Caroline highly doubted she had misunderstood what she’d seen in Dame Ashforth’s sitting room.
Impulsively, she turned in her seat to wrap both hands around the marquis’s firm, but not really very pronounced, bicep. “Hurst,” she said, tugging on the arm.
He was concentrating on steering his team—a smart pair of grays that Caroline had purchased for him, to go with the phaeton—around an overturned orange cart. “What, Caroline?”
“Hurst.” She waited until he had successfully navigated the orange cart, then gave his arm another tug. “Hurst, kiss me.”
Obligingly, he turned his head, and placed a swift kiss on her temple, before turning his attention back to the road.
“No,” Caroline said, with a feeling of something akin to despair. “I mean, pull over and kiss me properly.”
Hurst, looking very surprised, nevertheless did as she asked. He pulled the phaeton to a stop, turned in his seat, and stooped to press his lips to hers.
Caroline, who had not lied when she’d confessed to receiving good marks in school, remembered with perfect clarity exactly how Braden Granville had kissed her. And so, accordingly, she let go of Hurst’s arm and reached up, taking his face in her hands. Then she pressed quick, eager kisses all across the marquis’s mouth.
Only instead of letting his lips fall open under the sensual onslaught of her mouth—as Caroline had, when Braden had kissed her like that—Hurst pulled his head back, and eyed her as if she had just escaped from an asylum.
“What,” he said, “do you think you’re doing, Caroline?”
She sank back into her seat dejectedly. “Nothing,” she replied.
Well, and what had she been thinking? That she could somehow recapture the excitement she’d used to feel when Hurst kissed her, back before she’d found out about him and Jackie Seldon? Back before Braden Granville had shown her what a proper kiss was?
No. It was over. There was no hope for it now. Esteem and friendship, she told herself. There was nothing wrong with esteem and friendship.
Hurst stared down at her. Then, to her perfect astonishment, he said, “Caroline, I understand from your mother that you’ve been spending some time lately in the company of Braden Granville.”
She said, quickly, “Well, yes, but just because I’m purchasing one of his guns, you know, for Tommy, for when he goes back to school. To defend himself, you know. It isn’t anything more than that. Really. I swear it.”
“Oh, I believe you,” Hurst said. “That’s not why I’m concerned.”
She felt a completely uncharacteristic spurt of violent anger. The devil take the man!
“It’s just that I was wondering,” Hurst went on, thoughtfully, not looking at her now, but at the twitching flame of the gaslight they were parked near. “In all of your conversations with him, has Braden Granville . . . well, has he mentioned anything to you about . . . well, me?”
Caroline’s eyes flew wide open. Why, Hurst was fishing for information! He was actually trying to find out how much Braden knew about his affair with Jacquelyn Seldon. If only, she thought, he knew. If only he knew what Braden Granville and his man thought him—a phantom! The phantom lover!
The story Braden Granville had told her—about his man being attacked by someone who’d been following Jacquelyn Seldon’s lover—plucked at her conscience. But it could not, she knew, have any relation to Hurst. No one could possibly wish the marquis harm. The streets of London, Caroline knew, were disgracefully unsafe—and the criminal element was spreading, as she knew only too well, all the way up the hallowed halls of the country’s leading academic communities. Braden Granville’s man had no doubt been attacked by a footpad like the one who’d nearly killed her brother.
“Mr. Granville?” She kept her voice light. “Ask about you, Hurst? Whatever for?”
“Oh,” Hurst said, with elaborate casualness. “I was just wondering.”
I’ll bet you were,
Caroline thought about saying. Instead, she said, “Why, no.”
“Oh.” Hurst picked up the reins, and whistled to the horses. “He’s a strange one, Granville. Your mother’s quite right, you know. You’re better off staying away from him. Did you really order a gun from him for Tommy?”
She’d told so many lies lately, she was having trouble keeping track of them all. She supposed she had said something along those lines to someone, and said, “Why, yes.”
“I’ll pick it up then, when it’s ready. All right? I don’t want you going near that fellow again.”
Caroline sat quite still for the rest of the ride home, and said very little. What was there, after all, to say? She had already learned everything she needed to know.
Which was that when Braden Granville kissed her, every single one of her senses came alive, until it felt as if someone were lighting firecrackers—yes, firecrackers!— inside of her.
