Slightly Dangerous

by Mary Balogh

  The two of them walked away, arm in arm.

  Audrey looked at Christine and grimaced. “Oh, dear, the battle lines have been drawn, I’m afraid,” she said. “You surely cannot resist such a challenge now, though, can you, Christine? You simply must win my money back for me.”

  Rowena Siddings slid an arm through Christine’s as they made their way to the drawing room.

  “How ridiculous we all are,” she said. “Shall you and I participate in this wager, Mrs. Derrick, or shall we keep our distance and admire the great man from afar?”

  “I believe I shall keep my distance and laugh at him from afar if it turns out that he is as pretentious and toplofty as he is reputed to be,” Christine said. “I do not admire greatness that has no substance.”

  “How splendidly brave of you.” The girl smiled. “To laugh at the Duke of Bewcastle.”

  Or at herself, Christine thought, to have been drawn into all this secretive, girlish nonsense when all she had had to do was give Melanie a firm no at Hyacinth Cottage the day before yesterday or Audrey a firm no in the sitting room.

  But she had no one but herself to blame, she conceded ruefully.

  3

  THE DRAWING ROOM WAS ALREADY FULL OF GENTLEMEN. The house party, it seemed, had officially begun—which was just as well. It could never end if it did not first begin, could it? Was it too soon, Christine wondered, to start counting the days until she could go home?

  Justin Magnus, Melanie’s younger brother, was the first man she saw. He smiled and waved at her from across the room. Lady Chisholm was talking to him, and Lady Chisholm liked to talk. Christine waved and smiled back. Small—he was half a head shorter than she—and thin and quite unremarkable in appearance, Justin nevertheless had charm and humor and intelligence to recommend him. And he always dressed with exquisite taste and elegance—unlike poor Hector, his elder brother. He had proposed marriage to Christine at that first house party long ago. But after she had refused him, and after she had accepted Oscar instead, they had settled into a friendship that had deepened as time went on until for the last few years before Oscar’s death he had seemed to be her only friend—the only one available, anyway. Her own family had been far away. He was the only one who had never believed the horrible rumors about her—even the last ghastly one. He was the only one who had spoken up in defense of her, though neither Oscar nor Basil and Hermione had ever believed him. He had remained her friend ever since.

  Basil was the next man Christine saw. Of medium stature and slender build, with thinning fair hair and a bald patch at the crown of his head, and with a narrow face and regular, rather than handsome, features, Viscount Elrick had always been cast in the shadow by his younger brother when it came to looks. He had also been more than ten years older. But he had adored Oscar and had been shattered by his death.

  He did not ignore Christine, though she had half expected that he might. He bowed with meticulous formality while she spoke his name and curtsied. And then, like Hermione earlier, he turned away to talk with the elderly gentleman Christine remembered as the Earl of Kitredge. He had not spoken a word to her.

  She went in determined search of the remotest corner of the room. It was time to become the satirical spectator of humanity, a role she intended to play for the next two weeks. If she was fortunate, no one would take any notice of her in all that time.

  Fortunately she reached the corner and settled into a chair there before the Duke of Bewcastle came into the room—she had been dreading seeing him again after that unfortunate incident earlier. But really—what was she dreading? That he would pounce upon her, or rather that he would direct an army of servants to pounce upon her, and have her dragged before the nearest magistrate for assault and battery upon his eye?

  He came into the room with Bertie, and there was immediately a different quality to the sound in the room. The young ladies chattered more brightly and smiled more dazzlingly, and the young men laughed more affectedly and swaggered more noticeably. The older ladies preened themselves.

  It was really quite amusing.

  They might all not have bothered, though. If they had been a roomful of worms, he could scarcely have looked about him with a more supercilious air. His cold, aristocratic face said more plainly than words that he considered this whole scene so far beneath his ducal dignity that really it was too much trouble either to smile or to look marginally approachable.

