Lord Horton turned pink. Elizabeth surmised the story of his collapse on Lady Alameda’s lawn had made the rounds. Now who, she wondered, would have distributed the tale? A quick glance at Miss Devious-Dunworthy giggling with Robert and two other couples answered the question. Her brother would think it a great lark, and Miss Devious would find it a useful attention-getting tale.
Elizabeth took a deep breath. “I trust you completely, my lord. I’m honored you would undertake the task.” She inclined her head graciously. “Indeed, I cannot think of anyone I would rather have instruct me.” She laced her remark with a hint of seduction. Enough seduction that Sir Blah and Lord Looks-Like-A-Cherub stopped laughing abruptly.
Lord Cherub-face protested and tried to recover his advantage. “Oh no. That is to say, I mean, dash it all, Lady Elizabeth. If you’re serious about learning the steps, I’d be happy to escort you to the balcony where we might practice in private.”
The others glared at him as if he were completely barmy for making such an improper suggestion.
“Didn’t mean it like that. Good heavens, it isn’t as if we’d be in the dark. Lady Ashburton has enough torches out there to light half of London. A bit of privacy, that’s all, to learn the steps without everyone watching.”
Sir Blah frowned skeptically. “Highly improper.”
Lord Horton regained his confidence. “Hardly necessary, old boy. I can manage the lesson right here in public.” He emphasized the “ck” sound on the end of public, sending Lord Looks-Like-A-Cherub into the sulks. Apparently her handsome suitor didn’t possess the requisite backbone that Lord St. Evert had insisted she deserved, either
She turned to Sir Blah for a moment, appraising the condition of his spine, and then sighed. At least he had twenty thousand a year. Perhaps she should give him a chance. According to rumor, he didn’t gamble, didn’t drink overmuch, and his only excess was spending a substantial amount of time and money on an enormous pack of hunting dogs. She smiled at Sir Blah and could almost hear a lifetime of yipping hounds in the background.
Fortunately, the noise proved to be the musicians, merely warming up for the promenade to the waltz. Lord Horton took her hand on his arm. They started their march around the perimeter of the room, and he showed her how to point her toe. She knew perfectly well how to do it, but it pleased him to play teacher.
A hubbub at the entrance signaled the arrival of latecomers. With a flourish the footman announced the Countess, Lady de Alameda and her nephew, Lord St. Evert. Elizabeth’s hand flew to clamp her stupid heart in place. The wretched organ seemed to have forgotten its rhythm. When she got a proper look at him, it did nothing to calm her racing pulse. Her hands tensed. Her breathing came in rapid outraged bursts. The scoundrel had on a green coat, the color being an almost identical match to the green of her gown.
“Are you quite well, my dear?” Horton chafed her rigid hand.
No. She was not well. Not well, at all. She was angry enough to stab pins into a certain overgrown green coat.
Behave like a lady.
She gritted her teeth and mustered a weak smile. “I am well, thank you. May I say, Lord Horton, you are extraordinarily considerate. The very image of a gentleman.” Unlike some men in her acquaintance, backbone or not.
* * *
Elizabeth and Lord Horton had paraded nearly halfway around the ballroom when a formidable trio impeded their progress. Like the prow of a large ship gliding into a pier, Lady Bessborough and her imposing bosom blocked their path. Beside her stood Lady Alameda and their hostess, Lady Ashburton.
A long violet ostrich feather drooped over Lady Bessborough’s mountainous coiffure. “What’s this I hear, young Horton? Naughty poems?”
The color washed out of his cheeks. Elizabeth feared he might faint again.
“Delightfully wicked poems. Tell her all about them Horty-Porty.” Lady Alameda nodded enthusiastically, giving him no time to speak. “Brilliant use of erotic symbolism. Subtle. Very feathery.” Her eyebrows waggled suggestively. “I nearly swooned the first time I heard him. Truly remarkable. Wait till you hear the part about a ladybird climbing upon his soaring wing.”
“Why Horton, you slyboots! Didn’t know you had it in you.” Lady Bessborough laughed loudly and slapped him on the shoulder. “Something of your father’s disposition after all.”
