“I heard the musket shot, and didn’t want to miss out on any game shooting, if that’s what was finally happening.”
Lisbeth’s face was lit up like a star, as if the marquess emerging from shrubbery was a surprise arranged just for her.
“No, Lord Waterburn threatened to shoot us for singing.”
Waterburn had no patience for such whimsy. “I did no such thing,” he said flatly.
“I might have done, however,” the marquess teased. “Depending upon the song.”
Lisbeth dimpled beautifully while the marquess smiled at her and Phoebe suffered.
He was patently refusing to look at her and she likewise refused to look at him.
She wore a fixed, benign smile that had served her in countless social situations, the sort of smile that could offend no one, signify nothing, reveal nothing, and sent her gaze around the clearing in search for something neutral to light upon. For anyone happening upon the scene would have thought that the marquess and Lisbeth had eyes for no one but each other.
She settled upon the hound. She met its brown eyes. It blinked slowly in what she liked to think was sympathy. Neither of them wanted to be where they were at the moment.
“Don’t shoot without us!” came Jonathan’s voice from a distance. “Where the devil are you?”
“Where did you get to, Dryden?” Waterburn asked laconically.
“Get to? I think we’ve been parted but, oh . . . fifteen minutes.” With a single fluid motion, he retrieved his pocket watch, flipped it open with his thumb, reviewed the time, and replaced it. “Fifteen minutes,” he confirmed. “I enjoyed the exploration. Enviable lands.”
Fifteen minutes. She’d manage to upend her orderly life in fifteen minutes.
Although it might have been symbolically put to rights again the moment Lisbeth retied her bonnet, for all she knew. A moment of recklessness, never to recur.
She looked at the marquess then; it was impossible not to, since everyone, including the hound, was doing it.
And then he looked at her.
She couldn’t read any conclusions in his eyes, though it seemed to her he had trouble looking away from her. There was tension about his mouth. Then, doubtless he’d had more practice with disguising his thoughts than she had, and so she looked down.
“You’ve a great stripe of green on the front of your shirt, Lord Dryden,” Lisbeth said. “Did you take a fall?”
Lisbeth was suddenly a great one for noticing when things were out of order, Phoebe thought peevishly.
“I took a fall,” he confirmed evenly. After a hesitation doubtless only Phoebe noticed.
And Phoebe didn’t know whether it was the sort of fall Lucifer took, or the sort poets wrote about when love struck, or even if it was an innuendo at all, because she suspected everything was destined to sound like an innuendo from now on.
But now that she’d been kissed it was like someone had taken a hammer to her China pig full of ha’pennies and now she had a job of sorting the glittering things from the dangerous shards.
They all began to file out of the clearing. The marquess hovered an indecisive moment. Then turned and quickly bent to pluck something up off the ground.
“What did you find, Jules?” Lisbeth asked. “Are you gathering darling buds?”
“Nothing quite like that,” he told her, and smiled to distract her from her question, because his smiles did rather send women into a daze, as he stuffed the bundle of sage in his pocket.
Chapter 14
Jules handed the shirt with the great green stripe of grass to his valet, who took it without question or a change of expression, having seen much more dreadful things on shirts before.
The marquess had a full dozen identical clean ones in his trunks.
If it had been Marquardt, his London manservant, it would not have gone unremarked. Acerbically. But his valet did cast his eyes upward and allowed them to linger, almost mournfully, near his hairline.
Which caused Jules to swivel abruptly toward the mirror.
Bloody. Hell.
He sighed. Well, it had admittedly been an excellent throw. The velocity had done the damage. He touched the small darkening lump that only he and one other person would recognize as the shape of a hat brim.
He looked like a ruffian. And a fool. He was beginning to feel like the latter for many reasons, and not once, not once in his life had anyone accused him of being such a thing. Foolishness had never been an option in his life. He hadn’t acquired the knack for it.
He should have known. Kisses, he’d learned through hard experience, complicated things, unless they were a means to a foregone conclusion or part of an ongoing sensual entanglement.
