Cordelia glanced up and inadvertently intercepted the sultry gaze of Lord Lanford. The gazes of men tended to do that as they passed her; they heated and melted, as though held to a candle flame. She nodded absently in acknowledgment, and turned her head toward Lady Tremaine once more. Cordelia had begun to take this for granted, the fact that her position meant that her beauty could be used as a shield, a means of intimidation and not just as a means to an end. She had been an orphan and destitute, and at one time her beauty had been her only source of power. She had learned to wield it nimbly, but men were always stronger. A persistent man weary of her sweetly worded dodges could pin her down and take her by force. Before Hutchins entered her life, her beauty had brought her an inordinate amount of grief.
One could not pin down a duchess and take her by force. Or rather, one could not pin down an unmarried duchess and take her by force. If she were married, her husband, of course, would have the right. Cordelia intended to remain unmarried, and she intended to remain a duchess.
This aim, however, was now threatened by the fact that the Duke of Dunbrooke had arisen from the dead and was now ricocheting across the English countryside with a redheaded girl in tow. What did Roarke intend to do? Appear, a veritable English Lazarus, at Keighley Park, rally the servants, and undertake a coup to depose her? Was Roarke even aware that she had married his brother? Perhaps he considered the fat old pawnbroker’s comments mere blithering. Perhaps he had thought to himself, “The Duchess of Dunbrooke, my left foot. That’s just my mistress, you old sod.”
Cordelia knew better.
Viscount Grayson returned Lorelei to them with a bow, and almost by magic Colonel Pierce appeared and led Lorelei out onto the floor again. Cordelia wondered if Lady Tremaine noticed how animated Lorelei looked in Pierce’s arms, how comfortable and happy. Two balls in two evenings, and Lorelei had danced several dances at each with Pierce.
Ah, it seemed Lady Tremaine had noticed; she watched them take the floor together, her mouth opening as if to say something, then closing again immediately in a tight little frown.
Feeling slightly mischievous, Cordelia could not resist a tiny goad disguised as reassurance.
“He has forty thousand pounds a year, you know,” she said to Lady Tremaine, who, mercifully, momentarily, had gone quiet with dark thoughts. Cordelia gracefully and subtly gestured with her fan to the “he” in question, Colonel Pierce.
“Yes, but no title,” Lady Tremaine replied. “Lorelei’s father very nearly has forty thousand pounds a year. Quite fortunate in his investments, you see.”
They both donned bright smiles when, as if on cue, Sir Henry Tremaine rejoined them. He quietly deposited a minor piece of gossip in his wife’s ear, something about the daughter of a friend of theirs, and left them once more.
Forty thousand pounds. Good heavens, Cordelia thought. Edelston had known what he was about, then, when he had ensnared the Tremaine girl. She was fairly certain Viscount Grayson’s fortune didn’t even approach thirty thousand pounds.
The Dunbrooke fortune, on the other hand, exceeded forty thousand pounds by far. In the capable hands of Melbers, who had been the only person who seemed to care a fig for the Dunbrooke finances and investments and who had been given a free rein to do what he liked with it by Richard, it had grown like a weed, extraordinary expenses notwithstanding.
Cordelia absently fingered a fold of her gown, one of those extraordinary expenses. A midnight blue silk overlaid with gossamer-fine gold tissue, edged in tiny embroidered gold flowers, cut deeply at the neckline. A necklace featuring an enormous sapphire in the shape of a tear stopped just short of vanishing into her bodice between her breasts. It drew male eyes like a magnet, as she had known it would. Suddenly the very fact of this bored her; she had a bizarre impulse to tear the thing from her neck and fling it into the chandelier. It was a far cry from a gold locket. That stupid, stupid gold locket.
After giving his report this afternoon, Hutchins had asked her very simply, very quietly, what she wanted to do. Cordelia usually found the very absence of emotion in Hutchins’s delivery reassuring. But this afternoon, this particular “What do you want to do?” had fallen on her ears like a death knell. She could sell the Dunbrooke jewels and steal a good portion of the Dunbrooke fortune and disappear, perhaps to Italy, leaving scandal in her wake. But the continent was a small one; she would be located, she would be known.
