The Lady Most Likely...

by Julia Quinn

  “You are a menace,” Piers said, taking her arm. “Shall I signal for the bell?”

  “Oh no, we can’t go in yet,” Carolyn said. “Hugh’s not here, which is neither here nor there because he’s often late for supper, but Georgie isn’t down yet either. I’ll give her a few more minutes.”

  Chapter 18

  Lady Georgina Sorrell had grown accustomed to feeling lonely, ever since Richard died. Before that date too, if she were honest with herself. Poor Richard was ill the whole last year of their marriage, and even before that they seemed to have forgotten how to talk to each other.

  But somehow the loneliness felt particularly acute after watching Captain Oakes kiss his Kate so passionately that they didn’t even know they had an audience. That would make anyone feel a bit dour.

  It certainly wasn’t because Carolyn had originally suggested that she should marry the captain. True, Oakes was the type she liked: big, with that sort of brute manliness about him … She jerked her thoughts away.

  Brutish maleness was a ridiculous quality for a lady to admire.

  Richard had been utterly unlike that. He was always debonair. Polished. Clean-shaven, sweet-smelling.

  Boring.

  There it was: the truth about her marriage finally admitted. Richard had been boring, and then he got that horrible illness and declined for a year. And through all the misery of it, he never complained. He was angelic, really.

  It was hard to live with the memory of an angel.

  He never kissed her so hard that she bent backward, the way the captain kissed Kate, nor looked at her the way that the Earl of Charters looked at Gwendolyn, as if he wanted to lick her from her top to toes.

  And now all those happy couples were gathering in the drawing room to stare into each other’s eyes, and she just couldn’t … she just couldn’t.

  Her evening gown was new, made of a gorgeous brandy yellow silk, so heavy that it had wonderful drape. It was cut with a daring scantiness around the bosom that no debutante could get away with.

  Yet even a new gown with flirty little sleeves and sleek lines didn’t make her feel desirable. Or happy.

  She drifted down the stairs, fingers on the railings. After Richard died, she had made up her mind not to marry again. But even when she reminded herself of the pleasures of eating breakfast alone, of never receiving a knock on her bedchamber door from a man, of never fearing that someone she cared for would be dead by the next morning …

  Still the only thing she felt was envy. Green, fierce envy. She wanted to be desired so passionately that a man’s face looked almost mad with it. She wanted to be kissed until her lips were rosy and her eyes were shining.

  That did it. She reached the bottom of the stairs and rather than move toward the swell of high-pitched voices in the drawing room, she walked straight ahead. A footman sprang forward, opening the front door, and she walked down the steps into the open air.

  The butler scrambled after her with a wrap, but she sent him back into the house. It was only seven in the evening, and the air was warm. The sky was the deep pearly blue that promised twilight. She wandered into the rose gardens, met by the faint hum of bees catching last sips from roses warmed by the sun.

  The stables were beyond the gardens, through a little stone archway and down a pebbled path. By all rights the man in question should be in the drawing room, chattering to debutantes.

  He had lost the first lady on his list to his best friend and the second to Captain Oakes. He should be at his sister’s side, imploring her for the name of a third candidate. But Hugh hadn’t made it to the table earlier than five minutes after the gong any day in the past week.

  The air changed as she left the garden; the earthy smell of warm dirt and manure made roses seem effeminate and cloying. She walked toward the large ring adjacent to the stables. Light poured through the stable window to the rear, but the rest of the ring was in deep shadow.

  For a moment she thought he wasn’t here, but then she saw Hugh with his back to her, riding Richelieu slowly around the ring. She leaned against the fence, listening to the deep rumble of his voice as he talked to his mount. The horse was listening intently, perking first one ear, then the other.

  Richelieu was a rangy, powerful animal, his coat a color of rich brown so dark that it looked near black in this light. There was something of the devil about him, in the tilt of his eyes and the way he kept shaking his bridle as if answering Hugh.

