“Brandy.”
She poured a glass. “I was coming to fetch Clarissa, merely.” She settled for a half truth as she handed the glass to him. “Lady Beaumont is a stickler for the proprieties. Until you wed, she must limit your time alone together.”
“You and I are alone. Will that cause gossip?”
She looked up quickly, but his face told her nothing. Surely he wasn’t flirting—not with her. He wanted reassurance, she decided. “Of course not. I am an old friend of your betrothed and a guest in her house. I—”
“There ye be, miss!” A maid rushed into the room. “’Tis an uproar below stairs, and that’s a fact. Wine in the cellar’s two cases short, and Timms be shouting at James over it, and then the lobster for them patties were bad when Cook opened the crates, and she went into a swoon. Oh, and Ruddle says as Lady Beaumont’s laid down on her bed with the headache and needs you to fix one o’ them p-powders.” Out of breath as she finished, the maid bobbed a belated curtsy.
“Oh, dear,” Sarah murmured, embarrassed to have the household’s problems blurted out in front of the marquess. “You’ll pardon me a moment, my lord?” At his nod, she ushered the girl into the hallway.
Sarah kept her voice low. “Lilly, tell Timms he must return to cleaning the ballroom, and I will handle James. Send Willy to Gunter’s—inform them Lady Beaumont simply must have lobster, and counts on them to procure it. I shall return in a moment to make up Lady Beaumont’s powder.”
She hesitated, fighting a craven desire to call farewell to the marquess from the hallway and retreat below stairs. The ring pressed her wrist with the heavy weight of Duty.
“Go along, Lilly. I shall be down directly.” The maid eyed her uncertainly, then bobbed a curtsy. As the girl departed, Sarah forced herself to reenter the library.
“You said you are a guest in this house?”
“Why, yes. Oh, you mean—” At his raised eyebrow, embarrassment flushed through her again. Evidently her voice hadn’t been lowered enough. “I’m very grateful for Lady Beaumont’s sponsorship, and I do like to be useful. Domestic details are fatiguing to one of her delicate constitution, she says, and I’m happy to spare her. I’m quite accustomed to managing a household.”
“You’re Wellingford’s eldest, aren’t you?”
“Yes. With a houseful of servants and siblings, I have vast experience.” She took a deep breath, her fingers clutching his ring. “But with the ball tonight, you must forgive me for leaving you, after I—”
“Give back something that belongs to me?”
Again he surprised her. She’d sworn he’d not noticed her retrieving the ring. Feeling somehow guilty, she opened her hand, holding it out on her palm.
“I should return it. But I beg you, let me return it to Clarissa instead.” She paused, seeking the most persuasive words. “She is…high-spirited, I grant. Having lost her father when so young, she’s been given her head much more than is good for her. When her temper cools, she will wish to beg your forgiveness. Will you allow her to?”
He looked at her steadily. “Does she often fall into such, ah, ‘high-spirited’ freaks?”
Sarah stared at the ring in her hand, seeking some response short of blatant falsehood. “Clarissa has the disposition often reputed to go with her coloring,” she replied carefully. “But she is also generous, courageous and loyal. Granted, her—exuberance—needs curbing. She should have learned that years ago, but no one ever troubled to teach her. The small effort of guiding so beautiful and accomplished a lady would be well worth the prize. Do you not agree, my lord?”
She dared not even contemplate Lady Beaumont’s reaction should her appeal not convince him. Swallowing hard, she offered the ring again, praying he would not take it.
She didn’t realize she’d closed her eyes until she felt his hand on hers. For a horrified moment, she thought he meant to gather up the ring.
“You may open those solemn silver eyes, Miss Wellingford.” He curled her fingers back around the ruby. “I will spare you the task of informing Lady Beaumont her daughter just jilted her fiancé, mere hours before the ball that was to present them to the cream of the ton.”
A vision of the piteous shrieks and burnt feathers that must have followed such a revelation shook her. “Thank you, my lord,” she said faintly. She looked up to see him smiling at the relief she hadn’t managed to conceal.
