Winning the Wallflower: A Novella (6 page)

He put a finger to her mouth. “You deserve it, Lucy.”

At least he didn’t pretend that he cared. But why should he? There were all those other wallflowers out there in the ballroom. “I think my mother will be looking for me.” Her voice sounded thin but surprisingly composed.

“You are free to look wherever you wish, my lady.”

“And so are you,” she returned, as formal as any medieval lady with her knight.

Lucy walked out of the room ahead of Cyrus, shoulders back, teeth clenched. As it turned out, they were just in the nick of time. Olivia was strolling down the corridor toward them, her mother in tow.

“Here’s Lucy,” Olivia said, raising an eyebrow. “We were just looking for you, darling.”

Mrs. Lytton, Olivia’s mother, came to a halt. “I trust that your conversation has drawn to a satisfactory end, Mr. Ravensthorpe, Miss Towerton? It’s remarkable that Lady Summers allowed a young lady private congress with a gentleman, but I suppose that under the circumstances . . .”

Cyrus stepped forward and gave the lady a smile that went a good way toward melting her chilly exterior. It was calibrated between humble charm and admiration; and it wasn’t in the least bit sincere. That was one thing Lucy had learned about her erstwhile fiancé. His face didn’t match his thoughts.

“Sometimes privacy can be a boon,” Cyrus said. “Miss Towerton and I have just agreed to end our betrothal, on the very best of terms. In fact, I would venture to say that it was a most enlivening conversation, wouldn’t you agree, Miss Towerton?”

Lucy smiled tightly, a faintly hysterical bubble of laughter rising in her throat. “Absolutely.”

“That is quite
modern
of you,” Mrs. Lytton said. “I must say that I find a measured, disciplined attitude toward such arrangements to be of great importance. And indeed the dear Duchess of Sconce says as much in her
Mirror of Compliments
. You do know the text, do you not, Mr. Ravensthorpe?”

“I fear I do not,” Cyrus replied. “May I escort you to the ballroom, Mrs. Lytton?” He offered his arm.

Olivia’s mother made a sound like a bird that had learned to laugh, and took his arm. “The full title is
The Mirror of Compliments:
A Complete Academy for the Attaining unto the Art of Being a Lady
. Which does explain why you might not have heard of it,” she added. “It does not speak to gentlemen.”

Olivia wound her arm comfortingly through Lucy’s and a moment later they were in the entryway, surrounded by a disconcertingly large crowd of people. “Mr. Ravensthorpe,” Lucy said quietly, when he and Mrs. Lytton paused, “I will always cherish our friendship.”

“As will I,” he said. His kiss burned through her glove. Then he bent his head to Mrs. Lytton and drew her hand back through his arm.

And that was that.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

“W
hat on earth happened?” Olivia demanded. “I’m sorry that I didn’t arrive more quickly; drawing my mother away from her cronies almost took an act of God, I assure you. I gather the betrothal is at an end?”

“Yes,” Lucy said. Now that Cyrus had disappeared into the ballroom towing Mrs. Lytton, she was starting to feel ill. Seasick, as if she really had been on the deck of a pirate ship.

Clearly, it showed on her face. “You look awful,” Olivia said bluntly, grabbing her hand. “Come with me.”

A moment later they were in the ladies’ retiring room, where Olivia banished the maid to guard the door. “My friend is going to cast up her accounts,” Olivia told her. “Be so good as to send anyone who wishes entry elsewhere.”

Lucy realized she must truly have looked green, because the maid’s eyes widened and she scuttled from the room.

Olivia gently pushed her into a chair, and then commanded, “Tell me all!” before dropping into a chair of her own.

“We dissolved our betrothal, just as my mother wanted. But . . .”

“But what?”

“I did kiss him first.”

“And?”

“It was extraordinary.” Even now Lucy couldn’t put together all that heat and feeling with something as commonplace as a
kiss
. The word “kiss” didn’t mean anything. Yet in some dim part of her she knew that kissing Cyrus had meant the world.

“Lucy Towerton, if you can’t be more explicit,” Olivia exclaimed, “I’ll go ask him myself! Did
you
kiss him? Or did he lunge at you in pure frustration when you tried to break it off?”

A flare of heat swept into Lucy’s cheeks at the memory of the way Cyrus had lunged. For he
had
lunged at her. Plain Lucy, tall as a tower, had made Mr. Cyrus Ravensthorpe, Esq., lose his composure and pull her into his arms.

It was pure greed that made her feel now as if she’d give her entire fortune for another such moment.

“Lovely,” Olivia said, clapping her hands with a crow of pleasure. “Brilliant! He must not have thrown you to the side in a fit of prudery, given that you suddenly look pink instead of green.”

