With great effort, Lucy restrained herself to a casual stroll toward the door, fully intending to make an exit without another interruption. But just as she rounded an urn full of roses, she glimpsed a crowd of raucous men, their laughter tinged with a nastiness that raked her nerves.
Lucy gritted her teeth, quickened her step. She might even have managed to pass them altogether if she had not caught sight of their quarry. A golden-haired youth near her age stood like a man facing his executioners, his face rigid, his cheeks as white as the froth of neckcloth tied beneath a boyishly smooth chin. But it was his eyes that pierced Lucy like a dagger thrust. They caught hers for a heartbeat—filled with abject misery—then flashed away as if the humiliation were too great to bear.
“I envy you, Aubrey!” said a sly-looking fool. “It must be very convenient to have a brother like Valcour.”
Lucy missed a step, her gaze returning to the boy. Aubrey? Surely this couldn’t be the brother Valcour had supposedly been defending. The boy was as different in appearance from the earl as sunshine to midnight. And yet at first glance, who would guess that Lucy and Norah were sisters?
She paused, pretending to rearrange the lace at her wrists while she stole another glance at the boy. He was young, but a man nonetheless. Old enough to make his own choices. No wonder his pride was so battered by what had happened. Lucy felt a swift jab of anger toward Valcour.
“Chalmers, haven’t you heard?” A portly youth with a purple wig cuffed Patch on the back. “Valcour is like a mastiff trained to attack anyone who distresses those he is responsible for. Perhaps we had better warn that little opera dancer who rejected Aubrey’s suit last week. Aubrey may set his brother on her for revenge!”
Lucy flinched in sympathy as two hot spots of color darkened the boy’s cheeks. “I wanted nothing more than to match steel with d’Autrecourt,” he snapped. “The instant Sir Jasper is recovered, I’ll meet him. By God, I will.”
“Sir Jasper will refuse to meet you after his tête-à-tête with the point of your illustrious brother’s sword. D’Autrecourt may be a fool, but he’s not suicidal.”
“It is I who will fight.”
Disbelieving laughter rose from the crowd.
“Of course you will, my treasure,” Purple Wig chortled.
“I’ve told you a dozen times, I knew nothing of Valcour’s plans until it was all over!” Aubrey said.
“That’s not the way Filby told the tale,” Patch sneered. “He said there was a blond gentleman at Valcour’s side when he came to d’Autrecourt’s table. Everyone knows how nearsighted old Filly is, but there can be little doubt it was you.”
“Damn it to hell, it wasn’t! There was a private party at Bridgeton’s. I was there all night. Mirrivile can attest to it!”
“Your bosom friends? How convenient. We know exactly how objective they would be.”
Swearing inwardly, Lucy charged into the breach. “It is as he says,” she announced in a clear voice.
The men wheeled to face her, none more stunned than the earl of Valcour’s brother. Eyes that had been filled with fury and misery widened in surprise.
“A thousand pardons, miss,” Patch said with such annoying obsequiousness that Lucy was tempted to loosen his teeth. “It’s not our custom to discuss such inappropriate topics in front of a lady as lovely as yourself.”
“I am unfamiliar with English customs, sir.” Lucy peered up through thick lashes. “Is it considered appropriate for gentlemen to spread lies about an incident as long as there is no lady present to stop them?”
The patch quivered with anger at the corner of the man’s thin lips. “Certainly, miss, you do not mean to infer—”
“I’m not inferring anything. I’m stating quite plainly that you are spreading vicious and unfounded rumors.”
Lucy delighted in the man’s cheeks puffing out, scarlet with outrage.
“You see,” she continued, “I am intimately acquainted with the young gentleman Valcour dragged into his infamous duel. And I promise you it was not Lord Valcour’s brother. The earl was acting on his own dictatorial impulses. I’m astonished you didn’t guess as much at once. Surely you must know his despicable temperament better than I.”
“Damned disrespectful way to talk of an aristocrat!” Purple wig sputtered.
