Annie Burrows (3 page)

He came to a halt not three feet before her chair, a sardonic smile hovering about his lips.

And it took all her will-power not to get up and slap it right off his face. She had to remind herself, quite sternly, that this was a public ballroom and she must not cause a scene that would rebound on Rose.

She took a deep breath and snapped her fan shut.

She could be polite and dignified. She could, even though her heart was pounding, her mouth had gone dry and her knees were trembling.

She wasn’t an impressionable eighteen-year-old any longer, but a mature woman, and she refused to blush and stammer, or go weak at the knees, just because a handsome man was deigning to pay her a little attention.

Chapter Two

‘G
ood to see you, Morgan,’ said Rothersthorpe, his gaze sliding right past her as if she was not there.

After a moment’s struggle, she acknowledged that it was probably just as well he had not spoken to her first. Apart from the fact that it wasn’t the done thing, she still wasn’t fully in control of her temper. Only think how dreadful it would be if he’d said, ‘Good evening, Lydia’, as though nothing was wrong, and she’d let all this bottled-up hurt and anger burst forth like a cork flying from a shaken bottle.

As it was, she felt Robert’s hand go to the back of her chair. And when she turned to look up at him, she saw her stepson glaring at him too. He’d placed his other hand on the back of Rose’s chair and taken up such an aggressive posture that not even Rothersthorpe could fail to read the warning signs.

Oh, no. It looked as though there was going to be some kind of scene after all.

But at least it would not be of her making.

Not that Lord Rothersthorpe looked in the least bit daunted.

‘It has been a long time,’ he persisted. ‘Too long,’ he said with a rueful smile and thrust out his hand.

Lydia’s heart thundered in her breast while Robert stood quite still, looking at that outstretched hand. It was only when Robert finally took it, saying, ‘Yes, yes, it has’, that she realised she had been holding her breath. It slid from her in a wave of guilty disappointment. She hadn’t wanted Rose’s evening ruined by a scene, she really hadn’t. But a part of her would still very much have liked to see Rothersthorpe flattened by her stepson’s deadly right hook.

‘I cannot believe our paths have not crossed in all this time,’ Robert was saying as though he truly
liked
Rothersthorpe. When she’d been relying on him to dismiss him, the way he’d dismissed one penniless peer after another, during the few weeks Rose had been attending balls.

‘I do not spend much time in town these days,’ replied Lord Rothersthorpe. ‘And when I do come up, it is not to attend events such as this.’ He looked around the glittering ballroom with what, on another man’s face, she would have described as a sneer.

‘I have made a point of avoiding the company of most of the set I ran with at one time,’ he drawled. ‘A man has to develop standards at some point in his life.’

Standards? He had always laughed at people who claimed to have standards.

What on earth could have happened to make him sneer at his younger self?

And now that he was standing so close, she could see that there were subtle changes to his appearance which she had not noticed from a distance. Time had, of course, etched lines on his face. But they were not the ones she might have expected. Instead of seeing creases fanning out from his eyes, as though he laughed long and often, there were grooves bracketing his mouth, which made him look both hard and sober.

‘So, the rumours about you,’ said Robert, ‘are all true, then? You have reformed?’

Lord Rothersthorpe smiled. In one way, it did remind her of the way he’d used to smile, for one corner of his mouth tilted upwards more than the other. But although he’d moved his mouth in the exact same way, it was somehow as though he was merely going through the motions.

‘Not entirely,’ he said. ‘I still enjoy the company of pretty young ladies.’ He looked down at Rose in a way that made Lydia’s hackles rise. Had there been just the tiniest stress on the word
young?
And where had all his charm disappeared to? When she’d been a girl and Nicholas Hemingford had spoken such words, she would have defied any girl it was aimed at not to have melted right off her chair.

But this man, Lord Rothersthorpe, well, she couldn’t quite explain why, but he did not sound charming at all.

And when he said, ‘Will you not introduce me to your lovely companion?’ the expression on his face put Lydia in mind of a...of a...well, yes, of a pirate intent on plunder.

Her fear crystallised when Rose smiled back up at him, for Rose did not appear to find anything about him the least bit sinister. But then what girl, fresh from her schoolroom, could fail to be anything but fascinated when he turned those smiling blue eyes upon her so intently?

A painful sensation struck her midriff. Rose was as deaf to warnings as she’d been herself at that age. She couldn’t see the danger. And nor, apparently, could Robert, because he was performing the introduction.