Horton’s color seemed to return after that last compliment, but he remained too astonished to speak.
“We wish to hear these ditties.” After using the royal we, Lady Bessborough looped her arm through his dangling limb and tugged him out to sea.
Lady Ashburton glanced around, both excited and anxious, and whispered behind her fan to Lady Alameda. “Oh dear. How erotic are these poems?”
Lady Alameda, who was busy maneuvering herself between Elizabeth and Lord Horton, took hold of his other arm. “Well, my dear, I can tell you this. I had to dismiss him from my sitting room. There were young ladies present.” She glanced pointedly at Elizabeth. “I feared they might get overexcited.”
Lady Ashburton tittered. “I’m all agog.”
“My sentiments exactly.” Lady Alameda and her cohorts ushered the unwitting poet away.
He cast a pleading backward glance at Elizabeth. “But I... I promised Lady Elizabeth.”
“Oh, never mind that. My nephew offered to take your place. He’ll be along to collect her shortly.”
“But I would rather, that is to say, my poems are not—” Pointy Nose made a feeble attempt to resist his captors.
“Now, Horton, look lively!” Lady Alameda ordered. “We’ve gathered a very distinguished audience in Lady Ashburton’s private drawing room to hear these bawdy poems of yours.”
Lady Ashburton patted her palms together eagerly, but with the soft fabric of her gloves it made almost no sound. “Oh yes! You will be all the talk, Lord Horton. All the talk. Lord Byron move over, I say. Nothing like a good arousing poem.”
“Amelia!” Lady Bessborough rebuked her friend loud enough for half the occupants of the room to hear. “You’re flushed already. Do try to control yourself, my dear.”
Elizabeth stood dumbfounded as they dragged away Lord Horton and his Missing Spine to begin a career as an erotic poet. She stepped out of the promenade pathway. Her hand fluttered up helplessly in a wave of farewell.
Someone captured her floating hand and bowed over it, someone in a green coat. “May I?”
By the time she composed herself enough to skewer Lord St. Evert properly, it was too late. The waltz had begun, and he held her in his arms, his green-sleeved arms.
As St. Evert whirled her in step beside the other waltzing couples, she caught sight of Sir Blah and Lord Not-So-Cherubic nudging one another and falling in line behind the matrons and their naughty poet. A veritable parade of guests streamed out of the ballroom after them. “Well, that’s that then,” she muttered and glanced up at Lord St. Evert.
He was studying her. “Are you disappointed?”
The question caught her off guard. Too late to hide the play of emotions that must surely be marching across her face. If only he would look away. Disappointed? To have exchanged pasty Lord Horton and his bulging corset for Lord St. Evert, whose hand on her back guided her with strength and confidence, whose sprinkling of mischievous freckles belied the intensity of his eyes and the firm line of his jaw? Hardly.
Yet she could not forget he probably had less than a thousand pounds a year compared to Lord Horton’s thirty. There was also the matter of the coat. Not to mention his abominable lack of fashion sense and a dozen other annoying habits. “I don’t know how to answer that.”
He almost smiled at her. “At last, an honest answer.”
One of his dozen or so annoying habits was the uncanny ability to lace his comments with barbs. She sniffed at him. “Are you trying to flatter me?”
His wicked dimples curled into existence. “You don’t need flattery, my lady.” He smiled as he glanced away, guiding them through a turn.
“And what precisely does that mean?”
“Haven’t you enough flatterers in your court?”
“No.”
He tilted his head, chiding her with a single look. “Tut-tut, Izzie. Honesty.”
“Don’t tut-tut me. You are not my father. Nor my governess. And you may address me as Lady Elizabeth.”
His impudent grin ought to have faded, but it stayed securely in place. “You’re frowning, my dear. Mustn’t pucker your brow in public. People will think I’m torturing you rather than waltzing.”
“They would be correct. While we’re on the subject of torture, I wish you would stop persecuting me in this childish manner.”
“Persecuting?”