  But it wasn’t Richelieu who caught Georgina’s attention. It was Hugh. Hugh, who was practically her older brother. Hugh, who had picked her off gravel paths when she’d sprawled, wiped her tears, likely wiped her nose, if not her bottom.

  He wasn’t wearing a shirt. He was riding his horse around the ring without a scrap of cloth on his upper body. Just like that, her heart sped up and started thudding in her chest.

  Her memory presented her, willy-nilly, with a picture of her marriage, one that made her husband look like a faded image in a mirror. Richard had been as sleek and white-skinned as she was. He hadn’t been frail, until he was ill, but his arms were wiry and his chest hairless. He was neat, and elegant, and resembled a well-groomed swallow.

  But Hugh—nothing about Hugh could be described as wiry, or sleek. His chest was pure muscle, the kind that came from fighting thoroughbred horses for mastery, day after day. Even in the waning light, she could see that his shoulders were enormous, his arms rippled with muscles as he loosely held the reins. He was turned to the side, slightly away from her, so she could see how the muscles marched down his broad back.

  Her fingers twitched as her imagination leapt straight from watching to touching, to running her hands down those muscles and feeling him live and strong in her arms. He was like a medieval champion, practicing to defend his lady, or to start a Crusade.

  She forgot to breathe, willing him to turn so she could see his chest. Finally, they reached the curve of the stable yard, and Richelieu turned toward her. The horse began to prance a little, lifting his legs in a graceful, flirty dance.

  Hugh laughed down at the stallion, still talking. His skin was a dark honey, so he had probably made a habit of throwing off his shirt when he got too hot. His chest was shadowed with hair that darkened to an arrow just before disappearing into his breeches.

  Wincing at her own foolishness, she discarded the idea of a medieval knight and turned him to a god … Apollo, training a new horse so that he could ride the skies to awake the sun.

  Georgina swallowed. She should leave. Now. Before Hugh saw her, before she acted on the promptings of her overheated imagination.

  He raised his eyes and saw her. It was a moment she never forgot, in the whole of her life: the great bronzed man astride a perfect horse, backed by sky the color of a dark sapphire. Hugh looked as remote and untouchable as any Greek deity—and yet the moment their eyes met, something flared to life in his face that she had never seen on a man’s face before.

  Something that was for her alone. Something that stole the breath from her chest and sent a shiver down her back.

  And then it was gone, and Hugh was swinging down from his mount, giving her a cheerful hello.

  “I suppose I’m late to supper again,” he said, throwing Richelieu’s reins over a post. He didn’t seem to be aware that he wasn’t properly clothed. The last rays of the sun caught on his shoulders and arms.

  Georgina had an overwhelming urge to run. He was absurdly different from the men she had known. Too much, too male, too strong, too—too everything. “Yes, you should come to the meal now,” she managed. “After you bathe, of course.”

  He reached out and pulled a linen shirt off the railing. “I had a bath after the training session this morning. You never come to watch.” He pulled the shirt over his head.

  “I didn’t know you were admitting an audience for your ablutions,” she said, laughing at him.

  “I could make an exception for you,” he replied, his eyes on hers. “But I was actually referring to m
y training sessions with Richelieu.”

  “No,” she said. She refused to join goggling women who sighed over his shoulders and saved sugar for his horse.

  Though to say that she wasn’t sighing over his shoulders would be a lie.

  “Why not?” he asked, sounding genuinely curious. “Don’t you like horses anymore? You loved them as a girl. I still remember that little pony you had—”

  “Sugarpie,” she put in.

  “That’s right. Not a Shetland, but a Fell pony. She had a straight back, as I remember, and a temper.”

  Georgina smiled. “Do you remember how she would buck and carry on if she thought it was high time to return home? If I took her just a hair too far away from the stables, she would gallop me all the way home.”

  “I have a mind to take Richelieu into the country tomorrow,” he said, pushing his shirt into his breeches. “Would you like to come with me?”

  “I haven’t a mount.”

  “Carolyn’s mare is not as feisty as your Sugarpie, but she has nice manners. You’d be doing me a favor.”