“He did not,” Lucy stated, pulling herself together. “In fact, he actually kissed me rather than the other way around.”

“Then why on earth aren’t you still betrothed?”

“Do you know why he chose me, Olivia?”

“Because you’re a lovely person.”

“Because I’m a wallflower.”

Olivia frowned.

“He chose me because no one else wanted me,” Lucy added, just to make it all truly clear. “I forced him to be honest about it.”

“That’s awful,” Olivia breathed. “You are right to throw him over. What an awful man. But why? Why on earth would he want a wallflower?”

“He knew my parents wouldn’t object to his father’s profession, and he didn’t want any fuss about it. They were too frantic to marry me off. And I think he didn’t want to bother with wooing anyone.”

“I don’t care for him any longer,” Olivia said, her eyes darkening. “How dare he say such a thing to you? It’s
absurdly
arrogant. Disgusting, really. Are you saying he deliberately looked for a woman who would be too desperate to even consider refusing him?”

“I told you that he never actually bothered to ask me to marry him,” Lucy said, around the lump in her throat. “He concluded the transaction with my father and thought that was good enough.”

Olivia frowned. “Something doesn’t make sense here. The man has a fortune. He’s as handsome as Adonis. Why on earth would he think that he couldn’t find a wife just by snapping his fingers?”

“I forgot to add that he wants someone from the aristocracy, and it seems that I was the highest ranked wallflower available who didn’t have spots.”

“That’s revolting,” Olivia snapped.

Lucy managed a weak smile. “See how lucky you are? He didn’t even look at you.”

“Because I’m too plump? I
loathe
that man!”

“Aren’t you listening? Because your parents are not members of the aristocracy.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” Olivia said sheepishly. “It’s a sore spot, obviously.”

“He’s just so blasted handsome. I could even . . . I could feel so much for him.”

“Well,
don’t
. It would be a terrible thing to be in a marriage predicated on a man knowing that his wife hankers after him, while he condescendingly pats her head once in a while.”

“That’s just what I thought. Although I was too stupid to figure that out until after we kissed. So I broke off the betrothal, even though the kiss was rather wonderful.”

“There’s one good thing about this,” Olivia said, getting to her feet. “You are not a wallflower any longer, thanks to that lovely fortune of yours. You can flaunt the fact that Ravensthorpe could never win the new you.”

“I’m sure it will make all the difference to be the belle of the ball because men are lusting after my dowry,” Lucy said dryly. “Cyrus—that is, Ravensthorpe—may not have cared much for me, but at least he wasn’t attracted by my money.”

“There’s a happy medium. You’ll find someone who might come to know you because of all the fuss, but then will fall in love with you.”

Lucy snorted, but she followed Olivia out of the room, nodding to the maid hovering in the corridor. “I don’t seem to have my dance card; I suppose I must have dropped it in the study. Perhaps I should just return home. I’ll tell Mother that I have a headache.”

Olivia turned around and poked her. “You sound like a wilting violet. You must put him
out
of your head, Lucy.
Out!
He’s not worthy of you.”

“He said that my height didn’t matter to him in the least.” That was a bit of a non sequitur, but Lucy couldn’t help reliving the details of her tête-à-tête with Cyrus.

“One doesn’t marry a man because he manages to squeak out a backhanded compliment like that! Pull yourself together, Lucy. Your height won’t matter to any of the men who are taller than you, as Ravensthorpe is.”

“True,” Lucy said, straightening her backbone. “It wasn’t much of a compliment, was it?”

Olivia didn’t even bother to agree. “Let yourself shine instead of trying to hunch and make yourself shorter,” she scolded. “The right kind of men will flock to your side.”

Lucy thought about the way Cyrus had responded to her once she forced him to really “look” at her—to
see
her. There was something to Olivia’s advice. Maybe she had made it all worse, because she herself was so mortified by her height. She nodded. “You may well be right.”

“I think I saw your mother filling out your dance card earlier this evening,” Olivia said, tucking her hand under Lucy’s arm. They had reached the door to the ballroom.

“Yes, she did fill it out.”

“Then it’s all to the better that you lost it. Now you have no idea with whom you are supposed to dance. Make your own choices.”

Lucy came to a sudden realization and drew Olivia to a halt. “Do you know, this evening has offered a quite good lesson?”

Olivia groaned. “Not along the lines of the lessons my mother recites from
The Maggoty Mirror
? In short, advice about being a lady?”

“Yes, actually,” Lucy said, lowering her voice. “You see, Cyrus—Mr. Ravensthorpe—kissed me very passionately.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” Olivia said with a tone of distinct rancor. Cyrus had made a definite enemy in Miss Olivia Lytton.