He’d never had a kiss quite like that one. One he hadn’t planned. One that had seemed so . . . necessary.
One that had nevertheless solved nothing.
One that had led to him flattening himself behind a shrubbery and later, sneezing a tiny winged insect out of his nose on the walk back to the house. It had lodged there while he lay flat on his back, staring up at the crisp blue Autumn sky, contemplating his folly, listening to Miss Vale prevaricate wildly. He was almost sorry he hadn’t heard her invent a bawdy new verse to the Colin Eversea song.
He’d walked back to the house accompanied by a chattering Lisbeth, whom he listened to indulgently, enjoying her lightheartedness and easy cheer and her elegant loveliness. All of which were obvious and pleasing and none of which challenged him, and all of which could be fielded with a nod here or cheerful word or tease there, even as his mind was consumed, troubled, clouded, giddy, with something else entirely.
Behind him had walked a mildly bitter and mostly taciturn Waterburn, who was swinging no dead fowl at all and resented it so thoroughly it was almost audible, and Jonathan and Argosy, amiably debating the merits of Argosy’s new high flyer.
Phoebe walked behind all of them, quietly, which seemed wrong. The behind part, and the quiet part. She was not the sort who should be quiet or should trail anyone.
She said she was worried about the health of the hound, who might expire at any moment and shouldn’t do so alone, so she kept pace with it. A ridiculous excuse that all accepted without question.
Jules sat down hard on the edge of the bed, and tipped his forehead into his hand. Then winced and jerked it up again.
He inspected the bruise in the mirror again.
Aesthetically, it was lovely. Currently a mottled reddish purple, darkening by the second to a more majestic shade of indigo. He impatiently raked his fingers through his hair and brought it down over his brow in a rakish forelock. The bruise disappeared.
He inspected the result.
He looked like a damned dandy.
Very well: he would consider the absurd new hair penance.
And so it was a somewhat chastened marquess, newly fueled with a resolve not to lose his mind over a schoolteacher, which he could surely manage, who went downstairs for the soiree, cheeks scraped smooth by a razor, body scrubbed, cravat fluffed, trousers spotless, coat crisp. Looking every inch the Marquess Dryden who caused spines to straighten and conversation to lull when he appeared, the way all the gazelle lifted their heads alertly when a lion appeared at a watering hole.
“Would you like to watch me dress, my lord?”
She propped up the smeared charcoal sketch of Jules, the Marquess Dryden, against the headboard. On the theory that pretending insouciance might actually make her feel insouciant.
“Shall I wear the green silk?” A question which amused her, because she only had the two nice dresses and she’d already worn the other.
She laid the dress gently on the bed, and then she shimmied out of her day dress while the smeared marquess looked on.
She splashed about in the lavender-scented basin until she felt clean and scented, and slipped into her dress. She tied a green ribbon around her throat, twisted up her fine, fair mass of hair and pinned it, then pulled two saucy strands down to dangle near her mouth,
and inspected the result in the mirror.
Well. Her nose hadn’t become any more retroussé, nor had her cheekbones suddenly become poetry, and her eyelashes were still thick but fair unto invisibility, apart from their golden tips. In other words, if she were lined up next to Lisbeth Redmond, she would hardly cast her in the shade.
But if someone had told her, in that moment, that she was beautiful, she would not have accused them of being drunk.
It was the fault of the kiss. Her eyes were brilliant with secrets, her skin glowed like a lantern.
Oh, she knew he had plans, and that his plans had dictated the course of his life and that he fully intended they would dictate his future. She knew his plans did not include her. And she might spend the entire evening holding a reticule and fetching things for Lisbeth.
But given the way the rest of the house party had proceeded, she had no reason to believe this evening would be ordinary or unexpected.
And so out onto the tightrope she walked, blowing the smeared marquess a kiss as she departed.
