JMcNaught - Something Wonderful (25 page)

"Of course," Anthony said, hiding a smile. "And you needn't worry that Alexandra will betray her background."

"I'm as concerned about her revealing her mind as I am her background. I can't think what her grandfather could have been about when he filled her head with bookish nonsense. You see," she admitted anxiously, "I so wish for her to have a wonderful Season, to be admired for herself, and then to make a splendid match. I wish Galverston hadn't offered for the Waverly chit last week. Galverston's the only unmarried marquess in England, which means Alexandra will have to settle for an earl or less."

"If those are your hopes, Grandmama, you're bound to be disappointed," Tony said with a sigh. "Alexandra has no interest whatsoever in the Season's amusements or in being admired by any of the town beaux."

"Don't be absurd—she's been working and studying and looking forward to this for months!"

"But not for the reasons you evidently think," Anthony said somberly. "She's here because you convinced her Jordan wanted her to take her rightful place in Society as his wife. She's been working all these months for one reason only—that she may be worthy of that honor. She has no intention of remarrying. She told me that last night. She's convinced herself that Jordan loved her, I think, and she fully intends to 'sacrifice herself' to his memory."

"Good God!" said the duchess, thunderstruck. "She's barely nineteen years old! Of course she must marry. What did you say to her?"

"Nothing," Anthony replied sardonically. "How could I tell her that, in order to fit in with Jordan's crowd, she should have studied flirtation and dalliance, rather than drawing-room conversation and Debrett's
Peerage
."

"Go away, Anthony," her grace sighed. "You're depressing me. Go and see what's keeping Alexandra—it's time to leave."

In the hall outside her. bedchamber, Alexandra stood before a small portrait of Jordan which she'd discovered in an unused room when they first came to London, and which she'd asked to have rehung here, where she could see it every time she passed. The painting was done the year before last, and in it Jordan was sitting with his back against a tree, one leg drawn up, his wrist resting casually atop his knee, looking at the artist. Alexandra loved the lifelike, unposed quality of the painting, but it was his expression that held her like a magnet and made her pulse quicken—because Jordan looked very much as he had often looked when he was about to kiss her. His grey eyes were slumberous, knowing; and a lazy, thoughtful smile was hovering about his mobile lips. Reaching up, Alexandra touched her trembling fingertips to his lips. "Tonight is our night, my love," she whispered. "You won't be ashamed of me—I promise."

From the corner of her eye, she saw Anthony coming toward her and hastily snatched her hand away. Without taking her eyes from Jordan's compelling features, she said, "The artist who painted this is wonderfully talented, but I can't quite make out his name. Who is he?"

"Allison Whitmore," Anthony said curtly.

Surprised by the notion of a female painter and by Anthony's abrupt tone, Alexandra hesitated, then she shrugged the matter aside and pirouetted slowly in front of Anthony. "Look at me, Anthony. Do you think he would be pleased with me if he could see me now?"

Stifling the urge to give Alexandra a taste of reality by telling her Lady Allison Whitmore painted that picture while Jordan was indulging in a torrid affair with her, Anthony took his eyes from the portrait and did as Alexandra asked. What he saw stole his breath away.

Standing serenely before him was a dark-haired beauty wrapped in an alluring, low-cut gown of shimmering aquamarine chiffon the exact shade of her magnificent eyes. It draped diagonally across her full breasts and clung to her tiny waist and gently rounded hips. Her gleaming mahogany hair was pulled back off her forehead, falling in waving swirls over her shoulders and partway down her back. Diamonds nestled in the burnished waves, twinkling like stars on gleaming satin; they lay at her slender throat and sparkled at her wrist. But it was that face of hers that made it hard for Anthony to breathe.

Although Alexandra Lawrence Townsende was not beautiful in the classic tradition of fair hair and pale skin, she was nevertheless one of the most alluring, provocative creatures he had ever beheld. Beneath her sooty lashes, eyes that could enchant or disarm gazed candidly into his, completely unaware of their mesmerizing effect. Her rosy, generous mouth invited a man's kiss, yet her poised smile warned one not to get too close. At one and the same time, Alexandra managed to look seductive yet untouchable, virginal yet sensual, and it was that very contrast that made her so alluring—that, and her obvious unawareness of allure.

