WidowsWickedWish

by Lynne Barron

  The first of her new gowns had arrived just that morning. It was a lovely creation of deep burgundy silk trimmed with pewter-gray ribbon. The short capped sleeves rested along her upper arms, showcasing the slope of her shoulders. A sweetheart neckline bared a shadow of cleavage and the swell of her breasts. The rich fabric hugged her waist and the curve of her hips before flowing around her legs in yards and yards of glimmering silk that belled out around her as she twirled to inspect the back of the gown.

  “My goodness, my bottom is quite on display,” Olivia remarked to her maid in some alarm. Dozens of tiny gray silk buttons marched down her spine from the middle of her back to her tailbone. The trail of delicate buttons drew the eye unerringly to the rounded curves of her bottom.

  “And you might find it a bit difficult to sit,” Celeste added with a grin.

  “I’ve always found sitting to be quite overrated,” Olivia replied with an answering smile.

  “Mind you don’t run your fingers through your hair,” her maid cautioned as she tucked a wayward curl back into place.

  “I’ll try to remember,” Olivia promised, suspecting that her coiffure would be an unsightly mess all too soon as she did tend to fiddle with her curls when she was nervous or excited.

  She was certainly nervous to be reentering society once more.

  And excited to be resuming her affair with a certain raven-haired gentleman.

  Hastings House was awash in candlelight, music drifting through the tall, open windows on the second floor, when Olivia alighted from her carriage. A long line of carriages dispersed laughing couples, smiling debutants, dour-faced matrons and impeccably dressed gentlemen before the marble steps and grand portico that guarded the front door to her childhood home.

  Her mother had outdone herself with her annual ball. The soaring white walls of the foyer were draped with pale-blue and gray ribbons, the sconces filled with tall candles that cast shadows around the guests waiting to be received. Looking up, Olivia saw that her mother had half the candles in the immense chandelier removed and in their place were pretty little bouquets of white tea roses. The entire room was heady with their scent.

  Olivia had to admit, her mother had an eye for decorating when she chose to exhibit it, and a knack for finding new ways to show off the home she’d once lived in and now commandeered each year for the ball she hosted in honor of the Earl of Hastings’ birthday. No doubt, chandeliers all over London would cast paler light and throw off the scent of roses for the remainder of the Season and into the following.

  Her brother’s butler, Billings, a rather young man who’d taken the post three years previously when the former butler had been sent to her mother’s residence in Portman Square, took her silvery shawl from her shoulders and Olivia drew a deep breath and stepped into the receiving line where her brother and mother stood greeting their guests. As she made her way through the line behind an elderly couple, Olivia caught Henry’s eye and smiled at him.

  Henry’s eyes darted over her in a quick perusal as he kept up a string of pleasantries with Lady Grimson and her daughter Genevieve. When he met her gaze again he wiggled his eyebrows in a comical leer.

  Laughing at his antics, Olivia turned to look away from him before she lost all sense of decorum.

  “What a lovely gown.”

  Olivia turned at the familiar voice behind her.

  “Aunt Lucinda!”

  Her aunt stood in the line behind her, her hand tucked into the elbow of a tall, distinguished gentleman with chestnut hair cut short and warm hazel eyes.

  “And Simon!” Olivia stepped toward her aunt and cousin, brushing her lips over the lady’s soft cheek before lifting her own for the man’s kiss. “But where is Beatrice?”

  “My lovely daughter-by-marriage wisely decided to remain at home with my grandson,” Aunt Lucinda replied with a smile.

  “Bea didn’t wish to cause Henry any discomfort on his birthday,” Simon added meaningfully.

  “Yes, Bea wrote about Mother’s behavior last year,” Olivia replied carefully. “To cut an invited guest so publicly. What was she thinking?”

  “There seemed little point in inviting a repeat performance,” Simon said with a nod that prompted Olivia to step back into the space that had opened up as the line moved slowly forward.

  “How was your visit to Idyllwild?” Aunt Lucinda asked.

  “Simply lovely,” Olivia all but gushed. “The children had a splendid time.”

