1
London
May 1870
T
here was no light in the room other than that given off by the flames in the ornate marble fireplace. The fire was low, but managed to throw the couple on the divan into deep silhouette. Still, Caroline was able to make out their features.
She knew who they were. She knew who they were very well indeed. She had, after all, recognized her fiancé’s laugh through the closed door, which was why she’d opened it in the first place.
Unfortunately, it appeared she ought to have knocked first, since she’d obviously interrupted a moment of utmost intimacy. And though she knew she should leave— or, at the very least, make her presence known—she found she could not move. She was riveted where she stood, staring quite against her will at the Lady Jacquelyn Seldon’s breasts, which had come out of the bodice of her gown, and were now bouncing vigorously up and down in rhythm to the thrusting hips of the man who lay between Lady Jacquelyn’s thighs.
It occurred to Caroline, as she stood there with one gloved hand gripping the doorknob, and the other clutching the frame, that her own breasts had never bounced with such wild abandon.
Of course, her breasts weren’t nearly so large as Lady Jacquelyn’s.
Which might explain why it was the Lady Jacquelyn, and not Caroline, who was astride the Marquis of Winchilsea.
Caroline had not previously been aware of her fiancé’s predilection for large-breasted women, but apparently Lord Winchilsea had found her lacking in that particular category, and had therefore sought out someone better suited to his tastes. Which was certainly his right, of course. Only Caroline couldn’t help thinking he might have had the courtesy not to do it in one of Dame Ashforth’s sitting rooms, in the middle of a dinner party.
I suppose I shall faint,
Caroline thought, and gripped the doorknob tighter, in case the floor should suddenly rush up to meet her face, as often happened to the heroines of the novels her maids sometimes left laying about, and which Caroline sometimes picked up and read.
Only of course she didn’t faint. Caroline had never fainted in her life, not even the time she fell off her horse and broke her arm in two places. She rather wished she
would
faint, because then she might at least have been spared the sight of the Lady Jacquelyn inserting her finger into Hurst’s mouth.
Now why,
Caroline wondered,
did she do
that? Did men enjoy having women’s fingers shoved into their mouths?
Evidently they did, because the marquis began at once to suck noisily upon it.
Why hadn’t anyone ever mentioned this to her? If the marquis had wanted Caroline to put her finger into his mouth, she most certainly would have done so, if it would have made him happy. Really, it was completely unnecessary for him to turn to Lady Jacquelyn—with whom he was barely acquainted, let alone
engaged
—for something as simple as
that.
Beneath Lady Jacquelyn, the Marquis of Winchilsea let out a groan—rather muffled, with Lady Jacquelyn’s finger in the way. Caroline saw his hand move from Lady Jacquelyn’s hip to one of those sizable breasts. Hurst had not, Caroline saw, removed either his coat or his shirt. Well, she supposed he’d be able to rejoin the dinner party more quickly that way. But surely with the fire—not to mention the heat Lady Jacquelyn’s body was surely generating—he must have been overly warm.
He didn’t seem to mind, however. The hand which had gone to cup Lady Jacquelyn’s breast moved to the back of her long neck, where fine tendrils of dark hair had escaped from the complicated coronet of curls atop her head. Then Hurst pulled her face down until her lips touched his. Lady Jacquelyn had to remove her finger from his mouth in order to better accommodate her tongue, which she placed there instead.
Well,
Caroline thought.
That’s it, then. The wedding is most definitely
off.
She wondered if she ought to declare it, then and there. Suck in her breath and interrupt the lovers in their embrace (if that was the correct term for it), make a scene.
But then she decided that she simply wouldn’t be able to endure what undoubtedly would follow: the excuses, the recriminations, Hurst ranting about his love for her, Jacquelyn’s tears. If Lady Jacquelyn
could
cry, which Caroline rather doubted.
Really, what else could she do but turn around and leave the room as quietly as she’d entered it? Praying that Hurst and Jacquelyn were too preoccupied to hear the latch click, she eased the door gently closed behind her, and only then released a long-held breath.
And wondered what she ought to do now.
It was dark in the corridor just outside the sitting room door. Dark and cool, unlike the rest of Dame Ashforth’s town house, which was crowded with nearly a hundred guests and almost as many servants. No one was very likely to come this way, since all the champagne and food and music was a floor below.
No one except pathetically abandoned fiancées, like herself.
Her knees suddenly feeling a little weak, Caroline sank down onto the third and fourth steps of the narrow servants’ staircase just opposite the door she’d closed so quietly. She was not, she knew, going to faint. But she did feel a little nauseous. She would need some time to compose herself before going back downstairs. Leaning one elbow upon her knee, Caroline rested her chin in her hand and regarded that door through the slender bars of the banister, wondering what she ought to do now.
It seemed to her that the thing any normal girl would do was cry. After all, she had just caught her fiancé in the arms—well, to be accurate, the legs—of another. She ought, she knew from her extensive novel reading, to be weeping and storming.
And she wanted to weep and storm. She really did. She tried to summon up some tears, but none came.
I suppose,
Caroline thought to herself,
that I can’t cry because I’m terrifically angry. Yes, that must be it. I am livid with rage, and that’s why I can’t cry. Why, I should go find a pistol and come back and shoot Lady Jacquelyn in the heart with it. That’s what I ought to do.
But the thought left her feeling more physically weak than ever, and she was quite glad she’d sat down. She didn’t like guns, and could not imagine ever shooting anyone with one—not even Lady Jacquelyn Seldon, who quite thoroughly deserved it.
Besides,
she told herself,
even if I
could
shoot her— which I quite positively couldn’t—I wouldn’t. What would be the point? I’d only be arrested.
Caroline, finding a loose crystal bead on her skirt, pulled on it distractedly.
And then I’d have to go to jail.