Some of the color drained from Alexandra's high, delicately carved cheekbones as she waited for the silent man before her to tell her Jordan would have been pleased with her appearance tonight. "That bad?" she asked, joking to cover her dismay.

Grinning, Anthony took both her gloved hands in his and said truthfully, "Jordan would be as dazzled by the sight of you tonight as the rest of the
ton
is going to be when they clap eyes on you. Will you save me a dance tonight? A waltz?" he added, gazing into her huge eyes.

In the coach on the way to the ball, the duchess issued last-minute instructions to Alexandra: "You needn't worry about your waltzing, my dear, nor any of the other social amenities you'll be expected to perform tonight. However," she warned in a dire tone, "I must remind you again not to allow
Anthony's
"—she paused to cast him a severely disapproving look— "appreciation of your intellect to mislead you into saying anything tonight which could make you appear bookish and intelligent. If you do, you will not
take
at all, I assure you. As I have told you time out of mind, gentlemen do not like overeducated females."

Tony squeezed Alex's hand encouragingly as they alighted from the coach. "Don't forget to save me a dance tonight," he said, smiling into her bright eyes.

"You may have all of them, if you wish." She laughed and tucked her hand in the crook of his arm, as unselfconscious of her beauty as she was unaware of its effect on him.

"I'm going to have to stand in line," Anthony chuckled. "Even so, this is going to be the most enjoyable evening I've had in years!"

For the first half hour of Lord and Lady Winner's ball, Tony's prediction seemed to come true. Tony had deliberately preceded them into the ballroom so that he could watch his grandmother and Alexandra make their grand entrance. And it was worth watching. The Dowager Duchess of Hawthorne marched into the ballroom like a protective mother hen shepherding her chick—her bosom puffed out, her back ramrod straight, and her chin thrust forward in an aggressive stance that positively
dared
anyone to question her judgment in lending her enormous consequence to Alexandra or to
consider
ostracizing her.

The spectacle literally "stopped the show." For a full minute, five hundred of the
ton's
most illustrious, languid, and sophisticated personages stopped talking to gape at England's most respected, most dour, and most influential noblewoman, who seemed to be hovering solicitously over a young lady no one recognized. Whispers broke out among the guests and monocles were raised to eyes as attention shifted from the dowager to the ravishing young beauty at her elbow, who no longer bore any resemblance to the gaunt, pale girl who had appeared briefly at Jordan's memorial service.

Beside Anthony, Sir Roderick Carstairs lifted his arrogant brows and drawled, "Hawthorne, I trust you'll enlighten us about the identity of the dark-haired beauty with your grandmother?"

Anthony regarded Carstairs with a bland expression. "My late cousin's widow, the current Duchess of Hawthorne."

"You're joking!" Carstairs said with the closest thing to surprise that Anthony had ever seen displayed on Roddy's eternally bored face. "You can't mean this entrancing creature is the same plain, pathetic, bedraggled little sparrow I saw at Hawk's memorial service!"

Fighting to suppress his annoyance, Tony said, "She was in shock and still very young when you last saw her."

"She's improved with age," Roddy observed dryly, raising his quizzing glass to his eye and leveling it at Alexandra, "like wine. Your cousin was always a connoisseur of wine and women. She lives up to his reputation. Did you know," he continued in a bored drawl, his quizzing glass still aimed straight at Alexandra, "that Hawk's beauteous ballerina has not admitted any other man into her bed in all this time? It boggles the mind, does it not, to think that the day is here when a man's mistress is more faithful to him than his own wife."

"What is that supposed to imply?" Anthony demanded.

"Imply?" Roddy said, turning his sardonic gaze on Anthony. "Why, nothing. But if you don't wish Society to reach the same conclusion I'm drawing, I suggest you cease watching Jordan's widow with that possessive look in your eye. She does reside with you, does she not?"

"Shut up!" Anthony snapped.

