by Gaelen Foley
“What became of you after they died?”
“I was made the ward of the present Duke of Hawkscliffe—Robert.”
“I’ve met him. Excellent chap,” he murmured.
“The best of men,” she agreed with a reverent nod, though she rather doubted the straitlaced Robert would have approved of him. “Upon my joining the ducal household, I was designated as companion to His Grace’s young sister, Lady Jacinda Knight. She was three and I was four, and we have been best friends ever since. We grew up together, had all the same tutors. The family has always been extremely good to me,” she said fondly. “I accompanied Jacinda into Society from the night of her debut ball, charged by His Grace with the solemn duty of keeping the mischievous creature out of trouble.”
“Did you succeed?”
“For the most part, yes, but then Jacinda met her Billy, and I passed my duties on to him.”
“Who’s Billy?” he asked in amusement.
Lizzie chuckled. “Actually, it’s William, Marquess of Truro and Saint Austell. He dotes on her so—it warms my heart. They were married last summer. He just finished building her a villa on Regent’s Park. I have not yet seen it, but knowing Jacinda, I am sure all is in the first stare of fashion.”
“I haven’t met them, but I have seen them in Town,” he remarked. “She’s very beautiful.”
Lizzie nodded in unstinting agreement. “More than that, she’s smart. Much smarter than she prefers to let on behind all that sparkling vivacity. At any rate, once Jacinda married, I knew it was time for me to move on.” Lizzie opted to leave out the part concerning A Certain Person. “In August, I came here, where I have had the good fortune of enjoying Lady Strathmore’s company ever since.” She glanced affectionately at his aunt, who had been unusually silent throughout the meal, watching and listening to their exchange.
“It sounds like you miss your friend,” he observed.
“A little,” she admitted. “We write to each other every week. But what of you, my lord? Any further adventures planned?”
He shook his head. “The Katie Rose is up on blocks in a London shipyard, having her barnacles scraped.”
“The Katie Rose?” she echoed, charmed.
“The brigantine Aunt Augusta bought me for my twenty-first birthday,” he explained with a rueful smile. “I named her for my mother. Her name was Katherine, but that’s what my father used to call her when he was trying to talk her down from flying up into the boughs, as she was wont to do. To me, she had only one name, and it was: ‘Yes, ma’am.’ ”
She laughed softly. “Temper?”
“An Irish one,” he answered with a shadow of a smile.
“I didn’t realize you had Irish blood.”
“Half. Don’t tell anyone,” he said dryly; then he seemed to notice that his aunt was staring at him.
The two exchanged a wordless look that made Lizzie wonder if she was missing something, but the awkward pause vanished as a nod from Her Ladyship caused the footmen to clear the table for the third course. Plates and trays were whisked away; wineglasses and candelabra held clear while the white damask tablecloth was removed, exposing the rich mahogany table beneath with its silky patina of beeswax polish.
Again glasses were refilled, this time with a sweet dessert wine.
“Tea, coffee, or chocolate, ma’am?” the first footman asked the dowager gravely.
“Coffee,” she clipped out.
Devlin requested the same, but Lizzie declined, content with her glass of Madeira.
The first footman retreated to fetch the freshly brewed coffee while the others marched in with the third course: a small maple-cured ham that all of them were too full to taste, blanched almonds and raisins, an assortment of biscuits, and lastly, set down with great pride in the center of the table, a magnificent floating island.
“You spoil me,” Devlin declared, turning to his aunt.
“Indubitably,” she agreed with a chuckle.
In a silver soup epergne—filled with sweet heavy cream that had been thickened with sack wine, whipped to a froth, and sprinkled with nutmeg and the bright yellow shavings of a lemon rind—floated three French rolls, cut sliver-thin and piled high with colorful layers of jelly, fruit, and sweetmeats. Mrs. Rowland and Cook had truly outdone themselves. The floating island was divine, as were the other delicacies. Savoring the lavish dessert, Lizzie was just reflecting on what a success the evening had been when everything began going wrong.
“Miss Carlisle, I know you mentioned Hawkscliffe is the ducal title, but what was it you said your Lady Jacinda’s family name was?” Devlin asked as the footmen brought in the coffee service on a gleaming silver tray. “Was it Knight?”
“Yes.”
