Enchanting Pleasures (23 page)

So Gabby meekly set off, leaving behind her one frustrated fiancé and seventeen pearl-tipped hairpins.

L
ADY
S
YLVIA PAUSED
at the door to her bedchamber. “I’m not such a bad chaperone as you suppose,” she said suddenly. “I could see as well as any that you and Erskine were the better match.”

Gabby blushed. “I’m truly sorry about this morning. I should not have visited Quill’s study by myself.”

“There’s a time and place for chaperones too,” Lady Sylvia replied. “And giving a hand to a wedding proposal isn’t one of them. Looks as if Erskine did just fine on his own.”

Gabby couldn’t help smiling at the roguish look the older woman was giving her. “Yes, he did,” she said.

“A good boy, he is. All heart, and don’t let the fact he doesn’t say much change your opinion. He’s a good boy.”

Gabby nodded.

Lady Sylvia pranced into her room, instructing Gabby to lie on her bed for at least forty minutes, so as to prepare herself for the onslaught of gabsters they could expect for morning calls.

“Mind you,” she scolded, “given that your bodice gave up its moorings last night, quite a few of them will be here simply to crane their necks. I’ve no doubt but what that tale has spread all over town. Still, if the men of the town could have chosen a bodice to drop, I daresay that most of them would have chosen yours. That will irk the ladies. Pure and simple jealousy.”

Gabby walked into her room and dutifully lay on her bed, but it was impossible to relax. Finally she sat up and took out Peter’s miniature. But his gentle eyes and soft brown hair had lost their allure. She’d lost her appetite for perfectly arranged curls and a gentle manner. Quill’s eyes were stormy and his hair was never perfectly arranged—if indeed his valet did more than draw a comb through it. And yet she only had to think about him to feel a rush of happiness. He talked with his eyes, and they told her that she was beautiful and desirable—yes, and intelligent too.

L
UCIEN STOOD IN THE ENTRYWAY
of Emily’s small house feeling tongue-tied, a most unusual emotion for a man known for his eloquent compliments. “I came to ask whether you might accompany me to a small party being given by Lady Dunstreet,” he said. “I much enjoyed our evening together.”

“As did I,” Emily murmured. But Lucien couldn’t see any trace of pleasure on her face. Then she raised her eyes. “I must speak to you, Mr. Boch. Will you spare me a moment?”

Lucien’s heart sank as he followed Emily into the sitting room and sat down opposite her.

“Mr. Boch, I am afraid that I shall not be able to see you again,” Emily said decisively. “While I greatly enjoyed the ball—” She broke off. “I am responsible for my small household, which now includes Phoebe. I am most grateful to you for inviting me to Lady Fester’s ball. But I must not make a habit of such pleasures.”

Lucien shook his head. “Can you not think of it in the way of business?” he said, hoping that there wasn’t a plea in his voice. “I was under the impression that attending social events could only help your writing.”

Emily twisted her gloves in her lap.

“Did you not enjoy it?” he added—and he knew that there was desperation in his voice.

At that Emily looked up quickly. “Oh, I did! It was more…more lovely than I would have dreamed. But I cannot do it again, Mr. Boch. I do not belong in that world. I am a working person.”

“As I said, could you not—”

“Absolutely not,” Emily said with quiet certitude.

Lucien opened his mouth, but she raised her hand. “Mr. Boch, I will be frank with you. I cannot afford to live as a woman of the
ton
. My sister and I sewed late every night last week to make the gown I wore.”

“It was exquisite,” he said promptly. “I was accompanied by the most elegant woman in the room.”

Emily colored but shook her head. “I do not belong in that world, nor can I afford to masquerade in it. I have Phoebe to care for, as well as my sister. Even my evening gloves were beyond our means.” She rose.

Lucien perforce rose as well. He walked behind her to the door, suppressing an angry wish to complain. But what could he say? He could hardly offer to buy her a ball gown. It would be a grossly impertinent breach of etiquette.

“May I call on you in the future?”

Emily had the most open, candid eyes he had seen in his life. “I shall not be at home if you call,” she replied gently, disengaging her hand from his.

