An Extraordinary Flirtation

by Maggie MacKeever

  “If you must,” said the marquess. “Do it by the hearth, where you can’t damage anything.”

  Zoe straightened—it wasn’t very comfortable to wilt—and gazed sternly at the figures on the bed. Lord Mannering looked as comfortable as any oriental pasha with one of his houris clutched to his side. “I think very poorly of you, my lord.”

  Why did that not surprise him? Nick might have been more annoyed about the low esteem in which so many people seemed to hold him had not Cara been pressed up as close against him as if she wished to crawl inside and hide. “Why, I wonder, should you think I care?”

  “Insufferable!” Zoe gasped, and took a turn about the chamber, much as her aunt had done before her, although without the resultant breakage, and uttering such dramatic phrases as, “I won’t trust myself to express,” and “Things have come to a sorry pass,” and “I do think it very hard,” a phrase that caused Cara to snicker, despite her embarrassment.

  “Brava! A performance worthy of Mrs. Siddons,” said Lord Mannering, when he had listened to as much nonsense as he could tolerate, “fleshpots” having been the deciding word. “Now, if you can stop emoting for a moment, perhaps we might put our heads together and discover some way out of this predicament.”

  “It is more than a predicament!” Zoe put her hands on her slender hips. “You are supposed to seduce me, Lord Mannering, and here I find you seducing my Aunt Cara instead. You should be ashamed.”

  Nick regarded her with the interest he might have accorded a particularly repulsive insect. “Why is that?”

  “It should be obvious. Unless you are so great a rogue that you don’t care if Aunt Cara gets her heart broken and sinks into a decline, which very well might prove fatal at her age. Because I must tell you, my lord, that though I mean to be an understanding sort of wife—after all, I shall be having affaires of my own—I do not intend that you should have an affaire with my own aunt!”

  Cara might well have spoken, had not Nick put a hand behind her head and pressed her face back down against his chest. “Too late. And whatever sort of wife you make—which I suspect will be dreadful— you won’t be mine, so I don’t care.”

  Zoe wafted the fan. “Don’t be absurd, my lord. Of course you’re going to marry me. You haven’t any choice.”

  Cara struggled. Nick held her all the tighter. “You really are a limb of Satan, aren’t you, Zoe? If you start shrieking again, I shall have you thrown out of the house, so you had much better not.”

  Zoe opened her mouth and closed it, and opened it again. “You cannot mean that you prefer Aunt Cara! You said I was the most beautiful damsel in all of England. I remember it quite well.”

  The marquess recalled what his life had been before Cara had returned to town, his days filled with the usual gentlemanly pursuits, as were his evenings, all uniformly pleasant and unprovocative—and bland. “Your aunt is no longer a damsel, for which I am immensely grateful, and I prefer her above anyone of any age, even when she’s angry with me, as she is at the moment. Will you behave yourself, cara, if I let you go?”

  Cara nodded. He allowed her to raise her head. However, he still held her against his side, so that she couldn’t scoot off the bed.

  Not that she wanted to go anywhere. Nicky’s hand was soothing, and his body warm. His gorgeous, almost naked body. He was behaving outrageously. Cara hoped he knew what he was about. “So,” said the marquess. “You see why this farce of a betrothal must come to an end.”

  Zoe saw nothing of the sort. Now more than ever she meant to crush Lord Mannering’s black heart beneath her heel. “You’ll forget about Aunt Cara soon enough, once you’re married to me. And then she will wither away like Cousin Ianthe, which will serve her right.”

  Since she was prevented from removing herself to a safer distance by Nick’s strong arm, and since he had just said such very nice things about her, even if they had been said merely in an effort to put off Zoe, Cara relaxed back against his broad chest. “I left Ianthe entertaining Squire Anderley and drinking brandy and planning to remove to Bath or Brighton. I think she’s got over her broken heart. And she refuses to plan your wedding, and I certainly won’t, so you and Beau are on your own.”

  Zoe frowned. “Beau doesn’t know anything about weddings.”

  “Except how to avoid them,” observed Nick.

  Zoe had wanted St. George’s, Hanover Square, but she was an adaptable miss. “Very well, we’ll be wed by special license, then. Or even better yet, elope! And we will do it soon, before you make any further assault on Aunt Cara’s virtue."

