“Why would any respectable gentleman wed into a family so scandalous?” another lady asked in response.
Why, indeed, Prudence silently mouthed. They wouldn’t. They didn’t. At least, that is what it had evidenced since she’d arrived for her London Season more than three weeks ago. Nary a suitor. Nary a dancer. Well, that hadn’t been altogether true. There had been one polite gentleman. Braving the mocking discovery of those ladies, she stole a peek around the column and found Christian with his perfect partner who did not stumble and trod all over his feet.
Odd, how that dance had come to mean so much to her.
“…shameful to even think a respectable gentleman would wed her. I also heard whisper of…”
Prudence had little intention of finding out whatever else that miserable harpy had heard whisper of. She continued along the length of the room and then slipped down the corridor. As she moved through carpeted halls, her ears still rang with the strains of the orchestra and the din of too-loud conversations. Desperate to claim a moment of solitude, she moved briskly through Christian’s home. Deeper into the townhouse, past closed door after closed door, before reaching the double doors that led to the back portion of the townhouse. She paused.
No scandals. No elopements or rushed marriages. You are to be… Prudence continued on. She slipped silently through Christian’s home. With the din of the ballroom faded and a loud hum of quiet blaring in her ears, she wandered at a more sedate pace through the marquess’ home.
“Oh, hello. Are you stealing off to meet someone?”
A startled gasp burst from her lips and she spun about. Her heart in her throat, she took in the person who’d discovered her not so furtive sneaking. Prudence’s mind went curiously blank.
A young lady, near to Penelope’s age, stood in the middle of the hall. Her head tipped to the side, she eyed Prudence with curiosity teeming from her brown eyes. The soft gold shade of the lady’s hair and the familiar brown of her eyes marked her a relation of Christian’s.
The girl took several steps closer, studying Prudence as though she were an exhibit on display at the Royal Museum. “You do not look to be one of those scandalous ladies.” She stopped and glanced curiously at her gown.
The tightness in her chest at the earlier cruelties dissipated. “Oh, indeed not,” she said on a whisper. “If I were scandalous, I’d certainly be wearing a dress of—”
They spoke in unison. “Red.”
The two young women shared a smile. How very nice it was to have a person to speak with against all the ugly gossips.
“Indeed.” Prudence gave an emphatic nod. “But it would not be a light pinkish-red.”
“Or mauve,” the nameless lady said, skipping over.
She gave a mock shudder. “Egads, never mauve. It would be the deep crimson that no debutante would ever be permitted to wear.”
The girl stared at her a long moment and then a wide smile wreathed her lips. “I daresay I must know your name. I like you very much.” She wrinkled her nose. “You aren’t at all like the ladies my brother is purported to carry on with.”
A sharp pain snaked through her being and she mustered another smile. “My name is Prudence.”
“And I am Lucinda Villiers.” She stuck her fingers out.
Christian’s sister. They both had sisters of like ages. Knowing that piece of him made him more…real in ways he’d not been before. For now, he was more than a rogue and a charming gentleman on the street—he was a man with a sibling and a mother.
Lucinda’s smile dipped and she looked pointedly at Prudence’s gloved fingers.
Prudence cleared her throat. “Forgive me, I was woolgathering.” She took her hand and shook it in greeting. The impropriety of being caught slipping off by the host’s sister raised distant warning bells. “I really shouldn’t be here.” Her mother would tie one of Sir Faithful’s leads about her if this was discovered.
A mischievous glimmer lit the girl’s eyes. “Neither should I.” She gave a wink. “But how else is a lady supposed to learn anything if not searching about herself.”
“Indeed!”
“My brother is determined to—” Alas, just what Christian was determined to do went unfinished.
Two low, deep masculine voices sounded down the hall.
“Oh, bloody hell,” Lucinda whispered with a ferocity that raised heat to Prudence’s cheek. “My brother and Tristan.” She took Prudence’s fingers once more and pumped her hand. “Lovely meeting. Must be off.”