Lucien bowed once more, his heart a leaden stone in his chest. “I much regret your decision.”

Only Louise knew how much Emily regretted her own decisiveness; she came down the stairs to find her sister brushing away tears.

“Did you send him away?” she asked.

Emily nodded, her chin wobbling in an undignified fashion.

Louise sighed. “Why, Emily? Why should you begrudge yourself a few evenings of pleasure? You have most certainly earned them.”

“He has no serious intentions…. And I have no time for frivolity. I have Phoebe to care for,” Emily said.

“Pooh!” Louise replied.

“I am too fond of him,” Emily said.

“Is that such a problem?”

“I do not wish to become a kept woman.”

“You never would,” Louise said stoutly. “So why not just enjoy what is offered and refuse the
carte blanche
when he offers it?”

“Because…because I am afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“I might wish to become his mistress,” Emily whispered miserably.

There was a moment of silence.

“That is a problem,” Louise acknowledged.

Emily’s chin wobbled, but she managed a small smile. “Isn’t it just?”

Louise gave her a tight squeeze. “I will say one thing, Emily.”

Her sister paused, looking back from the stairs.

“If you are truly honest, you will note in your next column that a certain young woman accompanied by a former French count wore the most beautiful costume at the Fester ball.”

“Lucien is a marquis, not a count,” Emily corrected. But she smiled.

G
ABBY SPENT THE REMAINDER
of the morning in a stranglehold of anxiety. When should she tell Peter that their engagement was off? Or would Quill prefer to tell Peter himself? She would forget this nerve-racking problem only to find her heart beating rapidly as she imagined Kasi Rao being forcibly dragged from Mrs. Malabright’s arms.

The only positive aspect of her paroxysms of worry was that her dropped bodice faded in her mind from a dire humiliation to a mere embarrassment.

Lady Sylvia’s prediction about the number of callers they might expect proved to be absolutely correct. By the time Gabby returned downstairs, the Indian Drawing Room was crowded with people come to see the fashionable lady with the indecent gown—or the indecent lady with the fashionable gown, however one wished to phrase it.

Sophie, the Duchess of Gisle, arrived just after visiting hours commenced. “I thought if we were in the same chamber, we could accept commiseration together.” Her eyes were dancing with laughter. “I do believe that we ought to complain to Madame Carême, don’t you, Gabby?”

The assembled ladies quickly noted the duchess’s familiarity with Miss Jerningham and adjusted their opinions accordingly.

“I, for one, will never patronize that particular
modiste.”
A thin, waspish-looking lady shivered dramatically. “Obviously, it was her design that was at fault.”

“You wouldn’t have to worry,” Lady Sylvia snapped. “No gown is going to fall off yer chest, Amelia. And if it did, there’s nothing to expose.” Lady Sylvia was proving herself a formidable opponent, taking off the head of any person brave enough to insinuate that ladylike behavior did not include disrobing in public.

Gabby nodded, and smiled, and murmured polite nothings, and blushed whenever bodices were mentioned. She tried to ignore the fact that her throat tightened every time the door opened. Quill was nowhere to be seen. It was rare for him to appear until the evening, but surely today he would join them for luncheon?

“Well, you got away with it, gel,” Lady Sylvia said after the throngs of visitors had trickled to nothing and the room finally emptied. “Thanks to Her Grace. That girl is a right ‘un, I’ll tell you that.”

The door opened once again and Gabby’s heart jumped into her throat. Here she was, besieged by trouble, and she kept being distracted by memories of Quill’s hungry kisses and the way he groaned in his throat when she—She took a deep breath.

But it was Peter, not Quill, who entered. Gabby could barely meet his eyes. What would Peter think of her if he knew what she had been doing with his brother? She was jilting him. She was going to humiliate him in front of the entire
ton
, given that he introduced her to all his friends as his fiancée only the night before.

She wanted to die of mortification. Even more strongly, she wanted to burrow into the fierce warmth of Quill’s arms and remember why she was doing such an unladylike and scandalous action as marrying her fiancé’s brother.