In the midst of her reverie, her fingers fluttered up to touch her sapphire, and she was jolted back to the present, a ballroom full of spinning couples and chattering matrons and ogling men. Something about the solidity of the gem, of all it represented, focused Cordelia’s careening thoughts.
The Duchess of Dunbrooke was the invention of a lifetime, and Cordelia feared she had no energy left for another invention, and no will to begin again in any other fashion.
“Forgive me, but I need some time to think,” she had told Hutchins this afternoon, faintly. “I shall have an answer for you this evening.”
And now she did have an answer for him. Passion and sentimentality were foolish indulgences at this point in her life. She must be practical. Which meant she must remove Roarke Blackburn from her life. Permanently.
Cordelia glanced up suddenly, sensing an intent gaze upon her, and saw Edelston across the ballroom. He was leaning against a pillar, and not surprisingly, his fine eyes were fixed on her sapphire and on the snowy swell of bosom that cradled it. A rare involuntary smile leaped to her face, accompanied by a peculiar and unexpected sense of relief. The greatest luxury in Cordelia’s life, greater by far than gowns and jewels and London townhouses, was being understood. Edelston understood her and, to her continued bemusement, failed to judge her. He was, she supposed, the closest thing she had to a real friend in the ton. No matter that the now-habitual haunted look on his face seemed to drain the very light from the room. She was delighted to see him.
Deftly she tapped the arm of Charlotte, Lady Caville, a beanpole topped in plumes who was drifting by, with her fan.
“Lady Caville, may I introduce you to my dear friend Lady Tremaine?” Thus having procured a substitute for her presence, Cordelia made her way over to Edelston.
“You will make all the young girls swoon from the romance of it all, Tony, if you go about with that look of torment on your face.”
“Hello, Cordelia.” Edelston bowed low, which Cordelia knew afforded him a better view of her bosom on the way down. “I fear the mamas of those young ladies have all been forewarned about Lord Edelston and his desperate need of a fortune.”
“And of Lord Edelston’s engagement.”
“And of Lord Edelston’s engagement,” Edelston repeated, with a touch of bitterness. “It matters not. They are all boring. They are none of them Rebecca.”
“Even that one?” Cordelia gestured to a brunette minx with enormous dark eyes who was casting a saucy look at Edelston over the shoulder of her dancing partner. “She has the look of a budding adventuress.”
Feature for feature, Edelson was still the most handsome man in the room, Cordelia assessed objectively. He would likely be the recipient of a number of saucy looks before the evening was over.
Edelston’s eyes followed the young lovely about the floor for a spell, and he couldn’t disguise the speculative interest in his eyes. Still, he repeated, “They are all of them boring.” Cordelia had the faintest suspicion that he was attempting to convince himself of this.
“Tell me, Tony,” Cordelia said. “Is it Rebecca that you yearn for, or is it the idea of Rebecca?”
Edelston stared at her openmouthed for a moment, indignant. “What on earth do you mean?”
“Is it that Rebecca is particularly enthralling, or would you be just as enthralled by any young girl who managed to slip your grasp?”
Edelston frowned. “It is Rebecca,” he said firmly.
“Say the word, Tony, and I can find you another heiress, despite what all the mamas know about you.”
“It is R
ebecca,” he repeated stubbornly, but the conviction in his voice was, in truth, wavering. Cordelia knew his thoughts: what a relief it would be to not deal with all of his creditors, to spend freely and recklessly again as a young man was meant to do.
Cordelia nodded, her face unreadable, a slight smile playing on her lips.
“How are you faring, Cordelia?” Edelston asked suddenly. “You look . . . very well, indeed. But a trifle pale.”
Cordelia gave a start. Imagine Edelston noticing such a detail. A gentleman would never dare suggest a lady might not be in the pink of health, but a friend would. Cordelia was so absurdly touched that, for a moment, she could not find words to answer. She felt her cool, ironic smile, that faithful tool of her disguise, falter.
