An Extraordinary Flirtation (26 page)

“The fox up and nipped you, squire?” Beau extended his hand. “You should stick a wad of paper under your lip and pinch your nose. I’d appreciate it if you tried not to drip on the rug.”

With Beau’s help, Paul stood up. “Wad I should hab is some branby!” he said.

“Excellent notion. So should I.” Once the masculine ritual of decanter and glasses was completed, Beau gazed around the room, and found his sister rubbing Lord Mannering’s back. The congratulations he had meant to give her on the excellence of her aim—it was Beau who had taught Cara to use her fists, a very long time ago—died in his throat. “Unhand the marquess!” he said instead. “He’s going to marry Zoe at once.”

Cara stiffened. Nick caught her wrist before she could move away. “No, I think I will not marry her at all. One week in your daughter’s company and I would be fit to strangle her.”

That’s what came of these long betrothals. The marquess sounded like a man who’d made up his mind, alas. Beau contemplated his daughter’s two latest conquests. Paul Anderley was sprawled on the second sofa. “Don’ book a’ be.
I
bot boing do barry her!” The paper stuck beneath his upper lip, and the grip he had on the bridge of his nose, had an even more unfortunate effect on the clarity of his speech.

“Of course he isn’t going to marry me!” Zoe draped herself over the back of Baron Fitzrichard’s couch. “No one’s going to marry me, and the sooner you accept that, the better it will be for everyone, Beau."

Beau was a long way from acceptance. “Someone is
going to marry you!” His gaze moved to Colin, who had retreated to the hearth along with the dog. “Who’s
this?”

“Colin Kennet, my nephew and heir,” said Nick. “He won’t marry her either, because I’ll disinherit him if he does.”

“I’m not going to marry anyone until I reach the age of reason,” volunteered Colin. “Which from the way things are going looks to be a long way off. And even then I wouldn’t marry
her.”

Zoe turned up her little nose. “You should be so fortunate.”

Colin snorted. “I should be so cursed.”

Stung, Zoe pushed out her lower lip. “I suppose you’d prefer a
biddable
female.”

Colin petted Daisy, who was inspired by these raised voices to snuggle closer to him for protection. “Anybody would.”

Zoe sniffed. “That shows all
you
know! Lord Mannering fancies Aunt Cara and she’s not biddable by any means.”

Colin glanced at his uncle, seated now in a walnut wing chair. Lady Norwood remained by his side, perhaps because he held her wrist in a grasp that didn’t look especially loverlike. Did Nicky think she might hit him again? These nuances of romantic behavior were too much for Colin to grasp.

While Zoe and Colin quarreled, the gentlemen followed suit, a disagreement that rapidly accelerated until mention was made of a duel. Fitz roused sufficiently to debate who was going to fight whom, Nicky being up to no such strenuous activities, although he himself would be happy to stand in. Or, alternately, to second someone. Fitz had already demonstrated his prowess with a fireplace poker, which it was a pity Beau had missed.

Beau rather thought it was a blessing. He stared at the baron’s lilac cravat. “Nice necktie,” he said.

Fitz preened. “I call it the Point Non Plus. After Anderley there.” Paul glowered. Ianthe thrust the vinaigrette under the baron’s nose. “Stop it, all of you!”

Patience was not Zoe’s long suit. She eyed the grandfather clock. When the babble of voices failed to abate, she walked over and gave it a great shove. The clock toppled sideways, and hit the floor with a great crash. In the sudden silence, she announced, “I cannot think I would be the right wife for you, Lord Mannering. There, I have cried off.”

Beau stared from the shattered clock to his wayward daughter. “Great-Uncle Percival brought that clock with him when he fled Austria."

Zoe plopped her hands on her hips. “If you don’t start paying attention to me, I will
break everything in the house! What’s more important, Beau, your own daughter or some silly French spy?”

Beau wondered if he’d drunk too much of his brandy. Else how had French spies got involved in this mess? “You can’t cry off!”

“I already have.” Zoe picked up the fireplace poker. “And everyone heard me. Isn’t that right?”

“Right as a trivet!” Fitz decided it was safe to sit up. Safer than lying down, at any rate, when the spawn of Satan had a fireplace poker in her hand. “We all heard you cry off. Nicky’s betrothal is at an end.”

Beau glared impotently at his daughter, and then at his sister. “Blast it, Cara! I brought you to town so that Zoe might profit from your good sense!”