But when her fiancé kissed her now, she felt nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.
My God, she couldn’t help thinking. The trousers.
The trousers
don’t fit.
I
t was after midnight when Braden Granville rang the bell to the front door of the stylish Mayfair town house. Despite the late hour, however, only a second or two passed before the door was swung open, and when it was, a giant of a man stood behind it, broad across the shoulders as a fireplace mantel, and with a face that looked as if it might once have been used as a horseshoe anvil.
That face crumpled with relief when it recognized Braden.
“’S’bout time you showed up, Dead,” the butler cried, in tones of rebuke. “This place’s been busier than a Covent Garden whore on a Saturday night—”
“Please, Crutch.” Braden threw his balled-up gloves into his top hat and handed the hat to the butler as he stepped through the door. “Not now. I’m not in the mood.”
“You’re goin’ to be in even less of one,” Daryl “Crutch” Pomeroy said, as his employer moved toward an inside door, “when you see who’s waiting fer you in your—”
But Braden only waved the giant’s warning aside. “Unless it’s the tax collector, I couldn’t care less. Bring me a whiskey, will you, Crutch?”
“You’re goin’ to need a lot more’n a whiskey before this night is through,” Crutch muttered menacingly. But since Braden had been listening to Crutch Pomeroy’s dire warnings for more than twenty years, he ignored him, threw open the door to his library. . . .
And was more than a little startled to see his father sitting in the exact chair upon which Braden had been looking forward to enjoying his nightcap.
“Braden!” Sylvester Granville cried, his favorite book resting in his lap, his stockinged ankles crossed on the ottoman before the fire. “Thank goodness. I’ve been waiting all night. Come here, my boy. Come here and see what I’ve done!”
Behind Braden, Crutch muttered, “Told you so. Insisted on waitin’ up for you, he did. Said’e’s got somethin’ to show you.” Then the butler left the room, closing the door firmly behind him.
“Come, boy!” Sylvester patted the arm of the leather chair beside his eagerly. “Sit here!”
Sighing—he really was rather tired—Braden moved from the door to the seat his father had been saving for him.
“Good evening, Pa,” he said, as he sank into the deeply cushioned chair. “What is it you wanted to show me?”
Sylvester held up his somewhat battered leather-bound book of the peerage. “I’ve written it in myself,” he said, excitedly. “They may not put out another edition for a year or more, you know. Have a look.”
Obligingly, Braden leaned forward, and looked where his father pointed. There, on the page listing the descendants of the Duke of Childes, he saw his own name beside Jacquelyn Seldon’s. But before his name, his father had written the word Sir, and afterward, the letters
bt.
“For baronetcy,” the old man explained, enthusiastically. “For likely you’ll be made a baronet. Which isn’t nobility, you know, but it is definitely gentry. Quite definitely gentry. Now, if Her Majesty’s feeling particularly generous, and makes you a baron . . . well, that will be quite a different kettle of fish.”
But Braden hardly heard his father. He was staring down at the book, at the name his father had linked to his. Jacquelyn. Jacquelyn Seldon. His bride.
“Pa,” he said, slowly. “What if it weren’t to come off? Would you be very disappointed?”
Sylvester looked up from the book, the firelight casting an orangey glow to his whiskers. “The letter of patent? Oh, but my boy, I have it on certain authority that it will.”
“Not the letter of patent,” Braden said, with a quick shake of his head. “But the wedding. To Lady Jacquelyn. Supposing I were to marry . . . well, someone else, instead.”
The senior Mr. Granville looked concerned. “Not marry Lady Jacquelyn? Oh, but my boy, whyever not? She is the loveliest creature.”
Lovely. Yes, Lady Jacquelyn Seldon was lovely, all right.
“Supposing I married someone else instead,” Braden went on—quite brashly, he knew, but he’d been feeling somewhat brash ever since leaving the Dalrymples’ ballroom. “Supposing I were to marry, instead, Lady Caroline Linford.”
Sylvester’s gray eyebrows rose to their limits. “The daughter of Lady Bartlett? Lovely Lady Bartlett, whom we met at the opera?”
Braden nodded. “Yes. That Lady Bartlett. Her daughter.”
