by Julia Quinn
“Clive must have been furious!”
“That might be painting it a trifle too harsh,” David said, “but certainly rather embarrassed.”
“A doubly hyphenated name would have been bad enough,” Susannah said. “I shouldn’t like to have to introduce myself as Susannah Ballister-Bates—” She searched for an appropriately awful third surname. “Bismark!” she finished triumphantly.
“No,” he murmured dryly, “I can see why you wouldn’t.”
“But this—” Susannah finished, stepping right on top of his soft words. “This is quite beyond the…oh dear. I don’t know what it’s quite beyond. My comprehension, I suppose.”
“He wanted to change it to Snowe-Formsby,” David said, “but I told him our Mann forebears would be quite upset.”
“Forgive me for pointing it out,” Susannah replied, “but your Mann forebears are quite deceased. I rather think they lack the capability to be upset one way or another.”
“Not if they left behind legal documents barring monetary inheritance by anyone who drops the Mann name.”
“They didn’t!” Susannah gasped.
David merely smiled.
“They didn’t!” she said again, but this time her tone was quite different. “They did no such thing. You only said that to torture poor Clive.”
“Oh, it’s poor Clive now,” he teased.
“It’s poor anyone who must answer to Snowe-Mann!”
“That’s Snowe-Mann-Formsby, thank you very much.” He shot her a cheeky grin. “My Formsby forebears would be quite put out.”
“And I suppose they also blocked inheritance by anyone who drops their name?” Susannah asked sarcastically.
“As a matter of fact, they did,” David said. “Where do you think I got the idea?”
“You’re incorrigible,” she said, but she couldn’t quite manage an appropriately horrified tone. The truth was, she rather admired his sense of humor. The fact that the joke was on Clive was merely the icing on the cake.
“I suppose I shall have to call you My Lord Snowflake, then,” she said.
“It’s hardly dignified,” he said.
“Or heroic,” she agreed, “but as you’ll see, I’m still trapped here in the snowbank.”
“As am I.”
“White suits you,” Susannah said.
He gave her a look.
“You should wear it more often.”
“You’re quite cheeky for a woman in a snowbank.”
She grinned. “My courage is derived from your position, also in a snowbank.”
He grimaced, then nodded self-deprecatingly. “It’s actually not too uncomfortable.”
“Except for the dignity,” Susannah agreed.
“And the cold.”
“And the cold. I can’t feel my…er…”
“Bottom?” he supplied helpfully.
She cleared her throat, as if somehow that would clear her blush. “Yes.”
His green eyes twinkled at her embarrassment, then he turned serious—or at least more serious than he had been—and said, “Well, I suppose I ought to save you, then. I rather like your—don’t worry, I won’t say it,” he interjected upon her gasp of horror. “But I wouldn’t want to see it fall off.”
“David,” she ground out.
“Is that what it takes to get you to use my name?” he wondered. “A slightly inappropriate but I assure you most respectful, comment?”
“Who are you?” she suddenly asked. “And what have you done with the earl?”
“Renminster, you mean?” he asked, leaning toward her until they were nearly nose to nose.
His question was so odd that she couldn’t answer, save for a tiny nod.
“Perhaps you never knew him,” he suggested. “Perhaps you only thought you did, but you never looked beyond the surface.”
“Perhaps I didn’t,” she whispered.
He smiled, then took her hands in his. “Here is what we are going to do. I’m going to stand, and as I do so, I’ll pull you up. Are you ready?”
“I’m not sure—”
“Here we are,” he muttered, trying to heave himself up, which was no small task given that his feet were on skates, and his skates were on ice.
“David, you—”
But it was no use. He was behaving in a predictably manly fashion, which meant that he wasn’t listening to reason (not when it interfered with an opportunity to make a show of his brute strength). Susannah could have told him—and in fact, she tried to—that the angle was all wrong, and his feet were going to slide out from under him, and they’d both go toppling down…
Which is exactly what they did.
But this time David didn’t behave in a typically manly fashion, which would have been to get quite angry and make excuses. Instead, he just looked her straight in the eyes and burst out laughing.
Susannah laughed with him, her body shaking with sheer, unadulterated mirth. It had never been like this with Clive. With Clive, even when she’d laughed, she’d always felt as if she were on display, as if everyone were watching her laugh, wondering what the joke was, because one couldn’t truly count oneself as part of the most fashionable set unless one knew all the inside jokes.
With Clive, she’d always known the inside jokes, but she hadn’t always found them funny.
But she’d laughed all the same, hoping that no one noticed the incomprehension in her eyes.
This was different. This was special. This was…
No, she thought forcefully. This wasn’t love. But maybe it was the beginnings of it. And maybe it would grow. And maybe—
“What have we here?”
Susannah looked up, but she already knew the voice.
Dread filled her belly.
Clive.
Chapter 5
Both Mann-Formsby brothers were in attendance at the Moreland skating party, although it can hardly be said that their interactions were amiable. Indeed, it was reported to This Author that the earl and his brother nearly came to blows.
