Edith Layton (14 page)

Damon’s parents had raised an impressive family, but they were an impressive couple. Arthur Ryder was tall, lean, and distinguished. Elizabeth Ryder was still a handsome woman, his partner in elegance. That wasn’t surprising; they were distant cousins. Their eyes filled with tears of gladness whenever they looked at Damon, and they couldn’t stop doing that; it was clear they’d starved for the sight of him. From time to time they dragged their gaze from him and looked at his fiancée, and then their eyes grew shadowed. Or so Gilly thought, guiltily.

They sat at the Sinclairs’ dining table and the uproar was hilarious. Until Damon’s mother tapped a spoon on her glass for silence. “Children!” she chided, as though even the middle-aged men and women were
really children. “What sort of impression are we making? What a clamor! Thank you,” she said into the sudden hush. “I’ve a notion to talk to Miss Giles, and I don’t wish to shout, she’ll think I’m ferocious.”

“But you are, Mama!” Alfred shouted.

“I wish I could be—to you!” she answered, as they all laughed. She leaned forward. “Now, Miss Giles, don’t let my disastrous brood discourage you. I promise you Damon was ever his own man. So, having shown you the best and worst we can do, what I wish to know is when we are to meet your family? At the wedding? Or are they in town?”

“You have,” Gilly blurted. “Or at least, all except for my sister.”

“Indeed, there is only my Gilly and her sister, Betsy,” Damon drawled, putting his arm round the back of her chair, his eyes daring criticism. He was usually so charming and friendly that his sudden frostiness was even more threatening.

His implied protection was noted. No one spoke for a moment.

“But how sad,” his sister Mary called from down the table. “Miss Giles, you’ve no other relatives at all?”

“She has us,” Ewen said quickly. “Both Gilly and Betsy are my wards. I know we can’t make up for the tragic loss of their parents, but we do our humble best.” He sat straight in his chair at the head of the table, his gaze sweeping over each of his guests in turn.

There were few people, even among the jolly Ryder clan, who would question the haughty Viscount Sinclair when he looked his most imperious, as he did
now. But Damon’s mother didn’t. She kept her attention on Gilly.

“You’re from London?” she persisted. “Your family as well? Any connection to the Giles of Stratford, by chance? A delightful family. Francis went to school with Herbert Giles, clever boy, and they’re all fair as Vikings, like you.”

“No,” Gilly said, “or if they are, I haven’t heard of it. There was only my mother and father.”

“You’ve no cousins, aunts, uncles or such?” Damon’s mother persisted, as though amazed.

“I might,” Gilly said, raising her chin. “I never met them, though.” She wouldn’t lie. It was what and who she was. Well, and if they disapproved, she thought defiantly, though her face flushed and her stomach grew cold, they’d see the thing ended before it began, and so be it. Maybe it would be best. His family meant a lot to Damon. She wouldn’t stand between them. She’d never really understood his desire to marry her and always wondered if he’d one day regret it. Maybe today was to be that day.

“Well, then!” Damon’s mother said, sitting back with an expression of surprise. Gilly looked down at her plate. But her gaze flew up again at the next comment. “All the better for us,” Elizabeth Ryder pronounced. “We’ll be family enough for you. This way I won’t have to compete with other grandmothers for my grandchildren’s attention on holidays, as I do with
some
of my ungrateful brood!” She glanced around the table, as the culprits she was talking about either laughed or grew red-faced.

Gilly blinked. Damon smiled and bent his head to
whisper, “Not what you expected? There’s a reason I love them. Now you know.”

“But, surely they must wish you’d found a girl who had at least some kind of family,” she murmured.

“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” he whispered, his breath tickling her ear, “No one cares. You’ll find out.”

“Ho! Leave off that snuggling, Damon!” Alfred roared. “You’ve got to wait until you’re married, and wait you shall!”

Gilly tried to believe what Damon said as the conversation picked up to a roar again. He’d said she was “wrong, wrong, wrong.” But she’d lived by her wits for too long to doubt her instincts, and wasn’t consoled.

Gilly finally found herself alone for the first time in over a week. For the first time, in fact, since the gregarious Ryders had come to visit. His parents and his sisters Mary and Margaret and their husbands were staying at the Sinclair townhouse; the rest had taken rooms at hotels, or with friends. But they congregated together from the moment they woke in the morning, and the place they met was always the Sinclairs’ house.