  “And you did, as well,” her aunt replied with a warm smile, her eyes crinkling. “You look wonderful, although I daresay your mother will have something to say about the healthy glow you’ve acquired.”

  “I have decided that I will no longer allow my lady mother’s carping to affect me,” Olivia replied firmly.

  “Good for you,” Simon said as he circled around her, bringing his mother with him.

  Olivia turned with them, finding that they had almost reached the front of the line. She looked up to find her mother staring at her, a frown pulling her thin lips down.

  “How is little William?” Olivia asked her aunt while she met her mother’s gaze and offered a smile.

  “Growing like a weed,” Lucinda answered.

  “And Bea is feeling well carrying my new niece?” Olivia watched her mother turn away with a regal tilt of her head, her graying hair glimmering in the candlelight.

  “You seem terribly certain my soon-to-be second grandchild is a girl.”

  “From what Bea has written, she suffers from the morning ailment more this time,” Olivia replied with a grimace. “Girls are notoriously more difficult, in the womb and beyond.”

  “Fanny’s still giving you fits, is she?” Simon and his mother stepped back and Olivia followed, watching as the elderly couple made their greeting to the dowager countess and the earl.

  “I hope to find her a governess soon and put her agile mind to studying rather than wreaking havoc on all and sundry from dawn until dusk.” Olivia met her cousin’s eyes and dared him to argue the point.

  With a chuckle Simon dropped his mother’s hand and help up his own in surrender. “My wife has cautioned me repeatedly to keep my unsolicited opinions and advice to myself.”

  “Smart woman, my sister,” Olivia relented with a smile.

  The elderly couple ahead of them shuffled off toward the grand staircase and the ballroom beyond, from whence the strains of a string quartet rose above the chatter of two hundred or more people.

  “Smart enough to marry my son,” Lucinda agreed.

  “After you, ladies,” Simon murmured, stepping back to allow his mother and cousin to precede him.

  While Aunt Lucinda greeted her sister, Olivia rose onto her toes to press a kiss to Henry’s cheek. “You’re looking well for a man of your advanced age,” she teased as she stepped back to take in the coat of powder-blue velvet he wore over a silver brocade waistcoat and black trousers.

  “I feel like a footman,” he said, his blues eyes crinkling in his tan, chiseled face.

  “Perhaps one year soon you’ll resist the call to don the family colors,” Olivia whispered.

  “As you have done, I see.” Henry eyed her gown. “You look smashing, quite sophisticated and worldly.”

  “Just the look I was going for.”

  “Best to begin as you mean to go on, huh?”

  “Precisely,” Olivia agreed as her aunt stepped away toward the staircase, her sapphire gown swishing gently with the movement.

  “Chin up, fair lady,” Henry told her with an encouraging smile.

  Olivia looked away from his cheerful face toward her mother’s less happy countenance.

  “Lady Palmerton.” The countess’s lips barely moved as she greeted her daughter.

  “Lady Hastings.” Olivia dipped a graceful curtsy and rose with one hand extended toward her mother who only eyed the offending appendage before raising her head to glare down her nose.

  “You’re looking well,” Olivia lied. In truth her mother looked
as if she’d aged ten years in the time Olivia had been away. Her once brown hair was now almost entirely gray, the skin around her eyes a mesh of tightly woven wrinkles, and that around her pinched lips hanging loose enough to hide what had once been a firm chin.

  She was dressed in her customary ice blue, three silver feathers drooping from the back of her head, precariously close to falling across her face. Her dress hung off her bony shoulders. She’d laced her corset so tight that a roll of loose skin was visible above and below, giving Olivia the impression that her weight loss had been too rapid to allow for her dress to be altered to hide it.

  Olivia swallowed a sudden lump in her throat as she realized her mother was ailing, perhaps seriously.

  “Mother,” she began.

  “You’re looking plump,” Lady Hastings said, her watery gray eyes fastened upon the swell of her daughter’s bosom rising above her bodice with each suddenly labored breath she took.

  “Are you well?” Olivia asked, ignoring the barb.