With the speed that came from a troublesome sister, Lucinda sprinted down the hall in the opposite direction abandoning Prudence to her own devices.
Christian and Lord Maxwell’s voices grew increasingly closer. Heart thundering in her ears, Prudence shoved the nearest door open and slipped inside the darkened parlor. She closed the wood panel behind her and leaned against the frame.
The sound of footsteps penetrated the door and she held her breath, waiting for them to pass. Praying for them to pass.
Bloody hell, indeed.
Chapter 9
Lesson Nine
Be careful which keyholes you are caught listening at…
“I daresay it’s in bad form to hide from one’s own festivities,” Maxwell drawled from the chair he occupied on the opposite side of Christian’s desk.
To let his friend know precisely what he thought of his useless observation, he poured himself a snifter of brandy and held the glass up in salute. “Indeed.”
His friend leaned over and retrieved the empty glass and crystal decanter and proceeded to pour himself a glass. “If I were in the sorry state you now find yourself, I would also be hiding away.”
Christian cradled his snifter between his fingers and studied the amber contents. Redding had given him three months. It had since been two months and three days and yet, he could not bring himself ’round to that shameful, unenviable task of hunting some lady’s fortune. He tightened his hands reflexively upon his glass. Granted, there was little choice. The eighteen men and women employed here, and his sister and mother, all confirmed that.
“How bad is it?” his friend’s quietly spoken question called his attention up.
“Bad,” he replied instantly. He took another long swallow of brandy and welcomed the path it blazed down his throat.
“How long?”
He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Three weeks.” Three weeks and three days if one wished to be truly precise.
“Bloody hell, St. Cyr,” Maxwell hissed.
For the first time since he’d met Redding, a grin pulled at his lips. He could always rely upon his friend’s like reaction.
“What of your investments?”
Christian swirled the contents of his glass. Other than Redding, only Maxwell knew of his bold wager on steam power. Knew and approved of Christian’s gamble. “They are yielding a profit.” But it still was not enough.
“You need to marry.” His friend spoke with the same resolute determination that he’d evinced in battle. Then, Maxwell had long been the honorable one of the pair, knowing what was expected of him and seeing to those responsibilities.
He managed a tight nod. Christian braced for his friend’s amusement, but an uncharacteristic solemnity glinted in the other man’s eyes.
“I understand your circumstances and I’m not impervious to them, even if that is how it may appear.” Maxwell opened his mouth and then stopped. He stole a glance about. When he spoke, his voice was the deathly quiet practiced by a man who’d perfected silence around the enemy. “You require a marchioness. As my sister,” he meant his eldest, Kristina, “is in the market for a husband—”
“I am not wedding your sister,” he put in quietly.
“I was not going to suggest you wed her. Not again,” he said, at the pointed look Christian gave him. “And not because of your misbegotten sense of self-worth or the very obvious fact that it wouldn’t be natural for a man named Christian to marry a woman named Kristina.”
> A laugh rumbled up from his chest and he gave his head a slow shake. God, even with the direness of his circumstances he could always rely upon the much-needed brevity from Maxwell. “I’ve no intention of wedding any of the young innocent misses your sister might call friends.” One innocent slip of a lady stole into his thoughts—an honest, scandal-ridden one.
The other lord gave a droll grin. “Ah, at last you have that same determined look better reserved for the battlefield. You must have brought yourself ’round to your undesirable task.”
Such words could only come from one who’d known him nearly two decades. “Indeed,” he muttered.
Maxwell bowed his head. “I am of course here to help as a loyal friend.” The earl gave him a deliberate frown. “Knowing you as I do, you’ve already settled on the criteria for your wife.”
Title-hunting, merciless, grasping, mercenary. “I have.” Oh, the merciless world in which they lived. If it wasn’t the battlefield of war, it was the battlefield of the ballrooms.
