Was he actually in pursuit, though? Yes, in her presence he tended to forget the blackness and pain of the last months. And she was definitely pleasant to look at. But she also made him want things, made him feel things he wasn’t certain he had the right to enjoy any longer.
Dancing, first and foremost. And sex. As he considered it, he would place sex first, with dancing a far-following second. At least he could still manage sex, though it hadn’t been much on his mind until he’d crossed Theresa Weller’s path.
She twirled into view, shimmering in the light of a hundred candles. She laughed and spun, happy and safe amid her large circle of friends and admirers, while he crouched, steeling his thoughts against the creeping, silent dark that threatened to overwhelm him every night. The worst of it was the knowledge that the horror was real, because that one night, back when he’d thought that kindness and vigilance and honor would be met with the same, it had caught him.
At least he’d learned the lesson and accepted the pain and punishment that had been dealt him. Sommerset said that he didn’t deserve either, but it wasn’t about what he deserved. His men couldn’t change their circumstances. It was wrong of him to attempt to alter his.
The quadrille finished. Amid the chatter and the applause, a swirl of rose-scented lavender gown dropped into the chair Montrose had vacated. “Well?” Theresa prompted.
“Well what?”
“I told you that I wouldn’t ask you to dance again. I left a space open on my card later in the evening because you’re somewhat dim-witted, but you still have to ask me.”
That was bloody enough of that. Keeping his gaze sightlessly somewhere three or so feet ahead of him, he clenched his jaw. “Tease and prod at me as much as you please, Theresa, as long as you stay out of my damned reach,” he uttered in a low voice.
“I—”
“Because while I am slow-moving,” he continued, ignoring her interruption, “I am not a simpleton, and I believe I mentioned already that I am not a eunuch. I have some pride, and I must still have the remains of a gentleman about me, or I would tell you precisely what I would like to do with you right now. And it has very little to do with dancing.”
He heard her sharp intake of breath, waited for her to scream, faint, or stand up and stalk away. She had spleen, but he’d become well enough acquainted with her to know that she didn’t like being spoken to that way. And now she knew that he didn’t like it, either.
“Don’t you have a dance?” he demanded when she neither spoke nor fled.
“What, exactly, happened to your leg?”
Tolly flinched. That hadn’t been on his list of her possible reactions, blasted chit. “You don’t want to know. Leave me be.”
“I asked because I do want to know, and no, I won’t leave you be. Not until you answer my question.”
For a moment Theresa thought he might refuse to say anything. With her next dance partner hovering at the edge of her vision, she didn’t have much time to convince the colonel to talk to her. What she did have, though, was a very fresh memory of a kiss on the servants’ stairs. A kiss that had positively curled her toes. And quite possibly his, as well. He didn’t want her to walk away. He couldn’t want that. And so she asked an improper question, one that a lady wouldn’t ask. At least she’d made certain that no one but Tolly had heard her.
“Very well, Tess,” he said in a low, toneless voice, his gaze lowering to the floor. “I was stabbed and shot and thrown into a deep, damp well, and the corpses of my men were dumped in after me. That is what happened to my leg. Now go waltz with Lord Lionel.”
Theresa couldn’t breathe. She’d known it would be something awful. She’d even steeled herself against a tale of a battle and bloodshed. But this—no matter what she imagined, the reality must have been much, much worse. Shaking, she clasped her hands tightly together against her thighs. “Bartholomew,” she whispered, willing him to look at her.
He didn’t. “Will you go away now?”
She nodded. For heaven’s sake, she wanted some fresh air. A strong wind out in the open, in the sunlight, and preferably on the top of a hill. Grabbing onto the back of her chair, she stood.
As Lionel approached, though, Theresa stopped. She could fill her mind with other things, push the images that Tolly’s words conjured far away from her. He couldn’t. And she’d asked the question because she’d wanted to know the answer. Taking a deep breath, she faced him. “Look at me,” she murmured.
Golden brown eyes lifted to meet hers.
“I wasn’t teasing,” she continued in the same low voice. “I wanted to dance with you. What you just told me is horrific, but it is not my fault. And I would still like to dance with you. I would settle, however, for you coming to call on me.”
“Would you, now? You would settle for a social call?”
At this moment, she could recall the exact passage she’d written in her lady’s guide about how a lady did not ask a gentleman to call on her. And that wasn’t even the first of her own rules she’d broken where Tolly James was concerned. He intrigued her mightily, and though the reasons for that were still madly baffling, she couldn’t seem to stop thinking about him. And she wanted to figure out why.
“Since you haven’t managed a social call yet, I think that would be a good beginning.” She favored him with a slow smile, excitement tingling down to her toes. “And we both know you’ll be stopping by.” Before he could reply to that, however, she took Lord Lionel’s arm and pulled him onto the dance floor.
“That fellow always seems to be about, don’t he?” the marquis’s second son commented as they turned about the floor.
“Everyone’s about all the time during the Season,” she returned with a brisk smile. She wanted a bit of time to sort through her thoughts, and thankfully Lionel didn’t tax her mind too severely.
“Yes, but he’s always about you.”