“Hang me, I knew that sounded familiar.” He leaned back in his chair with a broad smile. “I went to school with her brother.”
“Which one?” The startling news instantly made her a trifle uneasy. “She has five.”
“Alec,” he said, and then let out a sudden, roguish laugh. “Of course. Lord Alec Knight, or, pardon, ‘Alexander the Great,’ as he used to insist on being called in those days.”
“Oh, yes, that sounds just like him,” she uttered faintly, but she felt as though she had just got the wind knocked out of her. Good God, it couldn’t be—they were friends!
But of course. Alec knew everyone, and the two were of an age. Devlin only seemed older because he had gone places, done things, while Alec had remained in London playing cards and breaking hearts. She lowered her gaze to hide her shock.
Lord Alec Knight. Her best friend’s brother, whom she had worshipped from the age of nine. The youngest of the five Knight brothers. The one she had always dreamed she’d marry. Her blue-eyed darling, who had answered her lifetime’s devotion with a humiliating rejection last summer in the coldest possible terms.
“Lord, we used to get into so much trouble together,” Devlin was saying, but she barely heeded his nostalgic chuckle.
Her heart had begun pounding, a knot of bitter hurt forming in the pit of her stomach at the mere mention of her former idol’s name. The elegant meal had turned to ashes in her mouth, and the euphoria she had felt all evening rose up to mock her. God, what am I doing?
Idiot! Did she intend to make the same mistake twice? Was she mad?
“We were great mates back at Eton—and at Oxford, before I flunked out. God’s bones, I haven’t seen him in years. How is the blighter?”
Trembling, Lizzie lifted her gaze and stared at him, at a loss. She could not think of a single word to say.
Alec. Her chest felt squeezed in a great vise at the thought of his sunny grin and sapphire eyes, but there were no more tears left in her. Gambling was Alec’s first love; she had finally learned that the hard way. He had the beauty of a fallen archangel and had used it last summer to pay off his debts, had whored himself out to a rich baroness so he could go back and gamble some more. Oh, it had been the jest of the Season, how the captain of all London rakes had become the glamorous Lady Campion’s kept man for a while.
Only Alec Knight could get away with such a thing and come out gleaming.
A born showman full of dash and style and outrageous charm down to the tips of his elegant fingers, he had made it seem a coup, a blow struck in behalf of all males, the usual financial supporters of women. Congratulated left and right by his hordes of scoundrelly friends for turning the tables on the female race, Alec Knight had made his choice, as far as Lizzie was concerned. He had thrown her love away on a roll of the dice.
She had thought she would never be able to glue all the pieces of her broken heart back together again, but finally, in the peace and quiet of Bath, she had begun to mend. So, what, in God’s name did she think she was doing making cow eyes at Devil Strathmore? He and Alec Knight were not the same man, but they were the same breed, a fact underscored by their friendship—and by their gambling debts. The parallel was obvious, though they were night and day—a dark devil and a golden god—
both of them too beautiful and too highborn for the likes of her; both dissolute scoundrels obsessed with adventure, addicted to living on the edge. Devlin might be king of the dark forest, but Alec ruled every glittering ballroom he stepped into, which was why she was never going back into Society again.
Devlin set down his fork and furrowed his brow, studying her intently. “Are you all right, my dear?”
Still mute with emotion, she looked straight into his eyes and thought, Don’t flirt with me. I can’t have you. I don’t want you. I don’t need any man. She was an independent woman.
A spinster.
A bluestocking and deuced proud of it. She cared only for books. Never again would she place herself at the mercy of his kind. Never again hand her heart over to be broken.
As the excruciating silence stretched thin, Pasha suddenly came to her rescue, jumping up on the table to make a dash for the pigeon pie.
Chaos exploded across the table, much to Lizzie’s relief.
“Pasha, no!”
“Get down!”
“Reeer!” The cat leaped over the epergne, a tawny streak of fur and insolence.
Wine splashed. Flatware clattered. Devlin yanked his coffee out of the way just in time to avoid wearing it, while Lady Strathmore laughed in delight. Silver lids went spinning. The candelabra tipped over, catching one of the linen napkins on fire.
The shocked footmen stumbled into motion, one quickly dousing the little flame with a heave of melting ice from the wine cooler, while the second leaped to roll the dowager’s chair out of the way.
Her nephew was on his feet. “Get that damned cat out of here!”