‘This is my half-sister, Miss Rose Morgan,’ said Robert. ‘It is entirely on her account we have all uprooted ourselves and come to town this spring.’

‘Enchanted,’ said Rothersthorpe, bowing low over her hand. ‘London society will be all the better for having such a beauty adorn its ballrooms.’

‘And this is my stepmother, Mrs Morgan,’ continued Robert, while Lord Rothersthorpe continued to gaze at Rose. ‘Though, of course, you already know her.’

Rothersthorpe turned his head. The expression of admiration which he’d bestowed upon Rose vanished without trace.

‘I would hardly claim to know her,’ he replied, making her a curt bow. ‘Our paths crossed, briefly, almost a decade ago. I seem to recall that you came to town for the sole purpose of catching a husband?’

There was a distinct note of accusation in his voice, which was monstrously unfair. She could have snatched at those rambling words and held him to account for them. Instead, when he’d made it so obvious he regretted them the moment they’d left his lips, she’d let him escape.

‘You know very well that I did,’ she therefore replied. In fact, she’d told him quite plainly that if she didn’t find a husband before the end of the Season she was going to be in a pickle. And he’d brushed her concerns aside by making a jest about things never being so bad as you feared when the time came to face them.

‘And since,’ he said with a hard smile, ‘in those days, I was virtually penniless, that naturally meant you did not waste much of your time upon me.’

It had not been like that. Why was he twisting it to make it sound as though
she’d
been in the wrong?

‘Not when you made it so very clear that you did not
wish
to get married, my lord,’ she retorted, confusion temporarily diluting her annoyance. ‘No woman with an ounce of self-respect would wish to be accused of setting her cap at a man so clearly averse to the notion of getting
leg-shackled.
’

‘Touché.’
He raised his hands to acknowledge the hit. ‘It is true to say I was young and enjoying my freedom far too much to sacrifice it. However, now,’ he said, turning his attention back to Rose once more, his expression softening, ‘I have matured to the point where the prospect of matrimony no longer terrifies me. On the contrary, now that I am a respectable man of means, marrying is not only the next logical step for me to take, but one which I find most desirable.’

Lydia felt as though he’d slapped her. The prospect of marriage back then
had
terrified him. She’d seen it on his face, understood it from the way he’d vanished without trace after uttering what she might have interpreted as a proposal, if she hadn’t known him better.

Mrs Westerly’s words rang in her ears, for the second time that night.
‘You mark my words, when the time comes, he will marry an heiress...’

An heiress. She looked at the predatory way he was examining Rose. Rose, who was not only incredibly wealthy, but extremely pretty too.

Had it been only this evening, before setting out, that she’d decided she’d never been in better looks? Oh, she’d dismissed Rose’s comment that she looked like a fairy princess as the nonsense it was. She was too curvaceous nowadays to warrant that description. Not that she minded. She’d been positively scrawny when she’d been Rose’s age. Worn down by cares that the Colonel had lifted from her shoulders. From the moment she’d married him, her health had begun to improve. And bearing and feeding a child had even bequeathed her a bosom of which she was positively proud.

She was better at picking out clothing that suited her, too. The pastels Mrs Westerly had told her to wear for her own début had always made her look completely washed out. White-blonde hair, greyish-blue eyes and milk-white skin could really make a girl look, according to the acid-tongued reigning beauty that year, like a streak of pump water.

So she’d been pleased with the ensemble she was wearing tonight. The rich blue of her underskirt brought out the colour in her eyes, though it was the gauzy overskirt, sprinkled with spangles, that had caused Rose to make the comment about fairy princesses. She’d even decided not to worry that the neckline was a touch too daring, that there was nothing wrong with revealing what she now regarded as her best feature. Besides, the pearls that nestled between her generous breasts had always boosted her confidence. Colonel Morgan had given them to her on her wedding day, telling her she was a pearl beyond price. If he’d only said it on that occasion, she might have dismissed the words as idle flattery. But he’d kept on saying it, right up to the day he’d died. Even when he’d taken to giving her diamonds, these pearls remained her favourite. Because they made her feel...valued.

But now she felt as though she’d become invisible because Lord Rothersthorpe had eyes only for Rose.