  “Oh?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ve been working Richelieu too hard. I need to take him out for fun.”

  “Fun? I thought racehorses liked racing. Isn’t that fun for him?”

  “If training becomes too much like work, he’ll lose heart. I’ll let him eat some grass from a ditch, and steal an apple from an orchard, and just graze in a field, if I can find one without an irate farmer. I want to let him be a horse tomorrow, not a potential winner.”

  “Fun,” she echoed.

  He leaned over the railing and tipped up her chin with one finger. “Do you remember having fun, Georgie?”

  “I often have a good time,” she protested, her eyes caught by his lower lip. All those years when she thought of him as a surrogate older brother, why hadn’t she noticed that his bottom lip was so deep? Because it wasn’t an appropriate thought, that was why.

  “You don’t seem to be having a very good time this summer.” He reached out and tapped her nose. “Droopy lips. Sad eyes.”

  This was the Hugh she remembered, the one who looked out for all of them, who picked up a trailing child, who dried tears and asked questions. “Well,” she said, smiling a bit, “it is true that both of our prospective spouses were stolen away.”

  Something changed in his eyes. “I didn’t know you had one.”

  “Captain Oakes?” she prompted. “Carolyn invited him to this party especially for me, and one of the women on your list snatched him up before I had more than a dance or two.”

  “But Bergeron is dancing attendance on you,” he said, leaning on the fence as if he were prepared to talk all night. “And Geerken, though he’s such a lame fool that I trust you aren’t considering him. I was under the impression that you had sworn off matrimony, but if so, you clearly forgot to inform your devoted swains.”

  “I can’t announce that. I would have nothing to do at balls. No one would dance with me.”

  “Yes, they would.”

  “No—”

  He leaned a little closer. “You’re a widow, Georgie. They would dance with you because you are utterly delicious, and they would love to bed you.” His breath stirred the curls at her forehead. He smelled like clean sweat and faint spice, like straw and man.

  “So you would leave me with no one to talk to but reprobates?”

  “A rake’s conversation is undoubtedly more interesting than Geerken’s.”

  “You make it sound as if no true gentleman would wish to marry me, but I can assure you—”

  “Oh, they want to marry you,” he said. “Pembroke, Landry, and Kitlas. Especially Kitlas. He looks at you as if you’re Venus herself. All except for Louis DuPreye, of course, and that’s because he’s already married.”

  “Then he should stop ogling me,” Georgina said firmly.

  “And touching you,” he said. “You tell me if he goes too far, and I’ll knock him into the next county.”

  Some dim part of her mind registered that Hugh seemed to have cataloged every man who had danced with her in the last week, every man who had paid her a compliment. Of course, he was probably just keeping an eye on her, the way a good brother ought.

  “Unless you want him to touch you,” he added.

  “No,” she said, hardly remembering what it was she wanted or didn’t want, at least when it came to her suitors.

  “You’re so damned beautiful that you could tell every man in the house that you don’t mean to marry, and they wouldn’t give up hope.”

  “You’re just being loyal because you’ve known me so long,” she said, smiling at him.

  “Hair like a flame.” He ran a finger down one of her curls.

  “Temper to match, that’s what my mother always said.”

  “You must know about your eyes, so I’m not going to say anything about them,” he said briskly (and disappointingly). “Perfect little chin, high cheekbones, gorgeous skin … Gods alive, Georgie, just who would you classify as beautiful if not yourself?”

  She felt thrilled—and embarrassed. “I didn’t mean that sort of beauty. I meant the kind of thing that Gwendolyn has.”

  “Gwendolyn?” He looked stunned. “Pale version of yourself, if you ask me. Like a faded portrait.”

  That was uncannily close to her comparison of Richard to him. “I didn’t mean our physical looks,” she said, trying to explain, though she felt like a vain fool begging for compliments. “It’s the way Gwendolyn looks as if she stepped from the frame of a Raphael painting.”

  Hugh turned around and bellowed, “Fimble!”

