She fingered the silk of her fan nervously and her smile expanded.
He grew acerbic. “My apologies, Miss Oversham, but has something I said amused you? Has Ward suddenly become passé? Are horses objects of mirth? Do allow me to share the joke.”
She cleared her throat. She wasn’t mute. Excellent. “You needn’t shout, Lord Moncrieffe. It’s just . . .” He leaned forward as it seemed she was about to confide something. “It’s just I cannot seem to stop smiling.”
It was his turn to go silent.
“You do it very well,” he offered cautiously, finally.
“Thank you.” She beamed queasily.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Genevieve Eversea slip back into the room, a sleek little blue shadow. She was now carrying a cup of punch. Pressing business, indeed! He watched her locate a spot the size of her bum on a nearby tufted settee and wedge herself in behind a large-rumped denizen of the Pennyroyal Green community, he suspected, as he hadn’t yet been introduced, and Eversea had seen to it that everyone of any rank had been introduced to him. It was an excellent location in which to moon over Harry, he thought, without being spotted by any of her other admirers.
He wondered if she was within earshot of his conversation with Lady Oversham.
To whom he returned his attention. He gave a start when he discovered her splendid teeth were still bared.
“I’ve a painting of a horse by Ward,” he volunteered. “Comet, my stallion’s name is. I’ve another horse, too. Named Nimbus.”
Genevieve’s fan slipped from her grasp. Perhaps she’d been having a quiet laugh at his expense and it had jostled from her grip. When she bent over to retrieve it, her bodice gapped, affording him a startling view of almost all of two deliciously round, pale breasts.
It was such a sensual shock the breath went out of him.
It was all the more erotic because he knew he was the only one who could see it, and because she didn’t know that he could, and because they were both in the midst of a crowd.
He was a man. He gulped down the view for the duration of its offering, which was cruelly brief. And then Genevieve was upright again, and regret washed him.
Miss Oversham didn’t seem to notice his infinitesimal distraction.
When he returned his attention to her, his composure ruffled, his mind’s eye filled with breasts, Miss Oversham was plucking at a bracelet on her wrist. And smiling.
“I think I understand, Miss Oversham. Do I make you . . . well, do I make you nervous?” His tone was gently cajoling, the way a favorite uncle might speak to her.
Genevieve Eversea assumed a position so alert he was certain she was listening. If she’d been an insect her antennae would have been waving about.
“Yes!” Miss Oversham admitted with some relief. The smile snapped neatly back into place. “It’s nerves! I’m terribly sorry, sir, and not proud to admit it, but that’s the truth of it. It’s just . . . the things that are said about you. The . . . duels. The . . .” She stopped. Her fingers worried over the stones in her bracelet.
The rest was clearly unspeakable.
She’d acquired a mortified flush. She was now a beaming red and yellow and brown, like some exotic bird. A toucan.
“Ah, now,” he soothed in his low, easy voice, the way he would a spooked horse or a woman whose bodice he was about to slip lower. It worked a treat. Her pupils dilated in sudden interest, for it was that kind of voice and she was a woman after all. She’d decided he was attractive and pleasant and she visibly softened. When he bothered to use that tone on women they generally did.
“When one is a duke, one often forgets the effect the title has on others, but I am just a man, I assure you, albeit one with a title. The stories that abound are mostly apocryphal. Shall we address some of them?”
Genevieve took a genteel sip of the punch she’d retrieved. And then studied her lap as assiduously as if she’d had a book open there. The better to concentrate on what he was saying, he supposed.
He’d never seen more vigilant shoulder blades.
Miss Oversham nodded cautiously. “You are too kind, sir.” Her smile was tremulous.
“I am nothing of the sort,” he said quite sincerely, but she took it quite another way, and he could see she found his modesty affecting.
He shifted his weight onto one leg, the picture of casual elegance, the picture of someone settling in for a long chat.
“Well, let’s explore which of them makes you the most nervous. Might it be the rumor that I shot a man in a Brighton pub simply for the pleasure of watching him die?”
