A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal (19 page)

“Very bad of me,” he said, and his voice was pure sin, deep enough for a girl to fall into it and never see the light of day again. “Generally I take a great deal of pleasure in following every step a lady requires.”

She wasn’t the only one giving a flirting lesson. “Well, you’ve skipped one,” she said, unable to resist.

“I await your instruction,” he purred.

The wicked impulse worked through her too quickly for good sense to catch up to it. “There’s a bit of touching required,” she said with an offhand shrug. “Accidental-like, only of course it isn’t.”

His eyes narrowed. He took a deliberate step toward her. “And teasing as well, I think.”

Her breath was coming shorter. “The teasing is all on the girl’s part,” she said. “Well, the talk, anyway. It’s the lad’s part to tease with his …”
Body
, she wanted to say, as her eyes took on a will of their own and skimmed down the length of him. When they reached his face again, her throat tightened at the look he was fixing on her. “Maybe it doesn’t matter,” she said hastily. “It’s not like you need to know how to flirt with a Bethnal Green girl—”

“Oh, I think I do.” Suddenly he was right in front of her again, and his palm was cupping her cheek, his thumb brushing lightly across her lower lip. “I’d like very much,” he said huskily, “to know how to please a girl from Bethnal Green.”

“You’re doing fine,” she whispered.

“I aim for better than fine.” His eyes dropped to her lips and his expression darkened. “But you,” he said, “do not.”

It took a moment to realize the comment wasn’t kind. “Beg pardon?”

His hand fell away. He took a measured step back. “You are making no effort,” he said. “You are wasting my time. You are wasting my money. If you don’t mean to take this project seriously, then … leave.”

“Leave?” It took a moment to reassemble her wits. “You—you’re changing your mind about all this?”

“I’ve not changed my mind,” he said. “I never expressed an interest in supporting you for your own amusement. I wanted an heiress to wed. If you have no interest in becoming Lady Cornelia, then I have no interest in you.”

Panic leapt up inside her, tangling with sudden, smarting anger. His judgment wasn’t worth two farthings to her! She had enough fancy goods squirreled away by now; she’d be happy to leave! But she’d thought she’d have more time before having to risk facing Michael again—and she hadn’t yet laid plans to find a new job—and how dare he break their agreement so easily!

“Go back to Bethnal Green,” he said. “Waste the rest of your undoubtedly short life by slaving for pennies in a factory that you otherwise might have bought. Or stay here and put in the work necessary to reclaim your birthright.” He shrugged. “The decision is yours. But make it quickly. If you’re not willing to become a lady, I need to make other plans for myself.”

He turned on his heel and started to walk out.

“Wait,” she blurted.

Impatience marked every line of his body as he turned back.

She took an unsteady breath. She’d known he could take all of this away, but she’d thought—foolishly, she was a damnable fool—that maybe he liked her. Besides, he had so
much
. Couldn’t he spare a bit of his good fortune without making her grovel for it?

But she’d misjudged him. Now the fairy tale was ending. Her stomach shuddered at the thought of returning to the Green before she’d laid plans for a job—and for handling Michael. It
couldn’t
end like this. How terrible it would be to look back on this moment and have to put the blame for it not on St. Maur’s arrogance but on her own stupidity.

How
terr
-ible. That was one of the harder words for her to say properly; Mr. Aubrey, the elocutionist, always chided her for letting the
e
slip into a
u
. It was
terr-
ible to feel slow and cloddish. In school, she’d always been the quickest in class. Numbers, letters, geography, shapes—not one of them had given her pause. She’d always thought herself clever, not just for a girl from Bethnal Green but for a girl from anywhere. She couldn’t bear to think she might be wrong about that.

Maybe that fear had kept her from trying as hard as she might have done.

She opened her mouth to say all of this—or to say, “I’m sorry.” But nothing came out. Her tongue felt as stiff and useless and stubborn as her pride.

St. Maur’s sigh sounded loud in the silence. “Come,” he said. “Before you decide, I want to show you something.”

A
quick, calculated decision prompted Simon to take Nell to the gallery. Perhaps he hadn’t done a good enough job of showing her the advantages that cooperation would afford her. The gallery would advertise them effectively.

When they rounded the corner, she came to a stop—amazed, as he’d guessed she would be, by the arched cathedral roof and the long wall fronted with stained-glass panels. “Stars,” she said softly. Her hands burrowed like small, frightened creatures into the folds of her gown as she looked around.

While he found himself staring only at her—and remembering, with sudden vividness, how she’d looked that first morning in the library. Exhausted, bedraggled, she had gazed up at the skylights and glowed in just this way, a glow so bright that it had drowned out every ragged detail.

That glow now worked a different magic. Paired with her demure, pink gown, it recast the significance of her features, leading a man to misread the shine in her large blue eyes as innocence—or vapidity, he told himself. That was Kitty’s vacant gaze on her face.

But he couldn’t hold on to the idea. The tight roll of her coffee-brown hair was no mode Kitty would favor. It conjured—ludicrously—a lack of vanity, the style of a girl who ducked her head when walking to church. Only someone who knew her better would guess that those small pink lips, parted now in admiration,
concealed a hot tongue that bandied insults like a sailor.

He
knew her better.

The thought sent a strange shock through him. That her disguise was so transparent to him suddenly felt profound, an intimacy next to which his irritation seemed trivial.

“It’s like a palace,” she said.

He caught his breath as her eyes found his, shining in a face alight with interest.

Her guttural intonations were not the only thing that distinguished her from her look-alike sister. Despite their unfriendly exchange minutes ago, Nell made no attempt now to hide her admiration. In her sister’s world, in his world, people strove to appear unimpressed.