This morning, though, the men and many of the women, bored with being pent in town, went out riding to the nearby countryside with Ewen and Damon. The other woman had gone on a shopping tour, taken in a convoy of carriages. Bridget was in her rooms, feeding the baby. The other children were on a long ramble in the park with a crew of visiting nannies.

When Gilly poked her head into the morning room, she found it blessedly empty. She stole in and sank into a chair with a sigh, reveling in the time alone.
Lately her days and evenings had been so busy she hadn’t had time to think. There were so many new people to be charming to, so many stories of Damon’s childhood and youth to hear again and again. Gilly was so busy being civil and fond, she was too weary when she found her bed at night to do more than fret for a few minutes until exhaustion claimed her.

It was good, because she hadn’t had time to panic. It was bad, because she wondered if she should. Now, at last, through some quirk of fate, she was alone.

“There you are! What good fortune!” Damon’s mother cried as she peeked in the room. Gilly leapt to her feet. “No, no, sit down. We finally have time for a good long cozy chat! Don’t mind Cousin Felicity,” she added, motioning to the white-haired woman with her, “she knows me better than I do myself.” Gilly nodded at the sweet-faced elderly female who always trailed after Damon’s mother.

“And not a moment too soon!” Elizabeth said, taking a chair next to Gilly. “Because in a matter of weeks you’ll become my daughter!”

There was nothing to say to that. Gilly only nodded again.

Elizabeth laughed. “Don’t worry, it won’t be that bad! After all, after the wedding, you’ll be on the Western border and we’re on the Channel, as far east as you can go without speaking French. We’ll have half a country between us!”

Gilly smiled weakly. Was she joking? Or was she relieved because this cuckoo’s egg of a girl, this stranger found in a noble nest, wasn’t going to be on her doorstep?

“It’s as well,” Cousin Felicity said. “Can’t think of what Lady Annabelle would do if she had to see her every day.”

“Felicity!” Damon’s mother said, looking shocked…and amused. “Oh,” she said to Gilly’s confused expression. “You see, Lady Annabelle is…well, the thing of it is that she….”

“Expected to be in your shoes,” Felicity said with relish.

Elizabeth shot her companion a strange look. “Not really. Well…yes, really, I suppose,” she sighed. She turned to Gilly, her face pink. “Annabelle’s a near neighbor and a dear one. She’s known Damon since she first opened her eyes, and doted on him since then. We all felt she never married because she was expecting him to…Not that she’s that old. Only a few years older than you, in fact. But he was always so charming to her, we all thought…. But who knows what’s in a young man’s mind? And just look at the lovely bride he found! But Felicity’s right. Just as well you don’t have to cope with Annabelle every day of your life from now on.”

“A good family and thirty thousand a year,” Felicity said.

Gilly knew old people were often outspoken, but she felt implied criticism. She didn’t know what to think. But she knew how to defend herself. If she’d thought about it she wouldn’t have found the courage, but defense was automatic with her. “Perhaps you ought to remind him of it, then,” she said sweetly. “Maybe he forgot. I have a dowry, but it isn’t anywhere near thirty thousand a year. Yes, better tell him quickly.
There’s still time for him to change his mind. No sense whistling a fortune down the wind. I suppose Lady Annabelle is beautiful, too? Sunny-natured and kind to animals?”

“Yes,” Felicity said, “and she’s a raven-haired beauty and—”

“F
elicity
!” Elizabeth gasped. “Gillian was funning you—at least, I hope she was. My dear,” she told Gilly. “We never meant to imply he’d be better off with Annabelle! After all, we only want what he wants, and he never offered her anything but kindness in all these years.”

“I see,” Gilly said. “Well, you know Damon! Did I tell you what he said about that time you sent him dancing slippers when he was in America?” She deftly changed the subject, and soon they were talking about the subject nearest to Elizabeth’s heart—Damon. But though Gilly laughed at the anecdotes about him, she was hardly listening. She was too busy reviewing what had been said. She couldn’t forget that Damon’s mother hadn’t said
she
didn’t think he’d be better off with Annabelle…L
ady
Annabelle, which was worse.

