Rafe continued adding notes to his book. “I decided that was at an end.”
She waited for him to give some manner of clarification. “I do not follow, Mr. Audley,” Edwina said slowly.
“I encouraged her to head on to Hatchard’s, sparing her from”—not even deigning to look up, he gestured with his pencil between him and Edwina—“this tediousness.”
“What?” Which meant she and Rafe were to be together alone? Which she’d not minded before. Not until he’d come to hate her.
At last, he looked up—briefly. “Come, Miss Dalrymple,” he scoffed. “The only reason I’m here, and the only reason my sister wished to come here was so that she might experience the museums and culture of London. As such, she is done taking part in your societal experiment for us.”
Her stomach fell. For coward that she was, she’d been welcoming the buffer the young woman would have presented between her and Rafe. “That is . . . certainly disappointing.” Edwina perked up. “I’m certain the duke would—”
He leveled a flinty glare on her, icing the remainder of the words on her lips. “Do not even think about it. I’ve already spoken to the duke. He knows my being here and fulfilling his wishes are contingent upon his promise to not force Cailin to suffer through Polite Society.”
“I wouldn’t betray Cailin,” she said softly, and promptly flinched. As she’d done just that to Rafe.
A cool grin formed on his lips.
Forcing her frustration on to a matter within her control, she met his smile with a frown. “I’ll have you know, Mr. Audley, my lessons are—”
“Tardy? You were late,” he interrupted, pausing long enough to carve himself a piece of his roast fowl. “And to your sessions?” A blush heated Edwina’s cheeks. “Tsk. Tsk.” Rafe popped the bite into his mouth.
Under any other circumstances, she would have been hopelessly captivated by a gentleman so determined to have his sister see London as she’d wished. But being called out? Even if it was deserved? Calling on a lifetime’s worth of training, she swept forward with all the grace she could muster, and as she joined him, her mind raced. “My tardiness was . . . intentional.” She lied. It was a blatant, shameful one, to salvage her pride. “There are some circumstances by which—”
“It is permissible?” He looked up again, a devastatingly distracting half grin on his lips, and she promptly missed a step, before correcting course. “Hmph,” he said, making another note in his book.
Tardiness . . . permissible? Far from it? Edwina frowned and arched her neck, to peer at that page. “No! Do not write that.” Only the most elevated arrived late, and when they did, their pride was called into question. Think. Think. She stopped before him. “I was merely illustrating just how valuable it is for a person to arrive promptly and punctually. Any disappointment you may have felt in this moment, you may be assured, the lords and ladies awaiting your company will too feel.” Edwina couldn’t help it. She smiled. Widely.
Suspicion glinted in his eyes, and for a moment she expected he’d call her out as the poor liar she was. “Tell me, is dinner at the noon hour permissible, too?”
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the footmen stationed across the room glancing at one another and repressing smiles.
Hmph. Let them laugh and let Rafe be smug. The truth remained that, in knowing the specifics of when lords and ladies took their meals, he had learned something from her. “In order to prepare for the evening meal, it only makes sense that we have all those same courses laid out,” she said in the tones she used for her most difficult charges.
He grunted.
“I should point out once more that it is impolite to grunt.”
Rafe speared a pickle and popped it into his mouth. “Anything else, princess?” he asked around the rather large bite.
She sighed. “I need also remind you, speaking with your mouth full is also impolite.”
He yanked a piece of bread off with his teeth, and proceeded to chew. “Who would have imagined that?” he drawled, and then swallowed.
And this time, it was her turn to sharpen her gaze upon him. Why . . . why . . . he was making light of her. Refusing to rise to his baiting, she helped herself to the chair next to his. Edwina set down her things and looked to one of the footmen. “If you would?” she asked, gesturing to Rafe’s plate.
The young man came forward, hesitated a moment, eyeing the duke’s son with a suitable level of wariness, before clearing his dish.
“What the hell?” he groused, and the glare he favored her with would have once terrified her. No more.
“This is a formal lesson, Mr. Audley, not a regular afternoon meal for you.” The time for games with this man—with this charge—she silently corrected—were at an end. He could be annoyed with her. He might even dislike her immensely. Which he did. But those sentiments were not going to interfere with the work she had to do—not anymore. She had tiptoed enough around him in a bid to earn back his friendship. It was time to focus upon their business together. “As you know, His Grace intends to introduce you to an intimate gathering of his closest friends during a formal dinner party this coming Saturday. It is time that we put your lectures into practice.” Edwina snapped open her notebook, and set it down above the empty plate in front of her. “As I have with your previous assignments, I’ve taken the liberty of providing detailed notes for you to take with you after we’ve finished so that you might read them at your leisure.”
“Splendid,” he drawled. Her heart fluttered at the hint of teasing there. The first sign of it since their fight seven days earlier. “I’ll save it for kindling.”
And just like that, her hopes were dashed. He would not let go of his anger. Do not give in to his baiting. Do not give in to his baiting.
