Kasey Michaels (16 page)

Isadora nodded sagely. “Lady Gwendolyn demanded it,” she said, obviously assuming that Bramwell was led around on ropes by his aunt—a conclusion His Grace was happy to embrace.

“She’s an exemplary woman, a charitable woman,” he said, sighing the sigh of the good, loyal, beleaguered nephew, and knowing himself, yet again, to be a coward. “I could not gainsay her. But now that I’ve attended the once, I won’t be required to return.”
Until next week
, he added mentally, remembering the terms of the forfeits Lorrie had devised, damn the man.

“Well, that’s good, then, I suppose,” Isadora said, breathing out a sigh of relief. But then the crease was back, and Bramwell looked about for an avenue of escape, feeling sure he wasn’t going to like what she said next.

He was right.

“I don’t know how to phrase this,” she began, and he pinned a polite smile on his face, knowing full well she’d probably rehearsed whatever she was about to say, until she had committed every word to memory. “But, lud, Selbourne, I’d never dreamt, never supposed—”

“The gossip?” he put in helpfully, trying to see his fiancée in a good light. He
needed
to see her in a good light. “You hadn’t counted on it all being dug up again for another airing, had you? That’s because you’re a good soul, Isadora, and not small-minded, like so many of this scandal-mad company we call Society.”

“Exactly! Lud, Selbourne, you’re so astute. It all seemed so simple when first you approached me with your dilemma. Your title, your consequence—your fine, sober reputation. You should have been above such gossip. But I must confess to having some small reservations on the thing now. I hadn’t thought Miss Winstead’s presence here in London would bring the whole sordid business to everyone’s attention again. Frankly, I hadn’t heard much of the details, as I was only a girl then, and not privy to such, such—”

“Titillating scandal?” Bramwell put in, wondering why he was being so damnably helpful.

“All right,” Isadora said, quickly agreeing with him. “It’s embarrassing for me—for
you
, I mean. That’s what it is. And with Papa coming to town in less than six weeks? Well, we must have her gone by then, Selbourne. Married and gone. There’s no other way. She doesn’t
blend
, you understand. There’s no hiding her, even here at Almack’s.” She sighed again. “She’s a sweet little thing. If only, she weren’t so
singular
. Margaret Simmons tells me that her mama told her that she very much resembles the mother. That, Selbourne, worries me more than I can say.”

“Why, my dear?” he asked, watching as Sophie appeared on Lord Lorimar’s arm just as another set was forming. She was smiling up at him, one of those wide, unaffected, crinkled-nose smiles, and Lorrie was looking thoroughly infatuated. Bobbit should be a happy man, next time Lorrie stopped by Portland Square. “Are you afraid it’s true, Isadora, what they say? Like mother, like daughter?”

Isadora took out an ivory-backed fan, unfurled it, and began beating at the still, humid air. “Lud, you could wrap it up in clean linen before saying such a thing—but yes. I
am
afraid it could be like mother, like daughter. Aren’t you?”

He looked at her levelly, at last saying what was on his mind. What had kept him awake most of the past two nights. “That would depend, Isadora, on whether you also believed the saying could expand to include
like father, like son
. Or haven’t you thought about that, my dear? No, I suppose not. Shall we join the set?”

Isadora closed her fan with a snap, then held her hand out to her betrothed, her stare deep and unblinking, as if seeing her future husband through new, rather startled eyes. “Lud, Selbourne,” she said, her lips barely moving, “I’d never quite thought of that.”

Another hour and it would be over. The opening salvo in Miss Sophie Winstead’s war to conquer the
ton
, one gullible, grinning man at a time—or so it seemed to Bramwell.

She’d danced every dance, except for those she spent out on the balcony with her partner, sipping lemonade and holding court to a dozen or more gangling youths, gout-ridden old lechers, gaily dressed half-pay officers—and more than a few married men who should have known better than to be seen with the Widow Winstead’s daughter.

Meanwhile, Bramwell knew he’d had enough daggers sunk into his back by glaring mamas and disappointed debutantes to slay a battalion of Caesars.

But when he saw Miss Ann Sturbridge put a handkerchief to her mouth and run for the anteroom, sobbing, and turned to see the girl’s fiancé kneeling at Sophie’s feet, making a great business out of reciting some drivel as he held a hand to his heart? Well, that’s when the duke of Selbourne had decided that enough was enough!

“You’re coming with me,” he said, grabbing Sophie’s forearm as she stood talking to three young gentlemen and the kneeling fiancé—three fools and an outright baboon, Bramwell decided—and hauling her toward the balcony.

“I say, Selbourne!” the baboon called after him. “That ain’t sporting!”

Bramwell turned on the man, all but baring his teeth at him, so that the baboon subsided.

Unfortunately, the baboon’s outcry, coupled with Bramwell’s rather florid face and pained expression, had brought the attention of several other gentlemen in the area.

“Oh-ho, Selbourne, what’s forward?” one of them called out jovially, as Bramwell and Sophie whizzed by, Sophie smiling just as if the duke was taking her to see some amusing jugglers at a country fair. “Never say another balcony scene. Watch your balance, old fellow. How many
tumbles
from grace can the Selbourne name take, even for a willing Winstead?”

“Stubble it, Farnsworthy,” Bramwell gritted out, giving Sophie’s arm another tug as she stopped, looking curiously at the grinning gentleman who’d just spoken. He saluted her, then gifted her with an elegant leg, flourishing a lace-edged handkerchief and bowing nearly to the floor.