  A stable hand appeared in the doorway. Hugh gestured toward Richelieu and jumped over the fence. Georgina fell back a step. He towered over her. His hair had fallen over his brow, and his shirt billowed loose again.

  “You’re a fool,” he said conversationally, taking her arm and walking back to the house.

  “I know,” she said. “Let’s talk of something else.”

  “Right. Tomorrow. I’ll see you at the stables at eight in the morning. We have to leave before people drift down to see Richelieu in training.”

  “I didn’t say I would—”

  They were just passing under the old stone arch leading to the rose gardens. He stopped and pulled her to a stop as well. She stumbled, and he caught her arm.

  “You can’t just rein me in like one of your horses, Hugh,” she said, knowing she was trembling. And not from stumbling. It was the warmth of his hand on her bare arm.

  “Damn it, Georgie.” He stared down at her. “You know I’m no good at compliments.”

  “I was fishing for them,” she confessed. “Just ignore me.”

  “That’s just it. I can’t ignore you. I never ignore you.”

  She opened her mouth, but no words came out.

  “If I’ve learned one thing in this damned interminable week, it’s that I feel happy when I see you. Whereas I don’t feel a damned thing when I look at Gwendolyn. Other than relief that she took herself off my list,” he added.

  She could feel a shaky smile shaping on her lips. “Oh, Hugh.”

  He waited, just a moment. He was giving her a chance to start away, like a rabbit jumping from under a hedge. She could utter a careless laugh and scamper back to the house.

  She didn’t move, just stood there.

  Hugh kissed the way he rode: ferociously, fiercely, with attention and control. Of course men had kissed her since she finished her mourning. But kissing Hugh didn’t resemble those kisses.

  Her fingers slid into his hair, and her whole self strained to grasp the sultry smell of him, the firmness of his lips, the strength of his arms around her, even the harsh feeling of the old bricks at her back.

  “Georgie.” There was something in the raw sound of his voice, the way her name lingered on his lips, that woke her up.

  “I don’t want to marry,” she said, pulling back. “I’m not on your list, Hugh. You understand that, don’t
you?”

  “The hell with the list,” he said. And then he was kissing her again, and it was delicious and terrifying. That big body was up against hers, and even through the heavy silk of her gown she could feel the maleness of his demand.

  That was Hugh. Whether he was taming a horse or kissing a woman, he wasn’t afraid of his body. Even now his hands were running down her lower back in an utterly inappropriate way.

  In a way that no man had ever touched her, now she thought of it.

  “What do you mean, the hell with the list?” she said, as his lips slipped from hers and down her neck.

  It felt so good … a temptation to stop thinking and simply revel in the way his lips caressed her skin. But Georgina always thought. She kept thinking throughout the intimacies she shared with Richard, back in the first year of their marriage, when they were still bothering with that sort of thing.

  Richard would courteously inquire whether something was acceptable to her, and she would think about it before deciding. Most of the time she agreed, though she had entirely rejected the idea of making love with the lamp lit.

  She had the feeling that Hugh wouldn’t be so courteous. Scandalously, he had his hand on her bottom now, shaping it, and that was something that Richard would definitely have asked about before he even thought of touching her. And she had a strong feeling that it never would have occurred to Richard to want to caress her there.

  And yet it felt … It felt delicious.

  “We shouldn’t,” she whispered, out of some fugitive sense of propriety.

  Hugh straightened, glanced toward the house. “I have to dress for supper. Sit with me?”

  “I can’t sit with you,” she protested. “You know that as well as I do. We are seated according to precedence, and as the Earl of Briarly, you are so far above me in that respect that I’m practically below the salt, as the old saying goes.”

  His hands tightened on her waist. “I’m not going to spend another damned meal watching Kitlas make cow eyes at you and DuPreye lick his lips and brush up against your shoulder. While I sit next to Gwendolyn, who has no conversation, by the way, grinding my teeth and hoping that DuPreye’s hands aren’t wandering toward your knee under the table.”