‘But I am being remiss,’ he said, turning towards her with an obvious effort. ‘I really ought to offer my condolences on your loss. Although...’ he paused, his eyes scanning her outfit slowly, before returning to her face ‘...you are so clearly out of mourning that I wonder if it is indelicate of me to remind you of Colonel Morgan’s demise at all.’

It felt just as though he’d honed sarcasm into a sharp blade and thrust it between her ribs. The others might have missed it, but she’d seen the barely concealed contempt with which he’d assessed the finery with which she’d been so pleased, not half an hour since. And it all became too much.

‘Do you think I ought to go about in blacks for ever?’ She felt Rose flinch, though she was too angry to tear her gaze from Lord Rothersthorpe’s sardonic eyes.

‘And if it was indelicate to remind me of my husband’s demise,’ she continued, in spite of Robert clamping the hand that had rested on the back of her chair firmly on her shoulder, ‘why did you do just that?’

‘Naturally,’ put in Robert, while Lydia was floundering under the horrible feeling that Lord Rothersthorpe was deliberately trying to hurt her, ‘we had to delay Rose’s come-out until we were out of full mourning.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ Lord Rothersthorpe said mechanically, ‘if I have caused any offence.’

But he didn’t look the least bit sorry. On the contrary, she’d seen a flare of something like satisfaction flicker through his eyes when he’d goaded her into lashing out at him. And just to prove how insincere his apology to her had been, when he turned to Rose, his face showed nothing but compassion. ‘The death of a parent is always a difficult milestone in one’s life.’

A parent, but not a husband, was what he meant.

‘I trust it would not be inappropriate for me to ask if you would care to dance? Is it too soon for you to think of it?’

‘Not at all,’ said Rose, leaping to her feet.

‘Oh, but, Rose,’ said Lydia, ‘you really ought not...’

Lord Rothersthorpe turned to her and smiled. Mockingly.

‘If you remember me at all, Mrs Morgan, surely you recall that I never pay the slightest attention to anything a girl’s chaperon might have to say?’

Oh, but that twisted the knife in the wound he’d already inflicted. To refer to her as a
chaperon...

She knew his opinions of chaperons, all too well. He’d never had a good word to say about any of them and now he was calling her one, to her face.

And it was no good reminding herself that a chaperon was exactly what she was. She knew what he meant.

Her eyes stung as the last vestige of hope that she might ever have meant anything to him at all curled up and blackened, like a sheet of paper tossed on to an open flame.

‘Rose,’ said Robert sharply, ‘you cannot dance. You know you cannot.’

‘I know no such thing,’ she retorted. ‘My brother has some dreadfully stuffy notions about the suitability of dance partners,’ she said to Lord Rothersthorpe. ‘If he had his way, I would never dance with anyone. But he cannot object to you, since you are clearly a good friend of his.’

‘That is not the reason for my objection and you know it,’ growled Robert. ‘Lord Rothersthorpe, I hope you will forgive my sister for being so outspoken—’

‘Of course,’ he cut in smoothly. ‘It is far better than blushing and stammering out some nonsense, like so many of the débutantes one comes across.’

Lydia flinched. It was as though he was deliberately distancing himself from all he’d once claimed to find appealing about her.

The only good thing to come of her reaction was the fact that Rose noticed it. Her eyes flicked from Lydia to Lord Rothersthorpe, and for a moment, she looked as though she was regretting her defiant outburst.

But then Robert, fatally, said, ‘Rose, I am warning you...’

At which she stiffened her spine, shot her brother a rebellious look and laid her arm on Lord Rothersthorpe’s sleeve.

Short of leaping over the chairs, and forcing her back into her seat, there was nothing Robert could do.

With one last hard smile, Lord Rothersthorpe bore Rose away with him.

And Lydia felt as though a chasm had opened up inside her. A cold, aching void, into which all her cherished memories of this man tumbled. And shattered.

* * *

Lord Rothersthorpe hadn’t known he had it in him to dissemble so convincingly. He hadn’t known he could smile and perform all the steps of the dance in the correct sequence, and even flirt with his partner as though he was enjoying himself, when his gut was roiling with acid rancour.

But then, a gentleman simply couldn’t give way to the savagery that had welled up in him when he’d seen Lydia sitting there draped in the silks and satins she’d got from marrying that disgusting old man. A gentleman couldn’t walk up to a woman he had not seen for eight years and twist on the obscenely opulent ropes of pearls she had round her neck until they choked her.