Jules slipped into the salon as unobtrusively as he could manage, taking up a spot against the hearth. Behind the screen a fire burned merrily and superfluously, and the back of him began to heat uncomfortably. Even as lofty as the ceilings were, enough humans were already milling about the room and it was bordering on stuffy. A tray-bearing footman appeared at his elbow so quickly and silently he almost jumped. The footman was offering port. It wasn’t at all what the marquess wanted to drink but he took it. Holding it would give him an occupation.
He’d been seen, despite his attempt at unobtrusiveness. He knew it, because he could practically hear, as usual, the neck muscles straining not to crane in his direction. He intercepted numerous glances sent from beneath lowered female lashes, acknowledging them with a faint smile that caused hearts to leap.
He looked about for someone tolerable to have a comfortable, noncommittal conversation with. But he didn’t see the Earl of Ardmay, lately and rather swiftly married to Redmond’s daughter, Violet. Isaiah Redmond was across the room, simultaneously charming and inspecting a gentleman who had the clammy awestruck look of the newly wealthy, eager to impress Redmond and to be included in his circle of rarified influence. He was just the sort who might be persuaded to join the Mercury Club, Isaiah’s investment group . . . should he be found acceptable.
Isaiah would be at his side soon enough, he knew. The Redmonds, until the King decided to bestow a title on them or the Everseas—he was forever dangling one—craved the aristocratic connections. An earl was now in the family, but he was hardly the sort of earl Isaiah had always dreamed of.
The Marquess Dryden was another story altogether.
He saw Lisbeth perched on a striped settee. Effortlessly, achingly pretty in gauzy white, a diamond sparkling at her throat, a coronet in her hair, destined to hear a dozen compliments comparing her to an angel or a nymph or some such ethereal creature tonight. He wondered if she ever tired of her compliments, or if the assortment she received ranged widely enough to divert her.
But he was conscious of looking at her the way a man admires the main course . . . dutifully. While looking forward to the dessert.
Dessert was sitting right next to Lisbeth.
And she hadn’t yet noticed him. Or so it seemed. She was wearing a green dress that had been the rage two seasons ago. Willow, he thought they’d called it. And it was simple—cut square at the neckline and low enough to reveal a tantalizing, pale swell of bosom, puffed at the sleeves, ribboned beneath the bosom in a darker shade of green. Her slim white arms were covered in a surprisingly fine pair of cream kid gloves up to nearly the elbow. She’d tied a narrow matching ribbon around her throat and dressed her hair up high. Tendrils of it traced her jaw, and he followed them down, down, past her lips, to where they tickled, lightly, her collarbone.
What he should have thought was: She looks every bit of what she is—a country schoolteacher, invited to attend a party out of charity, a paid companion to Lisbeth. For she did.
But what he thought was: I haven’t yet touched her hair.
And from that thought a dozen more spiraled in an exhilarating, carnal rush: there was a universe of her he hadn’t yet touched or tasted. The whorls of her ears. Her collarbone. That vulnerable bend of her elbow revealed just above the long gloves she was wearing. The shadowy valley between her breasts. Dear God, her breasts. The curve of her shoul—
“What are you looking at, Dryden?”
Jules gave a start. Waterburn had materialized and planted himself against the hearth and followed the line of his gaze with his usual unerring instinct for annoying Jules.
Waterburn answered his own question. “Are you looking at that grunting governess creature?”
Grunting? “She’s a schoolmistress,” he said shortly.
Waterburn shrugged, as if the entire lot of working class females was interchangeable and he couldn’t be bothered to distinguish between them.
“Why do you ask? How was I looking at her?” He took great pains to sound amused and ironic. But tension pulled the bands of muscle across his stomach taut. Surely Waterburn saw nothing incriminating. Inscrutability was one of his chief qualities. And certainly now that he had a forelock his expression would be even more difficult to decipher.
Waterburn inhaled, apparently giving this actual thought. “Well, it’s a bit like the way you looked at Countess Malmsey when she wore the blue dress the night of the Mulvaney ball—”
He paused to allow the requisite moment of reverie.