Feeling better, she smiled back. “I’m sure Clarissa will write you, wishing to meet before the ball to apologize. I must go, but please stay and finish your brandy.” She held out her hand. “Good day, sir, and again, my sincerest thanks for your understanding.”
He shook her hand, but to her surprise, retained it. “Bear me company a moment longer, if you will.” As she looked toward the open door, a protest on her lips, he continued, “Your domestic crises will wait, and I dislike drinking alone.” He turned on her his very charming smile.
When she nodded reluctantly, he brought her fingers to his lips for a brief salute. “Thank you, my very cool and calm Miss Wellingford.”
His breath seemed to have ruffled the tiny hairs below her knuckles. She took the hand back, feeling less than cool and calm. Not at all certain it was the thing for her to entertain him alone, even with the door open, she seated herself at the edge of a wing chair.
He settled on the small sofa and grinned at her. “I shan’t ravish you, you know, and I’ll send you off before there’s any irreparable damage to your reputation.”
“Don’t be nonsensical,” she replied, nettled that he had perceived her unease. “I’m hardly a green girl in need of a chaperon, and your passions are elsewhere engaged.”
His grin widened. “All right, I’ll behave. But after observing you fling yourself—quite decorously, of course—into the breach of a distressing scene and handle it so neatly, I admit a juvenile desire to see what might ruffle that calm veneer. Are you truly ‘Ice,’ Miss Wellingford?”
“Certainly not. I have a full share of all the warmer emotions. Wexley cursed us with that silly sobriquet before you came to London, and I hoped, since you’ve replaced him in Clarissa’s regard, we might escape it.”
“Not if you continue to wear white gowns and Clarissa her red. With your fair coloring, and her fiery hair, the ton is constantly reminded.”
Sarah couldn’t admit that new gowns were, for her, an impossibility, but with a trousseau to plan perhaps Clarissa could be persuaded. “You might suggest you should like to see Clarissa in emerald, to match her eyes. She refuses to wear the so-called ‘insipid pastels’ generally required of girls in their first Season, but she’s fond of bright hues.”
“Would she change from her favorite russet for me, do you think? I wonder.”
Before Sarah could frame an unexceptional answer to that leading remark, the marquess laughed. “I’ll ask no more questions that force you to choose between truth and loyalty. Clarissa has a good friend in you, indeed. But since you are, as you put it, not a green girl in her first Season, how did two such opposites as you become friends?”
“Do not men ever befriend their opposite? And we met as you probably met your closest companions, at school.”
“True, but my friends from Eton were of an age. You must be—four years older than Clarissa?”
“I’m three-and-twenty, my lord,” she admitted. “We were schoolmates at Mrs. Giddings’s Academy for Gentlewomen.”
“And?”
Sarah looked up with a tiny frown. Surely he wasn’t interested in schoolgirl reminiscences.
“I’m eager to learn everything about my betrothed,” he said blandly.
“Of course,” she replied, still puzzled.
“You were telling me how you came to be friends.”
Wary, she took up the tale. “We met, as I said, at school. As you might expect with one of her commanding personality, Clarissa was her form’s acknowledged leader. After several—incidents, we came to admire each other’s strengths, and grew to be friends.”
“‘Incidents,’ Miss Wellingford? You alarm me. What sort of mischief did my future wife brew?”
“Nothing significant.” Sarah was sure Clarissa would not thank her for revealing details of her hoydenish youth. Even if he did wish—belatedly—to learn “everything” about Clarissa, she hardly felt it her task to enlighten him.
His lordship, however, continued to stare at her with a wide-eyed expectancy that positively begged her to impart all manner of ill-advised confidences. Well, she would not.
“We had a few, ah, disagreements over strategy, but resolved them. And later indulged in the normal sorts of high jinks schoolchildren enjoy.”
“She was volatile, and you were the cautious one?”
“Something like that. I always favored the prudent approach, while Clarissa tended to be more adventuresome.”
“Passion and Prudence, eh?” His shoulders shook. “What a pair you must have been.”
“Oh, we did not long collaborate. The next year, things, ah, grew difficult at home, and I had to withdraw. We lost contact until we met by chance this spring at Lady Moresby’s rout. Clarissa invited me to call, and I assisted Lady Beaumont with several trifling matters. Then—”
“Wexley made his infamous remark?”