  Cara roused from the blissful stupor induced by Nicky’s lazy fingers drawing circles on her arm. “If I don’t give a fig about my virtue, I don’t see why anyone else should, particularly since that horse has long since left the gate.”

  A Loversall was seldom shocked, but Zoe was so much so at that moment that she plopped down on the bed. “No virtue?” she gasped.

  “None.” Cara snapped her fingers. “Gone. Poof. Like a dandelion in the wind.”

  Zoe was impressed. “You’ve only just come to town!”

  Nick smiled. “It doesn’t take long.”

  They were interrupted at this juncture by Mary with the tea tray—a task the male servants decided she could handle on her own, although she had promised to report back to them each and every detail of what was going on. It quickly being established that Lord Mannering was either unable to leave his bed, or in no mood to do so, and additionally that he wasn’t willing to let Lady Norwood do so either, the tray was set down carefully on the counterpane. Nick would have preferred brandy to tea, but had been told that he may not have it, and so Mary thoughtfully fetched some more of the laudanum draught. Since Zoe felt in need of refreshment, and Daisy in need of company, all four ended up snug as bugs in the great carved bed—or like a pasha surrounded by two houris and a hound.

  Zoe’s desire to pitch a fit was temporarily superseded by her amazement regarding her aunt’s behavior. She leaned against a carved bedpost. “I know we Loversalls are victims of our tumultuous passions, but this seems a little fast.”

  Nick lifted one of Cara’s hands to his lips and gazed soulfully at her. “You refer to the abruptness of our, ah, connection. A mere moment can seem a lifetime when one is in the grasp of a fatal passion.”

  Cara gazed soulfully back at him. “Ah, but what signifies a lifetime when one’s senses are overwhelmed?”

  Zoe munched on a biscuit and pondered the queer circumstance that Lord Mannering was looking at her aunt the way she’d wished him to look at her. “Isn’t it unusual that a gentleman should have a fan in his bedroom?”

  Cara smiled. Lord Mannering looked wolfish. “Not at all,” he said.

  Zoe dropped her gaze to the fan, and contemplated the many uses to which such a thing might be put. Daisy crawled closer and poked at it with her nose.

  “No!” said Nick, and reached for the fan, and groaned from the resultant pain. Cara placed her hand on his bare back and rubbed. He purred.

  It was a very nice bare back, as Zoe had already noted, as was his front, not that she had viewed a great number of nude male torsos, but she was sufficiently her father’s daughter to appreciate the aesthetics of the thing. “I am still willing to walk on you, my lord. Beau says I have gifted feet.”

  “No!” snapped Cara, wearied with the game. “Keep your feet right where they are. Just so you know it, Zoe, I’m not going to let you marry Nicky even if I have to elope with him myself.”

  The marquess looked intrigued. ‘Would you elope with me?”

  “No!” said Zoe. “Because then you would abandon her and break her heart, because it’s clear to me now, my lord, that you are a swine.”

  “Swine,” mused Nick. “There’s a new one for the list.”

  Zoe was still ruminating. “You must have known Aunt Cara before, because even a female of our family wouldn’t give her all so quickly as this.”

  As Cara recalled, it hadn’t taken her very
long to give her all after she’d first set eyes on Nicky. She glanced at him. He winked.

  Zoe tsk’d. “But then you came upon me alone in the front hallway, and couldn’t help yourself, and made a dead-set at me, which was a very shabby thing to do. Don’t elope with him, Aunt Cara. He’ll just cast you aside.”

  Perhaps it was the laudanum that made this conversation so damned difficult to follow. “Why should you think I would cast Cara aside?”

  Zoe knew what she knew. This was the same man who had accosted her in Papa’s front hall. Or allowed her to accost him, which was practically the same thing. Although she had to regard her aunt with a new respect, for thinking about a thing (as Zoe had), and doing it (as Cara clearly had), were two entirely different things. “I shan’t allow you to be cruel to Aunt Cara. It’s perfectly all right if you’re cruel to me, because I don’t care. I was going to break your heart anyway.”

  Lord Mannering looked sardonic. “You were.”