Theresa stifled an annoyed sigh. At times, dancing was quite overrated. “Shall I name all of the gentlemen who are about me all the time? Your name would appear on that list, my lord. And you and I don’t have a close familial connection as Colonel James and I do.”
“But Montrose don’t mind me being about you. He ain’t so fond of Bartholomew, there.”
“And why is that?”
“You’d have to ask Alexander. I ain’t a wag.”
Theresa just barely restrained herself from pointing out that Lionel had done nothing but gossip since the moment they’d met. Instead she glanced again in Tolly’s direction, as she’d been doing all evening. His chair was empty.
Keen disappointment touched her, in herself for ignoring the rules of politeness and decorum and quite probably saying the wrong thing, and in him for taking the excuse of their conversation to leave when he hadn’t wanted to be there in the first place.
After those blasted kisses he had best manage to pay a call and say hello properly, or she would be forced to track him down and find out why. And that was something that would never appear in her Guide.
Bartholomew stepped down from the hired hack and stopped on the street for a moment to gaze at the modest Cheapside home. Every instinct he possessed yelled at him to climb back into that carriage and return to James House posthaste. Instead he dug the tip of his cane into the hard ground and limped forward.
With his free hand he swung the brass knocker against the door. At ten o’clock the hour was still fairly early for the peerage during the Season of balls and parties, but this wasn’t the home of a nobleman.
The door swung open. A stern-looking woman in a voluminous night rail and a robe, a lit candle in one hand, peered out at him.
“This house is closed for the evening, sir,” she said, her voice softer than he expected.
“Yes, I know,” he returned. “I wondered if I might have a minute of the good doctor’s time.”
“Well, come into the sitting room, and I shall inquire.”
More walking and sitting and standing again. “I’ll wait here,”
he decided.
“Your name, sir?”
“Colonel James.”
With a nod she shut the door on him. Bartholomew clenched his jaw against the growing urge to run—or rather, to hobble away at his best speed. There was a damned war raging in his mind. To one side his own resolve to accept what misfortune fate had dealt him, to…honor his men by continuing to suffer from the attack that had ended their lives. That ongoing pain of the last months pushed and shoved against a woman’s words; Theresa Weller wanted him to call on her, wanted him to dance with her. And he quite simply wanted her.
The door opened for the second time, and the more familiar figure of Dr. Prentiss stepped forward. “What can I do for you, Colonel?” he asked. “Did you manage to tear that wound open again?”
“No.” He swallowed. “I wondered whether you might call on me at James House tomorrow. I…want you to break and reset my leg.”
Prentiss eyed him for a long moment, then nodded. “Is noon acceptable?”
Fourteen damned hours to contemplate how large a fool he was to intentionally risk losing a limb altogether. “Yes. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet, Colonel. I imagine you’ll be hating me tomorrow.”
He was more likely to be hating himself by then. With a nod Bartholomew turned and made his way back to the waiting hack.
He knew he was being foolish, because he’d been driven to this moment by hope. Hope that he might in a few weeks be able to limp without excruciating pain. And hope that if everything went far better than he deserved, he would be able to waltz with Tess Weller. The only problem with all of that was that he and hope had had a very poor relationship for the past eight months.
“I can’t approve of this, Tolly.”
“I didn’t ask you to.” Wishing his brother would give up the argument, Tolly continued to pretend to be interested in the stack of calling cards on the hallway table. None of them were for him, but that didn’t signify.
“Who is this Dr. Prentiss, anyway?”
Bartholomew went through the stack for a third time. “I met him through a…friend.” Not that he considered the Duke of Sommerset to be a friend, precisely, but he wasn’t certain how else to describe him without revealing the entire Adventurers’ Club business. “And he’ll do as well as anyone, don’t you think?”
“No, I don’t! You have both legs. You need simply to thank God for that and leave it be.”
Bartholomew gazed levelly at his older brother. “I do not have both my legs. I have one leg and one anchor dragging and clanking with me wherever I go. As I said, I didn’t ask your permission. I informed you because I’ll be off my feet for a time. If you prefer that I do this elsewhere, I w—”
“Don’t even begin throwing that garbage in my direction.” Stephen jabbed a finger at him. “You are not going anywhere. And whatever you think of my opinion, this is too risky.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, myself,” Bartholomew said slowly. “I need to risk this. I just wanted you to know.”
“Thank you for that, at least.”
“You’re welcome.”
When Stephen still showed no sign of going away, Bartholomew muttered a curse and limped to the base of the stairs. The narrow, closed-in servants’s stairs were easier to descend, but he needed to hang on to the railing of the main staircase to climb up.
Three steps up from the bottom, he heard Stephen start after him. As soon as his brother’s arm closed around his shoulders, he shoved backward. “No!” he growled, panicked at being grabbed from behind even though he knew damned well who it was. He’d known before, too, eight months ago.
“I don’t understand,” his older brother grumbled, returning to the foyer. “You never used to behave like this.”
“No, I don’t suppose I did.” Wrapping his hand around one of the balustrades, he hauled himself up another step. “He’ll be here at noon. I’m going to have a drink.”