“Trying to embarrass me. Your coat.” She glanced at the sidelines. Two debutantes in white ruffled gowns nodded in their direction and tittered. “You see. People are laughing at us.”
“You have a vivid imagination. I doubt anyone is laughing at us. Who would care about such a trivial matter?”
“They are. I saw them laughing.”
“Nonsense. The whole world does not set their clocks by you.”
“I’m well aware of that.”
“Good. Then don’t wrinkle up your brow so ferociously or they will be snickering at your prune face instead of the color of our clothing.”
Prune face, indeed! And it will be all his fault. “This is the third time, is it not, that we have matched? I do not believe for one instant that it is simply a coincidence your coat is the exact color of my dress. You did it on purpose.”
“I assure you, Lady Elizabeth. It is precisely that, a coincidence. More to the point, we don’t match. There is not one peacock on this coat. While you have a veritable flock of them on your gown.”
“Splitting hairs. It’s as if you snuck into my room, saw from a distance the fabric I was sewing, and copied it. These peacocks blend with the background color to form the very shade of green you are wearing.”
“Sewing? And here I thought you were merely reading late at night.”
“So you did spy on me.”
“You wound me, my lady. Were I to spy on you, I would do a far better job of it. I would find the exact fabric and produce a coat far more interesting than this dull old thing. This happens to be my cousin’s coat. I borrowed it for the evening. My coat was...” His dimples disappeared, and he swung her forcefully into the half turn, narrowly avoiding another couple. “No longer suitable.”
She stared at him. He was earnest. This coat certainly didn’t resemble the horrid creation with huge lapels he’d worn to Lady Sefton’s breakfast. No, this one fit his broad shoulders perfectly and hung as if Weston himself had designed it. Perplexing.
He leaned in, speaking nearer to her ear. “Further to the point, if I were to sneak into your room late at night, let me assure you, it would certainly not be for a look at your fabric.”
Elizabeth blinked. She felt the jostle of his shoulder under her hand. He was chuckling at her. He’d just made a lurid remark, hadn’t he? Yes. Yes, he had. She felt a rush of heat prickle up her neck. “I ought to slap you for that remark.”
“Should you? Why?”
“It was unseemly.”
“Oh, well, in that case, slap away, my dear. But first, tell me, what must I do to you for wearing that unseemly gown?”
“My gown?” She glanced down to see if something had fallen off or ripped open or...
Her brow pinched together again. “It is perfectly respectable.”
“It is not.”
They were in the middle of a turn, so she glanced over her shoulder, checking in one of Lady Ashburton’s huge gilded mirrors to see if there was something wrong with the back of her gown. “You are gammoning me.”
“I never gammon.”
“Ha! There’s a tale. Where is this honesty you prize so highly? Nothing is wrong with my gown.”
“A very clever construction, I’ll grant you that. But I’ve figured it out, and it is unseemly. You made it look as if the real dress is falling away and you are left in nothing but your wispy underclothes.”
She gasped and pulled her hand from his shoulder to cover her breast. “How can you say such a thing?”
“Honesty.” He grinned. “And yes, it’s too low there, too.”
How had he deduced the precise mechanism of her design so easily? Confusing man. What was he? Like his hair, which was gold one minute and strawberry the next. He was a frilled fop with a physique any Corinthian would envy. All she could do for a moment was breathe and let him whirl her around the room. He looked so smug, so sure of himself, so irritatingly in control. Well, no more.
Elizabeth returned her hand to his shoulder and relaxed in his arms. On the next turn, she pretended to have difficulty maneuvering and allowed herself to float just a trifle too close to him. There it was. That flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. She smiled softly and turned her head, as if completely disinterested. His arms stiffened, and she felt a delicious sense of triumph. When she brushed ever so slightly against the inside of his muscular thigh, he nearly stumbled. Balance had been restored to her side of the universe. Just in the nick of time too, for the ending strains of the waltz sounded.
She took particular delight in the confused expression on Lord St. Evert’s face as he led her off the floor and over to her brother and Miss Dunworthy. Elizabeth decided to needle him. “Are you ill, my lord? You look a bit unsettled. A gastric disturbance, perhaps?”