  “I was.” Zoe rubbed against the carved bedpost, which made an excellent back-scratcher. “And I probably still will, so you shouldn’t fall in love with me, because I wish to have a child someday, and you are—”

  “Too old.” Nick picked up the fan and trailed it along Cara’s arm, which gave Zoe a notion of what else he might have done with it, the naughty man. A less self-centered miss might have found herself embarrassingly de trop. Zoe merely nibbled on a scone.

  The laudanum was working its magic. As was the realization that Cara hadn’t removed herself from the bed, though she could have done so easily enough, had she truly tried. The marquess decided he would be able to engage in amorous congress again, aches and pains be damned. But first he must manage to get himself un-betrothed, because he had been so cockle-brained as to tell Cara that he wouldn’t quench his appetites with her while he was betrothed to another, and if he didn’t quench said appetites soon, he would surely go mad; and were he to go mad, she would say he deserved it for the way he had treated her earlier, which had indeed been shabby, not to mention cockle-brained. He didn’t doubt for an instant she would have her revenge.

  Nick wound a tendril of Cara’s hair around his finger and wondered what form that revenge might take. Perhaps she would tie him to the bed and torture him with the fan. She glanced quizzically at him as he groaned.

  Poor Aunt Cara! She was smiling at the marquess in a positively addled fashion, although every damsel learned from the cradle the folly of exposing her heart on her sleeve. Aunt Cara had exposed a great deal more than her heart, as anyone with half an eye could see. Clandestine meetings, assignations—but when had there been an opportunity for matters to progress so far?

  Oho! All those headaches. Zoe’s eyes narrowed as she filed this information away. “Lord Mannering is your True Love! This changes everything. Poor Aunt Cara. For your True Love to turn out to be such a—a—”

  “Slug,” supplied Lord Mannering. “Toad. Maw-worm.”

  Cara winced. He had remembered. “What makes you think that Lord Mannering is my True Love?” she inquired, thus distracting the marquess from his musing about which amatory position might be most suitable for a gentleman with a damaged back.

  “Why else would you have married Norwood?” Zoe said reasonably. “Unless you were in love with someone else? I’m glad to have the business explained. Although I don’t suppose you would wish me to tell that to the people who keep asking me.”

  “I would much prefer that you did not.” Cara refused to look at Nick, who took her hand nonetheless and raised it to his lips.

  “I don’t think you should do that,” Zoe said sternly. “It’s me you’re going to marry, if you will recall.”

  The marquess frowned at her over Cara’s fingertips. “You really are the most tiresome chit. The truth is, I don’t even like you much.”

  “Oh!” Zoe clasped her hands to her breast, not the wisest of reactions, since she was still clutching the scone, and consequently smeared crumbs and butter all over her carriage dress, as well as her white collar. After Daisy leapt up to lend her assistance, not even the pink roses and ribbons on Zoe’s bonnet remained unscathed.

  Zoe took off that item and set it on the floor, out of the dog’s sight. “Are you saying that you didn’t come to my papa’s house to make me an offer, my lord?”

  Nick had certainly tried to say so, several times. “I did not.”

  “But you said—”

  “I said I wished to speak with your father. I didn’t say what about.”

  Zoe watched as Lord Mannering pressed his lips to Cara’s fingers, and she raised her other hand to touch his bruised cheek, and leapt to a conclusion that might have smote her sooner, had she not been so self-involved and young: Zoe hadn’t been able to engage the marquess’s heart because it had already been engaged elsewhere. “It was all a sham, wasn’t it? You only pretended to be interested in me, Lord Mannering, so that Beau would bully Aunt Cara into coming to town.”

  The marquess glanced at her. “Well, yes.”

  A terrible blow to a damsel’s pride to find out in so rude a manner that her fiancé preferred someone else. Zoe snatched up the fan and fluttered it. “You needn’t think that I shall fall into the dumps.”

  “Nothing so extreme,” soothed Nick. “You are merely going to decide that we wouldn’t suit, and cry off.”

  Wouldn’t suit? The most elusive bachelor in London wouldn’t suit her? A marquess, to boot? No one would believe such a silly thing. Besides, Zoe wasn’t entirely convinced that she wished to cry off, and thereby forfeit her chance of becoming a marchioness.