“Yes,” she said shortly, not wishing to pursue the point. The very day after Wexley’s comment, Lady Beaumont invited her to reside with them in Grosvenor Square. Revealing that detail, however, might insinuate Clarissa resumed their friendship because their continued appearance together would give The Beauty a unique cachet to set her apart from the other Diamonds of the Season. Though Sarah privately suspected as much.
“As I was saying, learning I was staying with an elderly aunt, for Mama was too ill to sponsor me, Lady Beaumont graciously asked me to spend the remainder of the Season.”
“Where you would be closer at hand to ‘assist with trifling matters’?” Englemere asked dryly.
Sarah drew herself up. The fact that he echoed her own opinion merely made her more uncomfortable, for he must know she could never agree to so shockingly uncivil an assessment, regardless of its truth. “In this house,” she replied stiffly, “I have been treated with every kindness, as a favored guest. If I have said anything to make you think otherwise, then I have expressed myself badly indeed.” Rising, she nodded to him. “I must bid you good-day.”
He rose too, rueful dismay on his face. “Now I have offended you. You said nothing, and I meant no disrespect, to you or your gracious hostess. I spoke out of turn, as I sometimes do among friends.” One corner of his mouth turning up, he offered her an apologetic half smile. “Pray forgive me, Miss Wellingford.”
A dimple creased the skin next to his mouth. She had the absurd desire to touch it, and gave herself a mental shake, annoyed both at his uncommon perspicuity and his effect on her. Of course he was charming, she told herself crossly. He probably practiced in front of his glass.
“Miss Wellingford?” he repeated, looking grave now.
She nodded shortly, but before she could reply, the maid reappeared at the doorway.
“I be so sorry to disturb you again, but, oh, please, miss!” Lilly gasped. Her expression as desperate as her voice, she stood on the threshold, breathing gustily and pleating the edge of her starched white apron.
“Yes, Lilly, I’m coming. My lord.” Sarah curtsied.
As she rose, he once again caught her hand and brought it to his lips. “Thank you for the conversation, Miss Wellingford.” Craning his head to ascertain the maid had already started down the hall, he added softly, “I must also apologize for being so—inquisitive. It was just borne upon me rather forcefully that the events of a Season don’t allow one to gain a very clear insight into another’s character. I was casting about, I suppose.”
She drew back her hand, trying not to let the unexpected prickling sensation fluster her. “Indeed, my lord, I’ve sometimes thought all the busyness was expressly designed to prevent couples from getting to know each other.” Belatedly realizing that was hardly a fortuitous remark, she looked up to catch him grinning at her.
Torn between exasperation and humor, she shook her head. “Now, before you trick any more impolitic comments from me, I must go.”
“To make yourself useful?”
“I like to be useful,” she said at her loftiest. His throaty chuckle followed her into the hall.
She’d brushed through that tolerably well, she decided as she hurried after the maid. Once she settled the household, she would search out Miss Clarissa. The peal she intended to ring over that damsel should echo in her flighty friend’s ears for a week.
What a charming, intelligent woman, Nicholas thought as Miss Wellingford departed. Not that one could trust appearances, of course. He’d met her before, but she always seemed to withdraw into the background, and he’d not taken much notice of her.
Though she lacked the sort of vibrant loveliness that instantly captured masculine attention, her gray eyes and classic profile crowned with a coronet of white-gold braids were nonetheless attractive. And her womanly form merited much more than a second glance. Would that ice melt if one loosed those heavy plaits from their pins, fanned the silken strands free to play down—
In a wash of heat, he squelched his wayward thoughts. Best concentrate on the problem at hand.
The lady who’d just left him was about as different from his volatile betrothed as one could imagine. He’d chosen Clarissa Beaumont for her beauty, breeding and the fact that, of all the eager young misses crowding the Marriage Mart this Season, she alone didn’t bore him.
He hadn’t bargained on a chit of her tender years being already a hardened flirt. Or a shrew.
