Kasey Michaels (31 page)

“You’ve a nasty streak in you I hadn’t noticed until now, Simon,” Bartholomew said, looking at him consideringly. “Do you know that?”

“Thank you, Bones,” Simon said, watching as another of the patronesses, Countess Lieven, approached Lester Plum—who had just stuck a fat knot of licorice whip between his jaws. The countess had a spotty-faced debutante in tow, obviously intent on having the two of them introduced, as the main purpose for Almack’s existence was the pairing off of male and female, with marriage as the object. “Uh-oh. Over there, Bones—watch our Mr. Plum. This has all the hallmarks of being delightful.”

And it was. Lester, his left cheek now-bulging suspiciously, bobbed his head a half dozen times—his version of a bow, Simon could only assume—then stared at the debutante’s extended hand as if it might be poisonous.

When it became obvious that the young lady was not about to withdraw her hand, Lester rolled his eyes like a panicked stallion ready to bolt and bowed over it. He placed a smacking kiss on the nearly dead white flesh, then hastily withdrew his handkerchief and rubbed it fiercely across her skin, removing what, Simon was sure, had to be a telltale trace of licorice spittle.

Lester then stood up very straight—like a brave soldier brought to the wall to be shot—and swallowed down hard, wincing as he did so, the knot of licorice nearly visible as it made its way down his gullet. He then reached into his pocket, pulled out another licorice whip, and handed it to the young woman.

“Oh, poor puppy,” Bartholomew groaned commiseratingly, as if he knew just how Lester felt, having made his own share of
faux pas
at Almack’s before he’d refused to step inside the front doors these past three years. “The countess will bounce him now, for certain. And probably us as well, for having brought him.”

“Oh, you of the faint heart, Bones,” Simon said, laughing as the spotty-faced debutante, wearing a smile that came within a whisker of beatific, slid her arm through Lester’s and allowed him to lead her onto the floor to join the set just forming. “Perhaps we London gentlemen have been going about this courting business all wrong—posies, drives through the park, odes to my lady’s eyebrows. Have you any sugarplums on your person, Bones, or have you decided not to dance tonight?”

“I don’t believe it!” Bartholomew exclaimed, shaking his head as Lester and his female companion danced by. “And I’ve never seen the like before. Um, about those sugarplums? Do you really think—uh, oh! Filton at four of the clock, Simon. Stap me if you weren’t right. And he’s looking fine as nine pence, too, just as if he didn’t owe his oppressed tailor close to three hundred pounds. Are you going to take straight aim at him, or wait until he comes to you?”

Simon turned in the direction Bartholomew had indicated and watched as Noel Kinsey—resplendent in his knee breeches, if a tad paunchy beneath his long-tailed coat (Simon really,
really
didn’t like the man)—lifted a quizzing glass to his eye and surveyed the dancers. Obviously on the hunt for heiresses, he scanned the line of young ladies about to begin the quadrille and stopped as his gaze alighted on Callie, who was, Simon knew, both unknown to the earl and the most beautiful woman in the room.

“Where’s Armand?” he asked tersely, wanting to know the positions of all the players before he began the game.

“Just rounding the corner at the far end of the dance floor with Callie now returned to his arms,” Bartholomew supplied quickly as the movements of the dance brought Callie and Armand together, really outdoing himself in his role of “spotter” for the evening, “and taking dead aim at Filton.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Here we go, Simon, for better or worse.”

“It’s not a marriage we’re after, Bones,” Simon growled, finding that he did not at all like the way Noel Kinsey was looking at Callie—and what would everyone think if he raced to the middle of the floor and threw a shawl over her lovely, exposed shoulders? “Now, come on. First we talk with him, then we leave him alone for a space, to ruminate over what we’ve said, and then we lure him off to White’s for a night of cards. He’ll go easily enough, once he hears a bit of what we have to tell him about Callie, then finds that she has no space on her dance card for him.”