  Lord Mannering and her aunt were still making sheep’s eyes at each other, which was hardly what Zoe had anticipated regarding the Experiencing of Life. She consoled herself that any step along life’s pathway was probably better than none. Even if it meant she had to temporarily give up her dream of being wed in St. George’s, Hanover Square. “I’ve made a muddle, haven’t I?” she sighed.

  Zoe was at her most appealing in this rare moment of self-doubt. Cara leaned forward to touch her hand. Even Nick regarded her with slightly less disfavor. “You didn’t make a muddle all by yourself. I am guilty of using you in an attempt to lure your aunt to town. Since you’ve made no secret of your opinion that I’m bordering on decrepitude, no one will think it odd of you to cry off.”

  Zoe wondered if the marquess was in his dotage. It would explain many things. “I can’t cry off now, for the whole world knows we were caught in a compromising situation, and I don’t wish to look like bachelor’s fare, thank you very much! Not that I care about such stuff, but you may be sure Beau does. He has become positively prudish of late.” She pushed away Daisy, who wished to lick her face. “I don’t suppose you’d care to shoot each other, or drink poison, or fall upon a sword?”

  “Odo, Fenella, and Brasilia,” said Cara, in response to Nick’s puzzled look. “And no, we would not.”

  A pity. Zoe had rather fancied such a dramatic end to her proposal. “Then I see nothing else for it. I shall simply tell Beau the truth, and ask him to find a way out of this coil. However, Lord Mannering, you must promise me that you will reform. Beau wouldn’t wish to see Aunt Cara hurl herself off the battlements, or be eaten by a bear, because she found you in the throes of ardor with someone else.” Zoe paused and looked thoughtful. “Well, Beau might not mind so much, but Cousin Ianthe almost certainly would!”

  Chapter 18

  The various members of the Loversall household were gathered in the drawing room, Ianthe in her usual position behind the tea tray, which on this occasion held a coffee urn in Pontypool Japan, decorated with a rustic landscape featuring sheep. Cara perched on the sofa near the fireplace, and Beau lounged in a deep-seated chair, with Daisy leaning against his knee. All were watching Zoe pace the carpet, gesturing and declaiming dramatically. “And so,” she concluded, “you see that it was all a great misunderstanding. It isn’t me who Lord Mannering wants, but Aunt Cara.” She clasped her hands to her bosom.
“True Love will have its way!”

  Beau eyed his sister. “This exceeds all belief.”

  Cara was growing annoyed with so many people—well, actually just two of them, if she didn’t include herself—expressing surprise that the marquess should want her. “What exceeds belief?” she snapped. “That someone should think I wasn’t an antidote?”

  Beau recalled that his sister had a temper of her own, though thankfully not equal to his daughter’s. “That’s not what I meant.” He looked at his daughter. “You aren’t going to try and tell me Mannering didn’t make you flattering overtures.”

  Zoe noticed a butter stain on her sleeve, and rubbed absently at it. “Well, yes, he did. But that was only because he wished for you to send for Aunt Cara to show me the error of my ways. She is his True Love, you see, but then she went and married Norwood.”

  Ah. There was one mystery explained. For a woman who loved one man to abruptly marry another made perfect sense for, and to, a Loversall. Beau turned back to Cara. “You and Mannering.”

  “He did give her the Sophora japonica,” Ianthe pointed out. “A very romantic gesture, don’t you think?” Beau eyed the sapling, drooping in its wooden pot before a tall window. The tree had taken a marked dislike to being dragged all about the town. “‘You’re not planting that thing in my garden! It looks like something the dog dragged in,” he said.

  Cara thought she might plant itch-weed in her brother’s garden, and train it to climb up the wall at night, and creep into his window, and invade his bed. “I wouldn’t dream of it. I shall take my Sophora japonica home with me to the Cotswolds when I leave, which may be very soon.”

  Beau didn’t wish his sister to leave just yet. There was a wedding to plan. “No need to get on your high ropes. I was merely a bit surprised.” He gazed sternly upon his daughter. “I don’t know what rig you think you’re running, miss, but I’m here to tell you that you shan’t.”