Nicholas swirled the brandy in his snifter and frowned. Should he have forbidden Miss Wellingford to give Clarissa back his ring? But how could he have resisted the appeal in those lovely silver eyes?
He recalled his fiancée’s ugly tantrum, and shuddered. He’d better devise an effective plan, lest he spend a lifetime regretting that bit of gallantry.
Having sorted out the wine, smoothed feelings, succored Lady Beaumont and supervised the unloading of the new lobster, Sarah at last sought Clarissa. Her anger had cooled, but she still intended to give that rash young lady a thorough dressing-down. The task was, how should she deliver it so that the increasingly unmanageable Miss Beaumont paid her any heed?
Drawing, for the moment, a blank in that suit, her thoughts wandered to the marquess. She reviewed their conversation, wondering again why a man of his obvious wit would choose to wed a lady as self-absorbed as Clarissa.
Sarah shrugged. He’d not be the first gentleman whose powers of discernment diminished in direct proportion to the beauty of the lady. Besides, as a leader of London society, he would naturally prefer a bride who flourished there.
Her conscience smote her at that dismissive assessment. To be fair, she must admit she’d learned at first hand seven years ago that he was also a man of honor and compassion.
Remembering that incident inevitably recalled thoughts of Sinjin, and she flinched. With habit of long practice, she took a deep breath, waited for the ache to ease and forced her mind back to the marquess.
Were the widower not society’s most famous gambler, as well as its most eligible bachelor, she might find him wholly admirable. But he did gamble. Indeed, Englemere’s Luck was a byword throughout the ton.
Coming to London from Oxford with an exalted title and only a modest competence, in a few years at the tables he’d amassed a fortune reputed to be second only to Golden Ball’s. It seemed, regardless of the wager or the game, the lord marquess could not lose.
Clarissa, along with the rest of the Upper Ten Thousand, considered his gaming prowess just another manly trait. Sarah could not.
She had seen her father when the gambling fever seized him, knew only too well the feckless optimism that, when Lady Luck frowned, convinced a man that surely the next hand, or the next throw of the dice, would find her smi
ling again. One reckless wager would follow the next until nothing was left, and heaven help any who depended on him.
Never would Sarah entrust her future to a gambler. Since Clarissa obviously didn’t share her reservations, she could only hope, for her friend’s sake, that Englemere’s Luck would hold for a lifetime.
Which brought her back to Clarissa. As vexing as her friend sometimes was, Sarah truly wanted the best for her.
In addition to striking looks, Clarissa had a keen wit and a tempestuous spirit as often sunny as surly, as soon generous as toplofty. However, Sarah worried, having become the reigning belle, she seemed to forget that even for an incomparable there were limits. Limits, Sarah must make her recognize, that Clarissa could disregard only at her peril.
In offering their home and sponsorship, the Beaumonts had done Sarah a singular favor. Despite Englemere’s insinuations, and her own reservations over Lady Beaumont’s use of her, she owed them gratitude, loyalty—and an unbroken engagement.
Entering upon her knock, Sarah advanced into the chamber and stopped short. Standing next to the crocodile-legged Egyptian-style settee, Clarissa’s abigail fluttered her hands and cast Sarah an apologetic look. Her charge reclined upon the settee, skirts drawn indecorously up above her ankles while she painted her toenails with silver gilt.
Despite her good intentions, Sarah’s sorely tried temper snapped. “Heavens, Clare! Do you now plan to appear as an abandoned woman as well as a shrewish one?”
Harris gasped, but Clarissa laughed as she sat up, apparently in high good humor after her earlier pet. “I think it vastly becoming.”
“Certainly, if you wish to look like a Haymarket whore. Not, I think, quite the thing for a marchioness.”
“Oh, Sarah, you’re so…fusty.” Her temper miraculously unimpaired, Clarissa waved her hand at the abigail. “Bring us tea or something, Harris. Sarah’s going to read me a scold, and I’d as lief not hear it with you gasping and moaning in the background.”
By the time the chaperon exited, Sarah had her ire under control. “At least you’ve sense enough to expect a lecture. Thunder and turf, Clare, what possessed you to treat Englemere so? Are you all about in the head?”
The Wedding Gamble Page 2