Callie was within the hallowed walls of Almack’s, the dream of every young woman in England. She was wearing a lovely white gown that shimmered in the candlelight and whose skirts whispered when she walked. Her hair had been styled with care, to look artlessly informal while still faintly regal, a narrow white-satin ribbon tied through it and stuck with pearls. Her dancing slippers didn’t pinch at her toes. Her dance card was full, she’d had eight invitations to go down to dinner, and she was, even in her own humble assessment, the belle of the ball, the success of the evening, the cynosure of all eyes, the most talked-about, gawked-at, popular young woman in all of London Society.

And she was miserable.

How many of these men would be paying the slightest bit of attention to her if Simon and Bones and Armand—even Imogene and Lester—weren’t running from ear to ear, whispering hints of her tremendous dowry?

Why, she could probably slide to the floor in a swoon, sing a hymn at the top of her lungs—and totally off-key—strip down to her petticoat and do a jig in front of the fiddlers, even walk to the middle of the dance floor and fling herself down and throw a foam-at-the-mouth fit, all without a flicker of notice... if it weren’t for those whispers.

But that wasn’t what had Callie feeling miserable.

She was miserable because of the things Simon had told her that afternoon, because she had goaded him into an explanation she never should have heard. Simon had his reasons for wanting to destroy Noel Kinsey. Good reasons. Private reasons. Terrible reasons.

That he’d had reasons had been enough for Armand, for Bones, for Imogene.

But it hadn’t been enough for her. No. Not for Caledonia. Johnston. She’d had to push, and push, until he was forced to relive a sorrow best revenged, then forgotten.

And now he hated her. Despised her. With every good reason.

Not that her own reason for wanting to punish Kinsey was no longer valid, but it paled beneath Simon’s story of his solicitor and that man’s son. At least Justyn had escaped with his life, if not his pride, intact. He would come home again someday, sadder but wiser. Young Robert was dead.

Oh, yes, Simon had every reason to be angry with her, disgusted with her. What was equally terrible was that she couldn’t even bring herself to feel the least angry with him for having tricked her.

Because he’d been right all along. She’d been silly, juvenile. Impetuous. If she had been allowed to keep to her half-thought-out schemes she and Lester would eventually have failed, been caught out, arrested, punished.

And she wouldn’t have gone home after Simon had found her out, carried her off to Portland Place. Simon had been correct there as well. She would have stubbornly stayed in London, searching out Kinsey, trying to shoot him. Shoot him! How could she have thought such a thing? Planned such a thing?

Those hours of walking with books on her head, of listening to Imogene’s endless lessons on deportment—everything—had been no less penance than she’d deserved. In fact, her weeks with Simon and his mother had been more in the way of a reward than a punishment. Even she was insufficiently thickheaded to see that.

And, over the course of time, Simon had come to care for her, at least a little bit. As she had come to care for him. Very much.

How much growing up she had done in these past few weeks. In so many ways.

Still, Simon hated her now. She’d known it that afternoon at the inn, the moment the light in his eyes had died. Whatever it was that they’d shared, it was over now. All that was left was for her to come to Almack’s, to behave herself, and to please Imogene by being the “well-dowered” belle of the ball while the woman desperately hunted out prospective lovers to enliven her old age.

It was the least she could do for the dear lady.

And yet, now that they were actually at Almack’s, now that the music was playing and she felt herself being caught up in all the same romantic notions of every other young woman present tonight, Callie wanted, longed, to dance with Simon.

She never had.

She had, however, watched his every move as he’d walked around the perimeter of the dance floor, talking to an older, yet still-lovely woman whom Callie believed to be one of the patronesses. The woman earlier had made a great fuss out of introducing her to Armand as if she hadn’t already known him, then told him he could lead her out for her first waltz.

She had continued to watch as Simon spoke with his mother, then with Bones, and still watched as he stood with Noel Kinsey, laughing and talking and acting as if they were the best of good friends.

