But then, his brothers could laugh.
They didn’t have to be him.
It was true he did, in fact, have a patented sultry look. It really didn’t require much more than simply being Lyon Redmond while aiming appreciative, unswerving attention at a woman for a tick longer than was strictly proper.
It raised a blush nearly every time.
And it was generally agreed among the bloods of the ton that given an option, they would choose his life over theirs, if only for a day. Perhaps that day would be spent at Manton’s, shooting the hearts out of targets or whipping the foil out of his fencing master’s hand; followed by an hour or two in London at their father’s secretive and exclusive Mercury Club, where England’s wealthiest men devised strategies for making themselves and each other wealthier; and perhaps conclude with a ball much like this one, where most of the women could be counted on to look yearningly past every other man present in the hopes they would intercept one of his smolders.
What Lyon could have told nearly anyone was that even he envied Lyon Redmond. Because the Lyon Redmond of current lore was primarily simply that: lore.
It was said he effortlessly excelled at everything. It wasn’t true. He focused on what he wanted to master and methodically, ruthlessly conquered it, whether it was cricket or calculus or fencing or shooting or a woman. And while it was true he invariably got what he wanted, he made absolutely certain the effort never showed.
He’d been born knowing the power of subtlety and the advantage of surprise. It was in the Redmond blood, after all.
Which meant he was also discreet about his carnal indulgences.
All in all, given other choices, Lyon would still ultimately probably decide to remain himself.
But he was beginning to feel like a prize bull confined to a gilded pen until such time as his father, Isaiah Redmond, deemed it was time for him to fertilize a carefully chosen aristocratic heifer. The Duke of Hexford’s daughter, Arabella, seemed a likely choice. Though Arabella was hardly a heifer. She was stunning and shy to the point of muteness and blushed apologetically after everything she said.
But she wasn’t here tonight. This particular ball was far too rustic an event for the daughter of a duke. Lyon was home for good from Oxford, though he had come by way of a lengthy stay in the family town house in London. London’s diversions were a startling contrast to those of Pennyroyal Green, whose closest thing to a den of iniquity was the Pig & Thistle and the perennial cutthroat chess game between Mr. Culpepper and Mr. Cooke.
Not that Lyon lingered in any iniquity dens. He cherished his inheritance, and he knew precisely what was required of him in order to keep it.
“Pay attention, you hapless fools,” he commanded his brothers. “It’s more like . . .”
Dozens of young women were milling about, most of them in white, some of them titled, all of them glowing and pretty in the way that youth and hope is always pretty, and it was charming and comfortable and as English a scene as one could wish for.
Later, Miles would swear he literally heard the sound of a gong being struck when Lyon clapped eyes on her.
But for Lyon, the prevailing sensation could only be described as panic.
Panic that she might be a vision rather than an actual woman. Panic that she was an actual woman, but that he might never be able to touch her, and his entire life would be rendered meaningless if he couldn’t. Panic that she would have nothing to do with him. Panic that he wouldn’t know what to say if she would have something to do with him.
It was absolutely absurd, and all of this would have amused every person who had ever met him, for Lyon, like his father, seemed to have been born knowing just what to say to get people to do just what he wanted.
She was wearing white muslin, beautifully cut and simple, but so were many of the other girls. She was petite. So were many of the other girls.
But she was somehow as distinct as the first wildflower one happens upon after a long, brutal winter.
An ache started up somewhere in the vicinity of his rib cage.
Her face was like a heart on a slender pale neck—perhaps that’s why he’d thought of flowers?
Her mouth, however, made him think of . . . other things.
Her mouth was a sinful pale pink pillow.
His brothers were staring at him.
“Lyon, what the devil is the matter?” Jonathan demanded. “Aren’t you a bit young for apoplexy? What on earth are you look . . .”
He trailed off. He’d followed the direction of Lyon’s gaze.
Which terminated in a slim, black-haired Olivia Eversea.
“Who is that?” Lyon’s voice was distant. A studied casualness.
“You don’t recognize her? That’s Miss Olivia Eversea. She of the good works, the too-clever-by-half . . . an Eversea, Lyon.”
Jonathan shot a worried look at Miles.
“No, Lyon,” Miles said, and this time he was deadly earnest. “You can’t be seri— No, no, no, no, no, n . . .”
Because Lyon was already moving toward her, carried like so much flotsam on the tide.
He wove through the crowd, leaving a little wake of turned heads. He might have even smiled and nodded appropriately, for such was his breeding, and such were his reflexes. Feminine hearts lifted and then broke as he passed.
Olivia lifted her head abruptly when he’d nearly reached her, as if she’d heard that gong. Her eyes flared for an instant.
And then she smiled.
Slowly.
Incandescently.
But with absolutely no curiosity or surprise.
More as though she’d been expecting him.
That smile . . . it was like walking through a door into a world he’d never suspected existed. He understood, all at once, the word “joy,” and why it was so small, just three letters. It was as simple and profound as a sudden flame in the dark.
He stopped about three feet away from her.
