Part 2 (2/2)
Jasmine rolled her expressive emerald eyes-really, with her coal dark hair and those lovely eyes, she was quite the beauty. ”It's Papa, of course. He keeps telling everyone and anyone that Tanner and I are to be married. It was his father's dying wish, you understand. Tanner's father, not mine. Oh, you'd know that, or otherwise Papa would be dead, wouldn't he? Oh, dear, I'm doing it again. Prattling. At any rate, Tanner is such an honorable man, which is really quite vexing.”
”Why is that vexing?” Lydia asked, although she decided she might know the answer to that question. Wasn't Tanner in her life right now because he was an honorable man?
”Why, because he'll do what his father wished on his deathbed, of course. He'll marry me. Eventually. And I really wish he wouldn't.”
Lydia's heart gave a distressingly revealing little flip inside her chest. ”You do? I mean, you don't? That is...”
”Good evening, beautiful ladies. May I say, you present a veritable landscape of loveliness. One so dark, the other so fair, and both the epitome of everything that pleases. I am all but overcome.”
Jasmine giggled nervously, snapping open the painted fan that hung from her wrist and frantically waving it in front of her face before turning to speak to her stone deaf chaperone, as if she knew she was not going to be necessary to the conversation between the gentleman and her new friend.
Lydia merely looked up to see Baron Justin Wilde executing a most elegant leg directly in front of her, and smiled. She doubted anyone could resist returning the man's smile, even if the timing of his arrival on the scene couldn't have been worse, what with Jasmine's news about her disinclination to wed Tanner. ”Well done, my lord. Any woman would think she'd been just delivered a most fulsome compliment, when, in fact, you harbor a distrust of all women. Most especially those whom you might deem lovely.”
He pressed his spread fingers against his immaculately white waistcoat. ”Ah, I am cut to the quick. My friend Tanner has been whispering tales out of school since last we met, I presume?”
”Nothing too dire, sir. I do, however, remember your conversation of earlier today. Should I have been studying my Moliere in the interim? Are you going to quiz me yet again?”
”A thousand apologies for that, Lady Lydia. You and Tanner were the first people I dared approach since my return to the scene of my disgrace. No, I fib. I did happen to be stopped by a few others in the park, one to tell me Society never forgives a murderer, and the other to confide that her husband was in the country for the week and she hoped I'd remembered her direction. All in all, not the most auspicious of homecomings, I think you'd agree? I fear my emotions were much too close to the surface for me to be fit company.”
”Your apology is accepted, sir, and there was really no need to explain. But I wonder, if you are so newly returned to England, how did you manage an invitation to this ball?”
He bent toward her, his remarkably green eyes twinkling with mischief. ”Very simple, my dear. I remembered the lady's direction. A sacrifice on my part, to be sure, but worth it in order to see you again this evening.”
Lydia felt hot color invading her cheeks, and was grateful she hadn't given in to Sarah's suggestion of the rouge pot, for otherwise she'd look like a painted doll at the moment. ”You shouldn't say such things to me.”
”Ah, but I always say such things. Being outrageous is a large part of my charm. Now tell me my sacrifice will not have been in vain, and that your dance card is not yet full.”
”Far from full, my lord, as you can see,” she told him, holding up the card she had been handed by one of the servants as she entered the ballroom.
”Is London peopled entirely with fools?” he asked her, s.n.a.t.c.hing the card from her hand and using the small, attached bit of pencil to scribble on it before returning both to her. ”I'd dare more, but convention limits me to three or else people will expect the banns to be posted tomorrow. Miss Harburton?” he then asked, bowing to Jasmine. ”It would be my honor to be added to your dance card, as well.”
Jasmine looked to Lydia, who didn't understand the question in the other young woman's eyes. Was she actually turning to her for permission? But then she handed over her dance card and Justin signed it as well just as Tanner approached, carrying two gla.s.ses of lemonade.
”Ah, Tanner, here you are. I didn't presume stealing Lady Lydia away for the first dance, but do see you have her returned here in time for the second. I shouldn't wish to appear desperate by having to track the pair of you down on some balcony, would I? Now if you'll excuse me, I believe manners compel me to find a certain rather rapacious lady and haul her about the dance floor for the next ten minutes as a reward for allowing me to escort her this evening.”
Justin then bowed to Lydia and Jasmine once more and turned on his heel, melting into the crowd that seemed to now border on a mult.i.tude in the large ballroom as the orchestra signaled with a rather rusty flourish of violins that the first waltz was to commence momentarily.
Tanner handed over the gla.s.ses of lemonade and then s.n.a.t.c.hed up Lydia's dance card, one corner of his mouth lifting as he read what Justin Wilde had written. ”It would appear, Lydia, that you have acquired an admirer,” he said, handing the card back to her. ”You as well, Jasmine? I a.s.sume so, as Justin is always very careful with his manners.”