All eyes turned to Cara, who lowered her gaze to the hand that so firmly clasped her wrist. “How selfish of you, Lady Norwood,” scolded Fitz, “to wish a little happiness of your own. Not that you look especially happy at the moment, but Nicky will make it up to you.”

Cara bit her lip. “Don’t tease her,” said Ianthe. “We all know that the path of True Love is often beset with difficulties.”

“Briars, brambles and banes!” agreed Fitz.

“It will only be a nine days’ wonder.” Zoe twirled the fireplace poker on her shoulder as if it were a parasol. “Perhaps I am one of those Loversall females who isn’t meant to marry, like Gwyneth and Ariadne. If you try to force me, Beau, I’ll just run away and wind up in a brothel, or perhaps victim of a white slavery ring.”

Beau frowned at his daughter. “You aren’t supposed to know about such things.”

“Well, I do! And I shan’t let you break Aunt Cara’s heart, because although
you
might not mind if she flings herself off the battlements, Cousin Ianthe and I do! Anyway, Lord Mannering will cry off if I don’t.”

Fortunately the family battlements had long since passed into other hands. Beau turned his astonished gaze on the marquess. “You wouldn’t.”

Nick shifted in the chair and winced. He felt as though five hundred devils were sticking then- pitchforks in his back. Cara’s cool hand moved to touch his cheek. He looked up at her. “Oh yes I would.”

“Lord Mannering prefers Aunt Cara,” explained Zoe. “He told me so himself. As we tried to tell you!”

So they had, but he hadn’t believed them. “You’re been frolicking with my
sister?”
said Beau.

Nick didn’t think that “frolicking” quite described what he’d been doing, but he didn’t quibble. “I have.”

Cara glanced at her brother. “Contrary to your expectations, Beau, as well as your daughter’s, even people in their declining years can still enjoy
amour.”

Beau disliked the fire in his sister’s eye. There were still things in the room that could be broken. “I never said—”

“You said I was dull and drab and dreary and I don’t even remember what else.”

“Dwabble!” interjected the squire. “She bo sush ding.”

“I’m sure I never meant—”

“Of course you did,” put in Ianthe. “You always mean what you say. At least in the moment of saying it.”

Beau raised his hands in defeat. “We’ll just have to hold up our heads and pretend nothing untoward has happened. Ianthe will—"

“No, Ianthe won’t. I am removing with Cousin Wilhelmina to Brighton.”

Fitz brightened. “Excellent choice! I was planning on going there myself. Prinny requires my advice about some additions to his Pavilion.”

Ianthe met her cousin’s gaze. “Zoe is
your
daughter, Beau. Perhaps one of your female friends might have some suggestions as to what you might do with her.”

Beau had some notions of his own, but unfortunately the dungeons had departed the family along with the battlements. “I don’t think I have any more female friends,” he said.

Zoe moved to her papa’s side. “No mistresses? Poor Beau! Aunt Cara isn’t the only one who is growing old.”

Beau might have taken exception with this comment, had he been listening. Instead, he was looking at Ianthe. “You are leaving me.”

Ianthe smiled, a little wistfully. “It’s time, don’t you think?”

Beau was uncertain what he thought, save that the notion of Ianthe’s departure was having a strange effect on parts of his person that hadn’t perked up for some time, even during a visit to the Temple of Health in the Adelphi, where he had sat upon a magnetic throne, and taken a crackling electrical bath, and been prescribed a course of treatment that included Nervous AEtherial Balsam and Imperial Pills. And if he had foregone the fifty pounds that would have purchased him a romp in the Celestial Bed, he had still learned some bawdy lyrics, most memorably “he kneaded her dough with his long rolling-pin.”

Beau was visited, then, by his own epiphany. Perhaps not Zoe’s antics had quenched his ardor, but Ianthe’s reproachful presence in the background of his life. “Yes, my dear, I suppose it is.”

Zoe didn’t see why anyone should care if Ianthe went to Brighton. “If I contrived to make it look like Lord Mannering had compromised me, he
truly
compromised Aunt Cara, because I found her hiding in his bed. So you should make him marry her instead.”

Cara interrupted. “No one is making anyone marry anyone.”

Beau studied his sister. “Do I want to know why you were in Mannering’s bed?”

Cara touched Nick’s hand, locked so firmly around her wrist. “No.”

Zoe played her trump card.
“And
he wasn’t wearing any clothes.”

Ianthe arched her eyebrows. “You didn’t tell me he was naked, Cara.”

“He wasn’t.”

“Yes, I was.”

