Marlowe was a most unlikely chaperone, but she had to admit he was effective. One snarl of his lips sent everyone in their vicinity scattering for cover. He seemed as little enamored of the ball as she was. He finished his champagne in one gulp and picked up a new flute from the tray of a passing liveried servant. He looked almost respectable in his evening costume as he sipped this second beverage, though a bit of his shirttail was poking out the back of his jacket from all of the squirming. He tugged at his new waistcoat, which fit much too snugly about his abdomen, and shifted on his feet restlessly.
“Demmed sweltering in here,” he muttered, jerking at his cravat. “Pardon my French,” he added grudgingly. “You don’t want to dance or anything, do you?”
He was such a gentleman. “I think I can resist the temptation if you can.”
“Good,” he grumbled, staring down at his feet. “These infernal boots pinch my toes. Feel like a bloody circus act in all this plumage.”
Katherine only barely refrained from pointing out that for once he did not resemble a circus act.
“Oh, hell,” he breathed, gesturing rather blatantly with his head and nudging her with his elbow so hard his champagne sloshed dangerously close to the rim. “Look who’s coming this way.”
“Well, I can’t very well look now. Who is it?”
“That bloody Scot. What’s his face. The one with the squint who were pawing you earlier.”
“He wasn’t pawing me. He was dancing the quadrille with me and tripped.”
“So he says.” He groaned. “Port side, Lady M.”
Katherine was not sure which way was port side, having no grasp of nautical matters, but she soon discovered the answer when Sir Thaddeus drifted up on her left and gave her an ungainly leg. He squinted down at her when he’d straightened back to his full height. “Lady Manwaring.” He squinted at Marlowe. “Viscount.”
Marlowe grunted moodily in response.
“If you are not engaged, my lady, may I request the next dance?” Sir Thaddeus asked.
Marlowe answered for her. “No you may not. She’s dancing it with me.”
Sir Thaddeus’s squint turned arctic. “Don’t see you leading her out, Marlowe.”
“Off with you, I say,” Marlowe said, seizing Katherine’s arm and clutching her to his side. “You won’t be throwing a rub in the way of our plans tonight, you blackguard.”
Though he clearly had no idea what Marlowe meant (neither did Katherine), Sir Thaddeus would not be dissuaded. He turned back to Katherine. “One word, Lady Manwaring, and I shall take you away from this scoundrel.”
Marlowe’s face started to go a worrying shade of red.
“Thank you, Sir Thaddeus. But I have indeed promised the waltz to the viscount,” she said quickly, before the two idiots decided on a dawn appointment over a dance.
“There you have it, Davies. She’s with me. Come on, Lady M, the music’s starting,” Marlowe said, tugging her toward the dance floor. He paused at the edge, realizing he still clutched his champagne flute. He shoved it into the hands of a small, wallflowerish sort lurking by a potted plant, who gasped in astonishment at the impertinence.
Katherine was glad of the narrow escape from Sir Thaddeus’s squint until she realized she would have to waltz with Marlowe. He was even more inept on the dance floor than Sir Thaddeus. They stumbled into the first turn.
“That was quite heroic of you, Marlowe,” she said, with the utmost sarcasm, after regaining her balance. “I am grateful, but really, you needn’t take it upon yourself to be my bodyguard.”
“It ain’t you I do it for,” he grumbled, concentrating on his feet, though it did no good. He shot them off in the wrong direction, sending them right into the path of the aforementioned royal duke and his long-suffering wife. “Though I do like you, and all of that rot. Not like most females I’ve had the misfortune to know. Have a brain.”
She laughed. “I think most women have fine minds. They just rarely use them. They’re almost as bad as men in that respect.”
“Touché, Lady M,” Marlowe said grudgingly.
“For instance, I think you have a bit more going on in that brainbox of yours than you let on.”
Marlowe gave her a sly look. “I wouldn’t bet money on it.”
“So if you don’t squire me around for the pleasure of my company,” she continued, “then why do you do it?”