Stephen stood back, watching his stubborn, fearless, athletic younger brother hitching himself up the stairs step by painful step. They’d received word from the damned butler that Tolly had returned to England. No word from Tolly himself, and still no explanation about what, precisely, had happened in India.
All he knew for certain was that Tolly had been injured, and badly. And he knew that his good-humored brother didn’t smile or laugh any longer, that he was curt and angry and on edge. If Tolly had decided to risk the loss of his leg by having it intentionally re-broken, there was clearly nothing anyone could do to change his mind.
That did not mean, however, that he could stop himself from worrying. And from wondering—if Tolly with an injured leg was unpredictable and barely civil, what might Tolly with only one leg attempt?
With a shudder Stephen returned to the morning room to explain to his wife and his sister that Tolly had not been joking and that they all might very well have just seen him on his feet—both his feet—for the last time.
Chapter Seven
“Making a match is always to be left to the man. If he is so occupied with being manly and adventurous that he doesn’t consider affairs of the heart, well, then he is a man whom I would not wish to marry. Setting your cap for such a man is both futile and foolish.”
A LADY’S GUIDE TO PROPER BEHAVIOR
Your cards this morning, Miss Tess.” Inclining his head, the butler held out the silver salver piled with calling cards.
Theresa wiped jam off her fingers and lifted the cards. “Thank you, Ramsey.”
“Those are all for you?” Michael asked as he strolled into the breakfast room. Planting a swift kiss on Grandmama Agnes’s cheek, he came around to rest his hands on Theresa’s shoulders and read the cards over her head.
“Let’s see,” she said, looking through them one by one. “Lord Lionel, Montrose, Bertle—oh, goodness, you may have him.”
“Thank you, no. He has a very particular odor about him.”
She looked up at her brother. “You should attempt a dance with him.”
“Let’s put that one aside,” he said with a grin. “Who else?”
“Harriet, Lord Hayverton, Lord Wilcox…” She stopped to slide that card across the table to their grandmother. “A caller, Grandmama?”
“Hmm. Apparently that hat was even more impressive than we thought.” Chuckling, Agnes read the note scrawled across the back of the calling card, then set it aside. “Wilcox has invited me to go for a stroll this afternoon. How very nice!”
“Don’t wear the hat,” Michael advised. “You’ll have the poor baron suffering an apoplexy of lust.”
While her brother and grandmother bantered about the state of Lord Wilcox’s health, Theresa looked through the remaining cards. As she finished and stacked them all together again, she frowned. Nothing from Tolly James. Not a card, not a note, not a flower or even a bare stem.
“What’s amiss, my dear?”
Swiftly wiping away her scowl, Theresa looked up. “Nothing’s amiss, Grandmama. I have three invitations to luncheon.”
“I foresee two gentlemen with broken hearts.” Releasing her shoulders, Michael went to the sideboard to select his breakfast.
One luncheon companion, two broken hearts, and one broken head, if she had her way. She’d done everything she could think of to make Colonel James aware of her interest. And judging from a trio of supremely exemplary kisses, he was interested, as well. And yet he refused to call on her.
Perhaps he kissed so many women when no one else was looking that he simply hadn’t yet made his way to her particular door. This was unacceptable. It was maddening. Didn’t he realize that firstly she was considered a catch, and secondly he was rotten and unpleasant and was not considered a catch?
She pursed her lips. Honesty made her admit to herself that he wasn’t entirely unpleasant—not the way he looked at her sometimes, anyway—and that considering what had happened to him, he was perhaps entitled to be a bit…prickly from time to time. On the other hand, the heated kisses and ho
rrific personal secrets with which he’d favored her, together with him otherwise completely ignoring her, was too much to bear.
Turning her annoyed, irritated growl into a cough, she pushed to her feet. “I forgot, I already made luncheon plans with Amelia,” she stated.
“Ah. Three broken hearts, then,” Michael amended with a grin. “You’re a cruel, cruel girl, Troll.”
Theresa paused in the doorway just long enough to stick her tongue out at her terribly amusing brother. Then she hurried upstairs to scribble out her regrets to her three would-be luncheon hosts, collect her maid and her hat, and attempt to figure out how she could accidently run across the colonel at James House and make certain he knew just how displeased she was—all without causing a stir.
Of course all of that would make her appear desperate for his attention, which she was most definitely not. Hmm. Perhaps she could accidently stumble across him and then ignore him. That would show him how little his kisses and his pretty eyes and his obvious courage impressed her.
By the time the family coach stopped at James House, she was ready for battle. After all, she had a dozen beaux trailing after her, and she’d had her fill of showing interest and kindness and empathy where none was returned. She’d never encountered the like before. Someone needed to teach that man a lesson.
Generally Graham opened the front door for her before her feet even left the coach. Today, though, she had to rap the brass, lion-shaped knocker against the door twice and then wait before it finally opened.
“Miss Weller,” the butler said, inclining his head.
“Good afternoon, Graham. Is Lady…” She paused, belatedly noting the butler’s pale complexion and the thin, straight line of his generally amiable mouth. “Is something amiss?”
A strangled male yell of pure agony ripped through the interior of the house. The sound froze her to her very bones.
“Good heavens!”
A Lady's Guide to Improper Behavior Page 8