In one of his typical mercurial changes of mood, Sir Roderick Carstairs grinned without rancor. "They're about to begin the dancing. Come introduce me to the girl. I claim the right of her first dance."

Anthony hesitated, mentally grinding his teeth. He had no justification to refuse the introduction; moreover, if he did demur, he knew perfectly well Carstairs could and would retaliate by cutting Alexandra dead or—worse—repeating the innuendo he'd just made. And Roddy was the most influential member of Tony's set.

Tony had inherited Jordan's title, but he was well aware he did not possess Jordan's bland arrogance and the unnerving self-assurance that had made Jordan the most influential member of the
haute ton
. The dowager, Anthony knew, could force the entire
ton
not to cut Alexandra, and she could guarantee Alexandra's acceptance by her own age group, but she could not force Tony's generation to fully accept her. Neither could Tony. But Roddy Carstairs could. The younger set lived in terror of Roddy's biting tongue, and not even Tony's own set had any wish to become the object of Carstairs' scorching ridicule. "Of course," Tony agreed finally.

With much foreboding, he introduced Carstairs to Alexandra, then stood back and watched as Roddy made her a gallant bow and requested the honor of a dance.

It took Alexandra most of the waltz before she began to relax and stop counting off the steps in her head. In fact, she had just decided that she was not likely to miss a step and tread on the well-shod feet of her elegant, bored-looking dancing partner when he said something that nearly made her do exactly that. "Tell me, my dear," he said in a sardonic drawl, "how have you managed to blossom as you have in the frigid company of the Dowager Duchess of Hawthorne?"

The music was building to a crescendo as the waltz neared its end, and Alexandra was certain she must have misunderstood him. "I—I beg your pardon?"

"I was expressing my admiration for your courage in having survived a full year with our most esteemed icicle—the dowager duchess. I daresay you have my sympathy for what you must have endured this past year."

Alexandra, who had no experience with this sort of sophisticated, brittle repartee, did not know it was considered fashionable, and so she reacted with shocked loyalty to the woman she had come to love. "Obviously you are not well-acquainted with her grace."

"Oh, but I am. And you have my deepest sympathy."

"I do not need your sympathy, my lord, and you cannot know her well and still speak of her thus."

Roddy Carstairs stared at her with cold displeasure. "I daresay I'm well enough acquainted with her to have suffered frostbite on several occasions. The old woman is a dragon."

"She is generous and kind!"

"You," he said with a jeering smile, "are either afraid to speak the truth, or you are the most naive chit alive."

"And you," Alexandra retorted with a look of glacial scorn that would have done credit to the dowager herself, "are either too blind to see the truth, or you are extremely vicious." At that moment the waltz came to an end, and Alexandra delivered the unforgivable—and unmistakable —insult of turning her back on him and walking away.

Unaware that anyone had been watching them, she returned to Tony and the duchess, but her actions had indeed been noted by many of the guests, several of whom lost no time in chiding the proud knight for his lack of success with the young duchess. In return, Sir Roderick retaliated by becoming her most vocal detractor that same night and expressing to his acquaintances his discovery, during their brief dance, that the Duchess of Hawthorne was a vapid, foolish, vain chit and a dead bore without conversation, polish, or wit.

Within one hour, Alexandra innocently verified to the guests that she was certainly excruciatingly foolish. She was standing amidst a huge group of elegantly attired people in their twenties and early thirties. Several of the guests were enthusiastically discussing the ballet they'd attended the night before and the dazzling performance given by a ballerina named Elise Grandeaux. Turning to Anthony, Alexandra raised her voice slightly in order to be heard over the din, and had innocently asked if Jordan had enjoyed the ballet. Two dozen people seemed to stop talking and gape at her with expressions that ranged from embarrassment to derision.

The second incident occurred shortly thereafter. Anthony had left her with a group of people, including two young dandies who were discussing the acceptable height of shirt-points, when Alexandra's gaze was drawn to two of the most beautiful women she had ever seen. They were standing close together, but with their backs to one another, and they were both minutely scrutinizing Alexandra's features over their shoulders. One was a coolly beautiful blonde in her late twenties, the other a lush brunette a few years younger.