Between the Devil and Ian Eversea: Pennyroyal Green Series

by Long, Julie Anne

  And then someone stepped out in front of him.

  He froze.

  A beautiful brunette with a decidedly pouting lower lip. Alarmingly, it took him a moment before he recognized her.

  He’d nearly forgotten about her altogether.

  And there really was no reason to avoid her now.

  “My apologies, Lady Carstairs, for not writing to you earlier. I’ve been unavoidably detained by business both in Sussex and London. But I am so pleased to find you here.”

  “I shall endeavor to forgive you. Some things are enhanced by anticipation.”

  Anticipation.

  She would have to say anticipation.

  It was as though someone had thrust an arrow into his gut.

  He froze for a moment.

  “Is something amiss, Captain Eversea?” Her hand went up to touch his arm.

  “No. Not at all.” He managed a smile. He stared down at her hand resting on his arm, and he was tempted to flick it away. It was a lovely hand, elegant, well-tended. It looked wrong there, somehow, like a spider. “Why don’t you tell me where your rooms are.”

  “The second floor. The third from the stairway.”

  They heard footsteps then, clicking down the hallway.

  A woman’s footsteps.

  Lady Carstairs ducked away. “Until then,” she murmured, and slipped with the skill of someone who was accustomed to slipping away, her fingers trailing his arm.

  Ian turned abruptly, toward the sound of the footfall.

  And went still.

  Tansy stood there.

  She’d been watching him.

  Her face was white.

  They simply stared at each other for some time. The pleasure in simply looking at each other, being in each other’s presence, was barbed with unspoken things.

  She had no right to that expression of betrayal.

  And yet . . .

  At last he spoke.

  “And what can I do for you, Miss Danforth?” he said quietly. Curtly.

  It felt strange. As though he were speaking his native language for the first time in a long time, after speaking another to everyone else.

  For twelve days, four hours, thirty-two minutes, and forty-one seconds.

  And it was a relief just to be near her. Suddenly, gravity seemed much less oppressive.

  She didn’t say anything for a time. She was apparently mustering nerve. How unlike her to need to muster nerve.

  “Are you going to make love to her?”

  He nearly swore. Damn her and her penchant for ambushing him with questions.

  He’d do nearly anything to take that expression from her face, and yet . . . And yet he wanted to shout at her for being naive. Things were as they were.

  “Are you going to marry a future duke?”

  The voices of the partygoers echoed like the remnants of a dream. One of those voices was that of the future duke. The young man with the lofty fortune, the influence, the money, the title. A young man who had likely never cuckolded the Duke of Falconbridge.

  “Probably,” she echoed, her voice frayed. Ever so faintly anguished. Defensive.

  And angry.

  His head went back hard. Then came down in a nod.

  And then he shrugged.

  There they had it, after all.

  More relatively absurd silence ensued.

  And Lady Carstairs was waiting for him in her room, and in minutes, in all likelihood, she would be tapping a satin slipper in impatience. He imagined the lush white curves of her body beneath his practiced hands. He imagined the moans and sighs he knew how to elicit. He would wrap one of her thighs around his waist and take her swiftly against a wall or in a corner. That glorious pleasure and forgetting could be had in burying himself in her body. Temporary surcease.

  Tansy didn’t move, didn’t speak.

  He moved so abruptly, toward her, she flinched.

  “What do you want from me, Tansy?” His voice was low, furious, urgent.

  She clasped her hands in front of her. He looked down at the little white knot of her fists and up at her white face. Two hectic spots of color appeared high in her cheeks.

  He wanted to touch her to soothe that color away.

  He didn’t dare.

  He waited.

  And waited.

  And when her voice came, it was whisper thin.

  “I don’t want you to make love to her.”

  He sucked in a sharp breath. He took the words like an arrow. The sort that murders.

  And the sort that Cupid shoots into its victims.

  There were so many things he could say. He could point out hypocrisy and futility and fairness and rightness. He could point out, yet again, that while she was wise in some ways, she was naive in the ways of the world and that men had needs and all that nonsense, and she had no right, no right, to stand there with that look on her face. That everything said about him was true, and she knew it. He could say that she had driven him to it. She had no right.

  Too bad for you, Tansy.

  It was the most merciful thing to say. It would allow her to go her way and him to go his, which was as it should be. Allow her to loathe him a little, and then a little more, and then finally forget.

  It was what he meant to say, anyhow.

  “Then I won’t.”

  Is what he said instead. Very gently.

  It was tantamount to a confession.

  He didn’t know who he was anymore.

  All he knew is, he wanted her to have whatever she wanted. No matter what it was. No matter what the cost.

  And having just sealed his fate, he spun on his heels and left her just as her lovely face suffused with a nearly celestial light, because he didn’t think he could bear to look at that, either.

  DURING A LULL between dances Stanhope sidled up to him, his handsome young face open and shining. He had a petulant chin, Ian decided, with a surly lack of charity. There was just something about it, the way it sat there, unblemished and square, that bothered him immensely.

  “I just wanted to thank you, Eversea, for your letter informing me about Miss Danforth.”

  “No need,” Ian said curtly.