Maxwell set his drink down on the edge of his desk with a firm clink. “You deserve more in your wife than the cold, calculated lady you’d seek to tie yourself to.”
He started at his friend’s unerring accuracy. “I did not mention my requirements.”
His friend waggled his eyebrows. “You didn’t need to. I know you, St. Cyr, perhaps better than you know yourself. The crimes you think yourself guilty of, we are all guilty of the same. There is no need to go through life flagellating yourself with remorse for your imagined failings. What happened with her,” Ah God, that traitorous bitch. “And Blackthorne could have happened to any of us.”
Ah, here it was after years of silence; Maxwell’s words, the closest they’d ever come of speaking to the truth. Only, it hadn’t happened to either of them. It had happened to Christian. A youth when he’d first met Lynette, he’d lusted for the dark-haired Belgian beauty and had put his pleasures before all else. Ultimately, Blackthorne had paid the price on the battlefield for his follies. Now, the last member of their trio had set himself up as a recluse, whispered about and spoken of as though he were a beast in hiding.
“And what of Waterloo?” Humiliated shame turned in his belly. “The misplaced praise when you were the one so deserving, could that have happened to anyone?”
A black frown marred the always amiable earl’s lips. He surged forward in his seat. “By God, do you think I cared about the pomp and praise?” Frustration darkened the other man’s tone. “During that bloody war, I only cared about survival. Yours, mine, and…” Blackthorne. Guilt slashed at Christian’s conscience once more. His friend narrowed his eyes. “You wear a cloak of guilt,” Maxwell slashed the air with his hand. “Toulouse, Waterloo. Blackthorne.” Ah, God, the dull blade of remorse twisted all the deeper. “How do you still not realize. I didn’t need the commendations. I didn’t want them. I was just so bloody glad to survive.”
He’d never deserved Maxwell’s loyalty. His friend was just too stubborn to see as much.
Maxwell dropped his elbows onto his knees. “And I wasn’t discussing Waterloo.” He paused and gave him a piercing look.
Lynette.
He swiped a hand over his face. “I do not care to discuss,” her, “it.” Nor did he think he ever would.
His friend searched his face a long moment, opening his mouth as though poised to press the point, but then he settled back in his seat. “Very well. Then let us speak on the matter of your wife.” One horror for another. And suddenly the matter of his future bride seemed far preferable to the talk of the past. “Those title graspers. The ones you are searching for, my mother keeps abreast of who those ladies are.” He picked up his brandy and waved his glass about. “Competition for Kristina. It will, if nothing, save you time in your quest, and at best, spare you from seeking out a lady with stars in her eyes for the dashing Waterloo war hero.”
Heat raced up Christian’s neck. Such a faux hero as he would never be deserving of an honorable lady. Say, one who sketched poorly and sprinted through the grounds of Hyde Park to rescue her younger sister from harm. He recalled her as she’d been earlier, entering his ballroom, flanked by her stoic mother on one side and her glowering brother, the Earl of Sinclair, on the other. For the dourness evinced by her kin, the lady wore a perpetual smile and the young woman he’d met on three occasions now, he suspected did it as her way of thumbing her nose at Society’s disapproval.
Honorable. Courageous.
“Miss Caroline Watts.”
No, her name was Prudence. Though he did wonder as to the lady’s middle name.
“An enormous dowry, a desire for nothing less than an earl, and also a father who will bow to her wishes.”
That snapped Christian’s attention away from the white skirt-wearing miss who’d been gawked and gaped at by the lords and ladies in his ballroom. It had taken a physical effort to not look to her in a silent, unspoken bid for support against the cruel gossips who’d flay her for the scandal made by her siblings.
“Will she do?”
“Will she do what?” he questioned.
Maxwell eyed him suspiciously. “As your prospective marchioness?”
Oh, Christ. His friend’s earlier commiseration then the mention of Miss Caroline Watts. It all pertained to his fortune hunting efforts. He forced his attention to the young woman in pale pink skirts. The black-haired, perfectly rounded young woman who’d eyed the crowd over the top of her fan.
