by Julia Quinn
Such candor would be refreshing if it weren’t so bizarre.
And if that weren’t enough, Lord Darington was seen Sunday last, walking along the streets of Mayfair without a coat.
Good heavens, has no one told the poor man that the Thames has frozen over?
LADY WHISTLEDOWN’S SOCIETY PAPERS, 2 FEBRUARY 1814
“Well, first of all, Dare, you called upon them way too early yesterday.”
Terrance sat back with a sigh. “Right, I forgot about that.”
Ronald Stuart shook his head. “A week in London, and you are still on country time. I shall have to keep you out late tonight, perhaps then you might sleep at least until noon.”
Terrance laughed and sipped his tonic.
“You know, you could have a brandy. It’s only me you’re with. No one you’ll need to keep your wits up for.”
Terrance glanced around White’s. “Thanks, but I like my wits.” It had been a very long time since he had last sat with Stu at White’s like this, a lifetime, really.
“Secondly, Lady Caroline is not anyone you should waste another thought on. Though it’s a bit of a slight to lose such a fine coat.”
“She had it sent to my home. I did not lose it.”
“Well, good then. Now.” Stu pulled a bit of parchment from the pocket of his waistcoat. “Miss Rellton isn’t going to do?” He dipped a quill in an inkpot on the table beside him and held it above the paper.
“No.”
“Then we shall go on to the next.” Stu scratched out Miss Rellton’s name.
Terrance frowned. Stu had the subtlety of a rampaging bull and the tact as well. A fine man, and the most loyal friend Terrance had ever had. But suddenly the businesslike way they were going about finding Terrance a bride seemed rather crass.
And he did not think Lady Caroline should be dismissed out of hand quite so quickly. “I asked Lady Caroline to the skating party.”
“Excuse me?”
“I asked—”
“Are you mad? She’s exactly what you told me you did not want in a wife, Dare. And, if I remember correctly, you wanted to get this done in a timely matter.” Stu stuck the quill back in the inkpot. “‘I need to get married, Stu, help me find a wife. But for God’s sake don’t make me stay through a Season.’ Does that ring a bell, Dare? That was you giving me instructions on this whole thing, wasn’t it?”
Yes, but how horrible his words now sounded coming from Stu’s mouth.
“And, anyway, Lady Caroline does not meet your requirements in the least,” Stu continued. “You asked me to find you someone who would be able to represent you well in society. Someone who—how did you put it?—glitters? Someone who can keep up a good conversation so as to divert the attention away from the fact that yours isn’t as glib. Well, I’ll tell you now, Dare, Lady Caroline is most definitely not the one to do that. She’s positively”—Stu grimaced—“positively bland, Dare, is what she is.”
Bland? Terrance thought of Caroline’s dewy complexion and large eyes, then remembered her strange words and obviously passionate demeanor.
If there was one thing that Lady Caroline Starling was not, it was bland.
“She refused me,” he said. And if he thought this information would calm his friend, Terrance was sadly mistaken.
“She refused you? She refused you?” Stu stood. “How dare she! As if she could do any better!”
“Stu,” Terrance said quietly. “Sit.”
Stu sat. “Well, really, she does think she’s quite the thing, doesn’t she?”
“No.” Terrance stopped for a moment, trying to find his words. “Actually, she seems not to like me.”
“She doesn’t like you?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Of course, but you don’t always say what you mean, now do you? Or at least you really never use enough words that I am sure I understand completely. And I really must understand this completely: Lady Caroline doesn’t like you?” Stu held up his hands as if surrendering to someone. “What on earth does liking you have to do with anything? I mean, Lady Caroline is the quintessential ape leader. She really ought to be most grateful to anyone who offers her a way off the shelf. She has no room to be picky.”
“I must disagree. Lady Caroline should be very picky. She is a beautiful woman.”
Stu furrowed his brow. “Fine, she’s beautiful. But no woman with any kind of intelligence would turn down an invitation from a well-heeled bachelor with a title in front of his name. Especially a woman who is well past her prime.” Stu waved his hand in the air. “Beautiful or no. It has nothing to do with liking at all.”
“Well, Lady Caroline doesn’t like me.”
Stu just shrugged. “Women, strange bunch, the lot of them. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because she’s not for you.” With a shake of his blond head, Stu returned his attention to the list. “But Miss Shelton-Hart most definitely is.” He looked up, his dark eyes alight with triumph.
A bit premature to think in terms of triumph, it seemed to Terrance. And anyway, he did not want to think of the next person on the list. He wanted to think of Caroline Starling.
So much for staying away from her.
“I shall call upon Miss Shelton-Hart this very moment and tell her that you shall be escorting her to the skating party,” Stu announced.
Lovely, he could just see Stu pounding into Miss Shelton-Hart’s drawing room and demanding that the woman go to the skating party with Lord Darington. “Shouldn’t you ask her, Stu?”
Stu blinked. “Right, that’s what I said, Dare.” His friend leaned in toward him and whispered, “Really, do try not to say things that make you sound touched. We know you are fine, but if others know of your problem, they will give you horrible grief. And believe me, this list of probable brides will be whittled down to nearly nothing.”
