He was enjoying himself enormously, he realized—and wooing her in quite a different way than he had planned, with a quite blatant lack of subtlety. But there was no conventional way of wooing this woman, he suspected.
“I rest my case,” she replied, a faint blush coloring her cheeks. “There is no common ground between us, my lord, upon which any sort of meaningful relationship might be built—if that is your intent. We are as different as night and day.”
“And yet night and day meet fleetingly at twilight and dawn,” he said, lowering his voice again and narrowing his eyes and moving his head a quarter of an inch closer to hers. “And their merging sometimes affords the beholder the most enchanted moments of all the twenty-four hours. A sunrise or a sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder.” He grinned wickedly at her and touched his fingertips to the back of her gloved hand.
She moved her hand sharply away and then, seeming to recollect that they were on public view, raised it gracefully in order to fan her flushed cheeks. “I know nothing of passion,” she said. “You are wasting your time with me, my lord. I am not the sort of woman on whom words like these will have any effect whatsoever.”
“The theater is certainly overwarm,” he said softly, his eyes on her fan.
She ceased her movements abruptly and turned her head to look directly into his eyes. He expected her to move back when she saw how close they were, but she stood her ground, so to speak. He could sense anger hovering behind her control, and willed it to burst forth, even in this very public setting. Especially here, perhaps. They would instantly become a spectacular ondit. But he could almost see her reining in her temper before she spoke.
“You would be well advised not to continue pursuing me after tonight,” she said. “I will not accept any future invitation that includes you, my lord. I am accustomed to moving in circles where gentlemen are unfailingly gentlemanly.”
“How intolerably dull for you,” he said.
“Perhaps,” she said, plying her fan again, “I like a dull life. Dullness is much underrated. Perhaps I am a dull person.”
“Then perhaps,” he suggested, “you should marry someone like Bartlett-Howe or Stennson. Every time they move they are lost to view within a cloud of dust.”
He thought for an intrigued moment that she was going to laugh. Then he was convinced that she was drawing breath in order to deliver the blistering setdown he had been trying his damnedest—Lord knew why!—to provoke. But dash it, the door of the box opened before she could either laugh or explode, and she turned her head away sharply to gaze down into the pit again.
Kit rose and bowed to Mrs. and Miss Merklinger, helped them resume their seats, and asked them how they had enjoyed the first act. He grinned and winked at a poker-faced Farrington, and resumed his seat beside Lauren Edgeworth only moments before Sutton and Lady Wilma returned and regaled everyone with a rйsumй of every topic of conversation they had pursued with Lady Bridges and her party.
The second act of the play rescued them all from death by boredom.
Chapter 5
It rained intermittently for five days straight. It was impossible to walk any farther abroad than the back garden of the Duke of Portfrey’s house during the brief intervals between heavy downpours of rain. Lauren would have been perfectly content to remain quietly indoors, keeping Elizabeth company and busying herself with her needle and her pen, but everything around her seemed to conspire against any such hope.
The Duchess of Anburey came the morning after the theater visit with gentle reproof for Lauren’s having agreed to remain alone with Viscount Ravensberg when Wilma had very properly tried to draw her away to call at Lady Bridges’s box. Even when Lauren pointed out that she had stayed in Lord Farrington’s box from choice and that their tкte-а-tкte had been conducted in full view of any of the theater patrons who had cared to look, her aunt informed her that a lady could never be too careful of her reputation. Especially Lauren, under the circumstances, she added significantly.
She invited the Duke and Duchess of Portfrey and Lauren to dine the following evening. It would have been a reasonably pleasant family event, Lauren thought afterward, if it had not been for the presence of the lone outsider, another of the Earl of Sutton’s worthy, dull friends, who was seated next to Lauren at dinner and scarcely left her side all evening. It was most provoking to be six and twenty years old, a jilted bride, so to speak, and the object of all the determinedly well-meaning matchmaking efforts of several of one’s relatives.
Viscount Ravensberg did not remain without a mention. Lord Sutton regaled the company in the drawing room after dinner with an account of the viscount’s latest scandalous escapade. He had made a spectacle of himself the day before by going for a swim in the Serpentine in Hyde Park in the middle of the day between rain showers, wearing only—well, the earl did not care to elaborate on that topic in the presence of ladies. Lord Ravensberg had been laughing merrily when he got out of the water and revealed himself in all his shocking dishabille—he had not even been wearing his boots! He had sketched a deep, mocking bow to Lady Waddingthorpe and Mrs. Healy-Ryde, who had stopped, despite the mortification of being witness to such a shocking sight, to do their duty and inform him that he was a disgrace to his name and his family and the uniform he had worn until so recently. It was they who had spread the story, of course, beginning in Lady Jersey’s drawing room no more than an hour later.
The worthy young man assured Lauren with hushed solemnity that some gentlemen were not deserving of the name.
There were letters to and from home during that week, including one from Gwendoline, Lauren’s cousin and dearest friend—more sister than either cousin or friend, in fact. They had grown up together and had been virtually inseparable for most of their lives. Gwen referred to a letter her mother, the dowager countess, had received from Aunt Sadie.
“It is evident that she is surrounding you with a veritable army of eligible suitors,” Gwen had written. “Doubtless worthy and impossibly stuffy to a man. Poor Lauren! Is there anyone special—anyone you consider eligible? Oh, I know you have no wish for a beau, eligible or otherwise, but . . . is there?”
Lauren could picture the bright, mischievous grin Gwen would have worn while writing those words. But of course there was no one. Did he deliberately court notoriety? she wondered, her thoughts going off at a tangent. Swimming half naked in the Serpentine, indeed!
Gwen’s letter ended with a sentence written in slightly darker ink, as if she had sat at the escritoire for a long time before adding it to the rest, dipping and redipping her pen into the inkwell as she did so.
“Lily and Neville called at the dower house this morning,” the sentence read, “to bring the happy news that Lily is increasing.”
That was all. No details. No description of how Lily must have been glowing with joy and Neville bursting with pride. No description of how Aunt Clara must have wept with delight at the prospect of holding her first grandchild—or of the pang of grief Gwen must have felt at the memory of losing her own unborn child in a miscarriage following the riding accident that had left her permanently lame.
Just the bare fact that Lily was going to have a baby. Lily and Elizabeth both—newly married and increasing and as happy as the day was long. While Lauren was planning to set up her own very lone spinster establishment later in the summer and convincing herself that it was what she wanted most in life.