Dark Angel / Lord Carew's Bride (3 page)

“Good afternoon.” He smiled, directing the full intensity of his dark gaze not at the blond beauty who had first taken his eye and who had stopped walking in order to curtsy, but at the greater challenge of her luscious companion, who was making no response at all beyond a candid stare and a slight pause in her walk. It was a pity, he found himself thinking, that she was very obviously a lady.

“Good afternoon,” Sir Albert said beside him while the one girl curtsied, the other waited for her before moving on, and the maids stepped closer.

The two gentlemen rode on and did not look back.

“Eminently bedworthy,” the earl muttered. “Lusciously, mouth-wateringly so. I am going to have to set up a mistress, Bertie. I have had no one since leaving England, if you will believe it, beyond one reckless encounter with a whore and then several weeks of terror at what she might have given me apart from an hour of strenuous and moderately satisfying sport. I did not repeat the experiment. And taking a mistress seemed somehow disrespectful to Catherine. I shall have to take a look-in at the theaters and opera houses and see who is available. It will not do to salivate in the park every afternoon, will it?”

“Hair the color of pale moonbeams,” said Sir Albert, waxing poetic, “and eyes like cornflowers. She is going to have armies of suitors before many days have passed. Especially if she has a fortune to match the face.”

“Ah,” the earl said, “you fancied the blonde, did you? It was the lady of the long and shapely legs who had my mind turning determinedly in the direction of mistresses. Oh, to have such legs twine about one’s own, Bertie. Yes, I must say I am glad to be back in England, scandal or no scandal.”

He knew he should be spending the spring at Chalcote instead of postponing his return until the summer. His father had been dead only a little over a year—since his own removal to the Continent with Catherine, his father’s second wife. His title and his property were new to him. He should have hastened home as soon as the news reached them, but bringing Catherine back had been out of the question and he had felt himself unable to leave
her at that particular time. Staying with her had seemed more important than hurrying home too late to attend his father’s funeral anyway.

Now he knew he should go home. But Bertie had been right. There was a great deal of stubbornness in him. Coming to London for the Season was madness when doing so meant facing the
ton
, who believed almost without exception that he had eloped to the Continent with his father’s wife after impregnating her. And now, of course, he had abandoned her to live alone in Switzerland with their daughter—or so the story doubtless went. Catherine was indeed living there quite comfortably with the child. He had given her the protection of his company during her confinement and for almost a year following it. Now she was quite capable of living independently—and he had been almost desperately homesick.

It would have been far better to have gone straight home to Chalcote. It was what he should have done and what he had wanted to do. London would be better faced—if at all—next year or the year after when the scandal had cooled somewhat. Except that scandal never cooled in London. Whenever he went there for the first time—whether it was now or ten years hence—it would flare about him.

It had never been his way to avoid scandal or to show that he cared one way or another for what people said of him. He did care as much as anyone, he supposed, but he would go to the devil before he would show that he
cared. He had not made any attempt to correct that erroneous conclusion that had been jumped to when he had taken his pregnant stepmother away from his father’s fury after she admitted that she was with child. It was as Gabriel had suspected—his father, sickly since before his second marriage, had never consummated that marriage. He had been afraid that his father would harm Catherine or her unborn child or would openly deny paternity and ruin her forever. The old earl had not done so, but gossip had blossomed into a major scandal anyway when her flight to the Continent with her stepson and her condition had become common knowledge.

Let people think what they would, the present Earl of Thornhill had thought. He had been established in Switzerland with Catherine before she told him who the father of her child was.

He should have returned to kill the man, he had thought often since. But as Catherine had explained to him, what had happened had not been rape. The foolish woman had loved the villain who had so carelessly impregnated her—the wife of a man who would know that he had been cuckolded—and had then made himself very scarce as soon as his sins had threatened to find him out.

And so the Earl of Thornhill was back, fifteen months after the sudden death of his father, almost one year after the birth of the child who bore his father’s name despite the very public conviction that she was not his father’s.

Back and foolishly thrusting his head straight into the
lion’s mouth. And eyeing British beauties who were obviously in town for the annual spring marriage mart. There would be one or two parents who would be outraged and foaming at the mouth if they knew that the Earl of Thornhill had just made his bow to their daughters—and had imagined one of them naked on a bed beneath him, her long legs twined about his.

He smiled rather grimly.

“Tomorrow, Bertie,” he said, “weather permitting, we will come for the fashionable squeeze. And tomorrow I shall send back acceptances to some of my invitations. Yes, I have had a surprising number. I suppose my newly acquired rank, as you say, and, even more important, my newly acquired fortune do a great deal to make some people turn a blind eye to my notoriety.”

“People will flock to view you,” Sir Albert said cheerfully, “if only to see if you have acquired horns and a tail during the past year, Gabe, and if they can see any signs through your stockings and dancing shoes of cloven feet. I revel in the irony of your name. Gabriel of the cloven foot.” He laughed loudly.

What would that dark red hair look like without the bonnet, the earl wondered, and beneath the light of hundreds of candles in their chandeliers? Would he find out? Would he ever be allowed close enough to her to see quite clearly?

He looked back over his shoulder, but she and her companion had passed out of sight.

“T
HERE
,” S
AMANTHA SAID
,
TWIRLING
her parasol, well pleased with life. “We are not to be quite ignored, Jenny. I even read admiration in their eyes. I wonder who they are. Will we find out, do you think?”

“Probably,” Jennifer said. “They are undoubtedly gentlemen. And how could they fail to admire you? All the gentlemen at home do. I do not see why London gentlemen should be any different.”