Sylvester immediately began to flip through the pages of his book. When he came to the Bs, however, he was sadly disappointed.
“Why, there’s no Bartlett here,” he said, looking stricken. “None at all! Could the publisher have made a mistake?”
Braden sighed. “No, Pa, no mistake. The Earl of Bartlett is rather newish. I believe he was only granted the title a few years ago, thanks to some unique plumbing he invented.”
“Plumbing?” Again, Sylvester looked stricken, but his affection for his son won out, for once, over his obsession. He reached out and patted Braden fondly on the hand. “My boy,” he said, kindly. “If you want to marry the plumber’s daughter, you go right ahead. Only you had better think of a pretty gift for Lady Jacquelyn, for she will be sorely disappointed!”
Braden didn’t doubt that. And since the chances of his actually marrying the plumber’s daughter were, after all, moot, he told his father not to worry, and helped him up the stairs, and saw Mr. Granville Senior tucked finally into bed. It wasn’t until Braden threw open the door to his own bedroom that he discovered what Crutch had meant when he’d asserted that the house had been busier than a Covent Garden whore on a Saturday night.
For there, curled in the center of Braden’s canopied bed, a sheet just barely covering her to her milky white shoulders, the Lady Jacquelyn Seldon.
She smiled at him coyly and said, “Well, it’s about time you came home.”
While it was a fine thing to be able to provide steady, legal employment for one’s friends, Braden thought, occasionally, as in this case, doing so proved problematic. A professional butler would have mentioned, upon Braden’s return, that his fiancée had demanded entrance, and was currently holed up in his bedroom, naked as the day she was born. Crutch, however, having spent most of his life as a hired thug, and not a gentleman’s servant, had couched the information in such colorful terms that Braden had completely missed the implication.
He would have been hard-pressed, however, to miss the implication in Jacquelyn’s next action, which was to fling back the sheet to reveal that she was, indeed, as naked as he’d suspected.
“Aren’t you coming to bed?” she asked, with a mischievous smile.
The Lady Jacquelyn Seldon, it had to be admitted, was every bit the jewel the
ton
had proclaimed her. Braden, who’d had occasion to observe her in most every condition and environment over the course of their year-long courtship, could testify to the veracity of this. Slender limbed and yet generously proportioned where being generously proportioned mattered, Jacquelyn Seldon’s dark beauty was universally admired. Her unerring taste in fashion, which always showed off her considerable assets to an advantage, was heralded wherever she went. High-spirited and vivacious, Lady Jacquelyn’s name was rarely left off any guest list, and happy was the hostess whose home the only daughter of the late Duke of Childes chose to grace with her presence. She was, in short, perfect in all the ways that mattered—at least in the opinion of the beau monde—and Braden Granville should have been gratified and flattered to find her sprawled across his bed in a state of extreme undress.
What he was, however, was annoyed.
“For God’s sake, Jackie,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
Jacquelyn traced a small circle on the linen sheet beneath her with one tapered fingernail. “What,” she said, her eyelashes sooty against the high curves of her cheekbones, “does it
look
like I’m doing here?”
He felt another keen burst of annoyance. What was the use, he wondered, of having a lock on his front door, if anyone who wanted to could come barging in, and make themselves at home?
“Well,” he said. “You can’t possibly stay here.” He knew he sounded churlish, but he didn’t care. He felt he’d been sorely tested these past two hours, first by Caroline Linford and her infernal fiancé, and now by his own. He was not certain, actually, how much more pushing he could take before he pushed back.
And Braden Granville was not a careful pusher.
“What do you mean?” Jacquelyn lifted her dark-eyed gaze to meet his. “Why can’t I? I’ve spent the night before, Braden. Plenty of times.”
“Certainly,” he said. He had to speak with a patience so forced, he was surprised she didn’t notice it. “But that was before.”
“Before
what?”
The dark eyes narrowed, just slightly.
“Before we got engaged, of course,” he amended, hastily. “Things are different now. I told you that the other day. Now get your clothes back on, and I’ll have someone run you home.”
Jacquelyn, instead of doing as he asked, let out a humorless little bark of laughter. “You can’t be serious, Braden,” she said.