“I remain somewhat distraught, Tony, but I am well enough, thank you,” she managed to say glibly, regaining control of her face. How could she possibly explain Roarke Blackburn to him, even if she wanted to, in the middle of a crowded ballroom? “How do you fare?”
Edelson glanced over his shoulder before responding to determine whether any interested ears were pitched in their direction.
“My creditors are haunting me at every turn. They await me on the doorstep of my house, at the entrance to my club. No doubt one of them is standing outside in the street at this moment, awaiting my emergence. And my fiance´e apparently despises me, and is missing.” He concluded this recitation with a fatalistic shrug.
Cordelia knew not where the impulse came from, but suddenly she wanted to give to Edelston the thing he wanted most, if only to take the shadow from his face. “Tony, may I ask you a delicate question?”
A wicked half smile touched Edelston’s lips. He and Cordelia had struck numerous indelicate poses together in the past; delicate was not typically a word they associated with each other.
“Ask away, Cordelia.”
“You must promise not to impugn my honor when you answer.”
“I promise.”
“If Rebecca has, shall we say . . . surrendered her honor to this Irish groom, this Connor Riordan, would you still want her back?”
Edelston recoiled as though struck.
“She would not do such a thing.”
“Still, if perhaps she was expertly seduced . . . we are all of us human, you see . . .”
But this was the rub precisely, and Cordelia knew it; Rebecca had become an icon in Edelston’s head, something other than, or more than, human.
“Have you heard anything?” he demanded. “Has she been . . .” He shook his head roughly. “I would still want her,” he said stubbornly. “Let us not speak of it further.”
Who was this young woman, to inspire such nearly unthinking devotion? Cordelia pushed the fresh twinge of jealousy away; she hated how the feeling weakened her.
“I have heard something, Tony,” she said slowly. “And I will do what I can to ensure that Rebecca is restored to you shortly, with the help of my assistants.”
Edelston turned his head her way. His eyes were still bright with hot emotion, but as they looked at her, taking her in, they softened, and his head cocked with curiosity.
“Cordelia, you would do this for me?” His gentle words surprised her. She had expected him to pounce on her words with enthusiasm, to demand news of Rebecca.
“I—” She sputtered to a stop.
“Even in light of the locket?”
Cordelia felt an inexplicable flush rise in her cheeks. “It is nothing, Tony, really.”
Edelston, ascertaining first that the pillar blocked them from the view of the people milling about the ballroom, reached out and drew a finger along the silky skin just above the neckline of her gown, then brushed his hand across her breast as he dropped his hand to his side again. He could feel her nipple stiffen against the silk.
“You look a trifle peaked, Cordelia,” he murmured. “Perhaps you should plead a headache, and I can escort you home?”
Cordelia was in the mood to be held by a man who wanted her, and if Rebecca Tremaine and Roarke Blackburn were specters in the room, it mattered little, at least for tonight.
“I will make my excuses to the Tremaines,” she said, and it was done.
Connor awoke with a start and lifted his head abruptly, a motion he immediately regretted. The throbbing in his head now rivaled the throbbing in his arm, and when he moved it felt as though a collection of billiard balls were colliding violently in his skull. In some respects this could be considered a good thing, as the pain in his arm was now much less severe, at least in contrast.
A fire was leaping merrily in the grate, and the warmth and gentle light felt wonderful. He slowly, gingerly moved his eyes, mindful of not disturbing the billiard balls, until they lighted upon Rebecca. She was sitting at the oak-plank table near the fire, and she had roped her hair back with what looked like his cravat. Her shirt was filthy, the white now officially a dingy gray, and her left cheek sported a great black smudge roughly the shape of Italy. She had gotten the fire started on her own, but not without some struggle, it seemed. Her head was bent intently over something. Looking at her, Connor was suddenly overcome with a sense of peace so alien he felt oddly disoriented, as though the boundaries that normally surrounded time had dropped and left him floating.
And then he saw what she was reading.
“Oh, no,” he blurted before he could stop himself.
Rebecca’s head jerked up from her Herbal, and he watched concern and then satisfaction flicker across her face as she ascertained once more that he was not at death’s door.