Without forethought, Lizzie seized the distraction to effect her escape, purposely knocking over her wineglass in the confusion so that her Madeira spilled all over her best gown. She didn’t even care. She just wanted out of there, now. Away from Devlin’s all-too-perceptive gaze.
“Oh, no!” she cried, looking down at herself as the footmen chased the cat down the far end of the twenty-foot table. When the Strathmores looked over at her, she glanced up with an innocent expression, hoping she gave no sign of her Jacinda-like ruse.
The eagle-eyed dowager regarded her skeptically, but Devlin let out a mild curse to see what the cat had done to her gown.
“Blazes, Aunt, can’t you keep that rat on a leash?”
“But, Devlin, Pasha loves pigeon pie,” Lady Strathmore protested mildly, chuckling as her spoiled pet huffed over to the warm bricks in front of the fireplace and pretended to ignore the scolding, sulking and licking his paw.
Having barely escaped a dousing from his own tumbled glass, Devlin cast about with a look of distress in her behalf, as if he knew she could never afford to replace the gown, a gift from the fantastically wealthy Jacinda. “That will come out if you hurry,” he offered. “I’m sure my valet could give it one of his treatments. Ben’s a genius, truly. No stain can stand against him.” He got out of the way while the footman quickly mopped up the spreading puddle of coffee.
“You’re very kind,” she murmured barely audibly. “I’m sure I’ll manage. If you’ll excuse me.”
“Off you go,” the dowager said blithely. “Do not fret, my dear. Owing it all to Pasha’s mischief, I promise your gown shall be replaced with a new one if the valet cannot fix it.”
“Thank you, ma’am, but I’m sure it won’t be necessary.” What need did she have for such finery? An estate keeper’s daughter had never really had any business going into Society in the first place. Without further ado, she sketched a curtsy and then hurried out of the dining room in a rustle of ruined wet satin.
Dev frowned and sat down slowly again after she had gone. “Now, that’s a shame,” he said, still puzzled by Miss Carlisle’s strange reaction of a few moments ago and the stricken look he had glimpsed in her eyes. “You will replace her gown for her?”
“I said I would.” His aunt observed him with a narrow smile. “You like her, do you?”
He glanced over, startled by her frank inquiry. Careful, old boy. His aunt had a habit of trying to marry him off to every eligible female in England. “She seems pleasant enough,” he said guardedly.
“To be sure, she is not the sort of idiotic miss you are used to. I confess, I am worried about the gel. Do you know how she spends her nights?”
“I cannot imagine.”
“Translating foreign texts for extra money.”
“Don’t you pay her enough, Aunt?” he asked indignantly.
“Of course, I do. She is saving up, you see, to open a bookshop.”
“A what?”
“You heard me.” They exchanged a puzzled look. Aunt Augusta shrugged and shook her head at the notion. “She is quite the bluestocking, our Miss Carlisle. French, Italian, German.”
“Even German?” he echoed, impressed. “I wonder where she learned that.”
“Why don’t you ask her? Or is the great adventurer, like every other man, frightened of a woman with brains?”
“I am not frightened of Elizabeth Carlisle, Aunt. Hang it, old girl, I haven’t seen you take to someone this way in years.”
“Well, she is quite worth one’s time. Reminds me of myself as a gel, in fact.”
He laughed idly, reaching over to pour himself a glass of port from the crystal decanter, now that his coffee had been spilled. “You were an heiress with a dowry of thirty thousand pounds and to the best of my knowledge, you’ve barely a smattering of French.”
“Yes, but I never took any nonsense from blue bloods like you, and neither does Miss Carlisle,” she said with a pointed glance. “In any case, I’m sure she will soon be whisked away in matrimonial bliss by my very capable young doctor, Andrew Bell.”
“What, Dr. Bell of the Bilious Pills?” he exclaimed.
“Oh, he’s quite mad for her. A good match, I should think. Solid, dependable, polite young man. Not bad looking, either.”
“Solid, dependable—?” Dev scoffed, shifting in his chair. “How relentlessly dull! That’s not what a woman like her needs.”
Aunt Augusta raised an eyebrow. “Well, I do worry about her, now that you mention it. I fear some foolish fellow has made mischief of the poor gel’s affections.”