  Melanie, of course, pounced upon him in full grand-hostess style, took him by the arm, and led him about, making sure that all the lesser mortals who had no previous acquaintance with him were given the opportunity to bow and scrape before him.

  Fortunately—very fortunately—Melanie failed to see Christine in her corner and so the very least mortal in the room was given no chance to rise to her feet in order to have the honor of making her deepest curtsy to the great man.

  Satirically observing, Christine reminded herself, surely did not necessitate heaping scorn upon the head of a man she did not even know. But she instinctively bristled at the very sight of the Duke of Bewcastle. She disliked him, she scorned him, and she would be perfectly happy to be soundly ignored by him for thirteen and a half days.

  Why was it that she reacted so negatively to him? She did not usually react thus, either to acquaintances or to strangers. She liked people. All sorts of people. She even liked all the little foibles of her acquaintances that drove other people to distraction.

  The round of introductions complete, the duke stood, plate of food in hand, conversing with the Earl of Kitredge and Hector, who had nodded and smiled kindly in Christine’s direction. The earl was a great man. He was also pompous. But she felt no animosity toward him. Hector was a viscount, and she was enormously fond of him. So it was not the duke’s aristocratic title that made her bristle.

  And then all Christine’s complacency fled as her eyes met the Duke of Bewcastle’s across the room and she had instant images of jailers and jails and chains and magistrates flashing through her head.

  Her first instinct was to efface herself utterly and lower her eyes in an attempt to fade into the upholstery of the chair on which she sat.

  But self-effacement had never been her way of reacting to the world’s ways—except perhaps in the last year or two before Oscar died. And why should she seek to disappear? Why should she lower her eyes when he was making no attempt to lower his?

  And then he really annoyed her.

  Still looking at her, he raised one arrogant eyebrow.

  And then he infuriated her.

  With his eyes on her and one eyebrow elevated, he grasped the handle of his quizzing glass and raised it halfway to his eye as if utterly incredulous of the fact that she had the effrontery to hold his gaze.

  Christine would not have looked away then for all the jails and all the chains in England. So he had recognized her, had he? So what? When all was said and done, her only crime was to have allowed the glass in her hand to tip too far when he happened to have been standing directly beneath it.

  She looked steadily back at him and then compounded her boldness by deliberately laughing at him. Oh, she did not literally laugh. But she showed him with her eyes that she was not to be cowed by a single eyebrow and a half-raised quizzing glass. She picked up a cake from her place and bit into it—only to discover that it was a fairy cake. She felt the icing ooze out over her lips and licked it off as the Duke of Bewcastle left his group and made his way toward her.

  A path opened before him as if by magic. There was nothing magical about it, of course. Everyone stood out of his way—he probably took it so much as his right that he did not notice it happening.

  Oh goodness, she thought as he approached, he really did have a magnificent presence.

  He stopped walking when the toes of his Hessian boots were a few inches from the toes of her slippers. Danger loomed, Christine thought, her heart fluttering uncomfortably in her chest despite herself.

  “I do not believe we have an acquaintance,
ma’am,” he said, his voice cultured, slightly bored.

  “Oh, I know who you are,” she assured him. “You are the Duke of Bewcastle.”

  “Then you have the advantage of me,” he said.

  “Christine Derrick,” she told him. She offered no other explanation. He probably had no interest in her family tree—or Oscar’s.

  “Have I inadvertently caused you some amusement, Miss Derrick?” he asked her.

  “Oh, yes, I am afraid you have,” she said. “And it is Mrs. Derrick. I am a widow.”

  His quizzing glass was in his hand again. He raised both eyebrows in an expression that could surely freeze grapes on the vine and cause ruination of the harvest for a whole year.

  Christine took another bite out of her cake—and that necessitated another lick of her lips. Should she apologize again? she wondered. But why? She had apologized at the time. Was his right eye a little pinker than the left? Or was she just imagining that it was so?

