Something pinched in his neck.
He had a strong presentiment that wherever she was going with this question would lead to even greater personal risk to his privacy than she’d already created. And what’s more, he did not know how to answer her, for given the nature of his nocturnal activities, he’d known many, many women. And not in such a context where one asked their occupations.
“Not that I recall,” he said brusquely. “Why do you ask?”
She lowered her voice. “Oh, don’t be nervous. It’s quite all right if she’s your mistress. I’m no longer easily shocked where you’re concerned, Lord Bore.”
“What?” he hissed, glancing behind him through the open doors to make sure she had not been overheard. The hall was empty. He strode over to where she stood beneath an orange tree. “I have no mistress. And you should not allude to such things. It’s not appropriate.”
Hypocrite. Stop inhaling her.
She rolled her eyes. “Apthorp, my dear, fretting about what is appropriate between us now is like worrying one does not have one’s parasol whilst drowning in the ocean.”
“I’m not in the mood for jokes, Constance. What is the relevance of the Theatre Royal?”
The teasing lightness left her face, and she straightened her spine.
“I believe the woman who spread the rumors about you might be an actress there. I have yet to find her, but when I do—”
“Don’t,” he cut in sharply.
There were indeed things she might uncover if she went pawing through his past. Things far more ripe for scandal than a peer with a proclivity for whipping. But her learning them would not improve the situation.
She crossed her arms. “Don’t? We agreed I would investigate who exposed you yesterday. With my brother. Don’t you recall?”
“I recall that you exposed me,” he said evenly. “No investigation is required. I implied otherwise to keep Westmead from guessing your involvement. I assumed that was obvious.”
“It most certainly was not,” she said loftily. “After all, I did not invent the rumors about you. I heard them at Lady Palmerston’s. If someone is trying to harm you by spreading tales, we must look into it, lest they imperil our plan. This woman is connected, I’m certain of it. Just leave it to me.”
At her condescending tone, he lost his grasp on civility. “Certain of it, are you? Like you were certain I meant to marry Miss Bastian? Certain I’m a flagellant? Forgive me if my faith in your powers of deduction is not high.”
Injury lit up her face. “I see.”
He cringed for letting his temper get the better of him, but he was right. She was not nearly as omniscient as she believed herself to be, and it offended him to his core that she insisted on meddling in affairs he was perfectly bloody capable of handling himself.
And above all, he could not trust her with any more details about his past. There was no telling what she would think of him or whom she would share it with.
“The carriage is waiting!” Rosecroft called from the stairs.
“One moment,” Apthorp said over his shoulder. He leaned in and whispered to Constance in a low voice. “We will continue this discussion when we have more privacy. You must tell me everything you know, and then you must promise me that will be the end of this. Promise me.”
“Why should I?” she whispered back. “Because you have proven you are so competent at handling things yourself?”
He breathed in sharply, and her eyes flashed with something smug.
She must have been paying more attention to him all these years than she’d let on, for one could not aim a barb with such precision if one had not made careful study of the target.
She wanted to hurt him.
Well, fine. It had worked.
“I don’t need to be reminded that I’ve made mistakes,” he said quietly. “My entire life is one long vivid reminder of it. I’d like to prevent you from following suit.”
Her face softened, slightly. “That came out harshly. All I mean to say is that I can fix this, Apthorp. You only need to trust me.”
“My God,” he said, sinking back against the wall. “What I trust is that you have never met a problem you weren’t tempted to make a thousand times worse.”
She let forth a bright, acidic laugh. “Ah, yes. I suppose this situation is all my fault. I suppose I am responsible for your affliction.”
“What affliction?”
She smiled and batted her eyelashes. “Your desire for unnatural acts, my lord. Is that not what really ruined you?”
He felt like she had slapped him.
To say such a thing when he’d already explained what Charlotte Street meant to him, and what she’d risked by exposing it, proved she had no business anywhere near the truth.
He turned on his heel and began walking for the door, so he wouldn’t have to look at the victorious expression on her face. Then he thought better of it, and turned back to her.
“I don’t have an affliction,” he said in a low voice. “I am perfectly capable of regulating my desires. But, Constance?”
“Yes?” she said, glaring. He leaned in and inhaled the burnt vanilla of her perfume from the bare curve of her pale throat.
“Don’t call them unnatural until you try them.”
On the way to the opera, Apthorp made polite conversation with the Rosecrofts, as though absolutely nothing were wrong.
That was because he was evil.
Only a very wicked man could appear so serenely unaffected when she was so angry she could breathe fire and singe his perfect eyebrows right off his perfect head.
She knew she had done badly by him. She had accepted her culpability. She was going out of her way to make amends. She was doing so at the ultimate cost of her own family.
And for all that, he chastised her for doing the very thing upon which they’d agreed.
She should not have provoked him, but his maligning of her character was too rich to swallow blandly when she knew he was not innocent. She had not invented his Wednesday evening pastimes, even if she had been wrong to expose them.