“Ah, yes. That blue dress,” the marquess allowed, dutifully, as the blue dress was legend now and it almost considered bad form not to say just that, the way one followed a sneeze with “Bless you.” It had been a splendid dress, and he would have wagered a guinea her modiste had sewn her naked into it, to the humble gratitude of every man present.
“—and a bit like the moment before you intend to fire a rifle. Rather . . . oh, purposeful, I suppose . . .”
He sounded both pensive and insinuating.
Jules opened his mouth, preparing to scoff.
“But noooo . . . that isn’t quite it, either.”
One of those footmen appeared and Waterburn gave a start and frowned. But then he took his port gratefully. “Silent as cats, those chaps,” he muttered, when he left. “Need to drink just to calm my nerves with them sneaking about. Wonder if Redmond uses them as spies. No . . . you looked . . . you looked . . .”
He was looking at Jules now with those pale eyes. Jules had clenched his teeth in anticipation, actually interested in what the man would say. As though Waterburn, of all people, was a sage come down from the mountaintops bearing prophecies.
But he wanted to know: How do I look? What on earth is it I’m feeling? Because God only knew he had no idea.
“. . . worried,” Waterburn concluded at last.
Jules gave a disdainful snort, and sipped at his port. “I’m worried I won’t get a stronger drink tonight.”
Then pulled it away from his lips and eyed it resentfully. The port was thick and cloying and sweet. He would have liked something stronger, something that bit back. He wanted a punishing drink. A thin, clear, angry one.
Did he look worried?
But God help him, Waterburn wasn’t finished. Jules was tempted to plant his foot in the man’s instep and go in search of a more comfortable conversation.
“Well, no,” Waterburn admitted. “That’s not it. Not exactly. But the mere fact that I cannot quite identify your expression . . .”
He let the sentence dangle. Took a sip of his own port, looked at it, and nodded in happy approval.
Jules just sighed, and shook his head, implying world weary, mild amusement. He deliberately inspected the rest of the room, his eyes lighting on one person at a time, causing more than one woman to absently touch a hand to her hair, or turn her best profile toward him unconsciously.
It was a glittering gathering, the sort of which he approved, in
which he reveled, in which he felt at home. It was his native environment; it reminded him of his place in the world and all he had done to keep it. And yet he was as interested in everybody here as a shopkeeper was in counting the number of potatoes left in a bin. In a day’s time they had become just that mundane.
Troubling.
Waterburn swirled the port around in his mouth. Swallowed. Gave his lips a smack.
“Do you find her . . . Miss Vale . . .” He said her name almost satirically. He appeared to be carefully considering the end of his sentence. “. . . appealing, Dryden?”
Jules turned slowly toward Waterburn. Whose tone was reminiscent of the careful one his mother had used to address his ancient great-aunt Calliope, Lady Congdon, when she’d blithely arrived at the dinner table one night wearing nothing but her chemise and one slipper.
“Because if it’s novelty you’re seeking, Dryden . . .” Waterburn lowered his voice. “Well, there are other brothels besides the Velvet Glove. For instance, Madame Elaine near the docks employs a young lady who supposedly sports a tiny beard, and another one who is so double-jointed she can wrap her legs round her own head not to mention yours if you’re clever enough to ask—”
“For the love of God, Waterburn. She’s a woman. She possesses all of her limbs, her form is not . . . unpleasant . . . her features are all present and accounted for and I don’t find her bosom wanting. And I wasn’t staring. I’m truly sorry you’re so bored. There will be cards later this evening. Perhaps losing your fortune to me will prove diverting.”
He realized too late this was both a confession and an obvious lie, in light of his recitation of her qualities. As tempered as he’d made them sound.
Waterburn stared at Jules, his eyes wide in genuine surprise. Then he narrowed them shrewdly.
Then widened them again and swiveled his great chiseled head to level upon Phoebe a speculative gaze.
“If you just need a place to rest your eyes, I would have thought you’d choose a beautiful woman, Dryden.”
How the Marquess Was Won Page 14