  “Might I be permitted to know why?” he asked, raising his glass almost, though not quite, to his eye.

  What a marvelous weapon it was, she thought. It set as much distance between him and troublesome mortals as any drawn sword in the hand of a lesser man. She rather thought she might like to use one herself. She would grow into an eccentric old lady who peered at the world through a giant quizzing glass, terrifying the pretentious and amusing young children with her hideously magnified eye.

  He was asking why he had amused her. Amused was not quite the right word, but she had laughed at him—as she was doing again now.

  “You were so very outraged—you are so very outraged,” she explained, “that I failed to obey your command.”

  “Outraged? I beg your pardon?” Both eyebrows arched upward again. “Did I issue a command?”

  “Indeed you did,” she told him. “You discovered me looking at you from across the room, and you raised first one eyebrow and then your quizzing glass. I ought not even to have noticed the glass, of course. I should have dropped my gaze obediently long before you raised it.”

  “And the raising of an eyebrow constitutes a command and that of a quizzing glass outrage, ma’am?” he asked her.

  “How else do you explain the fact that you have crossed the room to confront me?” she asked in return.

  “Perhaps, ma’am,” he said, “it is because, unlike you, I have been circulating politely among my fellow guests.”

  She felt genuine delight then. She even laughed out loud.

  “And now I have provoked you into spite,” she said. “It would be better to ignore me, your grace, and leave me to my chosen role of spectator. You must not expect me to show fear of you.”

  “Fear?” He raised his glass all the way to his eye and observed her hands through it. Her fingernails were cut short. They were also clean, but it seemed to her that he could see very well that she actually worked with her hands.

  “Yes, fear,” she said. “It is how you rule your world. You make everyone afraid of you.”

  “I am gratified that you presume to know me so well, ma’am, on such short acquaintance,” he said.

  “I suppose,” she admitted, “I ought not to have spoken with such frankness. But you did ask.”

  “I did indeed,” he said, making her a stiff bow.

  But before he could turn away and leave her, Melanie appeared at his side.

  “I see you have met Christine, your grace,” she said, slipping an arm through his and smiling graciously. “But may I draw you away for a moment? Lady Sarah Buchan has a question she wishes to ask you, but she is too shy to approach you herself.”

  She led him away in the direction of Lady Sarah, who darted a look of pure venom at Christine before dipping into a deep curtsy and simpering prettily at the approaching duke.

  Gracious heaven, Christine thought, that wager! Did the child seriously believe that she was already scheming to win it? But if the girl did, she was apparently not the only one. Harriet King came to stand before Christine’s chair.

  “A word of friendly advice, Mrs. Derrick,” she said kindly. “You may be able to lure the Duke of Bewcastle to your corner once by smiling invitingly at him and neglecting to look modestly away again, but you are going to need a far more active plan if you are to keep him in conversation for a whole hour.”

  Well, gracious heaven, Christine thought again, and laughed out loud.

  “I am sure you are right,” she said. “I will have to think of something really enticing.”

  But instead of sharing the joke, the girl turned away, her kind deed accomplished.

  Christine began to feel a premonition that spending two weeks unobtrusively in a corner might not prove as practicable as she had hoped. She had already drawn as much attention to herself there as she would if she had been standing in the middle of the room waving a banner. Of course, she had never been one to fade into any background—that had been half the trouble during her marriage. She was just too sociable by nature.

  Those eyes! she thought suddenly. She had discovered during her brief conversation with the duke that they were pure silver. They were the most extraordinary eyes she had ever seen. They were hard and cold and quite opaque. One’s own glance seemed to bounce right off them instead of penetrating through to the person within. She had been given the distinct impression either that there was no person within but only the hard, arrogant shell of an aristocrat or that the person within was kept well guarded and out of sight to the casual observer.

