“Ah, nothing.”
“Something,” she ventured.
He shrugged, then conceded, avoiding her gaze. “I had a friend like that, too. A gambling fiend.”
She noticed the taut look around his gray eyes. “I take it he ran into trouble.”
“He sold me down the river, more or less, trying to recoup his losses. Nearly got us all killed.”
“What happened to him?”
“Ended up in prison, and there he remains.” He shook his head in regret. “I hope your father can help that lad more than I could my unfortunate friend.”
Out once more: They parted again and gazed at each other intently. Grace felt sorry for him and said so when they brushed close on the next figure, passing back to back.
“It doesn’t signify. I learned an important lesson.”
“What’s that?”
“You can’t trust anyone,” he said idly. “Even a friend, half the time.”
She frowned. “Nonsense, there are people you can trust.”
“Oh? Like who?”
“My father. Me. Plenty of people,” she assured him.
He smiled at her in amusement when they parted once more, as if she were some innocent child who had just said something adorably naïve.
She furrowed her brow, irked by his patronizing little smile, so knowing, so world-weary.
Still, the man was too handsome by half.
She forgot her annoyance in seconds as she moved with him. Athletically built, he was an excellent dancer, smooth and effortless. With his arm around her waist and his hand supporting hers in the next figure, he made her glide. Gazing up into his gray eyes, she felt dainty and beautiful with the way he watched her, the hint of a smile on his lips.
“I rather like you, whoever you are,” he murmured in a low, silken tone that echoed the one he had used upstairs when they had been alone. “I desire to know you better, Grace Kenwood.”
She blushed at his frank enticement. “Whoever I am? But you learned my name. Did you already forget it?”
“No, of course not, silly girl. It’s just that I find you a bit of a mystery. You’re not like anybody else here.”
She snorted at what she was sure was a charmer’s line. “There is nothing mysterious about me, I can assure you.”
“That’s precisely what intrigues me. You are exactly what you seem. You don’t seem to know how rare that is.”
And he released her.
As she stepped back to her side of the floor, she was trembling, struggling to wake up from this silken dream.
The wistful desire to know what it would be like for him to make love to her shocked her when she noticed the drift of her own musings.
Egads! What was wrong with her.
The lines switched as the figures moved along; he went to dance with the lady next to her, while she took a turn with the other woman’s partner. Who held no such appeal though he was young and good-looking and dressed in the first stare.
Grace barely noticed him, going through the motions.
All her awareness was fixed on Lord Trevor. Her heart pounded when they returned to each other.
“Have I upset you again? Was I too forward?” he breathed, ducking his lips closer to her ear.
She was half-seduced already and feared he knew it. “Don’t be silly. It’s just—I wasn’t expecting you to come back to the ball.”
“I had to apologize to you.”
“Nonsense, you already did.”
“ ’Twas insufficient, Miss Kenwood. I behaved like a marauding Hun with you. You deserve much better,” he whispered. “And I want you to know I truly am sorry. Not just words.”
She lowered her gaze, smiling, her body tingling all over. “Well, I did jab you with a hairpin.”
“Yes,” he breathed, smiling as his lips grazed her ear. “You are rather violent for a preacher’s daughter, aren’t you?”
She shot him a merry look. “You brought it on yourself.”
“Hmmm.” His eyes glowed.
She has no idea how beautiful she is. Trevor found himself all the more deeply enchanted.
Miss Kenwood’s loveliness was beyond the physical. She was kind, modest, soft in all the ways that a man who had been too often cut by the world’s jagged edges could desire. But his recent betrayal was not so easy to forget, let alone escape.
Just as he finished the dance with Grace, bowed over her hand, and kissed it in respectful thanks, he turned with her to applaud the musicians, and spotted a familiar flash of golden hair on the other side of the ballroom.
Instantly, he tensed.
His smile faltering just for a heartbeat, he lowered his gaze, engulfed once more by the bitterness that had further hardened his already cold heart.
Laura and her idiot dragoon. Well, well. Grace’s charm must have, shockingly, got him to lower his guard a bit, but one look at Laura, and the cold fury, the stab in the back, the sense of abandonment . . . it all came flooding back.
Even more than he despised that feckless beauty, the truth was he blamed himself for ever relying on anything as weak as a woman in the first place.
No matter, he promised himself coldly. It would never happen again.
Unwilling to put Miss Kenwood in the middle of his silly Society dramatics or subject her to Laura’s haughty smirk, he chose to make his exit for the night.
Grace was still applauding the musicians when he took her gently by the elbow to say farewell.
If ever he needed reminding that women weren’t worth it, it was now. He made a mental note of it.
Grace Kenwood was more agreeable than most, a calm, steady presence peacefully content in who she was, she did not need to draw attention to herself. But whatever her appeal, he was not getting lured back in, ever, to the female trap.
This one, he feared, could make a slave of him—precisely because it would never enter her head to do so.
She was quintessentially safe.