“Use that fine mind of yours and figure it out.”
They stumbled again, and Marlowe laughed until he was gasping for breath. The poor man was dreadfully out of shape. “All my hard living is doing havoc on my waistline,” Marlowe continued in a low, confidential tone when he had recovered. “Demmed waistcoats ain’t buttoning up right no more.”
Katherine barely contained her mirth. So the viscount was insecure about his figure. It was a bit of vanity she had not expected from a man who regularly wore Grecian sandals and a dressing gown in public. His slimming regimen, however, seemed to be a theoretical concept, for as soon as the waltz was over, he tugged her over to the refreshment table.
“I’m famished,” he said, seizing a plate of cake. He only realized he hadn’t offered her any after his second giant mouthful. He hesitated before his third. “You ain’t hungry yet?”
“No, I’m not,” she assured him. She glanced around the ballroom, just in case someone had arrived while she was dancing. But no one had.
She sighed. Not that she’d expected him to. Her rejection had been pointed enough. She’d left no room for him to hope, to see any use in fighting for her.
Marlowe sensed her dampened mood and bumped her with his shoulder in a gesture he most likely thought consoling. “Don’t fret, old thing. I’ve a feeling Sherry will come ’round.”
He had interpreted the whole matter entirely wrong, but she hadn’t the courage to correct him. He’d probably plant her a facer even though she was female if he knew the truth. It was she, not his friend, who had behaved abominably. Her only consolation was that it had been the right thing to do. “I doubt that.”
“If I was a good friend to him, I’d have snatched you in my carriage and deposited you at his doorstep. He’d thank me for it in the end, I think.”
He was wrong again. Sebastian would not thank him in the end, once he discovered the truth about her. He would hate her once he knew her shameful secret, given his own heartbreaking past, and there would be no way to keep it from him in the end.
It was better this way. It had to be, even though she had broken her own heart by turning him away so cruelly.
But he would get over his infatuation soon enough. He had only pursued her because of their proximity, and perhaps a misplaced sense of gratitude for the aid she’d rendered him after his assault. Sebastian was clearly infatuated with a woman who did not exist, had brought that perfect, imaginary paragon bloody tulips and piano duets as if she were some debutante in her first Season.
As if she deserved them.
No, his feelings would quickly fade, or be redirected toward a more appropriate target—much as it pained her to contemplate. And then, perhaps, he would one day thank her for rejecting him, for not allowing him to throw himself away on her.
She managed a small smile despite the emptiness she felt inside. “Instead, you keep the hounds at bay,” she said, nodding toward a cluster of young men sending discreet glances her way. Sir Bertram’s squint, however, was anything but discreet.
Marlowe chuckled, took her hand, and raised it to his lips, bowing gallantly and quite gracefully, despite his bulk.
“I live to serve.”
But just as Marlowe straightened from his bow, she caught sight of something . . . someone . . . among that cluster of young men who made her blood run cold. Someone she’d never thought to see again. A ghost. She could feel the blood draining from her face, the air strangling in her lungs, the way her knees su
ddenly felt like Cook’s calf’s-foot jelly.
It was Johann Klemmer. And he was looking straight at her.
Smirking.
Twelve years ago she’d known him very well indeed—tall, lean, with ice-blond hair, a toothy smile, and a coarse Germanic handsomeness that had charmed her adolescent vanity—so her eyes could not be mistaken, no matter how much she wished they were.
She thought her father had taken care of him. She thought he’d gone back to whatever European hole he’d crawled out of with his ill-gotten fortune, never to return. She’d certainly not expected to see him here, at her best friend’s ball.
He began to walk in her direction, and she thought she might vomit all over Astrid’s refreshment table. Instead, and perhaps even more embarrassingly, she swayed on her feet. Marlowe had to catch her around the waist and pull her close. His brow wrinkled with bewilderment. “I say, Lady M, are you all right?”