She blanched so instantly it was like watching a curtain come down over her face.
“Oh. I see you hadn’t heard that one.”
“D-did you? Sh-shoot . . . ?”
“Shoot a man for pleasure?” he helpfully completed. “Oh, no, no, no. Dear me, no,” he soothed.
Color made a tentative foray into her cheeks. “Thank goodness!”
“I shot him because he’d bumped against me and caused me to spill my ale. No pleasure in it at all.”
The line of Miss Eversea’s spine seemed positively alive with . . . something. Outrage? Horror? Hilarity? He noticed the very fine line of hair traveling up the fragile nape of her neck, and something about that intimate little trail made the back of his own neck tingle as though she’d brushed her fingers there.
Something entirely unexpected was happening in the region of his solar plexus.
“I see,” Miss Oversham said faintly. She was very still, but her eyes darted nervously, as if they hoped to escape without her.
“He lived,” he hastened to reassure her. “ ’Twas just a flesh wound.”
“Excellent,” she tried, after he waited a patient moment. But her lips were still peeled back from her teeth and the word sounded parched and entirely insincere.
“Perhaps you’ve heard the rumor that I fought a duel with pistols with the Marquis of Cordry?”
She nodded helplessly.
He put a hand over his heart. “I can assure you the two of us never aimed a single pistol at one another.”
“None?” She sounded skeptical. She wasn’t completely stupid, Miss Oversham.
“None. We fought with swords and he stabbed me and then I stabbed him and disarmed him, and the doctor only treated the both of us for flesh wounds and the law never once interfered. I won. And I’ve only a wee scar.”
This last was meant to reassure her.
She was stricken silent.
“Soooo . . . .” He tapped a finger thoughtfully against his chin. “Those are the rumors I hear most often about myself. Are there any others you’d like addressed?”
He knew the one she would be incapable of not broaching. It took a moment for her to get the word out.
“W-wife?” The way she croaked it called to mind someone sitting bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night and wheezing “Ghost!” at an apparition.
“You are perhaps referring to the rumor that implies I poisoned my wife for her money?” he requested clarification brightly.
At last she nodded, and the plume waved like wheat in a rainstorm.
“Well, firstly, it’s true I’m staggeringly wealthy, but it’s family money,” he assured her.
“Staggeringly wealthy?” She sounded very sober and alert. For a blessed second, her teeth disappeared.
“Well most of it is family money,” he revised self-deprecatingly. “I’ve won a good deal in gaming hells. I’m a deep and lucky player, and you may have heard among the rumors that I seldom lose—though I always seem to have the best luck in the very worst of the hells, as fate would have it.” He shook his head ruefully. “But my sword skills are quite useful there, let me tell you, ha-ha! One is generally set upon late at night in Seven Dials or Covent Garden, but I make short work of thugs.”
He waited.
“Excellent,” she finally whispered, sounding horrified.
“And some of the money I earned from men who
had the unmitigated poor sense to attempt to get the better of me in business. If you can believe it!” He all but nudged her conspiratorially in the ribs with his elbow. “Ha-ha! I ask you!”
“I imagine that wouldn’t be at all sensible.” Her smile was rigid now.
“Not at all,” he nearly purred, very softly. “And the rest of my money, and I assure you the amount was modest, became mine upon my wife’s death as it was part of her settlement. But I of course didn’t poison her . . .”
“Wonderful!” Miss Oversham enthused with great relief.
He paused eloquently.
“. . . to get her money,” he concluded softly.
Miss Oversham’s smile congealed entirely. She’d gone waxen. She in fact looked near swooning.
He smiled slowly. “Feeling better about me now?” he asked gently.
Chapter 6
And this was when Genevieve leaped up, abandoning her punch on the floor.