“We have had a great deal of practice at it in Virginia.” Lucy gave him her sweetest smile. “Tell me, can you think of a better way to describe such a high-handed interference in his brother’s affair? He tore Mr. Aubrey’s reputation to shreds with no thought of the man’s honor. It seems to me you should be defaming Valcour’s character for his inexcusable indifference to his brother. If any man behaved so abominably to me, I vow I would make him sorry!” Lucy tossed her curls.
The company gaped at her outburst, but Lucy didn’t care. She had brought color back to Aubrey’s cheeks.
There was a questioning light in his eyes. For an instant, his lips tipped in a vulnerable half smile.
“I must thank you for your defense, milady, though I’m uncertain how I came by it.” He gave a courtly bow. “May I present myself? Aubrey St. Cyr. Your servant.”
“St. Cyr?” Lucy echoed a little faintly. Her fingers strayed to the miniature at her breast. “Of Harlestone Castle?”
“I sincerely hope not,” Aubrey said with a warm smile. “I fear it’s in such bad repair that it’s fit only to house the family ghosts at present.”
“But someone must have lived there.”
“At Harlestone?” Purple Wig scoffed. “It’s nothing but a crumbling pile of rubble with a few tapestries for the mice to chew on.”
“There are a few servants who still live there to oversee the lands, I think.” Aubrey cut in. “And my brother, the earl, keeps a suite of rooms in decent repair for when he must visit the lands. But no one has truly lived there since I was two or three years old. Why do you ask?”
Lucy looked away. “I… have a bit of music that was supposed to have been written for someone there. I was curious.”
“I’m sorry, but we St. Cyrs are a notoriously tone-deaf lot from all accounts. Not a one of us has ever played or sung a note to my knowledge.” He shrugged. “I’d like to help you, miss, but I’m afraid I can’t.”
“Which should be no surprise,” Patch interrupted in an annoying nasal drawl. “You’ll find that Mr. St. Cyr can’t even help himself, let alone someone else, my beauty. You are the ambassador’s houseguest, are you not?” He tried to take her hand to kiss it.
Lucy snatched her fingers away as if he had the plague and favored Aubrey with her most dazzling smile. “Lucinda Blackheath,” she said with a curtsy. “My friends call me Lucy.”
Aubrey smiled back, raising her hand to his lips. “Then I shall call you Lucy too.”
“It is the least you should do, St. Cyr,” Purple Wig said in pompous accents. “Since the lady has charged to your defense, berating us about things she doesn’t understand. Miss Blackheath, you can hardly be expected to comprehend how great a value we Englishmen place on honor, when you come from the wilds of America.”
“We Americans understand the British concept of honor very well. You should also be aware that we don’t shrink from pointing out tyranny when we see it.”
“Tyranny!” Patch echoed, a round of gasps erupting from those around him. Lucy took deep satisfaction in the way their faces paled, their eyes widened. Aubrey looked ashen as well, but Lucy could not resist burying her verbal thrust to its hilt.
“Tyranny, sir,” she enunciated in accents that would have done Patrick Henry proud. “The earl of Valcour is the most loathsome, arrogant, insufferable monster that I’ve ever had the ill luck to stumble across. Thankfully, we Americans have ways of dealing with tyrants.”
The chiming of the clock brought Lucy to her senses. But she couldn’t regret that she had stepped in, although it had cost her precious time.
She spun on her heels, fully intending to make good her escape. But she slammed headfirst int
o a solid wall of muscle, garbed in velvet. Hands caught her arms to steady her, but she couldn’t raise her eyes from the disturbingly familiar diamond stickpin glinting up at her with mocking brilliance from her captor’s neckcloth.
God, no! Not again! The fates couldn’t be so unfair.
“Valcour.” She squeezed his name through her lips and tilted her head back to meet dark eyes, their fierce intelligence all but concealed beneath narrowed lids.
He was magnificent: his sable hair unpowdered, caught back in a thin black ribbon, his broad shoulders covered in amber velvet with touches of rich gold about the collar and buttonholes. His waistcoat was the tawny color of a lion’s mane, accenting his powerful physique. The scar on his face only made him more dazzlingly handsome, more intriguingly dangerous.