  Either way they were rather disturbing eyes since, though they could not be seen into, they certainly seemed to possess extraordinary power to see right through one’s head to the hair on the back of it. Seeing them from close range and feeling them penetrate her skull had more than confirmed her initial impression that he would be a dangerous man to provoke. Had she provoked him? No more than a slightly troublesome gnat buzzing by his ear, she supposed—or flying into his eye.

  She sighed and finished off her fairy cake. She was licking her fingers when Justin arrived in her corner. She jumped gladly to her feet, and they hugged each other warmly.

  “Justin!” she cried. “It has been forever.”

  “And a day,” he agreed, grinning at her. “It was Easter, actually. I like your hair short. You look prettier than ever. You have just been making the acquaintance of the great man, I see. I’ll wager Mel had a few sleepless nights after she discovered that Hector had invited him here.”

  “And then she came to Hyacinth Cottage to persuade me to come too so that the numbers would be even again,” Christine said, grimacing. “And you know what Melanie is like when she has her mind set upon something. I did not stand a chance.”

  “Poor Chrissie!” He laughed at her. “And lucky me.”

  Christine relaxed for the first time all day, it seemed.

  “CHRISTINE WAS MARRIED to my poor cousin Oscar,” Lady Renable explained to Wulfric. “Perhaps you knew him? He was Viscount Elrick’s younger brother. He was charming and well loved. His death was a tragedy, especially for Christine, who was forced to return to her mother’s house in the village here. She was the daughter of the village schoolmaster when Oscar married her. She did brilliantly for herself. But, alas, it did not last, and now I feel dreadfully sorry for her. It is why I invited her here. She is a dear friend of mine and needs some diversion.”

  Her name had led Wulfric to realize that she must be a relative of Elrick’s, and then when she had explained that she was a widow, he had remembered that Elrick had lost his only brother a few years back. But it would seem that she was not Elrick’s dependent but was living with her mother and was forced to rely upon the charity of her friends to invite her to entertainments like this. Oscar Derrick, Wulfric guessed, had either been impoverished to start with, or—more likely—had squandered his fortune. His widow did not appear to have private means.

  She was dressed far less finely than any of the other ladies. Indeed, when he had first set eyes—or eye—upon her, he had
mistaken her for a servant. Her muslin dress was decent enough but not by any means in the first stare of fashion. Neither was she particularly young. She was well into her twenties, at a guess. She had a pretty, wide-eyed, rather round face, which—it had been impossible not to notice—was sun-bronzed. And, if that were not bad enough, there was a dusting of freckles across her nose. Her hair was dark and short and curly.

  She looked thoroughly countrified and quite out of place among Lady Renable’s guests. But then, she was out of place. She had indeed made a brilliant marriage, but she was in fact a schoolmaster’s daughter—and a markedly impertinent one too. It was too bad for her that Derrick had been inconsiderate enough to die young.

  Mrs. Derrick, Wulfric decided, was definitely not a lady whose acquaintance he would pursue during the coming two weeks. But then, the same might be said of almost every other lady guest too. He was beginning to realize how colossal a mistake he had made in so impulsively accepting an invitation that had been made verbally and at second hand—and via the notoriously vague Lord Mowbury.

  Lady Sarah Buchan, though she had been introduced to him not half an hour since, was making him a deep curtsy again.

  “I must ask you, your grace,” she said, gazing at him with huge brown eyes, her cheeks still flushed with color, “which morning activity you prefer—riding or walking. I have a wager with Miriam Dunstan-Lutt, even though I know it is not at all the thing for ladies to wager.” She tittered.

  He had not been on the marriage mart for a long time, and ladies of all ages as well as their mamas had stopped courting him a number of years ago on the correct assumption that he was not to be caught. Nevertheless, though he was out of practice, he could recognize a trap when he encountered one.

  “I normally write letters and conduct business in the mornings while my brain is fresh, Lady Sarah,” he said curtly, “and do my riding and walking later in the day. Which do you prefer?”