At least that was his assessment of her nature so far, professionally speaking. If he were still in the spy game, she’d be the perfect kind of mark, wide-eyed, naïvely unsuspecting. Devoid of cynicism, lacking vanity, obviously quick to forgive. The type who saw the best in everyone.
She should marry a country farmer, he thought dryly, who would never break her wholesome heart.
But it was true. She had a realness about her that threw him off his stride. Her lack of guile itself became a strange and foreign threat, at least to a man who had been betrayed twice by people close to him.
When Grace turned to him in question, Trevor bent closer to her ear. “Thank you for your company this evening, Miss Kenwood.” He chose his words carefully, wanting both to honor her and yet, to push her away. For both their sakes. “It was a welcome distraction. But I’m afraid that I must go.”
“Oh!” She looked at him in surprise, scanning his face. “Is something wrong, my lord?”
He gave her a formal smile and a middling lie, one not so much intended to deceive her, but a veiled and more courteous way of saying, It’s none of your affair.
“Not at all,” he replied. “I just remembered something I have to do at home. I’m so sorry, but it’s an urgent matter of business that requires my attention before morning.”
“Oh, I-I am sorry to hear it. Very well.” She smiled brightly, but he saw doubts flickering in her eyes.
He saw that she saw he was lying, but God bless her, she chose not to press him.
She offered her hand for him to shake, another oddly genuine gesture. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Lord Trevor.”
“The pleasure’s mine.” He shook her hand gently. “Give my best to your father, Miss Kenwood. Good night.”
“Good night,” she echoed.
He took leave of her with a nod, ignoring the confusion in
her fine blue eyes. Then he strode off without a backwards glance toward the opposite door through which the happy couple had arrived. By now, he had shrugged off his earlier petty scheme of making Laura jealous.
It was beneath him, and besides, at heart, he didn’t really give a damn.
He was beginning to think he had never really loved her. He had tried for a while, more or less. He’d told his friends many times over the years that he did, indeed, insisted on it, usually when he was drunk in some distant country, with a whore on his knee.
He had thought for a long time that they laughed at him simply because they were scoundrels who scoffed at love and used women freely—at least until most had wound up married and changed their tune. But he was beginning to understand now.
His brother agents had known that he was only fooling himself when it came to Laura; a planner, a dreamer, maybe it was only the vision in his head that he had been in love with.
An illusion that had never quite fooled his heart.
That being the case, why should he be surprised that the woman had finally jilted him? To be sure, the lack of feeling between them was mutual, if only he had cared to admit it before now. If only he had cared to quit denying that the two of them saw each other as a trophy, a prize.
They looked good together; their families approved of each other as excellent breeding stock, and any red-blooded man in his right mind would have loved to breed with Laura. Frankly, it was a wonder she had waited for him as long as she had.
But deep down, he supposed he had always known there was nothing really there between them.
Emptiness, he thought. Perfect.
That was what he’d built his future on, and for that, he had no one to blame but himself.
A distraction . . . So that’s what I was tonight, Grace mused, a little stung by this callous revelation.
But off he went. Another mysterious exit.
Oh, well. At least he had bothered to say good-bye to her. He did not even acknowledge several other guests who hailed him as he marched off through the crowd and disappeared.
Something had obviously upset him. She hoped it wasn’t her; she was fairly sure she had not committed any blunders. No, it was more like he had seen something—or someone—across the room that he didn’t like.
She stood on her tiptoes, trying to get a look around at what it might have been, but just then, her father found her.
“Here she is! Look, Grace, I’ve found you a partner to dance with at last. My daughter’s been waiting to dance with you all evening, George, just as I said. Poor thing, don’t let her be a wallflower.”
“Papa!” she said indignantly.
“Yes, sir.” George gave Grace a sheepish smile, while she frowned at her father.
Wallflower, indeed! He obviously hadn’t seen her dance with the gentleman-spy. Which, on second thought, might be just as well, considering the wicked impulses that mysterious gentleman aroused in her.
A lady’s father might not approve—especially when one’s father was a priest.
Well, it was he who had ordered her to charm the man in the first place! she reminded herself.
“I’m next, mind you,” the Reverend Kenwood added fondly, wagging a finger at her. “Don’t you go promising the next one to some young buck. A young lady ought to save at least one dance for her old dad.”
“Yes, sir,” Grace said archly.
His blue eyes twinkled behind his round spectacles, for he knew full well how she felt about putting herself on display. It did not seem so intimidating now that she had done it once with Lord Trevor.
“Sorry I left you in the lurch,” George mumbled after her father walked away.
Grace took his arm and gave it a forgiving pat. “I’m just glad you’re back.”
“I was winning, you know.”
“Always best to end on a high note. George?” she pressed him since the musicians were taking a short break. “Tell me more about that Order agent fellow you pointed out before.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve gone and fallen in love with him, too, while my back was turned?” he exclaimed.
“No, of course not! I’ve just been watching all the guests, and I noticed he went storming out a moment ago. I cannot figure why.”