Alive with remorse, in seconds Genevieve rescued Miss Oversham in the same way she’d sent her to the Duke of Falconbridge purgatory, only in reverse: she took her gently by the elbow, produced the excuse required by etiquette for absconding with his conversational partner—“We mustn’t monopolize Miss Oversham’s time now, and I know Louisa will want to know more about the modiste Miss Oversham uses, as she has just admired her dress”—which was a lie—and steered her to a healing conversation with Louisa, Marcus’s wife. Louisa was human balm in most circumstances. Lovely as a spring day but not the sort to make one envious, any more than one would envy the sun its ability to shine.
Relieved at having resolved the misery she’d inflicted upon poor Miss Oversham, she turned to dash from the room and almost ran headlong into a linen-covered wall.
The wall turned out to be Moncrieffe, who must have taken all of two entire steps in order to follow her.
She was now beginning to feel hunted. Though surely this wasn’t the case.
“I imagine you’re proud of the way you ingratiated yourself with Miss Oversham, Your Grace?”
“Ah, Miss Eversea. You’ll excuse me if I confess that it gladdens my heart to know that you abandoned your manners in order to listen to my conversation. But do feel at liberty to ask me anything you wish to know. You needn’t hover about like a lovely little bird to catch a morsel of information.”
She did roll her eyes at the “lovely little bird.”
And this made the devil smile.
Then again, doubtless it was almost a relief to speak to someone who was glowering rather than beaming at him. She almost took pity on him.
“What is the matter with you?” is what she came out with finally.
“What is the matter with me? That’s what you wish to ask of me, when there are so many other interesting questions you could produce? Lady Oversham conducted a veritable interview. Surely you can best her.”
“You terrified her! On purpose!”
“On the contrary,” he objected, surprised. “I simply recited a list of facts. You’re spluttering.”
“I’m not spluttering.” Genevieve took a step backward. The room was now her social chessboard and she was planning her moves with clever, grim determination.
He stepped forward.
“I do admire a woman of courage. And it takes courage to deflect a duke.”
“I’ve no courage at all, then,” she hastened to disparage herself. “I would never dream of deflecting a duke.”
“Perhaps we can discuss this further during the dancing portion of the evening. You’ll enjoy waltzing with me later this evening, Miss Eversea. I dance very well, despite the height.”
“Your modesty is as appealing as your sensitivity, Lord Moncrieffe. But perhaps a reel other than the waltz? We differ so in height I shall be speaking to your third button throughout the dance. Else you will need to look a great distance down and I will need to look a great distance up. I shouldn’t like you to end the evening with an aching neck.”
Inevitable at your creaky, advanced age, she left eloquently, palpably unspoken.
He looked down at her for a moment, head slightly cocked, as if he could hear that unworthy thought echoing in her mind.
“My third button is so often a wallflower during balls I doubt it will mind your conversation overmuch.”
She blinked. This was so delightfully . . . silly . . . she forgot herself absolutely for a moment. She stole a glance at his third button. It was nacre, of course, as were the rest of them, and looked like an expensive and luminous tiny moon brought down from the sky specifically to button up the duke. A row of snobs, those buttons, all of them.
Lovely gown, it might say to her. But can you trace your ancestry back to the Conqueror?
Actually, her family could, and this was in fact when all the trouble with the Redmonds allegedly began. That’s what she would tell the button.
He’d caught her looking at his button. He was smiling faintly, cryptically. He gave his head the slightest, slightest of to and fro shakes, as if once again he could read her thoughts.
“I very much enjoy the Sir Roger de Coverley,” she tried with polite stubbornness. “I would enjoy dancing it with you.”
This wasn’t true. But it was always the last dance of the evening. And a reel, not a waltz, and quite energetic, which made conversation difficult. With any luck he would have tired of the dancing and gone off to bed or off to the pub or off to see whatever debaucheries could be had in Sussex by the time the Sir Roger de Coverley got under way. Surely her brothers would keep him informed of the wickedness a man could get up to in the neighborhood.
She was also almost afraid to touch him. He was so very much . . . a man. Solid. Loomingly tall and angular. He demanded too much from her. She wanted to be alone with the enormity of her heartbreak, to nurse it for a time, and to not have to think or deflect. She wanted peace. And it was almost achievable in a throng like this, for all she need do was move through the crowd, a smile pasted on, and never alight and never talk to anybody.