”I don't even know who he is,” Jasmine exclaimed, wide-eyed. ”But he is pretty, isn't he? Oh, look, there's Lady Pendergast! She always wears so many feathers, doesn't she?” She poked Mrs. Shandy with her fan, directing her attention to the rather prodigiously obese woman in purple, sailing past them as if propelled by some errant wind catching at the trio of enormous white plumes in her hair.
Tanner smiled at Lydia, and spoke softly. ”Lady Pendergast's feathers, a b.u.t.terfly on the wing, most anything s.h.i.+ny-whatever takes her fancy. My cousin is easily amused, and even more easily distracted. But the baron was being attentive to you, I think.”
”The baron was only being outrageous, which I admit he does rather well,” Lydia said, taking the card, but not opening it. ”I think he's apprehensive about the evening, and how he'll be received.”
”Justin? Apprehensive? I seriously doubt that.”
They both looked in the direction the baron had taken, just in time to see him bow to an older gentleman who pretended not to see the gesture before pointedly turning his back on him.
”Oh, that's not good,” Tanner said, shaking his head. ”What one does, others may do, until the whole room turns its collective back on him. We managed to chase Byron out of England only a fortnight ago, and now it would seem we're about to do the same to Brummell, as well. That can't happen to Justin. I won't allow it. Excuse me, Lydia, while I follow him, make my own feelings known on the subject of his return and my friends.h.i.+p for him. After all, being a b.l.o.o.d.y duke has to count for something.”
Lydia nodded her agreement and watched Tanner hurry off to stand by his friend. It was as Jasmine had said, as everyone who knew him said: the Duke of Malvern was an honorable man.
Jasmine was now speaking with a young woman dressed all in virginal white, her complexion as pale as her gown, and since Lydia didn't wish to interrupt, she busied herself by at last opening her dance card, to see what the baron had written that had brought such a strange smile to Tanner's face.
The baron had scribbled his name on the second line, the fifth, and the eighth. The three dances he had mentioned. But it was the way he had signed the card that now brought a smile to her face.
Wilde. Wilder. Wildest.
What a wicked, wickedly interesting man.
The captain had been gentle, almost respectful, their attraction to each other expressed only in longing looks, but never in word or action. He had been, she was realizing more and more, not only her first love, but also her beginning. Not her end.
Tanner was an honorable man and a good friend (who had a spring in his step, according to Sarah), and a rather bemused but interested look in his eyes when she'd come into the drawing room this evening. She'd known, even at first feared, that Tanner could mean more to her than to simply be her friend. But she hadn't considered that he might know that. Besides, Captain Fitzgerald stood between them, a bond and yet also a division.
Baron Justin Wilde, however, was a man totally outside her limited realm of experience, a man who well could be teasing her, or he could be using his teasing to cover something that was perhaps more than a casual interest.
Why, she was beginning to feel like the heroine in a Pennypress novel. All she needed now was a menacing stepfather, or a dark castle complete with a ghost.
It was good that Rafe was a duke, and could frank her correspondence for her, as Lydia already felt certain her letter to Nicole was going to run to two sheets, if not more. Which, for a quiet person who was accustomed to little excitement in her life, was rather extraordinary, indeed.
CHAPTER FOUR.
TANNER AND JUSTIN stood on the dark balcony outside the ballroom, companionably sipping from their gla.s.ses as they leaned against the railing, looking out over the gardens and the inviting paths lit periodically by flam-beaux.
It was good to have Justin Wilde back in his life, Tanner thought. They'd had grand times together in the past, young men fresh from school and the country, eager to explore the world and maybe make their own mark on it. They'd laughed together, traveled to the races and boxing mills together. Raced their curricles neck-or-nothing, drunk deep in disreputable taverns, even shared an opera dancer or two. They'd been young, so young, all of them, with their whole lives ahead of them.
Now those memories seemed to be of another world, another time, one before Justin's marriage, his flight to the continent after the duel, and then many long years of war.
So many friends had been lost to that war, good men all. Jonathan, Richard, Harry...Fitz. A man needed to hang on to those friends he still had, stand with them, stand by them.
”I'm not hiding out here, you understand,” the baron said after a bit.
Tanner carefully kept his gaze on a married couple-but not married to each other-seemingly intent on finding a less well-lit area of the gardens. ”Absolutely not. I would never think that of you.”
”It's a mob of bodies in there. The woman must have invited all of London, and all of London came.”
”Perhaps even some who were not invited,” Tanner said, a small smile playing about his lips.
”I'll ignore that remark. b.a.l.l.s can be exceedingly boring, don't you think, when there's no card room?”
”Yes, without doubt. Boring. And the wine is warm. All in all, a distinctly disappointing entertainment. I can't imagine why any of us is here. Why are we here, Justin? And by here, I mean on this balcony.”
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