“But that didn’t make the slightest bit of difference when I broke off our engagement. He didn’t even try to persuade me to change my mind. He merely agreed, as if I had said that I didn’t feel like taking a ride in the park.”

“I see what you’re saying,” Olivia sighed. “I’m afraid this is something with which
The Maggoty Mirror
would definitely concur. Men are not moved by desire to behave in the ways a woman would wish them to, that is, honorably and with respect.”

“You see, your mother’s bible is good for something.”

“I’ll try to keep it in mind if I’m ever in a situation to adjudicate a case of male lust. I rather think it would mean I was contemplating adultery, though, and my mother would expire at the thought.”

Lucy frowned at her. “This is the third time you’ve mentioned your betrothal, Olivia. Are you quite certain that you wish to marry Rupert? No one can force you to do it against your will.”

Olivia squeezed her arm. “I don’t mean to bleat about it; forgive me. I am fond of Rupert, and things could be much worse. Just wait until I’m a duchess. I’ll lord over you so much that you’ll hardly believe you ever knew me.”

Lucy broke into a peal of laughter. It was very hard to imagine Olivia a duchess. For all she adored her—and she did—Olivia resembled no duchess she could imagine.

They turned in to the door of the ballroom and paused. “Goodness me,” Olivia said. “Look at all those people craning to look at us, Lucy. I would guess that the news of your broken betrothal has spread, and the
ton
has found a new idol to worship. Men seem to find gold so irresistible.”

Lucy threw back her shoulders, choked back the wish that Cyrus thought of her as an idol, and put a warm smile on her lips.

R
ather to Lucy’s surprise, Olivia was right. Suspected fortune hunters asked her to dance, but so did men who, she knew quite well, had substantial estates of their own.

Announcing that she had lost her dance card, she chose her partners on purely idiosyncratic grounds. She smiled coolly at men who were shorter than she and pleaded a filled dance card, even though no such card was in evidence. She was friendly to those of her own height, but declined to dance with them. She accepted only men who could be depended not to characterize her as a tower, a haystack, or a tall drink of water.

Except for the Duke of Pole. Had she turned down a duke’s request for a dance, her mother would have had a cataclysmic fit.

So when this short, pompous duke bowed before her, with all the air of a man bestowing the utmost favor, she smiled down at him prettily enough. He straightened, which put her eyes level with the wave of his hair. It was thick, and styled up from his forehead, rather like a unicorn horn. Only one as uncharitable as she would think he did it to make himself appear taller. In fact, Pole was fairly handsome, if one ignored the tight look around his eyes and the way his nose sharpened to a slight point.

While they made their way down the set, Lucy did her best to look enthralled by his subject of conversation: to wit, the abomination known as a purple waistcoat.

“I had not considered that the color of a man’s waistcoat reveals anything particular about him,” she said, when Pole finally paused for breath and looked for an answer.

He barked a laugh and launched deeper into his sartorial diatribe. It seemed that the color purple used to be reserved for royalty, and only the truly ill bred wouldn’t have a thorough knowledge of
that
.

Glancing around her, Lucy saw various shades of purple on all sides, including in her own gown. She could only assume that Pole hadn’t noticed that she, to his way of thinking, was risking an insult to the Crown.

“Lavender,” Pole said, in a mincing voice that was clearly supposed to be crushing mockery. “Violet!” He shuddered. It seemed that purple-waistcoat wearers harbored delusions about their ability to mingle with those of high blood, and wore a royal color in order to hide their plebeian origins.

When the dance ended, Lady Summers announced a light supper. At this, the duke escorted her to a small table in the library crowded with his cronies. The duke didn’t ignore her once they were seated, either. He handed her tidbits to eat, leaned close to share a few choice jokes about the appearance of those at the next table, and summoned a footman to refill her champagne glass.

Lucy found it an excruciating experience, especially when he glanced sideways at her with a lurking harshness in his eyes that promised that if she were an oak tree, he would have chopped her to a suitable height. So when a friend of one of her brothers, Lord Rathbone, happened by, she treated his casual smile as an invitation and sprang from her seat to greet him.

When she glanced back at Pole, he was regarding her with barely restrained irritation. She treated him to a casual farewell, and returned to the ballroom to dance with Lord Rathbone—who was tall enough, golden-haired, and effortlessly charming.

Normally her mother would have called for their carriage an hour ago, but she had been so thrilled by the sight of her daughter eating with the Duke of Pole that she retired to a comfortable sofa in Lady Summers’s sitting room and instructed Lucy not to call her under any circumstances until the duke left the premises.

Rathbone made her laugh so hard with stories of his misdeeds at Cambridge that she danced with him a second time, and later accompanied him to the refreshment tables in the library for a midnight snack. Over plum tartlets they discovered to their pleasure that they were both enormously fond of Byron’s verse.