Instead, she did that which she always did when he was most cross—she smiled. “I expect you’ll find the notes I’ve shared entirely too helpful to burn.”
“Oh, yes,” he murmured. He leaned close, so his lips nearly brushed her cheek. “It all sounds so very stimulating.”
And she would have to be deaf to fail to hear the suggestive quality to those whispered words. Where in the past, she’d received plenty of innuendos from plenty of employers, such whisperings were different with this man. With him, there had been shared passion, the like of which still kept her awake at night. And by the way he hooded his eyes, he well knew it, too.
She dampened her mouth, and his gaze followed that slight movement, settling there on her lips. “We should . . .” her words came breathless.
“Yes.”
And everything was so twisted in this moment, she didn’t know if his was a question or a statement, but it felt so very much like the latter.
Or . . . was that merely her yearning for it to be so?
“Begin.” She managed to squeeze that husky syllable out.
“Yes, let’s.”
And then he sat back in his chair, ceding the lesson to her, and the moment was shattered.
Edwina exhaled quietly. Dining. Dining. Focus on dining and not missing his embrace. Or his kindness.
“Now, the first thing to be aware of is that there is an order to seating. The mistress of the household sits at the upper end, and then the seating falls, right to left, according to rank as to superiority and the next of rank following and so on and so on. The gentleman, in this case, being His Grace, shall take a seat up there.” She pointed her pencil at the lower end of the table. “And there is no greater sign of ill-breeding than to alter this order or seat oneself in a place higher than one belongs.”
“Oh, the scandal. The horror.”
She ignored that heavy coating of sarcasm. “It is imperative that you do not shout across or even speak quietly across a table to another party. The parties seated to your right and left comprise the main individuals whom you should speak with.”
“In t
his case, being you.”
She nodded. “Precisely, in this—” She narrowed her eyes. “You’re teasing again.”
“I’m teasing again,” he confirmed, unapologetically.
“Resuming your lesson,” she said, not missing a beat. “We shall shift to the very important topic of . . . plates and silverware.”
* * *
• • •
This was hell.
Or, it should be.
There’d been five courses thus far, to suffer through in an etiquette lesson on dining, doled out by a governess of fine ladies.
And yet, nearly two hours later, with Edwina still filling every spare space of quiet with her far-too-enthused-for-a topic-on-dining voice, just like all the days prior, Rafe found himself enjoying it all—immensely. Nor, for that matter, did it come from just teasing her . . . though that was of its own immense enjoyment. It was that her enthusiasm was contagious.
“This fork, then?” he asked, holding the wrong one aloft.
“No. No.” Plucking the silver piece from his hand, she returned it to the legion of cutlery beside his plate. “Try again.”
Rafe made a show of eyeing each fork and spoon. “Oh, dear, however will I choose? The decision seems veritably life-altering. Not unlike the mines in which if a person makes the wrong decision—”
She swatted his hand. “Oh, hush. I’m not saying it is the same matter of life and death as the work you do daily. But it is . . . important to your fitting in here, and successfully immersing yourself in society, Rafe.”
Despite the footmen stationed at the front of the room, and her promise to the contrary, she’d used his Christian name.
That was, however, not what sent his earlier amusement fading. Rather . . . it had been what she’d said, as he fixed on not just the latest words driving her lecture, but on the solemnity to them and her, and the little tensing at the corners of her mouth.
“And you think that is so very important?” he murmured. “Fitting in?”
“Of course,” she said instantly. “It is eminently more comfortable when one . . . belongs.” She glanced down at her lap, and that slight dip of her gaze proved revealing in so many ways.
She spoke as one who knew what it was like to be excluded, and it also framed her efforts to transform her charges in a new light. Not ruthless, driven by prestige in her work . . . but rather, motivated because of her own understanding of what it was to be treated poorly.
And he didn’t like it . . . this new way of viewing Edwina Dalrymple. Because it relaxed the guard he was so very determined to have up around her, a wall he’d firmly erected this past week that had brought them back to their respective roles as adversaries.
“One might argue that it isn’t worth one’s time exerting efforts to find oneself accepted by people who won’t accept a person for who they are,” he said quietly, careful to keep inflection from his voice.
A sound of frustration escaped her, and she spoke on a rush. “That is an idealistic way of viewing it. It is ever so easy to say one doesn’t care, but when one is forced to live among people who deride you for not belonging?” Sadness filled her features, and she shook her head.
“Is that what happened to you?” he asked quietly. Despite all his resolve to not let himself be weak in any way around her, he couldn’t keep that question back. “Is that why you are determined to transform women and now, me, into this paragon of propriety and society’s rules?”
He tensed, anticipating that she would immediately default to the different standards she expected for them, one in which he was to share, while she kept her secrets close.
Then, Edwina nodded slowly, reluctantly. “People aren’t kind, and perhaps you were spared in Staffordshire from the world’s general meanness, but that isn’t how it is usually and certainly not everywhere. And when it happens? It is awful,” she finished on a whisper.