For the first time, he wondered why that was. Gratification so transparent as this only made a man long to witness it anew. To impress her all over again. He would like to be the focus of such wondering looks at all hours of the day.

The direction of his own thoughts began to unnerve him.

“It’s not at all like a palace,” he said. “I’ll have to show you Buckingham sometime.”

Her glow dimmed. Perhaps she didn’t believe he meant the offer. “Every newly married couple must be presented to the Queen,” he said to clarify. “She’ll not hold another levee until next May, but”—he paused only the barest moment—”if you decide to stay here, we’ll attend.”

Her mouth screwed into a little smile. She did not take his bait. “You’re daft,” she said. “You want to take me to meet the Queen?”

The amusement in her voice caught him off guard. For a moment, and no doubt in tandem with her prudish outfit, it actually chastened him.

Perhaps he was daft. If, come next May, they remained married—if the law had acknowledged her as Cornelia; if wedlock proved financially fruitful—then it still did not follow that they would socialize together. No matter how rich she became, she’d remain a product of the East End, a girl who’d grown up in filth while working for her living. He could not imagine her enjoying his circles.

In fact, he could not imagine her finding anything to admire in them.

The thought unsettled him. But why should it? What did it signify if her upbringing limited her ability to appreciate his world? His friends would see nothing to esteem in her, either. The fashionable set admired his tastes; he could persuade them to believe nearly anything about art that they did not understand. But about poverty, they believed they knew everything. They had maids and coachmen; they each had an amusing tale of encountering some aggressive street Arab. They saw dirt and filth daily, out the glass windows of their coaches. They would see no novelty in Nell, no beauty in her. They would find her terribly uncomfortable, in fact: proof that beneath the dirt lay human beings. She would be, to them, no more than a reproach in human form.

Changing their minds would be a challenge, the greatest he’d ever undertaken.

But he did so love to make people change their minds despite themselves.

“Court is terribly tedious,” he said. “Hot. Dull. You’ll loathe it. But we’ll go, if you stay.”

She eyed him. One moment he saw Kitty’s face, and wondered why he minded so much the thought of her leaving. The next he saw a woman with darker eyes, a blue so close to navy that they put him in mind of the sea five hundred miles from shore. These eyes were an invitation to drown.

He took a sharp breath even as she spoke. “Dull to rub elbows with the Queen, is it? You’re a hard man to impress, you are.”

And then she gave him her back as she turned to look at the paintings.

Bewildered, he studied her slim shoulders. Once again, as in that disorienting moment in front of the staff last week, he felt himself unbalanced by her, adrift in a sea of broken expectations, with no near handhold to cling to. She had something that no amount of money could purchase: an outsized presence.

He wasn’t sure he liked it. She needed to come off the lady, but only grand dames drew admiration for their talents at discomposing a man.

What did she see when she looked at him? Did he even want to know?

Well, in regard to this moment, the answer seemed clear. She thought he’d been bragging.

Good God. Perhaps he had been.

To his disgust and amazement, he felt himself flush.

This business of charming her was idiotic. She needed to cooperate of her own free will. “We could skip the formality,” he said.

She made no reply, turning a little to behold the length of the row of portraits. Her weight shifted to one leg, causing her hip to jut.

She was ignoring him. He realized the novelty of
it in the depth of his astonishment. It took effort to check a childish remark: her posture was unladylike in the extreme.

He stepped up beside her, deliberately crowding her. On an intuitive level he understood her show of indifference. After the gauntlet he’d thrown, she salved her pride by demonstrating that it would not be regard for
him
that kept her here.

But she was too intelligent to let this opportunity for betterment pass her by.
Pride got you nowhere
, he thought.
Use your brain, Nell
. This arrangement required concessions from her. She would need to be guided by him. She would need, he thought, to recognize her debts. “You like the clothing I’ve provided you,” he said. “That much is obvious.”

She did not so much glance at him as present a three-quarters profile. Her nose, Kitty’s nose, had been fashioned to support condescension. “It’s good, strong stuff.” She sounded grudging. “I need a better-fitted corset, though. And a bit of lace wouldn’t do any harm.”

Now he did laugh. He
was
a hard man to impress. But so, it seemed, was she. And he wanted to impress her. He had no bloody idea why he hadn’t managed it yet.

God help him, he was losing his mind.

He cleared his throat. “As I said, this wardrobe is—or would be—a temporary measure, only.”

She nodded. “That seamstress—”

“Modiste.”

She slanted him an unreadable glance. “That
mowdeest
said it would take ten days for the first gowns to be ready.”

He nodded. A pity that he’d missed that fitting a
few days ago. He suddenly envisioned how he might have interrupted it at an opportune moment, discovering her only in her chemise, corded by measuring tape, her pretty lips rounding into an
O
as she trembled and blushed beneath his inspection.

But he was an idiot. She’d not have trembled; she’d have chucked a stool at his head for spying.

“Who are these people?” she asked.

Right. Here was the main reason he’d brought her to the gallery. He followed her regard to the glowering old man in front of her. “These are your parents,” he said. “The late Lord Rushden, before you. And to the right, your mother.”

Nell’s belly gave a queer little leap. She walked closer to the paintings. The last earl was posing on a horse in front of a long lawn that led up to the building she’d seen in the painting in the library. Paton Park, St. Maur had called it.

The house was too pretty to be believed—a palace of rosy brick set amid low hills greener than St. James in the spring. This was her second view of it. The sight raised a flutter in her breast, a curious feeling that threatened to grow stronger the longer she looked.