It startled her when one of his dimples made an unexpected appearance. She’d thought she’d imprisoned them for the rest of the evening. But no, there it was, quirking evilly up on one side.
“This is far from over, Izzie,” he whispered, bowing over her hand.
Instead of letting go, he pressed his lips against her lace-gloved fingers. No quick kiss. St. Evert pressed on her a scandalous, overly warm thing that sent outlandish sensations up her arm and made her cheeks hot.
Elizabeth may have been the only one who gasped, but she felt as if everyone in the room must be holding their breaths, everyone must be watching him linger over her hand too long, everyone observing the evocative lift of his brow. She stood there like a fish knocked on the head, utterly stunned. He laughed. Or was that Miss Dunworthy chuckling?
St. Evert turned away and left her standing there like a marooned mackerel as he escorted Miss I-Despise-Her-Dunworthy out onto the ballroom floor. Elizabeth could still feel his lips on her hand. She gently twitched the fingers as her arm hung limp at her side. The sensation remained. Drat him.
10
Green Sleeves
“I hate men. They are all wretches!”
Late that night, long after Lord Horton discovered he did, indeed, have a gift for subtle erotic verse, and after the interminable carriage ride home, wherein Elizabeth was subjected to her brother rhapsodizing over the unparalleled beauty and exquisite charm of Miss Dunworthy, Lady Elizabeth sat brooding on her bed.
“I hate them all.” It was true, too. Honestly. Even her father. He should never have abandoned them for his stupid investments in America. She hated him for it. Thoughtless. Typical man. Couldn’t be depended upon. How could he leave them? He’d been her rudder. Her anchor. And now, now she was adrift in an ocean of confusion. Their entire family was in danger of sinking. How was she supposed to manage it all without him?
Perhaps she didn’t hate Robert, not altogether. How could she? But sometimes it seemed as if he had nothing but pigweed for brains. And Lord Horton appeared to be little more than a spineless twit. Unreliable. Why couldn’t he be intelligent, capable, and manly? But no, he wasn’t. She hated them. Most of all, she hated Lord St. Evert. Truly.
He made her feel petty and feeble. He questioned the purity of her motives. Called her dishonest. He even accused her of machinating. Except those weren’t the real reasons she hated him. No. The real reason eluded her, slipped around, sliding at the edge of her mind, just beyond her grasp.
She flopped back against
the pillows, too tired to sort it out tonight. The oil lamp flickered and she ought to turn it out. She slid off the bed. As she did, she heard scratching at the door.
She carried the lamp with her and whispered, “Who is it?”
“Lord St. Evert’s servant, mum.”
“Not you again,” she muttered. “Go away.”
“I come bearing gifts.”
She unlocked the door, having prudently taken that precaution in light of St. Evert’s vulgar comments at the ball, and peeped out. “What is it?”
“A package, miss. His lordship says I’m required to deliver it with a poem, seeing as how the lady is fond of poetry.”
St. Evert’s manservant, the same unkempt fellow who looked better suited to a post as a prison guard than servant, stood in the hallway holding a package wrapped in brown paper and string. One of his stockings hung at his ankle. He was too plump for his jacket, and one of the buttons was missing. “You need a new livery.”
“Just what I mentioned to His Grace. But he says, ‘fine feathers do not a cockerel make’.”
“He’s not a duke.”
“No, miss.”
“Then you ought not refer to him as ‘His Grace.’”
“Begging yer pardon, miss. An’ so I says to His Highness, not much of a cock without flash feathers, is he?”
Elizabeth sighed and gave up trying to educate the man. “Just so. Now, if you will kindly deliver your package, I was preparing to take a short nap before the sun comes up.”
“Aye, and here it is.” He hefted the package but did not hand it to her. “An’ this is the poem. He made me practice till I had it perfect. Says to apologize to you because it isn’t smutty enough, but he will leave that sort of thing to a fellow, w’ the name of Horton or Hortense.” He scratched at his wig.
“Do get on with it.”
“Yes, miss.” He pulled at skin on his throat and coughed lightly, as if that might aide his recital.
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