Terrance’s lips twitched, but he carefully did not laugh at his friend. “Anyway, I don’t want Miss Shelton-Hart.”
“And how would you know? Have you met her? Have you seen her?” Stu did not wait for Terrance to answer. “No,” he said succinctly as if to a child in the midst of a tantrum. “I’m off, then, to ask Miss Shelton-Hart to be ready at half past eleven, three days hence, for the incredible pleasure of being escorted to the Morelands’ skating party by Lord Darington himself.” Stu launched himself from his chair with great enthusiasm. “Will you be all right here alone?”
Dearest Stu. “Of course.”
“Right, then, I’m off.” Stu tipped his head at Terrance, shoved the list of names in his breast pocket, and took off with a light step toward the exit.
Terrance watched him go, and then he glanced around at the other gentlemen talking and smoking in White’s drawing room. Ever since his injury, he spoke less and saw more. It was amazing, really, the things he now understood whereas he would have completely missed them before.
Terrance watched as some young man twitched and stammered his way through some request of the Earl of Stan-wick. Though he was too far away to hear, Terrance knew it was a request, one the young man wanted desperately and was rather sure the old earl was not going to give him.
Poor sod.
Terrance stood. He remembered a time when he would come to White’s and wile away hours doing nothing more than drinking and smoking and talking. And now that seemed infinitely boring to him.
He was actually more interested now in finding his way into Lady Caroline’s good graces. It didn’t matter what Stu said, or even what Terrance had said he wanted before. Now that he had met Lady Caroline, Terrance did not care about anything he might once have desired.
He wanted to get to know Caroline. And he most definitely wanted to explore the base of her neck with his tongue. Very important, that.
With a nod to the Earl of Stanwick, Terrance left his club in search of Lady Caroline Starling.
One of the things Linney was most definitely looking forward to, when married and living in the country, was the freedom to go anywhere s
he wanted without having to find a chaperone. It was just such a horrible bother, especially since most of their servants were usually on some errand for her mother.
Usually, she would have sent a note around to Emily Parsons, her one and only friend and always willing to go with Linney and bring along one of the fifty million footmen her father retained. But, unfortunately, Emily’s family had decided that the frozen Thames was not sufficiently fascinating to warrant a winter trip to London, and so they had elected to remain in the country.
Thus, she had been forced to corner Teddy, their butler/ footman/all-around errand boy. Her mother would probably burst a vein when she realized that Teddy would not be there to put on his butler hat for the callers who would be showing up at any moment, but Annie would be able to do it. And Linney needed to get out.
Anyway, sitting in the drawing room, as she was always asked to do for some unfathomable reason, and listening to her mother talk a mile a minute, as well as enduring her disgust of Mr. Evanston who leered at their female visitors, was beyond her at the moment.
No, now she would much rather be right where she was. Linney stood in a deserted marble hall of Montagu House, Bloomsbury, in which the British Museum was kept, staring at the Rosetta Stone. Teddy was gossiping with a guard in the other room, with Linney’s blessing.
Linney touched the stone, letting her fingers play over the strange markings. She let herself wonder about what they said, about the world the stone had come from. The mysteries surrounding the stone intrigued her.
It made her sad, too. Somewhere there was a space this stone had once occupied that was now deserted. The Rosetta Stone had been taken from its resting place of thousands of years, stolen really, and taken miles and miles and worlds away.
And though she really could not put words to the idea, it didn’t feel right, just another one of the strange thoughts that she would never say out loud.
“Interesting, isn’t it?”
Pulled from her musings by a low voice just over her shoulder, Linney let out a shriek that echoed through the entire Museum and was probably heard on three different continents.
“Sorry,” the voice said.
She turned to find none other than Lord Darington. For a man to whom she was related, albeit distantly, but had never seen in her life, it seemed a little strange that she had now encountered him three times in as many days.
A little strange, and very disconcerting.
“My lady?” Poor Teddy came at a dead run around the corner, his face the color of the ice that now covered the Thames.
“Sorry, Teddy, ’tis nothing.” Linney frowned up at the “nothing.” “I was just startled, is all.”
Teddy gulped some air and nodded, but didn’t leave, either. Good boy.
“I did not mean to startle.”
No, he didn’t mean to startle, or offend; what on earth did he mean, then?
They stared at each other for a moment. Which was a bit on the uncomfortable side, but really fine since he was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. And he smelled good, too. That was not usually a point in favor of most men, she had to admit.
Mr. Evanston, for example, always smelled like the inside of an old shoe.
When it was warm out, the man went absolutely sour.
“Do you enjoy Egyptology?” Lord Darington asked, tipping his thick head of hair toward the Rosetta Stone.
She faltered a moment, a rather strange and altogether disturbing image of her fingers running through his hair causing her to swallow a touch loudly before answering him.
“Errr, no, actually.” She glanced at the stone. “Not particularly. I like the stone, though. I like to wonder about it, especially in the quiet of the museum.” Linney frowned. That hadn’t really made any sense, had it? “I mean…”
“Yes, I know.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. If he truly understood, then she was a fairy princess.