Imagine, holding her wholly responsible for his secret membership in an illicit brothel. At the best of times, men felt entitled to freedoms that women would be stoned for, but he’d surely known his actions were not sanctioned by society when he’d made a habit of them. There was a price for freedom, as she well knew. If one wanted to be free, one had to bear the risk of being damned.
Besides, she was no villain. Everybody loved her. She’d spent her entire adult life ensuring it. And tonight she intended to remind him of that fact.
“We’re here,” Hilary remarked, looking out the window. “And the crowd is enormous. Are you sure you’re up to this, Constance? You look fevered.”
Fevered indeed. More like aflush with the fire of vengeance.
“Oh, indeed. I have never been more thrilled to attend the opera in my life.”
She waited for the others to exit the carriage as she took a moment to pinch her lips and smooth her gown. Then she accepted Apthorp’s hand and stepped down onto the pavement.
She held herself poised and swanlike before the swarming mass of jeweled ladies, bewigged gentlemen, alewives, and begging children, letting them take in the sight of her and Apthorp together in public for the first time.
She shifted her shoulders, so that the silver threads in her pink dress would catch in the golden sunset light and make her glow.
The throng stilled. “It’s Lady Constance!” someone squealed.
She smiled. With a dramatic flick of her wrist, she released the silver lace that held her train and stepped forward, allowing her skirts to fan out behind her in a shimmering wave to the approving murmurs of the crowd.
“Repent!” some woman squawked from somewhere in the crush of bodies. “Repent, ye filthy cull!”
She paused.
“Look at Cunny and Arsethorp, fine as can be!” a man shouted from somewhere closer.
The crowd erupted in a s
ound she had not heard directed at herself in years: laughter.
She smiled and tossed her head and charged onward, clutching Apthorp’s arm. As a child, she had learned the first lesson of mockery: reacting to it is the surest way to invite more abuse. She would ignore her persecutors and let them read about her triumph in tomorrow’s papers. She sailed through the theater doors, all but dragging Apthorp after her, and braced for the usual onslaught of waves and bows from her friends.
Not a soul looked up.
The artistic gentlemen of Covent Garden seemed unusually preoccupied in purchasing refreshments and locating their seats. Fine ladies’ backs turned just as she and Apthorp neared them.
They were deliberately avoiding her.
It sent her back in time. To arriving in France and discovering that she was everything a little girl ought not to be. To returning a decade later to discover her hard-won adopted mannerisms now made her queer, forward, uncommonly direct.
She’d fought her way through that. She’d beguiled, charmed, and bought anyone who didn’t mind her oddness, and made herself bored by or indispensable to those who did, until she had amassed the kind of influence that, when accompanied with unconscionable wealth, made one impervious to judgment.
She’d thought that she was immune.
“Why, if it isn’t Lady Cunny’s cully,” a man’s cultured voice drawled from somewhere a few paces away.
She turned sharply, violating her own rules by trying to locate the source of the titters. The whole crowd seemed to undulate with quiet laughter.
Apthorp tightened his grip on her arm and continued strolling casually to the Rosecrofts’ box, an expression of mild amusement fixed on his features.
Either he was a marvel of equanimity or else he was stone-deaf.
In any case he was elegant and stoic, while she—the master of appearances—was becoming unsuitably upset.
She had been so certain that her popularity would serve as a layer of protection for them both. For the first time a horrible thought crossed her mind: what if she wasn’t enough to save him?
Her slipper caught on a half step, and she tripped over the hem of her dress, stumbling forward. Apthorp gently righted her before anyone could notice.
She clung to him, wishing he could make her disappear.
“It’s all right,” he said in a low, soft voice. “Don’t let on that you notice. It will pass.”
His voice betrayed no sign of being bothered.
He’s accustomed to it, she realized. She’d never considered it before, but he must have endured years of pretending not to notice what people said about him after he’d made his bad investments.
In fact, it now occurred to her he’d never reacted to the many rather mocking things she’d said to him. She’d called him Lord Bore a hundred times without him ever flinching.
“Don’t forget to breathe,” he said into her ear.
She inhaled and relaxed her posture. Usually she hated being told what to do, but it was soothing, under the circumstances, to not be the one in charge.
“Good,” he murmured. “Now lean up and say something amusing to me.”
Her mind went blank. “I can’t think of anything amusing,” she whispered in his ear. “I can scarcely remember my own name.”
He laughed softly, like she’d made a private, intimate kind of joke. “It doesn’t matter what you say,” he whispered back. “Just say it like you mean it.”
She turned and grinned up into his pretty amber eyes. “What a dreadful situation.”
“Isn’t it?” He smiled back.
“No one has been so rude to me in years, no matter how awfully I’ve behaved.” She met his eye. “And I’ve had my regrettable moments.”
She hoped he understood that she meant she was sorry for all the times she’d said things that, perhaps, were not quite nice. Things that might have made him feel a bit like she felt now.
His eyes went dark. “We’ve both had our regrettable moments,” he said quietly.
Was that … an apology for what he’d said in the orangery?
She paused, trying to read his odd expression, but her brother’s voice called out her name. They turned to the sight of Archer and Poppy.