He’d been a bastard, but he’d been spared much of the cruelty that met illegitimate issue. The world had taken Rafe’s mother as the wife of a man who followed the drum; it was the lie she’d told to explain away the babes she often found herself carrying, and her husband’s absence. There’d been suspicions raised by one of the boys who’d bullied Hunter, but none had hung too much on the wondering about their family. “I don’t necessarily know what your experience was,” he allowed, and waited until she lifted her eyes to his. “But those people?” People whom he had a violent hungering to hunt down and destroy for having hurt her. “Anyone who would expect you to change and be different, or who’d treat you poorly because of who you are? They aren’t worthy of a moment of your time, Edwina.”
Her lips trembled, and then parted, in a tender softening.
And despite every vow he’d taken not to feel anything but resentment and wariness for this woman, the anger in his chest . . . eased. Rafe resented how she’d betrayed him. But at least now, he understood some of what fueled her determination. She’d been treated poorly, and wished to spare him that same fate. “I’m not going to go about being someone other than I am to appease the duke or anyone else, Edwina,” he said, his voice gruff.
“I’m not trying to change you, Rafe. I wouldn’t want you to change who you are.” When she spoke in those impassioned tones, he . . . could almost believe her. Her fingers crept toward his, and then she abruptly stopped with a breath of space between them, a divide that hadn’t been there days ago. She lowered her hand to her lap, and he missed that touch. “I want you, however, to be prepared to be who you are in this world that is so very different.”
For the first time, her motives made sense; they made sense in a way different than they had from the start. When he’d thought her a lofty lady trying to make him into something other than he was, to please a duke.
Goddamn it, why was he such a fool where this woman was concerned? Without thinking, he grabbed the correct fork. “This one is the dessert fork,” he said between gritted teeth.
Edwina beamed, and he may as well have hefted the globe on his back like Atlas himself. Then her smile froze, and she gasped.
“What?” he asked guardedly.
“Why . . . why . . .” Her gaze went from the doorway to the table, and then to Rafe himself. “You know these things.”
He took a bite of the macaroon on his plate “ ‘Things’ is hardly precise.” It was just that he was determined to make this as difficult as possible for her.
“You knew the rules of punctuality,” she stated. “Just as you know that you are supposed to stand when a woman enters the room and not to grunt and which knife to use and which fork.” She half sounded ready to cry.
At last, he took mercy. “Aye.”
Edwina stared at him a long while. “That’s it? That is all you’ll say? Ayyyyye?”
That last deliverance was so identical to the graveled and gruff delivery of Rafe’s response that he grinned. The moment she landed a sharp, disapproving look his way, he let his smile fall. “No,” he murmured, and bowed his head in false contrition. “Aye, Miss Dalrymple.”
She gasped and tossed her uneaten macaroon at him. The confectionery missile hit Rafe’s arm and landed with a little forlorn thump on the floor.
And, in that moment, it was impossible to say who was more shocked: the pair of footmen who had been forced to attend this farcical lesson.
Edwina, with her horror-filled hazel eyes.
Or Rafe.
Picking up his napkin, he made a show of dusting the remnants of sugar from his sleeve. “Why . . . Miss Dalrymple, did you just hurl food at me?”
A crimson blush turned the lady’s cheeks red. “No.”
He lifted a brow. This one he really needed to hear.
“It was more like a little flick,” and she demonstrated said gesture with a flex of her hands.
One of the young servants came forward to retrieve the discarded biscu
it, but Rafe held up a hand. “A moment, please.”
Taking their cue, the servants instantly filed out of the room, leaving Rafe and Edwina alone.
She opened her mouth.
“I know,” he interrupted. “Our being together alone is improper.”
“Yes.” Edwina frowned. “You know that?”
He nodded.
Edwina narrowed her eyes. “What don’t you know about proper etiquette, Mr. Audley?”
He opened his mouth to respond, but she beat him to it, peppering him with a rapid questioning. “What about proper forms of address?” she demanded.
“Before or after your recent lectures commenced?”
“They are lessons,” she corrected. “And when did you master that particular topic?”
He lifted his head. “Before.”
With his every response, Edwina’s brows dipped lower and lower. “What about the topic of acceptable discourse?”
“What of it?” he asked, furrowing his brow in fake confusion.
The young lady gnashed her teeth.
And it was wicked how very much he enjoyed himself. A better man might care. “What do you know of it?” she asked again.
“I know Commerce, Coin, and Shipping are generally the safest sources of conversation for a man to speak on.” Rafe confirmed.
“You know that?” The lady looked unsure as to whether she wished to stamp her foot or cry, and Rafe, who’d been so determined to be coldly indifferent, couldn’t resist the lure of teasing and tormenting her. “How?”
“Oh, from the seven-part history filled with topics suitable for discussion and Rules of Good Deportment, or of Good Breeding and A Present for an Apprentice by John Barnard.” He nodded. “Yes. I’m extensively read on the matter, and as such, quite accomplished in proper discourse.” He paused. “That is, according to Polite Society’s standards.”
Along Came a Lady Page 24