He might have been a pirate, or some reckless knight of the road, if it hadn’t been for the aura of cold arrogance he wore like a mantle. For an instant Lucy couldn’t breathe.
Some emotion darted like quicksilver across the earl’s patrician features, but it was gone so quickly Lucy wondered if she’d imagined it. His lips curved in a smile that was unbridled mockery.
“I am waiting with baited breath to find out exactly how Americans deal with tyrants,” he drawled. “Something distressingly primitive, I would imagine.”
Suddenly Lucy wanted him to know exactly who she was, “I would be happy to refresh your memory, my lord,” she said.
“That would be most unwise, little one,” Valcour cut in silkily. “But, then, it is my impression that you aren’t half so wise as you are… beautiful.”
Lucy stiffened against a strange curling sensation in her stomach as those intense eyes swept from the white roses twined in her golden curls to the silver-gilt tip of the slipper that peeked from beneath the hem of her petticoat.
“Valcour, I’ll not have you tormenting her!” It was Aubrey charging to her rescue, his eyes filled with defiance.
“I am merely all eagerness to renew my acquaintance with the lady, Aubrey. You see, my introduction to Miss Blackheath was the most singular one I’ve ever experienced from an… er… female.”
“There is a tale behind it, your lordship?” Purple Wig piped up. “Do tell!”
Valcour smiled with a barely veiled warning. “I am the soul of discretion, Willoughby. And I am certain Miss Blackheath will reward me for my virtue by giving me the honor of this dance.”
“It’s quite impossible!” Lucy said with a wave of her hand. “I cannot…”
Lucy’s words trailed to silence as her eyes locked on the implacable lines of Valcour’s face. He said nothing, merely arched one dark brow.
Lucy wanted to drive her slipper into Valcour’s shin, to turn and flounce away, but there was a subtle threat in Valcour’s hooded eyes that made her aware of exactly how disastrous it would be if Valcour revealed her part in the debacle at the gaming hell a week before.
No gentleman would do such a thing—but hadn’t Lucy witnessed firsthand exactly how ruthless this particular nobleman could be?
Seething, she lifted her chin with the dignity of a queen and allowed him to lead her to the floor. She satisfied her raging temper by digging her nails as deeply as possible into the villain’s forearm.
Valcour’s eyes flicked to her hand. “Wasn’t it you who told me that it is always unwise to react in anger, Miss Blackheath? Or should I say, ‘Mr. Dubbonet’?”
“I don’t get angry, my lord,” Lucy said with acid sweetness. “I get revenge.”
He swept her into the line of dancers and made her an elegant bow. “I am quaking with trepidation.”
Lucy dropped into her most insolent curtsy. The strains of the minuet usually triggered Lucy’s most romantic dreams, carrying her far away, until her partner faded into a misty haze, the man necessary but insignificant in comparison to the music.
But as she dipped and circled tonight, every nerve in her body sizzled with awareness of Valcour. Valcour’s hand brushing hers, Valcour’s lean, powerful body circling with predatory grace. Something earthy obliterated the airy sensation she’d always had in the dance before—Valcour’s cold drawl building fires inside her.
She was reacting to him because of her anger, she reasoned, coming about to meet that ruthless gaze again. Anger at his intrusion, his insufferable conceit.
But she had felt anger with great regularity in her twenty years. And she had never felt like this… as if she were dancing on the edge of a precipice, waiting to topple off.
The sensation infuriated Lucy, and she glared up at the earl’s impassive face. “Well? What the devil did you want to dance with me for?” she demanded. “And don’t say it’s because you think I’m lovely or want to renew our acquaintance or any other such rot. If you do I’ll… I’ll…”
Valcour’s lips twitched. “Kick me?” he provided.
“It occurred to me.” Lucy touched his hand as if it were a viper and circled gracefully. “Unfortunately, it’s near impossible with all these petticoats getting in my way.”
Valcour chuckled, a rich, husky sound that seemed to burrow into Lucy’s chest. She was not the only one affected. His lordship’s reaction created a sensation, the couples around them gaping as if he had just pulled the chandelier down upon their heads.