  “Oh, please don’t deny me the pleasure of my gratitude,” he said quite grandly, looking pleased with the choice of phrase.

  “You’re going to be a duke. Far be it for me to deny you a thing.”

  Stanhope looked momentarily a little uncertain at this, and then he nodded, missing irony completely. Then again, irony is a defense for those who are at least occasionally disappointed, Ian thought, and surely the young lord hadn’t yet experienced anything of the sort.

  “I do think my courtship of Miss Danforth has gone well. Very well, indeed.”

  “Has it?” Ian grit his teeth.

  “It was easy, old man. Really, there was nothing to it.” He snapped his fingers. “A few bouquets, a few compliments about her eyes and the like, a few rides in the old high flyer, and she’s mine! She’s a simple thing, really.”

  “That easy, was it?”

  “Certainly. She’s young yet, and so her personality is still forming. Though she’s cheerful and agreeable. I suspect she can be molded.”

  “Ah. So she’s that malleable, is she?” He wasn’t aware, but his volume was increasing exponentially with each sentence he uttered. No mean feat when speaking from between clenched teeth.

  “Oh, of a certainty, sir,” Stanhope said gravely, on a confiding air. “Oh, she isn’t perfect. She’s a bit vain and frivolous. A bit vapid, I think, and a bit shallow. But that’s due to youth. A few babies will change all of that. And Lord, but she looks perfect.”

  Ian spent a moment in blank, furious speechlessness.

  “Vain? Frivolous? Vapid? Shallow?” Ian hissed the words
as if they were darts he were hurling into a board. Stanhope blinked at each one. “Have you . . . seen a mirror lately, Stanhope?”

  “Ha ha!” Stanhope laughed. He did laugh an inordinate amount. “Oh, ha ha, Eversea! Witty. But she is beautiful,” he pointed out. “She’ll be a marvelous ride, and my heirs will be incredible looking, don’t you think?”

  “Did you just call Miss Danforth . . . a marvelous ride?”

  “Yes.”

  “A . . . marvelous . . . ride,” Ian repeated slowly, flatly. As if learning new vocabulary.

  A red haze was moving over his eyes.

  “Yes?” Stanhope was a little confused now.

  “And you think she’s vapid, shallow, and frivolous. She is.” He said this as if he were trying to record the duke’s words for posterity. As if he wanted to get them precisely right.

  “Well, yes,” Stanhope hastened to reassure him. “But then most women are. The dears. What would we do without them, right, Eversea?” He gazed out over the ballroom at all the other women he might have had so easily, given his title. “And I know you never do without them.”

  Ian stared at him the way he would stare at a cobra he intended to shoot to smithereens.

  For a good long time.

  Without blinking.

  Stanhope looked at him, began to turn back toward the ballroom, and then recoiled when he really got a look at Ian’s expression.

  “You’re worrying me a bit, Eversea. You haven’t blinked. You’re a bit young yet for apoplexy, aren’t you?”

  “You should be worried, Stanhope,” Ian said pleasantly.

  Stanhope looked down and noticed that Ian’s hands were clenched into knots. The better to launch into the jaws of young lords.

  “Did you think . . . Oh, I meant no insult. She’s a grand girl. Splendid. I was certain I made that clear.” He gave a short nod. He seemed to think this took care of it.

  “That’s all you can say? She’s a grand girl?”

  And now Ian was shouting.

  And conversations in the periphery ceased as people craned to hear.

  Stanhope was now clearly baffled, and his feet shifted uneasily. “What higher compliment can I pay? What else is there, really?”

  “What else is there? WHAT ELSE IS THERE?” And suddenly he was breathless and hoarse. “She . . . apologizes to flowers. She talks to the stars. She rolls a perfect cigarette. She thinks about the servants. She smells like a bloody meadow. She shoots like a rifleman. She rides like a centaur. Just being able to make her laugh is like . . . winning a thousand Sussex marksmanship cups. Better than that, you pompous, whinnying, RIDICULOUS ARSE.”

  He was distantly aware that it sounded almost as though he was speaking in tongues, in a series of non sequiturs. That he was gesticulating incredulously and possibly somewhat threateningly. That Stanhope was staring wide-eyed at him, and that the brightening he detected in the room around him might just be the whites of dozens of eyes as they widened, too.

  He didn’t care. They were visions of her, memories, all queued up at the exit of his mind, every last one of them significant, like linked dreams, and he couldn’t stop them. And yet none of them were adequate. None of them added up to the girl.

  Stanhope took another step back.

  “Er . . . the whites of your eyes are showing, Eversea . . .”

  “She has a wit that can cut right through a man. She’s . . . oh, God, she’s gentle. She’s more forgiving than she ought to be and kinder and braver and wiser and more loyal than you’ll ever be, you worthless, mewling, OVERBRED, FATUOUS . . .”

  He trailed off when he realized that he had quite an audience.

  All silent.

  All utterly rapt.

  “Eversea,” someone muttered in resignation.

  “What a pity the syphilis has gone to his brain,” someone whispered. “That must be it.”