For a moment or for a year, they stood silent and smiling like loobies, as if they’d already said everything they were ever going to say to each other, perhaps in some other lifetime.
No one else existed.
And yet later they were to discover that dozens were watching all of this via sidelong glances and outright stares and stricken glares.
“Of course,” she said, finally, softly.
“Of course?” he repeated tenderly. Already cherishing those two words as the first she’d said to him. They seemed to capture everything about the moment. Of course. Of course it’s you I’ve waited for my entire life. Of course we’re meant to be together forever. Of course.
“Of course I’ll dance with you, Mr. Redmond. It’s why you’re here?”
He recovered quickly. “Among other reasons.”
She tipped her head to the side and looked at him through lowered lashes, a look amusingly reminiscent of his own patented sultry one. “I suppose we can discuss your other reasons during the waltz.”
Splendid! She was a flirt!
“Oh, I’m certain the discussion will take at least three waltzes. It might even require a lifetime.”
He’d never said anything quite so bold.
He’d never meant anything more fervently.
He was alarmed at himself and hoped he hadn’t alarmed her, but he hadn’t a compass for whatever this was and he didn’t know what else to do besides speak truth.
He held his breath for her response.
She made him wait, and he counted that wait in heartbeats.
“Why don’t we start with the waltz,” she said.
The words were both a challenge and a promise.
The promise lay in the fact that her words, albeit insouciant, were a little breathless.
Which is how he knew her heart was beating as fast as his.
And then she laid her hand on his proffered arm and led her out to the floor.
OLIVIA HAD NEVER been quite this close to Lyon Redmond, and it was so exotic she felt as though she’d
been given an actual lion to dance with. Everseas and Redmonds did not dance with each other. If humanly possible, they did not speak to each other, or about each other, or do business with each other. For as long as she could remember, it was understood that the word “Redmond” would be treated in their house rather as though someone had silently broken wind in company. Its occurrence was distasteful but occasionally unavoidable, and while it could be politely ignored, it was certainly not encouraged or enjoyed.
But he’d appeared before her and a curious thing happened: the entire ballroom had suddenly gone soft at the edges, and it was as though she could see beyond it outward to forever.
She exhaled at length. As if she could finally release the breath she’d been holding her entire life. Waiting for him.
She hadn’t yet had a season—she would most definitely have a season next year and it was generally assumed she would cause quite a stir and a veritable stampede of suitors, which she rather enjoyed picturing—but she’d heard all the things said about him, of course, and she’d been inclined to believe them. That murmurs soughed through ballrooms when he entered, and one would know he’d arrived by the near wind created by fluttered fans and eyelashes and heads whipping round to get a look. That other young men threw back their shoulders and stood straighter, but they couldn’t duplicate whatever it was he brought into a room: a self-possession, an unmatchable elegance, and an arrogance that challenged and awed. Something innate.
Now, however, with his hand at her waist and her hand gripped in his, the two of them were quiet, and something about the quality of his silence made her feel strangely protective.
It occurred to her that arrogance was an excellent cloak for a sort of shyness.
And now they had no choice but to waltz through a room filled with dropped jaws. Hopefully none of them belonged to any of her brothers. They could usually be counted upon to be off causing dropped jaws of their own. Her parents weren’t here tonight. They had clearly assumed that nothing was more benign than a Pennyroyal Green assembly and that Olivia would be the last person to do something untoward.
Her head reached to about Lyon Redmond’s collarbone.
If she tipped her head up and he tipped his down simultaneously, and she stood on her toes, by her calculations their lips would meet effortlessly.
She’d never had such a thought before in her entire life.
The backs of her arms began to heat.
His face was a glorious geometry of angles meeting planes meeting hollows that seemed specifically designed to make hearts pound and breathing more difficult, as if the observer had suddenly been thrust into a different altitude. Olympus, perhaps.
Really, he was untenably handsome and alarmingly masculine.
But his blue eyes were warm and bemused.
“It just occurred to me that I may have absconded with you, Miss Eversea. Was this waltz already spoken for?”
“Of course it was. But I’ll apologize to the gentleman in question apace,” she said airily.
“‘Apace’?” He was amused. “Would it be the man who is glaring at us? I can see the whites of his eyes as we sail by.”
“That would be Lord Cambersmith.”
“Good God, that is Bumble! I didn’t recognize him in grown-up clothes.”
He lifted his hand from her waist to wave merrily, and Bumble reflexively waved back before he realized what he was doing and dropped his hand to resume glowering.
“I used to go fishing with his older brother. Do you think he’ll call me out?”
“Would you shoot him apace?”
“I would try not to,” he said with mock regret. “It’s just that I never miss, and I should hate to ruin his grown-up clothes, given that he is so lately in them.”
She smiled up at him. The two of them were being insufferably and uncharacteristically selfish but neither could seem to care at the moment. Nobody else in the world seemed important.
“Well, he wouldn’t be within rights to call you out, and he won’t, anyway. I’ve known him almost since birth. He hasn’t any sort of claim on me.”
A hesitation.