He stopped and stared at her, his goblet halfway to his lips. “Is that so?”
“She does not speak of it, but I know a broken heart when I see one.”
He set his glass down, narrowing his eyes. “How very intriguing.”
“Careful, Devlin,” his aunt chided. “You’ve left enough of those in your wake.”
And so, Dev thought, had his old friend Alec Knight.
Suddenly, her strange reaction at dinner began to make sense. His chum had always been a notorious Don Juan. Indeed, Dev recalled how, even as a youth, Alexander the Great could usually be found half-buried under a mound of clamoring girls eagerly covering him in kisses. And then there had been the older women. Married women. Sophisticated seductresses old enough to be the then-teenaged lover’s mother. Everywhere Alec went, ladies fell at his feet; it was as though he had some unnatural power over them.
Taking a brooding sip of his port, Dev wondered if the innocent Lizzie Carlisle had succumbed to the rogue’s famous charm while growing up with him all those years under her guardian’s roof.
His protective instincts disliked the thought of it immensely.
Meanwhile, his aunt shook her head. “But enough about Lizzie for the moment, darling. Even more than her, I am worried about you,” she declared, taking him off guard.
Here we go again, Dev thought, suppressing a sigh, while her pointed gaze seemed determined to reroute the conversation in a direction where he had no desire to travel.
“I do not like at all what I am hearing about your wild ways in Town. Your drinking, your gambling, your women. These companions you keep of late—I hear they are a very bad sort. I hope you are not returning to your old ways, Devlin. We have been through this before.”
“That was a long time ago,
ma’am.”
“Barely long enough to live down your former reputation.”
“My reputation?” he echoed, resting his cheek on his fist with a cynical half-smile. “When have you ever cared about the world’s opinion?”
“I always care where you are concerned. Wild and wicked, a sensualist and slave to pleasure—that is how Society remembers you from your troubled times, and lately, I cannot see that you’ve done much to show them you’ve matured.”
He stared at her for a long moment. What she said, of course, was true, but the ton’s misjudgment of him aided his pursuit of his enemies. The lads of the Horse and Chariot Club were fast-living hellions who spared no expense on their pleasures, and Dev’s past as a lost boy of the ton gave them reason to accept him as one of their own.
Devastated by grief, he had flunked out of Oxford at eighteen, a year after his family’s destruction, and had moved to London, where he had quickly sunk into dissipation in an effort to escape his pain. He had earned the nickname Devil for his efforts, but by the time he hit rock bottom, Aunt Augusta put an end to all that with her ingenious plan of sending him off to see the world. He had no doubt she had saved his life.
“Oh, what am I to do with you?” she murmured, gazing tenderly at him. “Running full-tilt down the road to perdition, as always. I do not hold at all with such self-destructiveness. Why can you not form healthier habits?” She eyed his glass of strong port in disapproval. “Do you know what my father always used to say? ‘Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.’ ”
He smiled with a teasing glint in his eyes. “Your father, dear lady, was middle class,” he drawled. “We ‘blue bloods,’ as you put it, have a fine old tradition of destroying ourselves in the grand style. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Scoundrel,” she muttered, smacking his arm lightly. “Papa was worth ten of you useless aristocrats. Why, if not for our factories, you fine Strathmores would not have had a roof over your heads—except for the half-finished dome of your Uncle Joshua’s masterpiece.”
Dev smiled wanly at her. His father’s elder brother, Uncle Joshua, the eighth Viscount Strathmore, had driven the family to the verge of bankruptcy sixty years ago with his architectural obsession, building Oakley Park, the magnificent white mansion in Kent. Uncle Joshua had been forced to rectify the situation by marrying the heiress of an industrial magnate—Aunt Augusta. The best Society had viewed the match with pity—so noble a name forced to resort to the great merchant classes for its rescue—but the ton had soon learned that the ironmonger’s daughter was not to be trifled with. No, indeed, Dev thought fondly. Even now, at the grand age of eighty-two, old Lady Ironsides could still make the ton tremble in fear and awe of her wrath. Perhaps it was the origins of her fortune—iron ore—that were to blame for her formidable streak, but even he found the nickname amusing. As for Oakley Park, though it now belonged to Dev, he never went there. With his loved ones buried in the little Greek temple–style mausoleum overlooking the ornamental pond, visiting the estate was simply too painful.