  “Perhaps it’s only your dreadful choice of color that is making you look fleshy,” her mother continued. “Surely three years is long enough to lose the weight you gained with Lord Palmerton.”

  Olivia clenched her teeth and resisted the urge to remind her mother that she preferred her son, her baby, not be referred to by his title.

  “Perhaps we could take tea together tomorrow,” she replied in an attempt to turn the conversation.

  “You know my at-home day is Thursday,” her mother replied with an arch of her brow that only served to draw attention to little beads of moisture gathering on her forehead and along her temples.

  “Yes, of course. I thought it might be nice to take tea just the two of us, perhaps in the garden. The weather’s so lovely just now and before long it will be so hot…”

  “You’d do well to remain inside lest your complexion becomes as dark as a savage,” Lady Hastings interrupted with cold precision.

  “Aunt Hastings,” Simon murmured as he stepped beside his cousin and shot his aunt with a warning glare.

  The lady chose to ignore her nephew altogether, instead stepping toward her daughter until they were nearly nose to nose. “Come for tea at twelve o’clock Thursday, so that my friends might see that I still welcome you into my home after your shameless display here tonight.”

  “Shameless display?” Olivia repeated in confusion. “I’ve only just arrived. How…”

  “Arrived to announce in the most unbecoming fashion imaginable that you have tossed off your mourning with unabashed haste.”

  “Oh, Mother, really, is that all?” Olivia couldn’t help the laughter that tripped off her lips. “I hardly think anyone expects me to go on mourning a man who so abused whatever gentle feelings I might have held for him.”

  “Feelings?”

  “Yes, mother, feelings. Those incomprehensible sensations that come upon one at the most inopportune times, that remind us that we are human.” Olivia felt her temper fraying and held on to the edges with an iron will lest she embarrass them both in the foyer of her ancestral home.

  “Allow me to escort you to the ballroom.” Simon took hold of her hand and tucked it into the crook of his elbow, all but pulling her away from her mother and the ladies and gentlemen waiting to be received.

  Olivia followed him in a daze of anger and sorrow, of feelings.

  She sensed the curious eyes in the foyer as she ascended the stairs and clenched her fingers around Simon’s arm for support.

  “Steady on,” Simon murmured.

  “Mother looks unwell,” she whispered.

  “Yes,” her cousin agreed after a pause.

  “Has she been seen by Dr. Nelson?”

  “Somerton has brought the physician to your mother’s house twice.”

  “She refused to allow him to examine her?”

  “She refused to receive him at all.”

  Olivia drew in a shaky breath as they reached the wide landing on the second floor of the vast mansion. Finely dressed ladies and a few gentlemen loitered in the space, talking and laughing, seeing and being seen by all who approached the spacious ballroom.

  “The worst is over,” Simon said, his gloved hand covering hers and squeezing her fingers.

  Olivia forced herself to meet his eyes and gift him with a trembling smile.

  The ballroom had been transformed into a fairy forest at twilight, with towering trees in gilded pots strewn about the massive space and the tall ceiling draped in layer upon layer of silk in colors ranging from pale-orange to muted-lilac to midnight-blue. Silver stars hung from the silk sky and the breeze from the open windows and french doors set the whole of it gently swaying.

  From the top of the half dozen steps that led into the recessed ballroom, Olivia surveyed the assembled guests, most of who were related to her one way or another.

  Along one wall she spotted her uncle, the Earl of Somerton, in deep discussion with the Earl of Piedmont. Lady Piedmont, Olivia’s cousin Alice, stood beside him wearing a shockingly low-cut gown of emerald silk and an expression of absolute boredom.

  Turning toward the wall of french doors that led to the balcony, she saw Viscount Moorehead dressed in dark gray with a red waistcoat around his ample belly that matched her dress perfectly. Dear Bertie was flirting shamelessly with yet two more cousins, Lady Heloise and Lady Margaret.

  The dance floor was sprinkled with more cousins, uncles and aunts. From the corner of her eye she spotted her great-aunt Margaret, the Dowager Countess of Singleton, chastising her former daughter-in-law’s new husband, the beleaguered Mr. Simms.