“Jackie,” he said, “I thought I made it clear to you that this sort of thing—” His gesture incorporated her clothing, scattered carelessly about his floor, as well as her magnificently nude body. “—has got to stop.”
Jacquelyn laughed again, a sound that was more shrill than he was sure she’d aimed for. “Goodness, Braden, but you have gotten terribly proper lately. Whatever is the matter with you? I can remember a time when you would have been delighted to find a naked lady in your bed. This isn’t a bit what I thought our married life was going to be like, you ordering me
out
of bed, rather than into it.”
She was trying to be amusing, but Braden was in no mood for levity.
“Come on,” he said, reaching down and scooping up her pantaloons. “I’m tired, Jacks. It’s been a long day. Let’s go.”
This had been a miscalculation on his part. Normally, Braden had as keen an insight into the human psyche as he did the mechanical workings of just about any machine. But in this particular case, he had been too impatient, too out-of-temper to go carefully. He might, on any other night, have been able to cajole Jacquelyn out of her sulk and out of his bed, with no hurt feelings whatsoever. But this time, he trod too quickly.
“I’ll go,” she snapped, snatching the pantaloons out of his hand, and regarding him through eyes that were no longer flat, but quite heated. “A long day, eh?” Wriggling into the pantaloons, which happened to be a pair he had purchased for her, silk ones, trimmed with Venetian lace, Jacquelyn did not take her gaze off him. “Yes, and I suppose you’re all tired out from dancing at the Dalrymples’. Not, of course, that you bothered to turn a single reel with
me.
But
Lady Caroline Linford,
on the other hand—”
Braden frowned at the mention of the name. He couldn’t help it. That name had been very much on his mind of late, the more so since he had happened to get a good deal closer to its owner than he’d ever expected to. Lady Caroline Linford, at close proximity, had a rather devastating effect on his equilibrium.
Worse, the sight of Lady Caroline with someone else—in this case, the Marquis of Winchilsea—had proven to have a curiously unsettling effect on him. He knew he was being ridiculous, but when Slater had come and led Caroline away, all Braden had been able to do was glare at him, at his patrician profile, his nose that looked as if it had never once been broken, his thick blond curls, his cloying, precious blue eyes.
He wasn’t jealous of the man. Far from it! Slater was so utterly beneath contempt, so vapid, so self-involved, that Braden couldn’t feel jealousy toward him. No, what he had felt instead was fury—almost murderous fury— toward Caroline, who had gone and gotten herself engaged to a man in every way her inferior.
Not that Braden fancied himself as a much better catch. He had, after his mother’s death, and his father’s descent into gentle madness, run pretty much wild in his youth, and had suffered numerous run-ins with the law, most of them deservedly. If it hadn’t been for the patience and kindness of one man—Josiah Wilder, the gunsmith to whom the courts had assigned him as an apprentice, the man who’d dragged him, quite literally, out of a life of crime, treated him as a second son and shown him, in the years before Josiah’s eventual death from old age, that there was another way to live—he might be in Seven Dials still, hiding from the law or, more likely, drinking himself to death, a common and fairly well-respected practice there.
Still, even he had to be a better choice for a husband than Hurst Slater, who couldn’t open his mouth without letting out some inanity. So what if he was good-looking, with his blue eyes and unbroken nose? There was more to a man than looks. So he was a marquis? What was a title, anyway? Anyone could have one. Even, if his father was correct about that letter of patent, Dead Eye Granville.
Of course, the man had managed somehow to save her brother’s life. That was one fact that could not, unfortunately, be overlooked. Hurst Slater might well be vapid. He might well be vain. But there was no question that toward Caroline’s brother, he had acted with generosity and self-sacrifice—undoubtedly in an effort to win the affections of the boy’s suddenly wealthy sister—but he had done it, just the same.
Such nobility would appeal to a girl like Caroline Linford. It would, in fact, be almost impossible to resist. Coupled with a few well-placed compliments and the occasional peck on the cheek, and Slater soon found himself with a very wealthy bride. Of course she had said yes when he’d asked her to marry him. What else was she going to say? The marquis wasn’t just handsome. He wasn’t just attentive.
He had saved her brother’s life.
No woman in the world would have said no to such a man—with the possible exception of a woman like Jackie, who had never, Braden was now certain, felt gratitude or sympathy in her life.