She was not all right. Not at all. And she suspected she might never be again. In all of her nightmares, she’d never been faced with this. Somehow, perhaps naively, she’d always assumed she was free of him, if not the ghosts of her lost child and innocence. It was the one thing for which she had thanked her father: sending that faithless scoundrel out of her life forever.
Marlowe pulled her more firmly against him when she continued to sway, lost in her panic. They were beginning to attract some attention. “Katherine,” he murmured, truly concerned now. “What is wrong?”
“Unhand her, sirrah!” boomed a voice across the ballroom, shaking her from her current nightmare straight into another one.
The dancers upon the floor faltered and turned toward the speaker, the orchestra stuttered to a halt, and the entire room fell into shocked whispers. Lady Blundersmith, overcome by the sudden turn of events, swooned even more dramatically than Katherine and into the arms of the same wallflower who had unwillingly valeted the viscount’s champagne flute earlier. The wallflower was a slight slip of a thing, and the fainting matron was at least twice her size. They tumbled to the floor in an elegant lavender heap, knocking over a potted plant in their wake.
Katherine had recognized the voice immediately, but she was quite unwilling to turn her attention to its source, to have this new nightmare become a reality. She had enough trouble on her hands without adding Sebastian’s ire to the mix. But her eyes shifted of their own accord, as did every other eye in the room, to the figure who had shoved his way into the middle of the dance floor, glaring in her direction—or rather Marlowe’s—with furious contempt.
Sebastian was no longer the elegantly aloof jungle cat of their first meeting. His jacket was wrinkled and buttoned up crookedly, a seam split at the shoulder. His face was rough with yellowing bruises and the beginnings of a beard, and his curly hair looked as if it had been caught in a gale. She doubted he’d even slept since she’d last saw him. Her chest tightened painfully at the sight. The only things presentable about him were the shiny new tasseled Hessians on his feet.
He pointed his finger directly at Marlowe and stalked forward.
Marlowe nearly dropped her to the floor in his haste to release her. “Sherry! What the devil are you doing here?”
Oh, Lord.
Marlowe was a terrible actor. He couldn’t quite hide his glee at the turn of events. Now she realized why he had forced himself out this evening with her: to wind his friend up.
If only he knew that it was Katherine who had rejected Sebastian, not the other way around.
Oblivious to the scandalized murmurs and the flutter of fans surrounding him, Sebastian continued his progress across the floor, the crowd parting before him like the Red Sea. If she had been filled with dread at the sight of Klemmer, it was nothing to how she felt now. He wasn’t supposed to fight for her. He was not supposed to feel so strongly, not about her. This was not how things were supposed to go.
“What are you doing?” Sebastian returned indignantly. “Poaching about on my territory?”
Katherine realized with a jolt that she had just been likened to a tract of land. It did nothing to improve her mood, but her guilt and pain faded considerably. She put her hands on her hips and stepped in front of Marlowe. “Excuse me?”
Sebastian just stared at her with a stubborn jut of his chin, as if he couldn’t decide whether he was more hurt or angry at her. Her own anger faltered a bit. He had always been so coolly impenetrable, so to see him at the mercy of his emotions, unable to hide behind his usual insouciance, was as surreal as it was painful. He looked as devastated as she felt.
Impossible.
She had done that to him, she realized, her heart sinking like a stone.
Marlowe put a hand on her arm to steady her, which seemed to incense Sebastian even further, his eyes popping wide and nostrils flaring. Marlowe stepped around her. “I’ll handle this, Katie,” he said.
“Katie!” Sebastian hissed. “You false, opportunistic bastard!”
A shocked murmur went around the room at the use of such coarse language. Lady Blundersmith, halfway to her feet, fell back once more, pinning her unfortunate victim beneath her. The girl rolled her eyes and glared in their direction.
Katherine couldn’t help but glance toward Klemmer. He was observing the spectacle with an amused smirk she dearly wished to rub out of existence, along with the rest of him.