Now, that, Gentle Reader, would have been a sight to see. Fisticuffs on skates! What could be next? Underwater fencing? Tennis on horseback?
LADY WHISTLEDOWN’S SOCIETY PAPERS, 4 FEBRUARY 1814
When Susannah placed her hand in Clive’s it was as if she’d been transported back in time. It had been half a year since she’d stood so close to the man who’d broken her heart—or at the very least her pride—and much as she wanted to feel nothing…
She did.
Her heart missed a beat and her stomach flipped and her breath grew shaky, and oh, how she hated herself for it all.
He should mean nothing. Nothing. Less than nothing if she could manage it.
“Clive,” she said, trying to keep her voice even as she tugged her hand away from his.
“Susannah,” he said warmly, smiling down at her in that oh-so-confident way of his. “How have you been?”
“Fine,” she answered, irritated now, since, really, how did he think she’d been?
Clive turned back around to offer a hand to his brother, but David had already found his feet. “David,” Clive said cordially. “I didn’t expect to see you here with Susannah.”
“I didn’t expect to see you here at all,” David replied.
Clive shrugged. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and a lock of his blond hair fell forward onto his forehead. “Decided only this morning to attend.”
“Where is Harriet?” David asked.
“Off with her mother near the fire. She doesn’t like the cold.”
They stood there for a moment, an awkward triptych with nothing to say. It was strange, Susannah thought, her eyes drifting slowly from one Mann-Formsby brother to the next. In all the time she’d spent with Clive, she’d never known him to be without words or an easy smile. He was a chameleon, slipping and sliding into situations with perfect ease. But right now, he was just staring at his brother with an expression that wasn’t quite hostile.
But it certainl
y wasn’t friendly.
David didn’t seem quite right, either. He tended to hold himself more stiffly than Clive, his posture always straight and correct. And in truth, it was a rare man who moved with the easy, fluid grace that Clive epitomized. But now David seemed almost too stiff, his jaw too tight. When they’d laughed so hard, just moments before in the snowbank, she’d seen the man and not the earl.
But now…
The earl was most definitely back.
“Would you like to take a turn about the ice?” Clive suddenly asked.
Susannah felt her head jerk with surprise when she realized that Clive was talking to her. Not that he would have been likely to want to take a turn about the ice with his brother, but still, it didn’t seem quite appropriate that he do so with her. Especially with Harriet so close by.
Susannah frowned. Especially with Harriet’s mother so close to Harriet. It was one thing to put one’s wife in a potentially awkward position; it was quite another to do so with one’s mother-in-law.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” she hedged.
“We should clear the air,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact. “Show everyone we’ve no hard feelings.”
No hard feelings? Susannah’s jaw stiffened. What the devil did he think he was talking about? She had hard feelings. Very hard. After last summer, her feelings for Clive were bloody well as hard as iron.
“For old times’ sake,” Clive cajoled, his boyish grin lighting up his face.
His face? Really, let’s be honest, it lit up the entire pier. Clive’s smiles always did that.
But this time, Susannah didn’t feel her usual jolt of excitement. Instead she felt a little irritated. “I’m with Lord Renminster,” she said stiffly. “It wouldn’t be polite to abandon him.”
Clive let out a little howl of laughter. “David? Don’t worry about him.” He turned to his brother. “You don’t mind, do you, old man?”
David looked as if he minded very much, but of course he merely said, “Not at all.”
Which left Susannah even more irritated with him than she was with Clive. If he minded, why didn’t he do something about it? Did he think she wanted to skate with Clive?
“Fine,” she announced. “Let us be off, then. If we’re going to skate, we might as well do it before our toes freeze to black.”
Her tone couldn’t have been called anything but snippy, and both Mann-Formsby brothers looked at her with curious surprise.
“I shall be over by the vat of chocolate,” David said, giving her a polite bow as Clive looped his arm through hers.
“And if it’s not still warm, then you’ll be over by the vat of brandy?” Clive joked.
David answered with a stiff smile to his brother and skated away.
“Susannah,” Clive said, giving her a warm look. “Glad he’s gone, eh? It’s been an age.”
“Has it?”
He chuckled. “You know it has.”
“How is marriage treating you?” she asked pointedly.
He winced. “You don’t waste any time, do you?”
“Neither did you, apparently,” she muttered, relieved when he began to skate. The sooner they made their lap around the area, the sooner they would be done.
“Are you still angry, then?” he asked. “I’d hoped you’d managed to get past that.”
“I managed to get past you,” she said. “My anger is another thing altogether.”
“Susannah,” he said, although in truth, his voice sounded rather like a whine to her ears. He sighed, and she looked over at him. His eyes were full of concern, and his face had assumed a wounded air.
And maybe he really did feel wounded. Maybe he truly hadn’t meant to hurt her and honestly thought that she would be able to shrug off the entire unpleasant episode as if nothing had happened.
But she couldn’t. She just wasn’t that nice a person. Susannah had decided that some people were truly good and nice inside and some people just tried to be. And she must have been in the latter group, because she simply couldn’t summon enough Christian charity to forgive Clive. Not yet, anyway.