Caroline knew more than she’d ever wanted to know about jail, because her best friend Emmy was a member of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage, and had been arrested several times for chaining herself to the carriage wheels of various members of Parliament.
Caroline did not want to go to jail, which Emmy had described for her in all its lurid detail, any more than she wanted to put a bullet through anyone.
And supposing,
she thought,
they find me guilty. I’ll be hanged. And for what? For shooting Lady Jacquelyn?
It would hardly be worth it. Caroline didn’t have anything particularly against Lady Jacquelyn. Lady Jacquelyn had always been perfectly civil to Caroline.
Really, Caroline decided, if she was going to shoot anybody—which she wasn’t, of course—it would have to be Hurst. Why, not even one hour ago he’d been whispering into Caroline’s ear that he couldn’t wait for their wedding night, which was only one month away.
Well, evidently he was so impatient for it that he’d been forced to seek out someone else entirely with whom to rehearse it.
Cheating bastard!
Caroline tried to think up some other wicked words she had overheard her younger brother Thomas and his friends call one another.
Oh, yes. Whoremonger!
It would serve that whoremongering cheating bastard right if I shot him.
And then she felt a rush of guilt for even thinking such a thing. Because of course she was perfectly conscious of how very much she owed Hurst. And not just because of what he’d done for Tommy, either, but because out of all the girls in London, he’d singled
her
out to marry,
her
to be the sole recipient of those slow, seductive kisses.
Or at least, that’s what she’d thought up until very recently. Now she realized that not only was she far from the sole recipient of those kisses, but that the ones she’d been receiving were quite different from the ones Lady Jacquelyn was apparently used to.
Damn!
She brought up her other elbow, and now rested her chin in both hands. What was she to do?
The correct thing, of course, would be for Hurst to call it off. The marquis was invariably correct in all of his activities—well, with the exception of this one, of course—and so Caroline thought it was not unreasonable to hope that he might be the one to break off their engagement, thus sparing her the embarrassment of having to do so.
Darling,
she pictured him saying.
I
am
sorry, but you see, it turns out I’ve met a girl I like a tremendously lot better than you. . . .
But no. The Marquis of Winchilsea was nothing if not polite. He would probably say something like,
Caroline, my sweet, don’t ask me to explain why, but I can’t in good faith follow through with it. You understand, don’t you, old sport?
And Caroline would say she understood. Because Caroline
was
an old sport. Lady Jacquelyn Seldon was a strikingly attractive woman, who sang and played the harp quite beautifully, as talented as she was lovely. She would make any man a wonderful wife, although she hadn’t any money, of course. Everyone knew that. The Seldons—Lady Jacquelyn’s father had been the fourteenth Duke of Childes—were an ancient and very well respected family, but they hadn’t a penny to their name, only a few manor houses and an abbey or two scattered here and there.
That Hurst, whose family was just as noble but likewise just as poor, would have chosen to align himself with the Seldons wasn’t surprising, though Caroline wasn’t certain it was the most
prudent
thing he had ever done. What did he and Lady Jacquelyn imagine they were going to live on, anyway? Because unless they rented out all of those magnificent properties to some wealthy Americans, they hadn’t any source of income to speak of.
But what did income matter, to two people in love? It wasn’t any of Caroline’s concern, anyway, how the pair of them got on. Her problem was this:
What was she going to tell her mother?
The Dowager Lady Bartlett was not going to take this well. Not by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the news was likely to send her into one of her infamous fits. She quite thoroughly adored Hurst. Why shouldn’t she? He had, after all, saved the life of her only son. The debt Caroline’s family owed the marquis was enormous. By agreeing to marry him, Caroline had hoped, in some small way, to repay his kindness.
But now it was quite clear that winning Caroline’s hand hadn’t been any particular accomplishment for the young marquis. How humiliating!
And the invitations had already been sent out. Five hundred of them, to be exact. Five hundred people—the best of London society. Caroline supposed she was going to have to write to all of them. She began to feel a bit like crying when she thought of
that. Five hundred
letters. That was a bit much. Her hand usually cramped up after only two or three.
Hurst ought to be the one to write the letters,
she thought, bitterly. After all, he was the one who’d broken the rules. But Hurst, who was much more of an outdoorsman than an intellectual, had never written anything longer than a check, so Caroline knew counting on any help from him in that quarter was foolish to the extreme.
Perhaps she could merely put an announcement in the paper. Yes, that was it. Something tasteful, explaining that the wedding of Lady Caroline Victoria Linford, only daughter of the first Earl of Bartlett, and only sister of the second, and Hurst Devenmore Slater, tenth Marquis of Winchilsea, was regretfully called off.
Called off? Was that the right term for it?
Lord, how embarrassing! Thrown over for Lady Jacquelyn-Seldon! What would the girls back in school say? Well, Caroline consoled herself. It could have been worse. She couldn’t think how, but she supposed it could.
And then, quite suddenly, it was.
Someone was coming. And not out of the sitting room, either, but down the corridor. It was someone who was looking for Lady Jacquelyn, Caroline realized, as soon as the light from the candelabra he was holding illuminated his features enough for her to recognize them.
And when she did, her heart stopped beating. She was quite sure of that. Her heart
actually stopped beating
for a moment. It hadn’t done that when she’d opened the sitting room door and seen her fiancé making love to another woman. No, not at all.
But it did so now.
In spite of the candelabra, his foot hit the leg of a small table, on which rested a vase of dried flowers. When Braden Granville’s foot hit the table, the vase wob bled, and then fell over, sending a number of dried petals floating down onto the carpet runner below. He cursed beneath his breath, and leaned down to right the vase. Caroline, watching him from between the banister bars, saw that he looked more annoyed than he should, for someone who’d only accidentally knocked over some dried flowers.