But as luck would have it, that’s when she heard Harry laugh.
Her head turned toward it helplessly, the way it might celestial trumpets, and joy and misery thwacked her heart between them like a lawn tennis ball.
Harry noticed her looking, as he always did; he’d always seemed to know precisely where she was in a room. He threw her a quick smile, the smile that was mischievous and conspiratorial and intimate and had once meant everything to her, for they’d exchanged any number of these sorts of smiles across crowded rooms and each one had woven a net of shared understanding about just the two of them. Or so she’d thought. For all she knew he’d been flinging smiles just like that at Millicent the entire time she’d known the two of them, or compromising Millicent in the garden of some London town house the times he was out of view.
Maybe he’d even kissed more than Millicent’s hand.
And that thought stabbed her clean through.
She would have to retrain her heart not to leap like an ecstatic pet every time she heard his voice.
Harry glanced at the duke, then back at her, and then with comic sly speed crossed his eyes dourly before returning his attention to her brother Marcus and his wife, Louisa.
He was teasing her and sympathizing with her about the duke. He might have the grace to feel jealous, she thought. But no, he clearly didn’t see the duke as a rival. Why should he, when he didn’t see her as a woman, really. When he saw her as a friend.
And when the duke was more a contemporary of her father than of Harry.
Back to the duke.
It was like looking from spring to winter.
“I greatly admire your exquisite manners, Miss Eversea, and your concern for my physical comfort during the waltz is touching, indeed. So I know you’ll indulge me when I say I would very much prefer to dance the waltz, as I look less awkward during it than I do during any of the country dances. I am all arms and legs, as you can see.”
What nonsense. He was all toweri
ng grace and she had no doubt he’d look as fit and appropriate hopping about during a reel as he would sailing through the room in a waltz.
But she began to believe the bit he’d told Miss Oversham about the duel. Because if there was anything the duke did expertly it was identify vulnerabilities, parry, and thrust home.
But she was not without her own resources. She’d at last backed up the appropriate number of steps to do what she’d been planning to do.
“Lord Moncrieffe, I’m certain you would enjoy speaking with my sister, Olivia, while I greet my cousin Adam, the vicar of Pennyroyal Green.”
She stepped aside almost with a flourish to reveal Olivia standing near the ornate carved mantel. And before Olivia could get hold of Genevieve to stop her—and her hand did dart out in a valiant try—Genevieve had abandoned him once more.
And with something almost akin to a whoosh she disappeared into the crowd.
He looked after her. He was amused again. He intended to seduce and abandon her; he hadn’t expected to enjoy himself so thoroughly. He was the Duke of Falconbridge, for God’s sake. He didn’t sport a hump or a wen, he possessed all of his teeth, a flat stomach, and considerable sexual confidence. He could objectively assess his reflection in the mirror and knew most women found it far from wanting, even if his reputation frightened them. But many of them enjoyed being frightened.
And yet Genevieve had just knocked him off onto her sister like mud from her shoe.
Olivia Eversea was indeed a beauty, no question. But a fearsome one. She fair glittered, as if she was made of brittle opaque glass and a candle burned inside her. Her skin was very fine, like her sister’s. The elegant bones of her face were more pronounced because she was a bit too thin, and her eyes were fierce, a little cynical, and fringed with lashes so black and luxurious a man could be forgiven for believing she was one of those soft and gentle types. A trap, those lashes. Like an anemone. Her hair was naturally curly—ah, perhaps the source of Genevieve’s envy—piled up in a way that was meant to appear sweetly haphazard but which he knew likely took a team of expert women with heated tongs and other exotic implements to erect and properly tame. A few strands fell in lively, calculated abandon to her collarbone, which was also a trifle too sharp. She wore green, a sea foam shade. It was still a reflex, noting the colors of gowns, because his wife had forever asked him which colors suited her. All of them do, he would have told her, would she have tolerated such democracy for a moment.
What I Did For a Duke Page 7