So that was the first thing she resolved to ask Damon as soon as she could get him alone. The only problem was she didn’t know when that would be. The way things were going, it mightn’t be until her wedding night.

“The only way I can talk to you is while we’re dancing,” Gilly told Damon the moment she stepped into his arms for a polka at the ball Ewen and Bridget were giving for her, “and I can’t tell you what I want to because
half the world’s listening. Except for you! Are you
listening
to me?” she hissed, as he grinned in answer to a jest one of his cousins called to him as they whirled around the ballroom floor.

“Yes, she has a terrible temper,” he told the air over her left ear, and then grinned down at her. “You want to get me alone? Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“Nowhere!” Gilly said through gritted teeth. “Can we slip out or sneak away behind a pillar? Don’t leer. I have to talk to you! You found a way to sneak away at the ball the night we met. Why not here?”

“Because here, my sweet, we have as much privacy as a pair of elephants in the Tower zoo. We’re the main attraction. But I’ll find a way. Ah, here’s your next partner, right on time, or even earlier. Interesting. He’s so eager to claim his dance, he hardly waited for the music to stop. Good evening, my lord,” Damon said louder, turning to bow to Lord Wycoff as he came up to them.

“Ryder,” Lord Wycoff said, inclining his head. “My dance, my dear Miss Giles?”

The waltz began. Gilly flashed Damon a look of annoyance. She was frustrated and angry at his making a joke of something so important to her…and then as she stepped into the dance with Lord Wycoff, she forgot her problems, and became suddenly aware of her partner. Aware of the intense scrutiny in those dark eyes, aware of the way he held her so gently, yet firmly, aware of the tension radiating from the long body so close to her own.

“I wanted your last dance as a dewy maiden,” he said in his dark velvet voice, “so I can see what it will be like when I claim the first one after you are wedded.”

Her gaze shot up toward his. “Then you’ll be disappointed,” she said gruffly. Because what he’d said was innocent on the surface, but suggestive. And she knew he meant it to be. “I’m not being married for a month. And when I am, I’ll dance with Damon first, Ewen next, and probably Damon’s papa after that,
and
his gang of relatives after. You’ll have to wait your turn.”

She frowned. What she’d said seemed even less respectable. She gave herself a mental shake for her nonsense. They were only talking about dancing, no matter what his tone implied.

He smiled at her predicament, but there was such tender pain in his expression she missed a step. “Careful,” he said, as he held her up and turned her ’round again. “It’s too easy to make a misstep here. And don’t I know that!”

“You don’t find it hard to make one anywhere,” she said angrily.

“But you do, which is my problem…or was.”

“You think things will change after I’m married?” she asked, amazed.

“Things generally do,” he said mildly.

They were talking so normally, about such normal things. He hadn’t said one word out of line. But everything he said was double-edged, and she knew—or would swear—they were both talking about something else. “I don’t change,” she told him.

“You are changing,” he said sadly, his eyes devouring her face. “You will again. This is difficult for me, but why I came tonight. I had to tell you, before the fact, that marriage is a final step, one that oughtn’t be taken unless you’re sure of the path ahead. There’s marriage
for expedience, which was my fate.” He turned her in the dance and she moved with him as one, unwilling to miss a word.

“There’s marriage for love,” he continued without missing a breath, “which is rare as unicorns in Picadilly. But the most foolish is marriage for gossip’s sake. Dearborne wouldn’t have been believed beyond an hour. Difficult to think that hour could define all the hours of the rest of your life. Be advised from one who knows too well, if love isn’t found within marriage, it will be discovered without.”

“It’s not that!” Gilly said.

“Indeed? So it’s a love match?” He was a subtle man who seldom showed any emotion but desire or amusement, but his eyes were pained and oddly tender. So she said nothing. She wouldn’t lie, and found she couldn’t to him.

“I see,” he said. “But about those changes…. Although I regret some that will happen shortly, I cannot regret the fact that it might put you more easily within my reach. By which I mean to say,” he said when she gasped, “now that you’re going to be a married woman it will mean you’ll be able to visit us. You know, of course, I could never have invited a respectable single female to my house for even the most innocent of reasons. Not with my reputation.”

“You have no innocent reasons,” Gilly said flatly.

He laughed. “That, my dear Miss Giles, apart from your beauty, is what I most like about you. There is no nonsense about you.”