“She has a delectable form,” his friend put in.
Yes, yes she did. With her generous hips and abundant décolletage, she far fit with the standard beauty he’d come to crave.
“Well?” his friend prodded.
“She will not do,” he bit out.
His friend scratched his brow. “Are you cert—?”
“I am certain,” he snapped out.
“Very well, there is also Lady Gabriella Atwater.”
He knew his friend was trying to be helpful. He really did. And more, he should be attending the man and grateful for his efforts. But blast, if Maxwell wasn’t grating on his nerves with his methodical list. “And what of the Lady Gabriella?” he forced himself to ask. Considering the impending doom awaiting his family and staff in three weeks and three days, his friend’s response should matter a good deal more than it did.
“Graceful, outrageously dowered, determined to have nothing less than a marquess.” Nothing. Not “no one”. “And on her third Season.” Then, isn’t that what Christian sought in a bride? A woman who saw his title first and him not at all? Ultimately, they were all mercenary and he deserved nothing less, nay, wanted nothing less.
He forced himself to truly consider this particular candidate. He’d caught a glimpse of the lady as she’d glided through the movements of a quadrille with a remarkable ease and, as his friend indicated, grace. No, Miss Atwater did not stumble or falter as she danced.
He frowned. There had been something endearing about a lady so very different than those dull, paste copies of other dull ladies. One who, with her golden hair and cream white cheeks, had been nothing like the women who merely hungered for a spot in the bed of some fabled war hero.
“I can arrange an introduction to the lady,” his friend put in.
He thrust those ancient recollections of the woman who’d opened his eyes to the true ugly in the world and focused on his friend’s words. Miss Gabriella Atwater fit with all those important criteria for his marchioness. And as Maxwell had pointed out, on her third Season, the lady was no fresh bloom off the debutante tree with unrealistic expectations for what the world held before her. Christian forced himself to nod. “An introduction to Miss Atwater, then.”
Since she’d been old enough to open the nursery door and slip undetected past her often-harried nursemaids, Prudence had been listening at keyholes. It had proven a rather lucrative way for an inquisitive child to learn a great deal. There had been the information gleaned at the doorway of her brother’s office as Mother lamented
her woes about being parent to five troublesome Tidemore children. Then, the library door where her former governess, turned sister-in-law, Juliet, had met with Sin to discuss her charges. The inevitable truth had been that not all good could come from listening at those keyholes, as was evidenced by the shameful hurt Prudence had wrought years earlier upon her brother and Juliet.
Oh, that did not always hold true. On very rare, very special instances, one could learn a great deal of good at doorways. This proved to be one of those times. With her heart hammering wildly in her breast, Prudence stole a glance down the marquess’ darkened halls. Finding the corridors still blessedly empty, she pressed her ear to the wood panel once more.
“Will she do?”
She damned her pulse as it pounded loudly in her ears, further muffling the words of the gentleman speaking to Christian.
“…As your prospective marchioness…?”
Her heart tripped a beat. As her brother had suspected, Christian was in the market for a wife. There was something that made the truth all the more real, hearing it uttered from the gentleman himself. For one hopeful instant she allowed herself to believe the fleeting exchange on the quiet London streets had created some inexplicable pull between them that was mutual.
“…She has a delectable form…”
All such hopes were dashed on the other gentleman’s words. With a slight frown she glanced down at her still not at all delectable form. When she’d been a girl of fifteen and she, Poppy and Penelope had plotted ways to slip into a gentleman-only club, her sisters had unhelpfully pointed out that of them, only the curveless Prudence would be able to accomplish such an endeavor. That was the last she’d ever considered entering a gentleman-only club.
Christian’s response, though lost to the wood panel, hinted at a rejection of his friend’s suggestion and she swallowed back the giddy giggle that climbed up her throat.
Lords of Honor-The Collection Page 28