“Oh, no, what?” she asked.
“Ye shall not go experimenting with any of those potions on me, wee Becca.”
“But your whiskey cannot last forever, Connor, and the woods outside are full of wonderful remedies for pain. Why, if I had a little henbane—”
“You’d likely use a pinch too much and either send me to my reward or turn me into a toad, and then you would be lonely, indeed.”
Rebecca gave him such a look of pitying condescension that Connor smiled. Already she seemed more like a doctor.
“The receipts include careful measurements, Connor, and dosages for people of different weights. How do you suppose Dr. Mayall arrived at the receipts if he did not actually use them?”
“He was an Englishman. He experimented on enemy soldiers, no doubt.”
Rebecca rolled her eyes. She finally lifted her head up from her beloved new book and gave him a long look.
“Connor, you look dreadful,” was her verdict, delivered with some trepidation. “Are you feverish? I will make some tea.”
“I likely look worse than I feel, wee Becca. For example, you, my fine lady, look like a chimney sweep at the moment.”
She grinned mischievously, showing her dimples, and Connor, inspired to impress the chimney sweep, made a great show of standing up.
Oh, dear God. His stomach heaved and the ground swayed and a cold sweat rained over his body and if he didn’t lie down again immediately he would collapse into Rebecca’s arms in a very embarrassing faint.
Connor stretched his body back out on the floor as gently as he could and closed his eyes, waiting for the world to still.
When he opened them again he found Rebecca kneeling over him, pale and anxious. He offered her a wan smile. Lord, but she was a sight, lithe and blessedly real in her filthy clothes. He took a breath, and the scent of her rushed into him, sweat and soot and something wild and green and earthy that was Rebecca’s alone.
Rebecca reached for his hand to check his pulse.
“Connor, please, do be still for now. You need to rest. You’ve lost a good deal of blood.”
“And gained a good deal of whiskey.” Connor closed his eyes. He was enjoying the feel of her fingers pressed against his wrist. What a woman she had become, so fearless. They were silent together a moment; he could feel his heart beating against the press of her fingers.
Those fingers. A secret touch in a dark room in Sheep’s Haven, a moment almost e
xcruciatingly erotic. Because of its innocence, perhaps.
No. Because it had been Rebecca.
What the bloody hell was wrong with him? Connor moved his feet restlessly.
At last, Rebecca took her hand away. “I will make you some tea. But you need broth, and all we have for food are these meat pies. How can I get some fresh meat to make a broth?”
Connor opened his eyes. “Put a pot outside the door. A wee squirrel will no doubt oblige you by unbuttoning his fur coat and climbing in.”
Rebecca scowled at him. Connor felt contrite, but only a little.
“Wee Becca, it is true I am injured, but it is also true that I am still a bit drunk, and it’s the whiskey now that’s making me more ill than the hole in my arm, this I promise you. Tea is what I need, and more sleep, so we can be on our way in the morning.”
“We are going nowhere in the morning,” Rebecca said firmly.
“We cannot stay here.” He was deadly serious.
“You said no one knew of this place.”
“No one would dare come near it, because my fath—” He caught himself in time. “It is legend that the gamekeeper would shoot any trespassers. This is Dunbrooke land. But the land has been neglected for many years now, and there is no longer a gamekeeper.”
Connor searched Rebecca’s face for signs of suspicion, for something that indicated she had noticed his slip.
She was silent for a moment, a tiny furrow forming between her eyes.
“How is it that you are so familiar with Dunbrooke land, Connor? Isn’t the Dunbrooke fortune the largest in all of England?”
“I lived near here as a lad.”
“But . . . you’re Irish.”
“My da worked near here, ye see,” he said quickly, after a pause that he hoped was barely discernible. “Still, we cannot be sure that it is safe.”
Oh, how deft he was becoming at evasion. Safe, it would have been, had not his former mistress somehow become the Duchess of Dunbrooke and taken it upon herself to have them ambushed at every turn. Safe, they would have been, but he could not be certain that Marianne Bell knew nothing of the hunting box. She had been married to his brother, after all.
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