“What’s he talking about, Your Grace?” she asked, still looking back at Farnsworthy as Bramwell pulled her out onto the balcony, then unerringly directed her toward the bench that waited in the shadows at the far end of it. The fact that he’d had to growl at the young couple already ensconced on the bench, so that they had immediately taken themselves off to friendlier climes, did not bother him a jot.

“You know damn full well what he’s talking about, Sophie,” Bramwell accused as he all but pushed Sophie onto the bench, wincing as he realized he’d done it again. He’d called her Sophie.
Sophie, Sophie, Sophie
. That’s what he called her at night, when he couldn’t sleep, when she invaded his dreams, when she left him tossing and turning and calling himself every kind of fool imaginable.

“Well, no. I don’t, actually,
Bramwell
,” she answered, patting the space beside her on the bench, indicating that he should sit down, just as if they were bosom chums or some such ridiculousness. “Does it mean something in that sporting cant gentlemen use when they want to say something the ladies shouldn’t understand? Something none of my uncles told me about? Does
balcony
serve as another word for liaison? For keeping a mistress?”

She shrugged her perfect shoulders, then sighed. “Balcony. It seems a queer sort of word, the way that man said it. And perhaps insulting to my mother’s memory? All the gentlemen I’ve met have been so nice, so that I hadn’t thought anyone would be mean. Perhaps I should have, yes?”

Well, that stopped Bramwell, just as he was about to read her a lecture on circumspection, on proper behavior, on not reducing every man she met to a puddle of frustrated desire—at least not the betrothed ones.

“You don’t know how—” he shook his head, attempting to rearrange his thoughts. “No. No, of course you don’t. You couldn’t, and still ask such a question.”

He sat down.

Sophie leaned toward him, the flowery yet lemony scent of her drifting to his nostrils, infiltrating his brain. “Please, Bram,” she said, laying a hand on his arm. “Tell me. What is it I don’t know? Now that I think on it, that wasn’t the first time tonight someone has made references to a balcony in my presence. And they’re always
smiling
when they do. Why is that? I thought perhaps there was some joke I didn’t understand. So I just smiled, and they soon were talking about my eyes, or how lovely my hair looks in the moonlight, so that I let it go. I’m a great success this evening, yes? But now I must know, please.
What
is a balcony?”

Bramwell was dumbstruck, a part of him pleased beyond his wildest imaginings, another, saner part of him, totally aghast. Well, God damn! Who would have thought it, who would believe it? Sophie Winstead was an innocent. A totally exasperating, maddening, horribly complex, woefully simple
innocent
. Gentlemen admired her eyes, her hair, and she thought that was all they admired? All they wanted from the Widow Winstead’s daughter? For all the duke knew of the mother, for all he’d thought of the daughter, Sophie was an innocent. Playing at woman, playing in her mother’s world, believing she knew the game, the rules—and woefully ignorant of both.

She hadn’t known the word
pimp
. Oh, yes, she’d most certainly sent Wally on a quest for servants cum lovers for his mother and aunt. But had she really known what she was about, what she really had been suggesting when she’d sent Wally off on his merry way, to pimp for his freedom? Bramwell had thought so at the time, but he didn’t think so now. She was only playing the games learned at her mother’s knee. Smiling, flirting, giving out come-hither glances, and warning that she could not help but be irresistible.

Yes, that was it. She thought she knew the game.

But her mother obviously had not told her
all
of the ins and outs of that game. All the consequences. Sophie saw the dash and flair of romance, not a tawdry sexual arrangement. She probably saw her mother’s liaisons with her many “uncles” as marvelously romantic—full of happy times, pet monkeys, lively discussions and the aroma of cigars—and was without a notion as to how her mother actually had sold herself, her body, her good name, over and over again.

And she most certainly didn’t know how his father and her mother had died, how their deaths had rocked London Society with one of its most shocking, titillating scandals. If she did, she’d probably not be in London at all, giving the
ton
another opportunity to giggle over her mother, his father, the scandal—over Sophie herself.

Poor little girl. Poor little Sophie.

By God, what a shock! Bramwell Seaton, Ninth Duke of Selbourne, was shocked. Shocked to his toes. He cursed Sophie’s mother for a dangerous, romantic fool, cursed the men here tonight, leering and laughing and hoping for a hurried tumble in the shrubberies, a quick peek under Sophie’s skirts. He cursed himself for all he had thought of her, imagined of her, wanted of her.

“Well? Are you going to tell me?” Sophie asked, frowning up at him. “It’s bad, isn’t it? I’m not going to like what you say, yes?” He looked down at her, looked down on a beautiful woman-child, no more sophisticated than any of the debutantes at Almack’s this night, and just as virtuous—maybe more so, because at least she was honest about her reasons for being here.

Bramwell took a deep breath, steadying himself, cursing himself again, cursing his fellow man for the randy goats they all were—and started in to lie for all he was worth.

“You danced every dance? And everyone was kind to you,
chérie
?”

Sophie smiled into the mirror, shaking her head at the concern she could see in her friend’s reflection. “Everyone was
wonderful
to me, Desiree,” she said, waiting impatiently until the row of buttons was opened and she could step out of the last of her undergarments, turn around, and throw herself into the woman’s loving arms. “I am the Sensation of the Season, just as you said I would be!”

“And the duke?” Desiree persisted, giving Sophie’s cheek a kiss before her charge skipped off to the other side of the room to seek out her night rail. “He did not spend the evening glowering and growling?”

Sophie dived into the night rail, hiding her face from the all-too-observant Frenchwoman. “Bramwell was very solicitous of me, actually. But we decided together that we will not be returning to Almack’s.”