“You were wearing a sheet.”

“I’ll vouch for it!” volunteered Fitz. “I saw them both myself.”

Beau didn’t care to imagine what Fitz might have been doing in the marquess’s bedroom at that particular moment. Colin decided it was definitely time for an uncle-nephew talk.

“Cara wasn’t naked,” admitted Zoe. “But she was all rumpled, and I had to button her bodice myself. Did I mention that they were both in his bed? With a feather fan? Which was very poorly done of him, because he was supposed to be seducing me.”

“What kind of feathers?” inquired Beau.

“I thought it was rather
well
done myself.” Nick turned over Cara’s hand and pressed a kiss on her palm. “So did your aunt, at the time, although she won’t admit it, because right now I’m not in her good books.”

Zoe lowered the poker. There was a wedding to be planned. “You won’t wish to tie the knot at St. George’s. Perhaps you should get a special license instead. Or better yet, run off to Gretna Green! Aunt Cara, you
did
say you would elope with him.”

Cara tried, ineffectively, to withdraw from Nicky’s grasp. “Only to prevent him marrying you. Which we already know he isn’t going to do.”

Beau gave up musing about feathers to fix Nick with a stern eye. “It’s clear to me, Mannering, that you haven’t dealt well with the females of my family."

“Oh, I don’t know!” snickered Fitz. “Seems to me he’s dealt prodigious well with one of them."

Cara blushed. “None of this was his fault,” protested Zoe. “Lord Mannering wished to speak to Beau about Aunt Cara when he met me in the hall.”

Beau was growing short of temper. “Well, he can’t have Cara now. Think of the scandal it would make.”

Everybody stared at him, including Colin and the dog. Ianthe spoke for them all. “Don’t be absurd!”

But Nicky had never said he wished to marry her. He could have come to speak to Beau about anything from horseflesh to the price of wheat. “Has it occurred to anyone to wonder what
I
want?” Cara asked.

Nick rubbed his thumb over the palm of her hand. “What do you want,
cara mia?”

She wanted that clever thumb to rub certain other places. Which was something she wasn’t prepared to announce in the middle of her brother’s drawing room. “I don’t know! But I’m
not
going to get married because I’ve been compromised."

Cautiously, favoring his injured nose, Paul Ander-ley got up from his couch. “Do you bish be do bake you home?”

Did she? It was peaceful in the Cotswolds. Cara decided she had already experienced enough peace for a lifetime. “I’m sorry, Paul. I don’t.”

It was over, then. Paul could only comport himself with the dignity of a Master of Hounds at the end of a long and unsuccessful hunt. At least his damned nose had stopped bleeding. He bowed, and turned toward the door.

Widdle waited in the hallway. The butler tutted at his appearance. Paul plopped his hat on his head and snatched up his cane.

Zoe nibbled on a fingernail. “I wouldn’t think that you’re suited for a nunnery, Aunt Cara. Like Francesca was. Although she
did
get snatched by pirates, and ended up in a harem, so perhaps it wouldn’t be too bad.”

Fitz rose from the sofa. “It’s the very devil, isn’t it, to cut up someone’s hopes? Nicky’s not plump current, you know. He needs to be treated gently. Come, Loversall, show me those gardens of which you’re so proud.”

Beau stared at him in astonishment. “I’m not—”

“Yes, you are!” said Ianthe, and gave him a frown.

“Ah, the gardens. Yes, indeed.” Beau ushered in his various guests around the broken clock and out through the French doors, along with Zoe and the dog, neither of whom especially wished to go. Zoe fluttered her eyelashes at her father. “Forgive me, Papa! I have behaved very badly. You
will be cross with me.”

Beau slid his arm around her shoulders. “Nonsense! Loversalls cannot help our bad behavior, puss. It is our wild blood.” Ianthe rolled her eyes. Fitz took hold of Daisy’s collar, and said, “Everyone makes mistakes, Lady Norwood. Only a fool makes the same one twice.” He dragged the dog outside, and firmly closed the door.

Cara looked down at the marquess, and hoped she wasn’t making the most monumental of mistakes. “Are you in pain?”

“Not so much as I’m going to be.” He tugged on her wrist, and she plopped into his lap. He winced. She stiffened. “Nicky, your back!”

“My back is feeling better by the moment.” He drew her close against his chest.

Cara inhaled the scent of camphor. Nothing had ever smelled so good to her. His heart beat strongly against her cheek. “I can’t think when I’m near you, Nicky.”