She was watching so intently, in fact, that she missed a step and trod heavily on Armand Gauthier’s instep as he led her into another sweeping turn of their second waltz of the evening. Waltzing twice in the same evening with Gauthier, she had been told—by Gauthier—virtually ensured her social success. “Oh!” she exclaimed, flustered. “I’m so sorry, Armand!”

“As well you should be,” Armand told her, somehow keeping from missing a beat of the music, so that no one save the two of them knew of her misstep. “I was just most fulsomely complimenting your emerald-bright eyes—and you weren’t paying me the least attention. And you’re not smiling, Callie. People are watching. It’s very lowering to both my consequence and my high opinion of my own charms if you’re to look as if you aren’t in alt over being honored by my attention. But this is Simon’s fault, isn’t it? You’re in love with him.”

Callie missed another step. “I believe you’re left with two choices, Armand,” she told him as he tried not to wince—for this time she’d really come down hard on his toes. “Either talk about something innocuous, like the beastly weather we’ve been having, or lead me off this dance floor so that I might save you further injury.”

“As soon done as said,” he drawled. As they were already dancing near the edge of the floor, he guided her to a fairly isolated pair of straight-back chairs, snagging a glass of warm, watery lemonade for her as he passed by a young hussar who clearly had been in the act of taking the refreshment to quite another young lady entirely.

“That wasn’t nice,” Callie said, taking a sip of the liquid for she was, indeed, rather thirsty.

“No, it wasn’t,” Armand agreed smoothly, “but it’s also one of the privileges of my checkered, and perhaps nefarious past. I’m allowed a license given few others, as no one is quite sure whether it’s true that I have shot down six men in duels, killing four and seriously injuring the others. Such a dreadfully
lethal
man, I am, to be sure. No one is willing to challenge my prowess.”

“And you’ve made up that tale and all those other fantastic stories out of whole cloth, haven’t you?” Callie asked, more than willing to leave the subject of her love for Simon behind them. Had Simon seen them leaving the dance floor? Was he even now watching them, wondering what they were talking about?

“Only two or three of them,” Armand told her, removing the glass from her hand and taking a sip himself before pulling a face and pouring the remainder of the contents into a nearby potted palm. “My God, how can you drink this? How can they
serve
this? Now, what were we saying? Oh, yes. I only laid the foundations of my reputation, Callie. The remainder of the construction was left to the wholly gullible, wonderfully inventive minds of those darlings of Society who have nothing better to do with their time than speculate on my lurid past.”

“You were a card player,” Callie said, eyeing him closely, wishing she could ask him to kiss her hand, just so that Simon could see him do it.

“I played cards,” he said, smiling.

“You were a privateer.”

“I may have shared a ship or two
with
pirates.”

Callie giggled, just in case Simon was watching. She felt fairly certain Simon wouldn’t want her tumbling into love with Armand Gauthier. Why, he might even feel it his duty to come join them. Lord! Was she that desperate? Yes. Yes, she was. “And,” she said, throwing out a story of her own making, “you’re really the bastard son of a Turkish emir.”

“That was last week, I believe,” he told her, winking. “This week I am the bastard son of an American cotton planter again, or so Bones heard at White’s. Which brings us back to Simon, who has just left for that place, Noel Kinsey following along behind like a good little piggy.”

Callie shot a look toward the doorway, her heart dropping to her toes. She had been so sure he was watching her. “Simon’s leaving? And Filton with him? But he didn’t even
see
me!”

“Oh yes he did, my dear. And rest assured Simon will spend the evening singing your praises, and of the depth of your purse. Simon will also tell him that he will be the one who says yea or nay to any plea for marriage brought to him on your behalf. That should be enough of a lure to keep Filton stuck to Simon’s side until our dear friend can fleece the man down to his hose. So you see, my dear? You are being a help. Truly. You’re also completely and totally out of harm’s way, which is just where Simon wants you.”