Marlowe’s good humor began to fade, now that the insults had begun. “You’re making a fool of yourself, Sherry,” he gritted out. “And saying things you might regret.”
“I don’t think so, Evelyn,” Sebastian spat.
The crowd drew a collective breath.
Marlowe’s usually cool green eyes flashed furiously. “That’s enough, Manwaring, you’re clearly not yourself.”
“That’s right. I’m not myself, because I have discovered that a man I thought was my best mate is courting my . . . the woman I . . . Lady Manwaring behind my back.”
Some part of her—buried far, far beneath the layers of anguish, panic, and remorse—melted a little at his almost-declaration. But it was a very small part at the moment. He hadn’t even noticed the distress that must be clearly writ all over her face. What an idiot he was. What idiots the pair of them were.
She knew she should have stayed in with the dogs.
Marlowe looked down his hawkish nose at his friend with contempt. His mouth quirked in a smug smile. “Just keeping her warm for you, old boy.”
Well.
That was not on.
She gasped in shock, along with the rest of the room. Sebastian had long overstepped the mark, and now it appeared Marlowe was more than willing to meet him head-on. At her bloody expense.
Sebastian’s features contorted with rage. He lunged forward, his hands aiming straight for Marlowe’s neck. What followed could only be described as pandemonium. The other occupants of the room started to scatter, either to exit the melee or get a better view of the proceedings. Women cried out and men shouted, some in indignation, most in encouragement.
The two adversaries locked together in struggle, staggering one way, then another, intent on strangling each other. No blows were landed, other than a few kicks to the shins. They grunted in pain and exertion and cursed each other liberally and in general made grand fools of themselves. At last, Marlowe landed a kick hard enough to make Sebastian cry out and lose his balance. They both tumbled into the refreshment table.
They landed smack on top of the large, frothy cake, taking it and the rest of the table to the floor. Icing oozed underneath their bodies, coating their clothes like a thick layer of paint. They began writhing about in the cake, trying to land their punches, to no avail. It was the most ridiculous fight one could have ever imagined, and any alarm she might have felt was quickly swallowed by her growing fury.
“Oh, really!” someone said disgustedly by her shoulder. She turned. It was the duke, immaculate as always. A
strid came up on Katherine’s other side, lovely in a jade-toned Grecian gown, hands resting on her stomach.
“This was not what I had in mind,” the duke murmured.
“Nor I,” Astrid said, looking in awe of the proceedings.
Katherine shook her head in exasperation. Of course. She should have known that her friends had engineered the evening.
Katherine turned back to the fight, miserable and mortified and beyond anger. Both men now wore more of the cake than the floor did, but they seemed disinclined to yield. Perhaps Sebastian’s head injury had damaged him more than they’d thought. How could he attack his best friend? How could he possibly think that this would be an acceptable course of action?
Sebastian at last managed to drag Marlowe to his feet. He gripped his cravat with one hand, reared back his other arm, and brought it crashing into Marlowe’s face. She could hear the bone snap, and she cringed for the viscount. Icing and cake went flying everywhere as Marlowe fell back and slid across the icing-coated marble a few feet, clutching his nose, glaring up at Sebastian.
“You’ve broken it!” Marlowe howled in agony. “Again!” he added. He let his hand fall away, which was a mistake, for the blood began to flow out of his nose, over his lips and chin, mingling with the cake.
The duchess cursed and reached across Katherine toward her husband, but she was too far away—and too pregnant—to help.
Katherine turned to the blood-shy duke to try and stop the inevitable. Just as she had feared, his face had gone as white as the icing currently adorning his two best friends, and his eyes began to roll up into his head. His body went limp and he fell, face forward, into the cake next to Lady Blundersmith.
Katherine had had quite enough for the evening.
She turned to the duchess, who was hovering over her fainted husband with a resigned expression, fanning the air beside his head with her skirt, too big with child to bend over and help him.
Virtuous Scoundrel (The Regency Romp Trilogy Book 2) Page 18