Archer clapped Apthorp on the back in a hearty, affectionate manner that was no doubt designed to discreetly inflict pain. She felt the eyes of the crowd observe this signal of his blessing.
She hoped desperately they absorbed the message.
“Constance, have you heard the news?” Poppy asked. “It seems you and Apthorp are not the only betrothed couple making your debut. Your friend Miss Bastian is promised to Lord Harlan Stoke. It is said they plan to marry in one month’s time.”
“Pardon?” She felt like she might faint.
“Are you quite all right?” Poppy asked.
She was not all right.
Gillian Bastian was a fellow refugee who’d been raised in Philadelphia and deemed hopeless when she arrived in London in search of a titled husband to strengthen her family’s ties to the Crown. Always sympathetic to a fellow déclassée, Constance had ushered Gillian into her closest circle of friends and set about making her a figure in society. When that had been accomplished with some success, she’d moved on to securing the girl a husband.
Namely, Apthorp.
In all the months they’d been in league together, arranging pretexts for him to call, analyzing his every move for some hint into the progression of his feelings, Gillian had never mentioned an attachment to Lord Harlan.
A brisk engagement implied a long-standing history between the couple, and perhaps the anticipation of their vows. If Gillian had been anticipating vows with the likes of Harlan Stoke, she’d surely been in no imminent danger of marrying Apthorp.
It made no sense.
But more immediately distressing than this lapse in friendship was how stupid it would make Constance look to the man currently holding her by the arm.
No, not stupid. Careless.
She glanced up at him to see whether he had made the same connection.
His face had gone the color of alabaster, and was just as rigid.
“How wonderful,” Constance said in an absolutely miserable tone. “I suppose we should offer them our congratulations.”
Apthorp nodded, because he could not count on himself to speak. He followed Constance out of the box, trying to steel his face into an impassive line.
Vindication was, in normal circumstances, very elevating. But any joy he might otherwise take in proving that Constance had been wrong was overpowered by his revulsion at the name of Harlan Stoke. And at him marrying some harmless girl like Gillian.
“I’m sorry,” Constance said in a low voice, glancing at him. “I truly don’t know how I got it so wrong.”
He said nothing. He had not yet collected himself to the point that he trusted he could speak without shouting.
“Please don’t be angry,” she said.
“I’m not angry,” he ground out. “Not, in any case, at you.”
“I feel so foolish,” she said in the smallest voice he’d ever heard from her.
Her regretful tone brought him back to himself, and their need to assert their purpose here. He tried to smile at her. “Never mind. They’re not our concern. Let’s circulate about the room before the curtains. It’s important to pretend to be enjoying ourselves.”
She clutched his arm more tightly than was decent. Because he was upset, he allowed himself to take in one strong, fortifying whiff of myrrh and gardenia and squeeze her back. It made him feel better.
“What if no one acknowledges us?” Constance whispered, letting her gaze dart about the room. He’d never seen her so unsure of herself. At least not in half a decade. It made him want to draw her closer, protect her from the stares he—they—were attracting.
“They will,” he said firmly, scanning the room for friendly faces. “Look, there’s Avondale. He’s thoroughly dissolute. He’ll happily be seen with us. We might ev
en improve his reputation.”
He lifted his hand to the marquess, whose eyes lit up in greeting.
“Well, well,” Avondale said, clapping his hand on Apthorp’s back. “Lady Constance, I hear you’ve snagged yourself the least eligible man in all of London.”
The quip seemed to restore Constance’s spirits. “Lord Apthorp’s reputation for vice is second only to yours, my lord,” she said sweetly. “But I have made my peace with second best.”
Avondale threw back his head and laughed. Others noticed. Avondale was popular and wealthy. His approval would ease the way for them.
“Are you looking forward to the opera?” the marquess asked.
Constance smirked. “I’ve heard the aria is lovely, but it seems Lord Apthorp and I are the real focus of the evening’s entertainment.”
“My dear, with you in that gown, who would bother looking at the stage?” Avondale gave her a grin so wolfish it was physically painful to watch, but Constance only laughed and did something attractive with her fan.
God, she was good. Apthorp knew she was distressed, but to look at her bantering with Avondale, you’d never know that moments before her hands had been shaking as she’d clutched his arm.
Out of the corner of his eye he spotted Cornish Lane Day, his ally on the waterway bill in the House of Commons, and someone who had never looked wolfishly on anything other than a piece of legislation. Apthorp beckoned him over gratefully.
“Lord Apthorp,” Lane Day said with a bow. “My sincere congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Apthorp said. “Lady Constance, allow me to introduce you to Mr. L—”
“Oh, Mr. Lane Day needs no introduction,” Constance said, switching fluently from the knowing, flirtatious manner she had used on Avondale to a tone of demure respect pitched perfectly to the serious young politician. “I hear such glowing things about his speeches in the Commons.”
“Surely you flatter me,” Lane Day said, looking floored.
Constance leaned in and shook her head. “Not at all, sir. I’ve been eagerly following your success in the election, and I can’t say how long I’ve wished to meet you. I know how grateful Lord Apthorp has been for your skill in guiding his bill through the Commons.”
The Earl I Ruined Page 8