“Has anyone else?”
A blunt, bold question. Low, and gruff again.
“No.”
Though she sensed she had just been claimed.
Another little silence, as the truth of that settled in.
“And you, Mr. Redmond? Did you disappoint a particular young woman?”
“Dozens of them, likely. There are only so many waltzes during any given ball.”
This was so arrogant she laughed, and he smiled down into her eyes, teasing her. He was laughing at himself.
His smile faded and he grew serious and almost diffident.
“I will apologize to Bumble, and feel I must apologize to you, too. I can’t remember the last time I so egregiously abandoned my manners. It’s just that I . . . that it seemed important to reach you before you could disappear.”
That little hesitation charmed her. “Disappear?”
He paused again. “The way dreams do, when you wake in the morning.”
The words were gruff. She knew them to be truthful, because she sensed they’d caused him a great measure of embarrassment.
This was first indication that the matchless Golden Boy Lyon Redmond, who towered over her and had shoulders for miles, could be hurt.
Just let anyone try, she thought fiercely.
She accidentally ever so slightly squeezed his hand.
He returned the pressure subtly.
Never let me go. An irrational thought, especially since she suddenly wanted the waltz to end so she could dash off, run and run like a firework let loose. Or find a corner and think about all the things she felt right now, all of them confusing, all of them dazzling, all of them filling her a trifle too full. She was not impulsive, and she always liked to know the why and how of things, and she did not know how she had come to be dancing with him. Only that she would rather be nowhere else in the world than here, in his arms, in this ballroom.
“You’ve been away for some time, Mr. Redmond,” she said finally. When it seemed he still couldn’t talk.
“Oxford.”
“What did they teach you there?”
“Quite a number of things. Latin, cricket, how to get rich. Or richer.”
“Truly? Is there a professor of wealth, then?”
“They all are, if you listen properly. It’s how one applies what one learns. And the friends ones makes.”
She hadn’t the slightest objection to wealth although she often found its unequal distribution and the results thereof unfair and intolerable, and she was fascinated by this point of view.
“How do you intend to become richer?”
“Steam engines. Clever investing.”
“Steam engines?”
“Or rather, railroads. I do believe steam engines are the future of transportation. Imagine, if you will, Miss Eversea, a Great Britain united by rail from end to end. One day you may be in Scotland in a matter of hours. Or Bath. I’ve also ideas for importing and exporting. I do think the day of the canal will be finite, and—is this inappropriate waltz conversation? Ought I to be complimenting you on your . . .”
A swift glance that took in her coronet, her necklace, the soft fair swell of her bosom peeking very modestly above the lace she’d chosen so carefully for that particular gown.
He said nothing.
But that look poured down through her like hot honey and fanned out through her veins and she knew she was flushing.
“Thank you,” she said, finally, as surely as if he’d spoken.
He laughed again, sounding delighted.
It turned heads, that laugh.
He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “The redoubtable Mrs. Sneath is watching. I just saw her turban twitch. I believe it’s because her eyebrows went up.”
Olivia laughed, too, charmed to her toes, then stifled the sound, too conscious that the two of them ought not be enjoying th
emselves so instantly and thoroughly.
“She is redoubtable, isn’t she? And fearsome. I spend a good deal of time with her on the Society for the Protection of the Sussex Poor. My job is to take a basket of food for the Duffy family once a week. On Tuesdays.”
“The Duffys . . .” he frowned faintly. “They live in the house at the south end of town, beyond that big double elm tree. The house that’s all but falling down.”
“Yes!” She was peculiarly delighted that he knew this. The elm had been split by lightning and had gone on growing as if it hadn’t noticed.
“Mrs. Sneath certainly accomplishes things. And has since I was a boy.”
She was suddenly sorry she’d seen him only from a distance when she was a little girl, or the back of him when she was in church, and that she hadn’t hoarded every single glimpse to pore over in her mind later.
It occurred to her that they likely knew all the same people and all the same places, but had seen all of them from different perspectives. Their families included.
“I should like to be like her when I am older,” she said.
“You haven’t a prayer of being her when you are older,” he said instantly.
She bristled. “And why? I admire her immensely. She does so much good.”
He was unmoved by her little flare of ferocity, when she’d seen other men blink in the face of it.
“Oh, I think she’s remarkably, admirably effective. Like a general, she identifies needs, rallies the troops, and goes after addressing them quite unsentimentally. But I think it’s in part a redirection of her energies due to disappointment. Her boys are mostly grown and I think her husband bores her. I do not believe for an instant, Miss Eversea, that you are destined for that sort of boredom.”
She smiled slowly. The observation about Mrs. Sneath’s marriage seemed faintly scandalous, but it reminded her that for all her intelligence, he was still older and more seasoned and he’d seen more of people and the world. She had never thought about it in such terms, and she suddenly wanted to think about every adult she knew in a new light.
Poor Mrs. Sneath.
Lucky her, to have a thrilling life ahead of her.
Lucky her, to be claimed by Lyon Redmond.
The Legend of Lyon Redmond Page 5