The thought made her shiver again. In fact, what with one memory and another, she had spent the entire morning with a feverish pulse, and ill humor was beginning to creep over her.

Quill entered the dining room just as the rest of the family was sitting down, so Gabby assumed that he had not spoken to Peter. And yet, by halfway through the meal, the tension between the brothers was so clear that Gabby changed her mind.

The group was idly discussing a large fire that had destroyed a brew house and a public house in Argyle Street, suspected to be the work of a disgruntled patron of the public house who was refused a meat pie.

“There are two questionable items in the tale as it stands,” Gabby pointed out. “The first is the unlikelihood that a public house would refuse to give anyone a meat pie, and the second is that, in such an unlikely event, a customer would care enough to actually burn the premises. Why not simply buy a pie from another establishment?”

Quill’s eyes rested on her with something warmer than the appreciation one might show for a logical point. Gabby frowned at him in a warning that he ought to be more reserved with his attentions.

Peter was vigorously defending his account. “Apparently there was only one meat pie left, and the landlord had promised to save it for the Watch, or rather, for the Watch’s wife.” He smiled at Gabby and said, just a trifle ponderously, “We ought not to censure given that the recipient of the meat pie was a fair woman.”

Quill snorted. “Troy burned for the love of a beautiful woman. Are you saying, Peter, that London would have been well lost in order to satisfy the appetite of the Watch’s wife?”

“The landlord ought to be commended for placing his promise to a lady above mercantile concerns such as planks and mortar.”

Quill answered Peter with such a mocking smile that Gabby had the feeling that the conversation would have disintegrated into a family quarrel had not Codswallop appeared with the next course.

After the meal Quill disappeared before she could question him, and it wasn’t until five o’clock when he sauntered—yes,
sauntered
—into the parlor and asked Gabby if she would care for a ride in Hyde Park. It took all her fortitude not to scream her profound irritation to the skies.

Instead, she managed a stifled “yes” and went to change her clothing.

Quill looked after his betrothed curiously. Did she seem just a trifle disgruntled? She appeared to be a moody sort of girl. Sensitive, they called it when women were cantankerous.

Peter leapt to Quill’s side and dragged him over to the windows, out of Lady Sylvia’s hearing. “Well?” he asked eagerly. “When are you going to ask her?”

Quill looked down at his brother. “What in God’s name did you do to your hair?” he asked. “Is that pomade?”

Peter almost stamped his foot. “As I said, when are you going to ask her? I thought you planned to do so at breakfast. I didn’t dare speak a word to Gabby all day. I am quite certain that she noticed my incivility.”

“I asked her this morning,” Quill said, staring out the windows. It was all he could do to maintain a casual tone. He felt like shouting it. Gabby—beautiful, luscious Gabby—had agreed to marry
him
. A crippled man. A silent merchant. A man who had given up fashionable company for the inelegant world of trade.

Actually, that was the problem that had absorbed him all day. She didn’t know what a bad bargain she was getting.

“Well?” It was Peter who was almost shouting.

Quill had spent the day wrestling with his conscience. “She will give me an answer this afternoon,” he said negligently, as if the most important conversation of his life was naught more than a simple yes or no.

“Oh, God, it’s all over,” Peter groaned, raking his hand through the locks that had taken Rinsible forty-five minutes and a quantity of pomade to arrange. “If she put you off, then she was trying to think of a way to let you down easily. I
knew
Gabby would never take you.”

“She seemed encouraging this morning,” Quill said, wrenching his mind away from a memory of Gabby’s throaty little moans.

“She’s a nice woman. I am certain that she will refuse you gently. I told you, Quill, under different circumstances I would enjoy her company.” Peter sat down and stared straight ahead. “I think I will just go ahead and do it, Quill. I can’t move to America. They don’t…it’s full of savages. Impossible. I’ll just marry the woman. At least she seems to have escaped utter ruin, thanks to the Duchess of Gisle’s dropping bodice.”