  “I haven’t lost my mind!” He said this a little too loudly. And then added, “And I don’t have syphilis!”

  He had lost his mind.

  And to the end of his days he would regret shouting “I don’t have syphilis!” in a crowded ballroom.

  His brothers would never, ever let him forget it.

  The silence that followed was laden with doom.

  Young Stanhope stepped toward him and said quietly, “I say, Captain Eversea, perhaps you ought to retire for the evening? I’ll overlook the insult if you apologize. She’s enough to addle any man’s brains. Just look at her in that dress. Like an angel, she is.”

  Ian almost sighed.

  How very pleasant it would be to shoot this man, he thought idly. How easy it would be to say, “Name your seconds.” He would kill him. There was no question about it. But Stanhope’s only fault was that he’d never needed to develop character, and likely never would. Stanhope was the most important thing in Stanhope’s world, and that was the lens through which he saw everything and everyone.

  And yet Stanhope had enough breeding to forgive him, and this was nearly intolerable.

  Ian looked across the crowd and his eyes met Tansy’s wide blue-gray ones. And immediately he felt her everywhere in him.

  The expression in them nearly buckled his knees.

  And yet . . . if he did kill the young heir, he would destroy her reputation and future, not to mention his own.

  He sought out other pairs of eyes. Genevieve was staring at him with two hot spots of disbelief high on her cheekbones.

  She shook her head just a little, to and fro.

  Falconbridge was watching him, too.

  Ian met his eyes evenly. He’d thought to read murder there.

  But he saw nothing of the sort. He in fact couldn’t read the duke at all.

  For a moment he held that fixed gaze. Unapologetically. Defiantly.

  And suddenly he knew what he had to do.

  It was as clear, almost painfully clear, as if a blind had been yanked up in his bedroom on the morning of the worst hangover of his life.

  But then it was exhilarating. And so very, very simple.

  But first things first.

  “I apologize, Stanhope.”

  He turned on his heel and walked out of the ballroom, and that was a sound he would never forget, either: his boot heels echoing on the wooden floor as everyone watched him walk away.

  “MADNESS. THAT’S ALL it was. You know how old soldiers can be. And you can inspire anyone to madness. You’re very lovely, my dear.”

  He’d taken to calling her “my” this and “my” that, and every time he did, Tansy wanted to swat him, which surely wasn’t the way she should feel about someone who was allegedly about to propose to her.

  “He’s not old,” she said sharply.

  “Older,” Stanhope indulged placidly. Amused with her, apparently.

  There was a certain peace in knowing she was about to be proposed to. It would mean that years of upheaval would end. Life would take on a certainty it had lacked for too long. She would acquire a husband who could be managed. She would obtain what remained of her parents’ fortune. She would never want for anything. He hadn’t yet tried to kiss her, but she knew, thanks to a waltz or two, that he smelled of starch and almost nothing else, and she suddenly had grave difficulty imagining him naked or breaking wind or roaring in the morning.

  Or kissing her.

  Or making love to her.

  The night had continued after Ian’s outburst, and the dammed conversation had flowed again to fill in the brief shocked silence, and then everyone had drunk and danced enough to mostly forget about it.

  Ian, she was certain, had left the ball entirely. She knew he wasn’t in the ballroom as surely as she was certain she would know if the sun suddenly disappeared from the sky.

  She’d stayed. For a short time.

  She was certain she’d he
ld conversations and danced dances and fielded and issued compliments, but she couldn’t remember any of them when she returned to her chambers. She’d begged a headache, and allowed Stanhope to believe it was nerves.

  And Stanhope had parted from her, telling her he’d arranged to call upon the duke at eight o’clock the following morning.

  When she was in her room again, she leaned her cheek against the wall as if she could hear Ian’s heartbeat right through it.

  He was leaving tomorrow. Or so she’d heard.

  She finally made herself undress and crawl into bed, but she didn’t sleep at all.

  Finally, when it was just past dawn, she tipped herself out of bed and followed the little road of light to the window.

  But he wasn’t outside on his balcony.

  And so she sat down and took out her list of requirements one final time.

  She emphatically crossed out of fine moral character and carefully—and very painstakingly in even, small letters, smaller now, because she was running out of room—wrote something else there instead.

  She blew on it impatiently, waiting for the ink to dry.

  Then a tear plopped on it, and she was forced to carefully blot it, and wait even longer, which was maddening.

  And then with a sort of blind purpose she snatched it up and carried it down the hall to the office where the Duke of Falconbridge liked to conduct business.

  She gave a sharp rap on the duke’s door. Sharper than she’d intended.

  “You may enter,” he called. Very alert for that hour of the morning.

  He looked up and began to rise.

  “Titania.” He sounded surprised.

  She curtsied, but otherwise wasted no time on the niceties.

  “This is my revised list, Your Grace. I wanted you to have it.”

  He reached out and gingerly took it. She supposed it was starting to look a little disreputable.

  “From the looks of things, it’s grown quite a bit.”

  “As have I.”

  She had the satisfaction of seeing the duke blink.

  She whirled and left without being dismissed.

  Falconbridge’s eyes fell to the item that was clearly the newest.