How the Marquess Was Won (20 page)

“I . . . fear I didn’t see him. And I didn’t vanish, I just found a clearing,” she pointed out, trying for good humor, and stammering when Lisbeth’s blue eyes fixed on her unblinkingly. “I didn’t see him. I suppose I thought he was with you. And I’m sorry, but I don’t know which direction he took.” It wasn’t strictly a lie. Not at the moment. “I was distracted, you see, when I saw this clearing, I was drawn toward it. And then I began sketching and—”

She reared back when Lisbeth stepped abruptly toward her. So close she could see the tiny fine, fine hairs on Lisbeth’s upper lip.

“How on earth did your bonnet become
so
askew, you silly thing.”

Phoebe blinked. Lisbeth had never said such a thing to her before. She was patently
not
a silly thing, had never been, and everyone knew it. Everyone in fact counted on it. And while the words had the
ring
of affection, the question was strangely uninflected.

Lisbeth reached out and made a great show of rearranging Phoebe’s bonnet, unknotting the ribbons, freeing them from her hairpins, drawing them smooth between her fingers, her gaze unnervingly direct and uncharacteristically inscrutable. Phoebe remained as motionless as a rabbit before a wolf. Phoebe was certain that if Lisbeth were later interrogated about the number of hairs in her eyebrows she would surprise everyone with a correct answer.

“I must have knocked it askew on a branch,” she managed faintly.

While she submitted to having her bonnet rearranged, it occurred to her a word or two from Isaiah Redmond could remove her from her position at the academy and render her forever unemployable in England.

Whereupon she’d have no place to go—she hadn’t yet enough money saved for her journey to Africa—and would be ruined in nearly the blink of an eye.

She maintained what she hoped was an inscrutable expression. But now her palms were perspiring.

Lisbeth gave a brisk satisfied nod when she got her friend neatly wrapped and tied, precisely the way she liked her.

Which was when they heard the rustle of something significantly larger than a finch moving about in the woods nearby. Before they had time to flinch there came a voice.

“It’s Dryden, not a wolf or a bear. Don’t shoot, Waterburn.”

The marquess parted the hedgerow with as much dignity as anyone bursting through a hedgerow could muster, and emerged.

His hat was restored to his head. And he looked otherwise crisp.

The dog lifted its head, stared at the marquess with an expression remarkably like Waterburn’s disdain, gave an obligatory
woof
and rested its head on its paws again.

“I heard the musket shot, and didn’t want to miss out on any game shooting, if that’s what was finally happening.”

Lisbeth’s face was lit up like a star, as if the marquess emerging from shrubbery was a surprise arranged just for her.

“No, Lord Waterburn threatened to shoot us for singing.”

Waterburn had no patience for such whimsy. “I did no such thing,” he said flatly.

“
I
might have done, however,” the marquess teased. “Depending upon the song.”

Lisbeth dimpled beautifully while the marquess smiled at her and Phoebe suffered.

He was patently refusing to look at her and she likewise refused to look at him.

She wore a fixed, benign smile that had served her in countless social situations, the sort of smile that could offend no one, signify nothing, reveal nothing, and sent her gaze around the clearing in search for something neutral to light upon. For anyone happening upon the scene would have thought that the marquess and Lisbeth had eyes for no one but each other.

She settled upon the hound. She met its brown eyes. It blinked slowly in what she liked to think was sympathy. Neither of them wanted to be where they were at the moment.

“Don’t shoot without us!” came Jonathan’s voice from a distance. “Where the devil
are
you?”

“Where did you get to, Dryden?” Waterburn asked laconically.

“Get to? I think we’ve been parted but, oh . . . fifteen minutes.” With a single fluid motion, he retrieved his pocket watch, flipped it open with his thumb, reviewed the time, and replaced it. “Fifteen minutes,” he confirmed. “I enjoyed the exploration. Enviable lands.”

Fifteen minutes. She’d manage to upend her orderly life in
fifteen minutes
.

Although it might have been symbolically put to rights again the moment Lisbeth retied her bonnet, for all she knew. A moment of recklessness, never to recur.

She looked at the marquess then; it was impossible not to, since everyone, including the hound, was doing it.

And then he looked at her.

She couldn’t read any conclusions in his eyes, though it seemed to her he had trouble looking away from her. There was tension about his mouth. Then, doubtless he’d had more practice with disguising his thoughts than she had, and so she looked down.

“You’ve a great stripe of green on the front of your shirt, Lord Dryden,” Lisbeth said. “Did you take a fall?”

Lisbeth was suddenly a great one for noticing when things were out of order, Phoebe thought peevishly.

“I took a fall,” he confirmed evenly. After a hesitation doubtless only Phoebe noticed.

And Phoebe didn’t know whether it was the sort of fall Lucifer took, or the sort poets wrote about when love struck, or even if it was an innuendo at all, because she suspected everything was destined to sound like an innuendo from now on.

But now that she’d been kissed it was like someone had taken a hammer to her China pig full of ha’pennies and now she had a job of sorting the glittering things from the dangerous shards.

They all began to file out of the clearing. The marquess hovered an indecisive moment. Then turned and quickly bent to pluck something up off the ground.

“What did you find, Jules?” Lisbeth asked. “Are you gathering darling buds?”

“Nothing quite like that,” he told her, and smiled to distract her from her question, because his smiles did rather send women into a daze, as he stuffed the bundle of sage in his pocket.

Chapter 14

J
ules handed the shirt with the great green stripe of grass to his valet, who took it without question or a change of expression, having seen much more dreadful things on shirts before.

The marquess had a full dozen identical clean ones in his trunks.

If it had been Marquardt, his London manservant, it would not have gone unremarked. Acerbically. But his valet did cast his eyes upward and allowed them to linger, almost mournfully, near his hairline.