“All right, madam,” Valcour said at last. “I am dancing with you because I have a marked aversion to surprises. And discovering that I had involved a lady in a duel—a duel in a most unsavory setting, I might add—is exactly the sort of surprise I detest the most. As if that was not distressing enough, I discover that this lady was not some street urchin but, rather, the guest of the new American ambassador. You can’t blame me for being intrigued.”
“You can go on being ‘intrigued’ until you’re eighty, my lord. One would think you English would have learned your lesson after the War for Independence. People who go poking their aristocratic noses into a Virginian’s business get them snapped off.”
What amusement had shown on Valcour’s face vanished. “You will tell me, girl. The whole story.”
Lucy tossed her curls. “I’ll tell you when I feel like it. You can’t frighten me like you do your poor brother, my lord.”
“Ah, yes… poor beleaguered Aubrey, tyrannized by his wicked elder brother.”
Lucy managed a stiff smile at the Countess Maine and made a delicate dance step with her slippered toe. “You humiliated him!” she muttered to Valcour under her breath. “Perhaps you’ve been too busy to notice, but people have been jeering at him the whole night!”
“You’re quick to leap to the boy’s defense. I wasn’t aware you were such bosom friends.”
“I suppose that you’ve never met someone and felt an immediate kinship with them?”
“I can’t remember feeling—what did you call it? Kinship?—with anyone.”
For just a heartbeat there was something unexpected in Valcour’s eyes—a shadow that might have been loneliness. But it vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving in its place his customary disdain. For some reason it left Lucy even edgier than before.
“I find your brother kind,” she said, “and charming and handsome and amusing.”
“I would not be taken in by Aubrey’s charm if I were you. It has a way of vanishing at the most inopportune moments. Truth to tell, I would advise you to stay away from him altogether, madam. I fear he is rather volatile at present, and…”
Valcour paused, his gaze sharpening on Lucy’s face, his lips curling in something like amusement. “God knows, the thought of him joining forces with a little termagant the likes of you would be alarming to anyone concerned.”
“You had better be the one concerned, my lord,” Lucy said. “Your brother reminds me of a horse I once knew.”
“Knew?” Valcour echoed pointedly. “I suppose you shared a special kinship with it as well?”
“I did.” Lucy nodded. “He was a beautiful chestnut, with a glorious mane and wide, intelligent eyes. He belonged to the owner of a neigh
boring plantation, and the oaf had no time for the gelding. He’d climb on it once a month and expect the horse to do his bidding. When it did not, the man abused the animal, sawing at its mouth with the bit. One night the horse had had enough of such treatment. He threw the heartless bastard into a fence and broke his neck.”
Lucy’s eyes clashed with Valcour’s. “Where your brother is concerned, my lord, I think you should prepare to take a nasty fall.”
Valcour gave a cold grimace. “Your dire predictions don’t interest me in the least, madam. The reason you were in that gaming hell does. You have until the next minuet to tell me. Otherwise I will go straight to your guardians with the whole tale.”
“You wouldn’t!” Lucy sputtered.
The music drifted into silence, and Lucy was aware of the other couples making their bows to each other. She stiffened her spine, glaring at Valcour. He said nothing. He didn’t have to.
She cursed under her breath and started to spin away, but he caught her arm in a viselike grip to escort her from the floor.
“Miss Blackheath, I will be watching you. In case you were considering doing anything… more foolish than usual,” he remarked, then he turned and walked away.
Lucy’s hands clenched in her skirts, and she wished it were Valcour’s throat beneath her fingers. Now what was she to do? She had no doubt Valcour meant what he said. And if John or Claree ever found out what mischief she’d been about, that would be an end to any more such nighttime adventures. Helplessness was a new sensation to her. It made her blood boil.
“Bastard,” she muttered at Valcour’s retreating back. “Cursed, dictatorial—”
She started at the light touch of fingertips against her arm and wheeled to see Aubrey St. Cyr peering down at her with a worried expression.
There was something almost shy, endearingly boyish about his face. “Miss Blackheath, I couldn’t help but notice how upset you were. I hope my brother didn’t distress you.”
“Your brother lives to distress people. He delights in it. I only wish I could return him blow for blow.”
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