinced nothing short of relief at your ‘humiliation.’
“But one does know otherwise, doesn’t one?” He leaned forward and had the satisfaction of seeing her shrink back. “Or does one?”
The thought that she might have wanted him to break off with her and had actively conspired at it had never occurred to him before. Because two years ago, no matter what else he knew, he’d thought he knew Lucy. She’d loved him. Hadn’t she? Yes. Yes. Damn it!
He started to cross his legs but got all tangled up in the yards of satin and lace. No bloody skirt was going to stop him from crossing his legs! With a growl, he jerked one leg over the other and with immense satisfaction heard the unmistakable sound of ripping seams. He folded his hands lightly on the trousered knee the rent exposed and eyed her expectantly.
“What was I to do?” she asked, rather than answer his question directly. “Spend the evening frowning at poor Benford? Please recall that I am a gentlewoman, Alex, not the martinet you named me.”
He scoffed at that. “Do not try to pass off your lack of feeling and obvious indifference as a virtue.”
“Indifference?” Her voice quivered.
Unfortunately, he was beyond being able to heed the warning flash in her narrowed blue eyes. The poisonous little suggestion he’d fed himself would not be gainsaid. “When Miss Lillian Trent felt herself wronged by Sir Newburton, she did not show herself in public for the rest of the Season,” he announced stiffly, conveniently shoving aside the memory of telling his mother that Miss Lillian Trent deserved her poor treatment if the best she could do in answer to an insult was hide on her family’s estate for a year.
“Oh. I see.” Soft, patient, cool. She’d never had the gift of being able to pretend coolness toward him before. She’d always been a creature of fire: heated replies, scalding remonstrations, burning ardor, and scorching kisses. Sometimes cold, yes, but with an iciness so intense it burned. Never simple coolness.
He hated it.
“I was suppose to spend the evening frowning at you,” she went on as another clap of thunder broke, closer this time. The rain grew harder. “But, my dear Alex, that would have only given you an overblown sense of your importance to me. As well as Lord Benford.”
He wanted to wring Lord Benford’s neck. And who the hell was Benford anyway? Some jumped-up duke’s grandson.
“Added to which,” she continued, “I was even then well aware of the approach of my spinsterhood. I did not feel I had the time to waste making a point regarding my abused feelings that the jeunne fille Miss Trent had.”
“Spinsterhood?” And there it was, instead of shouting like he’d been on the verge of doing, he found himself laughing.
She always made the same mistake in every argument. For as far back as he could recall, whenever she wanted to win a point—which was all the time—she finished her diatribe with some statement that was such a gross exaggeration of the truth that he ended up laughing. As he was now.
She was not laughing. That little crystal-studded toe was tapping out a warning on the carpeted floor.
“Good God, Lucy,” he said. “You are hardly an ape leader.”
Her eyes widened at his laughter, but he thought she was not altogether displeased. She tried a little imperious sniff. She wasn’t going to back off. But then, when had she ever backed off?
“I beg to differ,” she said in a frosted voice. “I am well on the shelf and collecting more dust all the time. Why, any honest member of Polite Society would agree that I was already on my last leg, as it were, when you finished dallying with my affections.”
“Dallying with your—” he sputtered.
“Affections,” she finished for him loudly. “Affections that you dallied with since I came out at seventeen. Which means that you dallied with them for . . .” She tilted her head and went silent for a few seconds. “Why, six years! I was twenty-three when you decided we did not suit. I am twenty five now.”
He took a deep breath. “First, you are not at all . . . dusty.”
“How kind of you to say so.” Her eyes dropped to her lap with every appearance of being modestly flattered, except that she had no modesty and she wasn’t flattered. Who would be at such a backhanded compliment? Damn. Now he had the disadvantage not only of sounding irritable but also of being gauche as well.
This was no way to go about winning her back. Why must she make everything so bloody difficult? Why must he find it so exhilarating?
He would not let her do this to him. “Second of all, I did not dally with your affections, and well you know it.”
She lifted her gaze to his, and for a fleeting second he saw the impish light before she donned a vastly wounded expression and sniffed back a nonexistent tear. Her lower lip trembled—possibly with laughter, though he had the feeling she’d meant to simulate distress.
“Do not say you were”—another sniff, a little gulp—“amusing yourself.”
God help him. He would dearly love to throttle her. Or kiss her. And he couldn’t do either.
“Yes, yes, I admit it,” he said, spreading his hands wide in a symbol of surrender. “Diabolical fiend that I am, I spent six years trailing after you, trapping you in the dark snare of my irresistibility, with but one thought—how could I maneuver you into making a fool of me at Lady Carroll’s birthday party? And waiting eagerly for you to do so again.”
Rather than the amusement he’d expected, the pertness faded from her expression, and she frowned. “Is that how you see it?”
“What?”
“That I made a fool of you?”
His ire faded. “Lucy,” he said, with a twisted smile, “look at me.”
She did so and had the grace to look uncomfortable. “And you, Lucy. Do you really think I amused myself with you?”
“No,” she answered softly. “I just . . . It is just that I never realized that anyone thought I hadn’t married because of . . . of what you said. And when Hugh claimed that I was a spinster because no one would have me . . . Rather than have you think that I was the only one whose reputation had suffered—which it hasn’t,” she hastily added, “I wanted you to think that you, too, had lost some of your desirability as a potential suitor.”
“Which I haven’t?” he asked with a crooked smile.
She blushed at that. He watched in fascination as the color swept over her shoulders and the snowy column of her throat. Would it warm her flesh? Would the curves and vales exposed by her bodice know different temperatures, would the crest be cool and the shadows warm? Would her pulse beat closer to the surface at her wrist, beneath her ear, at the base of her throat? He looked up into her eyes.
Her hand rose and dropped in a quixotic little gesture of exasperation. “Pride. Between the two of us, we have rather cornered the market, haven’t we?”
“Yes,” he said softly, liking this newfound candor, the tacit admission of shared accountability.
They had been so young. So certain they could have their way if only they persisted. War had taught him differently. What had taught her the same lesson, he wondered.
Her smile grew gruff. “I may still have too much.”
The carriage suddenly turned a corner, the wheel skittering on the wet cobbles, banging into the curb. It lurched, tipping sideways, and Lucy, perched precariously as she was, fell forward. Alex reached out and caught her, pulling her into his embrace and cushioning her fall.
“Oh!”
The carriage righted itself, and the hatch flew open, water streaming in. “Everyone all right?” the driver asked.
“Owen,” Lucy started angrily, glaring up from where she rested in his arms, “you’d better take—”
The hatch slammed shut, and the coach continued on.