“I have not had a pleasant few months,” she said, her voice stiff and clipped.
His hand tightened around her arm. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But don’t you see I had no choice?”
She looked at him in disbelief. “Clive, you have more choices and opportunities than anyone I know.”
“That’s not true,” he insisted, looking at her intently. “I had to marry Harriet. I had no choice. I—”
“Don’t,” Susannah warned in a low voice. “Don’t tread down that avenue. It isn’t fair to me and it certainly isn’t fair to Harriet.”
“You’re right,” he said, somewhat shamefaced. “But—”
“And I don’t care one way or another why you married Harriet. I don’t care if you marched up to the altar with her father’s pistol pressed against your back!”
“Susannah!”
“No matter why or how you married her,” Susannah continued hotly, “you could have told me before you announced it at the Mottram ball in front of four hundred people.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was shabby of me.”
“I’ll say,” she muttered, feeling rather a bit better now that she’d had a chance to rail directly at Clive, as opposed to her usual arguments in absentia. But all the same, enough was enough, and she found she didn’t particularly care to remain in his company any longer. “I think you should return me to David,” she said.
His eyebrows rose. “It’s David now, is it?”
“Clive,” she said, her voice irritated.
“I can’t believe you’re calling my brother by his given name.”
“He gave me leave to do so, and I don’t see how it is any of your concern one way or another.”
“Of course it is my concern. We courted for months.”
“And you married someone else,” she reminded him. Good Lord, was Clive jealous?
“It’s just…David,” he spat out, his voice unpleasant. “Of all people, Susannah.”
“What is wrong with David?” she asked. “He’s your brother, Clive.”
“Exactly. I know him better than anyone.” His hand tightened at her waist as they rounded the pier. “And he is not the right man for you.”
“I hardly think you are in any position to advise me.”
“Susannah…”
“I happen to like your brother, Clive. He’s funny, and smart, and—”
Clive actually stumbled, which was a rare thing for a man of his grace. “Did you say funny?”
“I don’t know, I suppose I did. I—”
“David? Funny?”
Susannah thought about their moments in the snowbank, about the sound of David’s laughter and the magic of his smile. “Yes,” she said with quiet reminiscence. “He makes me laugh.”
“I don’t know what is going on,” Clive muttered, “but my brother has no sense of humor.”
“That’s simply not true.”
“Susannah, I’ve known him for twenty-six years. I should think that counts for more than your acquaintance of, what—one week?”
Susannah felt her jaw set into an angry line. She had no desire to be condescended to, especially by Clive. “I would like to go back to the shore,” she bit off. “Now.”
“Susannah—”
“If you do not wish to accommodate me, I will skate off by myself,” she warned.
“Just once more around, Susannah,” he cajoled. “For old times’ sake.”
She looked over at him, which was a dreadful mistake. Because he was gazing at her with that same expression that had always turned her legs to butter. She didn’t know how blue eyes could look so warm, but his were practically melting. He was looking at her as if she were the only woman in the world, or perhaps the last scrap of food in the face of famine, and…
She was made of sterner stuff now, and she knew she wasn’t the only woman in his world, but he
did sound sincere, and for all his childish ways, Clive was not at heart an unkind person. She felt her resolve slipping away, and she sighed. “Fine,” she said, her voice resigned. “Once more around. But that is all. I came here with David, and it’s not fair to leave him off by himself.”
And as they pushed off to take one more turn around the makeshift course that Lord and Lady Moreland had set up for their guests, Susannah realized that she really did want to get back to David. Clive might be handsome, and Clive might be charming, but he no longer made her heart pound with a single look.
David did.
And nothing could have surprised her more.
The Moreland servants had lit a bonfire under the vat of chocolate, and so the beverage was blessedly warm, if not adequately sweetened. David had drunk three cups of the too-bitter brew before he realized that the heat he was finally beginning to feel in his fingers and toes had nothing to do with the fire to his left and everything to do with an anger that had been simmering since the moment Clive had skated up the snowbank and looked down on him and Susannah.
Damn and blast, that wasn’t accurate. Clive had been looking at Susannah. He couldn’t have cared less about David—his brother, for God’s sake—and he’d gazed at Susannah in a way no man was supposed to look at a woman not his wife.
David’s fingers tightened around his mug. Oh, very well, he was exaggerating. Clive hadn’t been looking at Susannah in a lustful fashion (David ought to know, since he had caught himself looking at her in that exact manner), but his expression had definitely been possessive, and his eyes had fired with jealousy.
Jealousy? If Clive had wanted the right to feel jealous over Susannah, he should bloody well have married her, and not Harriet.
Jaw clamped like a vise, David watched his brother lead Susannah around the ice. Did Clive still want her? David wasn’t worried; well, not really. Susannah would never disgrace herself by becoming too familiar with a married man.
But what if she still pined for him? Hell, what if she still loved him? She said she didn’t, but did she really know her own heart? Men and women tended to delude themselves when it came to love.
And what if he married her—and he fully intended to marry her—and she still loved Clive? How could he bear it, knowing his wife preferred his brother?