Lord Langley Is Back in Town (8 page)

A suspicious silence fell over the ladies. Including Minerva.

Us?
Had he just said
“Us?”
As in her and him?

Even Knuddles stopped his snuffling and sniffing about to glance at the man.

“Whatever do you mean?” Nanny Tasha demanded. “Langley, you can’t be saying—”

“That is exactly what I am saying. I’ve come home. To marry the woman I love.” He gave Minerva another hug, drawing her even closer. “Adore,” he confessed. “Allow me the pleasure of introducing the future Lady Langley.”

The future Lady Langley? He didn’t really mean . . .

Minerva gaped at him just as the others were—good heavens, what had he said just before he’d kissed her?

Exactly what you told me to do. Taking a wife.

Her hands went to her lips as she realized that he’d meant her.

The margravine sputtered something in her own language before she got command of herself and managed to get out in English the one word they were all thinking. “Ridiculous!”

Yes, even she had to agree with the lady.
Ridiculous
. And outrageous. And utterly impossible.

Marry him? She’d rather walk naked through Almack’s. She twisted out of his grasp and turned to glare at him, to add her own imperious gaze to the four others that were blazing into this obviously ramshackled rake.

“Married? To such as this?” Nanny Lucia tossed her head, her dark brown locks tumbling around her shoulders in an elegantly tousled state of
dishabille
.

Minerva glanced over at the lady and felt a pang of envy mixed in with her growing annoyance at this pushy bit of Neapolitan temptation. Truly, there was an art and gift to looking like that, one Minerva didn’t possess.

Nor do I want to
, she told herself, if it had one prancing about in the middle of the night all trussed and trimmed like a holiday pudding.

“Truly,
schatzi
,” the margravine said, sending her own scathing glance at Minerva’s flannel covering, one brow arching to say in so many words that she wouldn’t be caught dead in such material—not even for her shroud. “You tease us, certainly.” She sidled once again in front of the duchessa, much to Lucia’s annoyance. “Marry this one? Why it is impossible! She has no . . . no . . .”

“Passion,” Nanny Tasha finished for her rival. The princess made her move then, taking center stage. “No essence, no fire. Nor has she wit enough to keep you entertained. No offense meant, Lady Standon.”

Minerva would like to have possessed enough manners to manage a “None taken,” but she found herself boiling mad and filled with an insensible . . . an enflamed . . . well, passion, that suggested the princess had it all wrong. They all did.

“How could she be offended when it is so very obvious,” Nanny Lucia sniffed. The others nodded in agreement, as if Minerva wasn’t even in the room.

She drew a deep breath, even as her fingers balled up into an uncharacteristic fist. Echoes of her grandmother’s taunts that her father would never get away with marrying her to the Marquess of Standon. That he would be doing naught but making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, to all their ruin.

“Oh, but looks are deceiving, ladies,” Langley was saying. “And I assure you, Lady Standon possesses all those qualities and more. She has made me the happiest man in England by agreeing to be my bride.”

Minerva’s head swiveled toward him. His bride? Was the man mad? First he came tumbling into her bedchamber and now he thought them engaged? No, not just mad. Utterly insane.

She should have pushed him out the window when she’d had her chance. And it was on the tip of her lips to call him out, to denounce this lie of his and then happily feed him to these imported wolves, but once again he caught her unawares.

For while she stood there fuming and plotting, he moved closer and slipped his hand around hers. The second their fingers twined, something very odd sparked, a flicker that ran from her fingertips through her limbs as if tapped from a Leyden jar. She couldn’t help herself, she looked at him.

And discovered that it only took a spark to ignite a blaze.

His blue eyes danced with a naughty, wicked light that would make a less sensible woman believe they gleamed like that only for her.

Minerva considered herself far too sensible to be swayed by a pair of mesmerizing eyes, by handsome Roman features, by stone chiseled lips and an air of confidence that could inflate a balloon and send it aloft to the farthest corners of the earth.

No, this is naught but more of his rakish parlor tricks,
she told herself even as he drew up her hand and then tipped his head down to place a kiss on the tips of her bare fingers.

When his lips touched her, that rare fire burned anew, as if his very breath reignited the smoldering embers. Her knees knocked and trembled in a most insensible fashion.

How could they not when his lips whispered once again over her, a warm, heated kiss that sent shivers trembling out in hurried waves up her arm and down through the rest of her limbs?

His other hand curled around her waist, catching hold of her, drawing her in closer so that she was encircled by him, protected, desired by him.

“Darling, dearest girl,” he mused. “I fear our secret is no longer that . . .
our secret
.”

If she hadn’t been doing her best to keep upright, she swore she could have mustered a snort of derision that would have met with even the approval of Knuddles. But good gracious heavens, how this man could utter two words, “our secret,” and make them run down her spine with the same sensual tease as his fingers had earlier.

“You want us to believe you are engaged to her?” Nanny Helga did manage to make an indelicate snort that said everything Minerva wished she could manage, and would muster once she got out of Langley’s enticing grasp.

Away from the spell he’d cast over her.

“She is right,
cara
,” Nanny Lucia agreed. “It is impossible to believe.”

The Russian moved again, in that deliberate, cat-like way of hers. “Yes, none of us are fools, darling. We know all your
tricks
.”

Minerva suspected the lady didn’t mean just his legendary diplomatic prowess.

Knuddles growled from his post in Nanny Brigid’s arms. The lady ran her fingers over the mane of black hair that surrounded the little dog’s monkey-like face. “If you think we will leave because you claim to love her, you are quite mistaken.”