Peter roused himself from dejection enough to look up at his brother. “I say, Quill, do you think it was a little odd that Her Grace’s bodice took the plunge just after Gabby’s?”

To Quill’s mind, it was not odd but obvious. Sophie had moved into the number-two spot on his secret list of treasured females, and there were only two females on it. Although he did maintain an errant affection for a milkmaid named Anne, who divested him of his virginity some fifteen years before.

He shrugged.

Peter was used to his unresponsiveness and didn’t even notice. “So Gabby didn’t give you an answer yet?”

Quill shrugged again. Of course, Gabby
had
said that she would marry him. But that was before he decided in all conscience that he had to detail what a bad bargain he truly was. Smelling of the shop, and dragging a gimpy leg. But most important, there were the migraines.

“Well, just give me a wink at supper,” Peter said gloomily, straightening his neckcloth and heading for the door. “As I said, you needn’t worry about me. I’ve decided to take my medicine and marry the chit.”

Codswallop appeared at the door. “Miss Jerningham awaits, Mr. Dewland.”

Quill stepped out of the salon and found Gabby pulling on her gloves in the entranceway. She was tightly buttoned into a pelisse of a deep rose color, and all her gorgeous hair was tucked away under a tight bonnet. She cast him an impatient look. Definitely she was in a cantankerous mood.

His curricle was pulled up before the house. Quill deftly helped Gabby up onto the seat and then followed. He waved off his groomsman and took the reins himself.

It was odd, Gabby thought to herself, how different it was in the carriage without Phoebe. Or perhaps it was because when Quill drove her from the docks, she was so much in love with Peter. She hadn’t noticed the way Quill’s muscled thighs took up most of the seat. But now …

She cleared her throat. “Have you informed your brother of our engagement?”

“No. I thought I should be certain that you wish to marry me first.”

Gabby blinked. Hadn’t she made that clear in the morning, rolling around on the rug like a trollop? “We agreed to marry,” she said, her voice stiff.

“I thought perhaps we should discuss the issue more rationally,” Quill replied smoothly, turning the curricle into Hyde Park.

Hot rage was rising in Gabby’s throat. He had tumbled her around on the floor, and now he wanted to back out of the marriage? She was no idiot. He had decided to renege. Probably the tumbling had convinced him that he didn’t want damaged goods, as Lady Sylvia had put it. Well, she wasn’t going to make it easy for him. She managed to school her voice into calmness.

“Certainly. What in particular do you wish to discuss?”

“I feel that I should clarify what sort of a husband I will be,” Quill replied.

There it was: he was going to say that she deserved a better man, and therefore he was breaking off the engagement for her own good. There was nothing she hated more than a cowardly approach.

“Do go on.” After all, it wasn’t as if
she
had proposed to him. She would have been perfectly happy married to Peter. Still would be happy, Gabby thought savagely.

“A gentleman does not engage in the activities with which I fill my day, Gabby,” Quill was saying. “I have invested in several English firms, an activity that is anathema to my father, for example.”

Gabby felt a flush of triumph. He couldn’t use this as an excuse!
“My
father spends his days exporting goods to the Netherlands and China,” she said, her tone cool. “I was not raised to believe that a gentleman should spend his time dawdling about the streets waiting for his next meal to be served.”

Quill paused. He’d lectured himself all morning about the necessity to be absolutely truthful with Gabby regarding the various infirmities stemming from his horse-riding accident. To be blunt about it, he had to tell her about his postcoital migraines.

“I would like to be very clear about the outcome of the accident I suffered six years ago,” Quill said. Now that it had come to the point, he was remarkably reluctant to give her a real reason to back out of the engagement. “Doctor Trankelstein feels that I will always have a limp when tired, for example. I cannot dance. And there are other limitations—”

Gabby turned her beautiful eyes up to his. He felt a shock. Could they be flaming with anger? Surely not.

“Your limp does not concern me, Quill.”

He opened his mouth and she cut him off. “Neither do any other bodily ailments that ensued from your accident.” There! That shut him up, Gabby thought. But the persistent beast was continuing. He truly has changed his mind since the morning, Gabby thought with some pain.