Which caused Jules to swivel abruptly toward the mirror.

Bloody.
Hell.

He sighed. Well, it had admittedly been an excellent throw. The velocity had done the damage. He touched the small darkening lump that only he and one other person would recognize as the shape of a hat brim.

He looked like a ruffian. And a fool. He was beginning to feel like the latter for many reasons, and not once, not
once
in his life had anyone accused him of being such a thing. Foolishness had never been an option in his life. He hadn’t acquired the knack for it.

He should have known. Kisses, he’d learned through hard experience, complicated things, unless they were a means to a foregone conclusion or part of an ongoing sensual entanglement.

He’d never had a kiss quite like that one. One he hadn’t planned. One that had seemed so . . . necessary.

One that had nevertheless solved nothing.

One that had led to him flattening himself behind a shrubbery and later, sneezing a tiny winged insect out of his nose on the walk back to the house. It had lodged there while he lay flat on his back, staring up at the crisp blue Autumn sky, contemplating his folly, listening to Miss Vale prevaricate wildly. He was almost sorry he hadn’t heard her invent a bawdy new verse to the Colin Eversea song.

He’d walked back to the house accompanied by a chattering Lisbeth, whom he listened to indulgently, enjoying her lightheartedness and easy cheer and her elegant loveliness. All of which were obvious and pleasing and none of which challenged him, and all of which could be fielded with a nod here or cheerful word or tease there, even as his mind was consumed, troubled, clouded, giddy, with something else entirely.

Behind him had walked a mildly bitter and mostly taciturn Waterburn, who was swinging no dead fowl at all and resented it so thoroughly it was almost audible, and Jonathan and Argosy, amiably debating the merits of Argosy’s new high flyer.

Phoebe walked behind all of them, quietly, which seemed wrong. The behind part, and the quiet part. She was not the sort who should be quiet or should trail anyone.

She said she was worried about the health of the hound, who might expire at any moment and shouldn’t do so alone, so she kept pace with it. A ridiculous excuse that all accepted without question.

Jules sat down hard on the edge of the bed, and tipped his forehead into his hand. Then winced and jerked it up again.

He inspected the bruise in the mirror again.

Aesthetically, it was lovely. Currently a mottled reddish purple, darkening by the second to a more majestic shade of indigo. He impatiently raked his fingers through his hair and brought it down over his brow in a rakish forelock. The bruise disappeared.

He inspected the result.

He looked like a damned dandy.

Very well: he would consider the absurd new hair penance.

And so it was a somewhat chastened marquess, newly fueled with a resolve not to lose his mind over a schoolteacher, which he could
surely
manage, who went downstairs for the soiree, cheeks scraped smooth by a razor, body scrubbed, cravat fluffed, trousers spotless, coat crisp. Looking every inch the Marquess Dryden who caused spines to straighten and conversation to lull when he appeared, the way all the gazelle lifted their heads alertly when a lion appeared at a watering hole.

“W
ould you like to watch me dress, my lord?”

She propped up the smeared charcoal sketch of Jules, the Marquess Dryden, against the headboard. On the theory that pretending insouciance might actually make her feel insouciant.

“Shall I wear the green silk?” A question which amused her, because she only had the two nice dresses and she’d already worn the other.

She laid the dress gently on the bed, and then she shimmied out of her day dress while the smeared marquess looked on.

She splashed about in the lavender-scented basin until she felt clean and scented, and slipped into her dress. She tied a green ribbon around her throat, twisted up her fine, fair mass of hair and pinned it, then pulled two saucy strands down to dangle near her mouth, and inspected the result in the mirror.

Well. Her nose hadn’t become any more retroussé, nor had her cheekbones suddenly become poetry, and her eyelashes were still thick but fair unto invisibility, apart from their golden tips. In other words, if she were lined up next to Lisbeth Redmond, she would hardly cast her in the shade.

But if someone had told her, in that moment, that she was beautiful, she would not have accused them of being drunk.

It was the fault of the kiss. Her eyes were brilliant with secrets, her skin glowed like a lantern.

Oh, she knew he had plans, and that his plans had dictated the course of his life and that he fully intended they would dictate his future. She knew his plans did not include her. And she might spend the entire evening holding a reticule and fetching things for Lisbeth.

But given the way the rest of the house party had proceeded, she had no reason to believe this evening would be ordinary or unexpected.

And so out onto the tightrope she walked, blowing the smeared marquess a kiss as she departed.

J
ules slipped into the salon as unobtrusively as he could manage, taking up a spot against the hearth. Behind the screen a fire burned merrily and superfluously, and the back of him began to heat uncomfortably. Even as lofty as the ceilings were, enough humans were already milling about the room and it was bordering on stuffy. A tray-bearing footman appeared at his elbow so quickly and silently he almost jumped. The footman was offering port. It wasn’t at all what the marquess wanted to drink but he took it. Holding it would give him an occupation.

He’d been seen, despite his attempt at unobtrusiveness. He knew it, because he could practically hear, as usual, the neck muscles straining not to crane in his direction. He intercepted numerous glances sent from beneath lowered female lashes, acknowledging them with a faint smile that caused hearts to leap.

He looked about for someone tolerable to have a comfortable, noncommittal conversation with. But he didn’t see the Earl of Ardmay, lately and rather swiftly married to Redmond’s daughter, Violet. Isaiah Redmond was across the room, simultaneously charming and inspecting a gentleman who had the clammy awestruck look of the newly wealthy, eager to impress Redmond and to be included in his circle of rarified influence. He was just the sort who might be persuaded to join the Mercury Club, Isaiah’s investment group . . . should he be found acceptable.