“I’ll bet I know,” he said dryly, then he looked around. “Righty-ho. There she is.”
“Who?”
“She’d be the reason he left. Lady Laura Bayne.” He shook his head. “I told Father’s secretary that inviting them both was a terrible idea. Nobody ever listens to me.”
“Why is that?”
“They think I’m a nitwit.”
“No, why didn’t you want them both to be invited?”
George shrugged. “The two of them were to be married, but he disappeared for months nearing the end of the war; she took him for dead and gave up waiting. Got engaged to somebody new.”
Grace’s eyes widened. “Are you serious? How awful!”
“Not for her. That’s her new beau there, Major Lord Dewhurst, of the cavalry. He’ll be an earl in his own right when his father dies, while our spy friend is only the younger son of a duke.”
“Only?” Grace murmured.
“I’m sure she jumped at the chance to improve her situation. Bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, as they say, and she’s already your age.”
Grace looked askance at him. “Practically ancient.”
“That’s not what I meant. She’s not like you. She’s a Society girl. Vain and rather mercenary. Montgomery might be a hero and all, but there was a good chance he’d never return alive,” George explained. “Meanwhile, Lady Laura had a future earl down on one knee before her. What would any female do?”
Grace was sure she couldn’t say. “Show her to me.”
He glanced around. “She should be easy enough to find. God knows, she’s usually the most ravishing creature in any room she enters. Half the men in the ton are in love with her, or at least in lust.”
“George.”
“There.” He nodded to the left; Grace followed his glance until she discovered the lady in question.
Oh, she thought, taken aback by her impossible beauty. Oh . . . I see.
Lady Laura Bayne was a smiling blond goddess with diamonds in her hair and a white silk gown skimming a perfect figure.
Grace felt her heart sink a little in dismay.
So that’s the sort of woman it took to snare a man like Lord Trevor, she mused with a quiet sigh. Oh, well.
It had been fun while it lasted.
George also sighed, gazing at Lady Laura. “Montgomery was a fool not to marry her before he went off to war, if you ask me.”
“Why didn’t he?” Grace turned away from the depressingly radiant vision of exquisite female beauty.
“Don’t know. It’s shocking, really—I mean that a woman like that couldn’t compel him. If it were me, she could make me do anything. But I suppose she’s surrounded by people who leap to give her whatever she wants.”
“Maybe that’s why she chose him,” Grace murmured. The man she had met had too much strength to let himself be ruled by a pretty face.
George shrugged. “I couldn’t say, but if it was a battle of wills or something, she won. She quit waiting and moved on, as you can see.”
“But you said that she thought Lord Trevor was dead.”
“Yes, everyone did, though his family refused to believe it,” he added. “Everyone felt rather sorry for them, refusing to put black crape on the door. Turns out they were right.”
“Where was he, then?”
“That, my dear, is a closely guarded secret. No idea.”
“Hmm.” Grace looked back wistfully at Lady Laura, with her gloved hand resting in the crook of her new fiance’s arm. “One wonders how she feels now that her former beau is back fro
m the grave.”
“Feels?” George laughed cynically. “You and your quaint country notions, poppet.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s not as though they were in love.”
“Why do you say that?”
“If he really loved her, he’d have married her long ago. Instead, he made excuses. Trust me,” George muttered, “I would know something about that.”
Grace pondered this. “Then why did he go stomping off like that when she arrived?”
“Pride, I daresay,” George said with a shrug. “Never forget, Gracie girl. The man’s a trained assassin. He’s hardly going to play the role of a brokenhearted sot—except for the benefits it gains him with the ladies, I should think.”
“What?”
“Sympathy!” He winked at her. “That’s why they all throng him so—offering their tender care to heal his poor, broken heart. Smart man. Sympathy always does bring out an interesting reaction in you females. I should try it myself sometime. Concoct a tale of woe . . .”
Grace scowled at him.
“In any case, the ladies of the ton had all but written him off years ago as spoken for, the property of our jealous goddess over there. But now he’s free again. They’ve got another chance. You can’t blame them for trying—” George shuddered all of a sudden. “God, I hope my Callie never meets him!”
Grace looked at him abruptly. The moment he said the words to her, it almost seemed like fate.
Beautiful, lively, aristocratic girls like Miss Calpurnia Windlesham were born and raised to marry men like Lord Trevor Montgomery.
Indeed, Callie was but a younger, fresher copy of Laura Bayne; and perhaps where Laura had failed him, Callie, as a malleable eighteen-year-old, would be easy for him to mold into whatever he might want in a wife.
Grace felt her heart turn to lead at the thought, but she refused to indulge the sinking feeling, with Papa’s words about the need for a strong new tenant at the Grange ringing in her ears.
Food, crops, money.
If the charming, golden Callie became part of the lure for Lord Trevor to take the Grange, this could be best for everyone, the whole village.
Gaelen Foley - [Inferno Club 06] Page 5