He touched the stone, right at the exact spot she had put her own fingers. “I see some poor sod, hunched over this rock…” Lord Darington stopped for a moment and took a long breath. “Chipping away. Who was he? It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
Yes.
Lord Darington glanced up at her with eyes the color of a summer sky. “It is sad,” he said softly, “that this stone is so far from home.”
Well, her fairy godmother would be dropping in at any moment, then. She blinked at Lord Darington.
He put out his arm. “Walk with me,” he said.
It would have been awfully nice of him to put that in the form of a question rather than a demand, but for some reason, Linney just slipped her hand around his elbow.
Mmmm, Lord Darington was warm.
In fact, for a moment, Linney had the strangest urge to curl right into him and breathe in his lovely scent and just be warm. She had not been truly warm in a horribly long time.
“You aren’t at all bland,” he said.
Linney stopped walking and just stared. “Well, thank you so very much.”
His face darkened as if he were blushing, which was exactly what he should be doing, but she doubted that was the cause. He was probably just getting prickly at her sarcastic tone.
Well, that was just too bad, because she was already prickly from being called not bland. “Are you trying to compliment me, Lord Darington? Or perhaps you are trying to put me in my place?”
He took a very deep breath. “It was a compliment.”
“Really?”
“Actually…” Lord Darington stopped and glanced up at Teddy, who stood at a discreet distance behind them, pretending profound interest in some piece of cracked pottery.
“I’m not sure why,” Lord Darington said, looking back at her. “But I really like you.”
“Well, goodness, I may swoon.”
Lord Darington frowned and a small muscle ticked along his jawline. For some reason, the sight of that muscle made Linney almost really swoon.
Lord Darington was a cad and a snob, and he said the most horrible things. And yet he was absolutely beautiful, and his very nearness made her feel all light in the head and…well…swoony.
And it was especially bad at this very moment, for Lord Darington was watching her lips with an intensity she had heretofore never seen in another person’s eyes. Especially someone looking at her.
Linney ran her tongue along her front teeth, and then tried, surreptitiously, to lick her lips, an altogether impossible feat, seeing that Lord Darington watched her like a cat eyeing a mouse.
And then Lord Darington kissed her.
Holy mother of God. Lord Darington was kissing her!
Linney stood frozen in shock as Lord Darington pressed his warm, full lips against hers. She had never been kissed before, of course. Actually, she had wondered if the act weren’t horribly disgusting.
It most definitely was not anything close to disgusting.
In fact, she quite liked being kissed.
Lord Darington pulled away slightly, but then returned, angling his head just a touch to the side and a bit higher so that her top lip was sweetly embraced by both of his.
Yum.
Yes, she definitely enjoyed this. If it was this much fun to kiss Lord Darington, the cad, maybe it would be very wonderful to kiss her soon-to-be fiancé, Ernest Wareing, Earl of Pellering?
He was not at all exciting, of course. But at least he wasn’t a cad.
Lord Darington opened his mouth slightly and sucked her top lip into his mouth. Linney’s hands lifted of their own accord, and she felt Lord Darington’s upper arms against her fingers.
His arms were solid, strong. And she suddenly remembered when she had first seen his hands; those lovely hands were now gently holding either side of her rib cage.
Since it seemed that all rules had been thrown to the pigeons, Linney decided to indulge—well, indulge even more than she was at the moment—and she inched one of her hands up and curled her fingers in the hair at the back of Lord Darington’s neck.
It was exactly as it looked, soft and thick. Oh, she did like Lord Darington’s hair. And his smell, and his hands, and his strong arms, and…
No, kissing Ernest Wareing, Earl of Pellering, would not be this thrilling. She was pretty sure of that at the moment.
She was also sure that she would like to kiss Lord Darington more than just this one time.
It was much too nice to do only once. “I would like to kiss you at least a dozen times,” she murmered.
Lord Darington leaned away from her and touched the side of her face with the tip of his finger. “A dozen?”
Caroline felt her face burn. Her legs were actually shaking, and she felt horribly light-headed.
Lord Darington’s arms tightened around her as if he understood completely that she might turn into a puddle at his feet at any moment.
“At least a dozen,” she heard herself whisper. Well, wasn’t she just making a cake out of herself?
“I like you, Lady Caroline.”
Hm, yes, swooning might definitely be in her future. “I will go with you,” she said then, her mouth working with absolutely no input from her brain. “To the skating party.”
He blinked, his hands leaving her sides.
Oh no, why on earth had she just said that?
“I think I’m going with Miss Shelton-Hart,” he said slowly.
“You think?” she said stupidly. And then she pushed away from Lord Darington. Oh, what a horrible fool she was, Linney thought, as she whirled around and nearly ran from Lord Darington’s presence.
Teddy looked away quickly, but she knew very well he had been staring intently.
Wonderful. She had completely forgotten that Teddy was standing there watching them. In fact, she had forgotten everything. Bloody hell, they were standing in the middle of the British Museum. Anyone could have seen them.