  “Ah, there’s Bentley,” Simon murmured and Olivia pulled her gaze from the family drama unfolding.

  Jack Bentley in evening attire fairly stole Olivia’s breath. Dressed all in black but for the crisp white cravat jauntily tied at his neck, he stood out among the dandies in their peacock blue and garish gold. His hair was shorter than it had been when last she’d seen him, the silver threads at his temples gleaming in the light cast by hundreds of candles.

  He stood just inside the ballroom beside a tall column, conversing with someone not visible through the crowd that swirled around the base of the steps. That unseen someone was both short and amusing if the way in which he leaned down to speak before tossing his head back to laugh was any indication.

  “I understand he paid a call upon you at Idyllwild while on his journey south,” Simon said.

  “Just a short visit,” she replied carefully, lest her sudden breathlessness be noticed.

  “Bentley’s a good chap,” Simon continued as he took the first step. “He’ll make a wise choice.”

  “Wise choice?” Olivia repeated without moving to join him in descending the steps.

  The crowd began to part, a rather large woman and her equally large daughter moving toward the refreshment table, no doubt.

  Simon looked at Olivia over his shoulder, a wry grimace curling his lips. “Of wife.”

  “Yes, of course,” Olivia murmured as Jack leaned forward to rest his forearm against the pillar in a pose so masculine, so entirely inappropriate in her mother’s ballroom, so completely Jack that she felt the floor shift beneath her as a wave of lust hit her.

  “Why else would a sane man venture to Town if he didn’t have to,” Simon replied before turning away once more. “Looks like he’s making headway, too.”

  Olivia barely heard his words over the roaring in her ears as a gentleman in a pink coat ambled off toward the wallflowers sitting in the shadows and Jack’s invisible companion became all too visible.

  The woman was stunning. From her golden-blonde hair piled high atop her head in a masterful confection of curls and ribbons, to her dainty gold slippers tapping to the beat of the violins playing across the room, the lady was absolutely beautiful.

  The blonde goddess, surely the Diamond of the Season, leaned ever so slightly back against the pillar, her head tipped back on her long, slender neck, and gazed up at the raven-haired man towe
ring over her.

  Olivia watched the woman tap Jack on the shoulder with her fan, a coquettish move she herself had mastered during her first Season. When he leaned down to whisper in her ear, Olivia imagined she could see their mutual attraction shimmering around them like a soft yellow halo.

  Good Lord, they were practically embracing, their bodies almost touching. Surely Jack’s arm brushed her hair, perhaps his fingers even trailed into her curls. And the lady, the beautiful, young, imminently marriageable lady, must feel the heat of his big body along her arm, her breast, her hip.

  The scene was so reminiscent of the day she’d peered into the stables to find Jack towering over Elizabeth Portman that she fully expected him to lean down and capture the pretty blonde’s lips in a passionate kiss.

  Shock slammed into Olivia with enough force to send her stumbling backward.

  “Easy there, Ollie,” came a laughing voice behind her.

  Olivia spun to face a smiling Henry.

  “Oh Henry,” she whispered, blinking furiously.

  “What’s amiss?” Henry gripped her arms above her gloves, his smile disappearing to be replaced with a look of worry.

  “Nothing at all, Henry,” she answered. “Other than the fact that you know I detest that childhood name.”

  “Has someone upset you?” he demanded, his gaze swinging about the crowded room as if he might see some sign of the miscreant.

  “No, of course not,” Olivia replied before looking beyond her brother to see her mother standing behind him, her gaze bouncing from her children, and a look of confusion clouding her eyes.

  “Hastings is to escort me down,” Lady Hastings told her daughter in a trembling voice.

  “Yes, of course,” Olivia replied.

  “Lucky me, escorting the two prettiest ladies.” Henry cocked out both elbows.

  Olivia waited until her mother had grasped one, her tiny hand curling around his arm in a tight grip, before she rested her hand upon his forearm and turned to face the crowd below.

  On cue the music came to a close and the assembled guests turned to the staircase.

  “The Countess of Hastings, the Countess of Palmerton and the Earl of Hastings.”