“Then stay for our wedding and see for yourself,” he told them. “I insist.”

I
n one of the small, private parlors of White’s, Lord Chudley had been spending a quiet evening reading his paper. Far more enjoyable than escorting Bedelia and her niece to some soiree or musical or whatever it was she’d been nattering on about over their tea this afternoon.

Bless her heart, he did love his wife, but Bedelia was a busybody by nature, the sort who could cannonade a fleet of American privateers with her forthrightness.

So he’d learned quickly that occasionally he was “utterly needed at his club.”

And good wife that she was, she understood and took no offense.

Even so, his respite was interrupted when two fellows came into the room, sharing a whispered exchange that spoke of deceit, and so Chudley watched them through softly shuttered lashes feigning a nap. His high-backed chair was turned slightly toward the fireplace, so the pair didn’t see him immediately, that is until they came deep enough into the room.

“Sir Basil—” one of them said, nodding toward where Chudley lounged, looking for all intents like a slumbering old gallant.

“Never mind him,” Sir Basil declared. “I daresay even if he were awake, at his age he’s as deaf as a post.”

Now if Chudley had been a more arrogant sort he would have taken this young pup to task for such cheek.

Deaf as a post, indeed! He wasn’t that old, and considering he’d just married his fourth wife, and had no trouble keeping her blissfully happy, he’d like to announce that he was as spry as a goat—they could only wish for such good fortune at his age.

But Chudley hadn’t spent his early years working for the Foreign Office not to know that arrogance and a lofty regard for one’s manhood had no place in this world.

That, and he still kept abreast of things in the old office, and he’d never once heard a good word said about this upstart Sir Basil. And from the shady looks of the company he was keeping, Chudley had no doubts the pair of them were into something they weren’t willing to discuss at Whitehall.

And if that was the case, his curiosity outweighed a slight about his hearing and age.

But demmit, who was that other fellow? He looked vaguely familiar.

“We have a problem,” Sir Basil was saying.

“What is it now, Brownie?” the man replied, glancing down at his fingernails. “You always have a problem. And they never amount to the drama that you insist on adding to them.”

“You’ll think differently when I tell you.”

“Then get on with it,” the other man said. “Tibballs is downstairs, utterly foxed and in the mood for a few hands of loo. And in a few hands I’ll have emptied his pockets.”

“You won’t have pockets to fill when you find out who is back in Town.”

The shake to Sir Basil’s voice almost prodded Chudley to open his eyes and give the man a level examination.

“Good God, man, get this over with,” the other fellow said, sounding all-too-bored and having taken no note of the fearful tremor to Sir Basil’s voice.

“Langley,” Sir Basil said in a deadly still whisper.

Chudley’s breath froze in his throat and he wondered if perhaps his hearing wasn’t up to snuff, for he would have sworn he heard the man say—

“Langley?” The man laughed. “Demmit, Basil, when did you start believing in ghosts? Langley is dead. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

There was the thud of boots as the man went to leave, but his departure came to a halt as Sir Basil continued, “Langley is not dead, you fool. He’s alive and in London. And you need to get out of Town. Now.”

Langley, alive? Impossible
. Chudley had seen a copy of the report detailing Langley’s last day in Paris. No, the man couldn’t be alive.

A skepticism shared by his cohort. “Are you sure you didn’t have too much of the Prime Minister’s infamous claret? Because you’re talking nonsense. Langley is dead.”

“Not as dead as you would like,” Sir Basil said, reverting to that lofty sort of mushroom tone of his.

Upstarts!
Lord Chudley would have snorted. Thought they had to act and sound superior to make up for being utterly common.

Yet, how could Langley live? As distasteful as it was to agree with the likes of this shady fellow, and having had more than his fair share of the Prime Minister’s claret a time or three, he was inclined to agree that Sir Basil was as foxed as the poor unwitting Tibballs downstairs.

“Bah, you’ve gone ’round the bend. He’s aloft, I tell you. Now if you will excuse me—”

“He’s alive, you fool,” Sir Basil insisted.

The strident note to his declaration had Chudley unshuttering his lashes enough not to give himself away, but enough to see the Foreign Office’s junior minister take hold of the other man’s lapels and drag him up close. “Langley got in my carriage tonight and demanded an accounting of how he was betrayed.”

Betrayed? Chudley didn’t like the sound of that. Any more than he liked the idea of Langley back in Town.

Devil of a fellow, Langley
. Not always on the up and up. Just before he’d been killed in Paris there had been rumors, nasty ones, that he’d been working for the French. Rumors of thefts. And that eventually his French contacts had finished the man off once they were done with him.

Messy business, dealing with frogs.

“He is demanding a full hearing. Wants to see the reports. Wants his name cleared.”

Good luck with that
, Chudley would have added.
Once a traitor . . .

“You’re serious,” the other fellow whispered.

“Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said?”

“No, this can’t be. I saw him—”

Chudley stilled.
Saw him what, my mysterious friend?

“If Langley is back in Town—”

Sir Basil shuddered, letting out a breathy sigh.

“Yes, now you see how that could complicate matters.”

“Complicate matters? He could—”

Chudley strained to hear more.

“Yes, that’s it, exactly.” Sir Basil cleared his throat.

“If he delves into—”

“He cannot!” Sir Basil declared, and then realizing he’d raised his voice, glanced over at Chudley.

Both men stood there for a time, an eternity to Chudley, but he stayed stock-still, if only to sort out everything he’d just learned . . . and hadn’t.