Samantha sighed. “I just wish we did not look so rustic,” she said. “I wish some of the clothes we were measured for this morning had been made up already. Aunt Aggy was a positive love, poker face or not, to insist on so many clothes for each of us, was she not? I could have hugged her except that Aunt Aggy is not quite the sort of person one hugs. I wonder if our Uncle Percy ever … Oh, never mind.” She laughed lightly. “I wish I were wearing the new blue walking dress that is to be finished by next week.”

“I am not sure,” Jennifer said, “that those gentlemen should have spoken to us. It would have been more proper if they had merely touched their hats and ridden on.”

Samantha laughed again. “The dark one was very handsome,” she said. “As handsome as Lord Kersey, in fact, though in entirely the opposite way. But I think I liked his companion better. He smiled sweetly and did not look like the devil.”

Jennifer would not own that the dark gentleman was as handsome as Lionel. He was too dark, too thin-faced, too bold. His eyes had bored into hers as if he saw her
not only without her clothes but even without her skin and bones. And his eyes and his smile, she had noticed, had been directed wholly and quite improperly on her. If he had deemed it polite to sweep off his hat and to smile and even pass the time of day, then he should have made it a gesture to the two of them. Not just to Samantha, and not just to her. His behavior had been quite unmannerly. She suspected that perhaps they had just encountered one of the rakes with whom London was said to abound.

“Yes,” she said, “he did look like the devil, did he not? As Lord Kersey looks like an angel. You were quite right to say they are handsome in quite opposite ways, Sam. That gentleman looks like Lucifer. Lord Kersey looks like an angel.”

“The angel Gabriel,” Samantha said with a laugh, “and the devil Lucifer.” She twirled her parasol. “Oh, this walk has done me the world of good, Jenny, even though Aunt Aggy has strictly forbidden us to show our faces at anything that might be called fashionable until next week. Two gentlemen have raised their hats to us and bidden us a good afternoon and my spirits have soared even though one of them looks like the devil. A handsome devil, though. Of course, you don’t have to wait a week, you lucky thing. Lord Kersey is calling on you tomorrow morning.”

“Yes.” Jennifer went off into a dream. Word had come during the morning that Lionel was back in town and that tomorrow morning he was to call on her father—and on her.

Sometimes it was very difficult to remember that one was twenty years old and a dignified lady. Sometimes it was difficult not to set one’s parasol twirling at lightning speed and not to whoop out one’s joy to surrounding nature. Tomorrow she would see Lionel again. Tomorrow—perhaps—she would be officially betrothed to him.

Tomorrow. Oh, would tomorrow ever come?

L
ADY BRILL, JENNIFER AND SAMANTHA’S AUNT Agatha, was merely a baronet’s widow and daughter and sister of a viscount, but she had a presence that a duchess might have envied and a self-assurance acquired during many years of residence in London. It should have been impossible for any self-respecting modiste to produce even a single garment less than twenty-four hours after her first call upon a client. And yet, thanks to the cajolery of Lady Brill, early in the morning after Madame Sophie had spent several hours at Berkeley Square with the Honorable Miss Jennifer Winwood and Miss Samantha Newman, a morning dress of pale green was delivered to the former by Madame’s head assistant, who made sure that the fit was perfect before she left again.

Jennifer was to be fashionable when she received her first formal town visit from Viscount Kersey.

And she must be demure and ladylike, she told herself as she brushed cold and unsteady hands lightly over the fabric of her new dress, smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles. Her heart fluttered. She breathed as if she had just run for a mile nonstop and uphill. Samantha had just darted into her dressing room with word that the
Earl and Countess of Rushford and Viscount Kersey had arrived.

“You look splendid,” she said, stopping just inside the door and gazing at her cousin with mingled admiration and envy. “Oh, Jenny, how does
it feel?
How does it feel to be about to go downstairs to meet your future husband?”

It felt rather as if her slippers had been soled with lead. If she had been able to eat any breakfast, she would now be feeling bilious. She felt bilious anyway.

“Do you think I should have had my hair cut?” she asked, and stared at her image in the glass, amazed that she could think of nothing more profound to say on such a momentous occasion. “It is really very long, yet short hair is all the crack, according to Aunt Agatha.”

“It looks very elegant piled like that,” Samantha said. “And very pretty too with the trailing curls. I thought you would be bounding with excitement.”

“How can I,” Jennifer asked almost in a wail, “when I cannot lift my feet from the floor? It has been over a year, Sam, and even then we were never alone together and never together at all for more than five minutes at a time. What if he has changed his mind? What if there was nothing to change? What if he never did want this match? It was arranged by our papas years ago. It has always suited me. But what if it does not suit him?” Panic clawed at her.

Samantha clucked her tongue and tossed a look at the ceiling. “Men are not forced into marriage, Jenny,” she said. “Women sometimes are because we are rarely
given a say in the ordering of our own lives. That is the way of the world, alas. But not men. If Lord Kersey did not like this match, he would have said so long ago and there would have been an end of the matter. You are merely giving in to the vapors. I have never heard you express these doubts before.”

She had had them, Jennifer supposed, suppressed so deep that even she had been scarcely aware of them. Fears that all her dreams would come to nothing. She did not know what she would do if that happened. There would be a frightening emptiness in her life and a painful void in her heart. But he was here—downstairs at this very moment.

“If I am not summoned soon,” she said, clenching her hands into tight fists and then stretching her fingers wide, “I shall crumple into a heap on the floor. Perhaps this is only a courtesy visit, Sam. Do you think? After all, we have not seen each other for over a year. There will be a few visits before he can be expected to come to the point, will there not? I am being unnecessarily foolish. In which case, I am doubtless very overdressed and Lord and Lady Rushford and Li—and their son will laugh privately at me. His mama and papa would not have come with him if this was it, would they?”