Maggie MacKeever (25 page)

So deep had been Adorée’s concentration—the composition of a missive to Sir Malcolm requiring greater cleverness than she possessed—that the sudden noise made her start and drop her quill. Ink splattered on both her letter and her gown. “Oh, drat!” said she.

“I’ll buy you another!” growled Lord Erland, and threw himself down on the sofa. He regarded Lady Bliss, who despite her extremely distrait appearance remained extremely lovely. “I’ll say this much for you, Adorée: you don’t have a range of vision that’s narrow as a needle! And you don’t spout arrant nonsense to a man.”

“I hope,” Lady Bliss remarked, “that you haven’t come to pitch straws with me. I’ve had more than enough problems for one day.”

Lord Erland stretched out his legs and propped them on a table, an act that drew Adorée’s unhappy attention to his magnificent physique, clad in evening wear. She admired his black coat, white waistcoat, black pantaloons, all of which were of excellent cut and subdued taste. Obviously, he preferred the best in everything. It was a very great pity, concluded Adorée, who numbered among her vices no false modesty, that fate denied him a lively romance with a lady of her caliber. She sighed.

Dominic, who was expert at reading female countenances, extended a hand. “Come talk to me! You may tell me your woes, and I shall tell you mine, and I promise you that I shan’t scold.”

Adore had a severe struggle with her scruples, which demanded that Lord Erland remain unacquainted with even the most minor of her woes. The earl, whose expression was not sanguine, would hardly refrain from scolding if he learned of matters between his cousin and her niece. Adorée stood, and knocked over the pile of bills that had rested on her desk. Exasperated with her clumsiness, she knelt and stacked them once more into an untidy pile.

“Dished again?” inquired the earl, an appreciative light in his eye. This was not prompted by the idea of Lady Bliss’s dire financial straits, but by the sight of Lady Bliss crawling around the floor. “I wish you’d let me help you.”

Having collected the damning evidence of her spendthrift Ashley ways, Adorée dealt with it in her usual manner, and shoved the bills out of sight. “And I wish I could let you,” she retorted. “However, there remains your cousin.”

“Curse my cousin!” Lord Erland’s foot thudded to the floor. “I have heard entirely too much about that young cub for one night. Are you going to come here or must I fetch you?”

So it was to be a truce? Adorée regarded him, a distinct gleam in her own eye. She was not averse to the notion of being fetched, unnecessary as the action would be. Nor was-she averse to putting aside her own problems for a time. She rang for Tomkin and requested a bowl of punch. It was not until the butler returned with this noble concoction of steaming port and roasted lemon that she seated herself by the earl.

“You know exactly how to titillate the most jaded appetite, do you not?” Dominic flicked her cheek. “You are a very unusual female, Lady Bliss.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, though it’s true that I’ve had a little experience with the likes and dislikes of gentlemen.” Unaware of Lord Erland’s reaction to this staggering understatement, Adorée sipped her punch. “Infinitely curious and interesting they have been. But that sort of thing is beyond me now, and it’s a crushing blow. I suppose I must content myself with memories.”

Lord Erland choked with laughter. “You have a lot of memories, I gather?”

Adorée was not surprised that the melancholy truth should rouse mirth in Lord Erland; gentlemen, for Adorée, had few surprises left in store. “Yes. My brother may say I’m touched in the upper works, but even Innis can’t deny that I
remember
things. I daresay I could console myself for years,” she added gloomily, “with my memories.”

Had Lady Bliss observed Lord Erland’s expression at that moment, she might have realized that such a vicarious existence need not be hers. However, she was steadily, and somberly, staring into her punch cup. “For almost as many years as it took to gather them,” Dominic offered wickedly. “But even you must have forgotten a few conquests along the way.”

Adorée did look at him, then, rather unappreciatively. “It is not kind of you,” she retorted, “to belittle my accomplishments. Heaven knows I have few enough of them! I swear that every one of my, er, conquests is as distinctly in my recollection as if it had happened yesterday.”

“Including my nephew?” inquired Lord Erland. She looked bewildered. “I thought not. Why did your brother say you lacked sense?”

This simple remark distracted Adorée, recalling to her as it did the circumstances that had prompted Innis to fly off the handle, and her discovery that Miss Lennox was not at all safe in Blissington House. “He has always said it,” she responded absently. ‘This time it was because I’d just broken a vase over his head.”

“I see.” Dominic was fascinated by these disclosures. “Or I will, I’m sure, when you explain.”

“There was nothing else
to
do! Innis was trying to seduce—” Again Adorée’s tongue had almost betrayed her. “And I’m sure she didn’t want him to. Innis was very angry and Miss—Well! The upshot of it all was that I forbade him the house.” She looked gloomy. “Not that it will serve but it may give me time—You will think me a dreadfully temperish female, I suppose, but truly I’m
not.”

Lord Erland might have drawn several interesting conclusions from these disjointed disclosures, had he been paying them any particular heed. Instead, he was engrossed in the various expressions that crossed Lady Bliss’s pretty face. “You may make yourself easy on that head,” he retorted roughly. “I’ve few delusions about either you or myself, and nothing you’ve told me has made me think the less of you.”

Adorée was not soothed. “That,” she sighed, “is because you thought nothing of me to begin with. I wish I knew what I have done to deserve this abominable situation!”

Lord Erland did not think she referred to the fact that she was seated beside him on the sofa and sharing with him a bowl of punch. He caught her face in his hands and turned it to him. “You forget,” he said softly, “how many gentlemen have found you fascinating. Indeed, I am among them. Did I not find you fascinating, I would not have come here tonight.”

Lady Bliss knew perfectly well what fascination, to a gentleman like Lord Erland, must entail. Considering her reputation, and her particularity for gentlemen like Lord Erland, it would have been a great deal more surprising if she had not. But she was no lightskirt, despite her countless indiscretions, and she steeled herself to offer a protest. “You left your cloak here,” she said, and blinked, because those were not the words her mind had formed. “I’ve kept it safe for you, in my room.”

“You have been,” Dominic murmured softly, as he traced the outlines of her face, “put to a great deal of inconvenience on my account.”

Little did he know the truth of
that,
thought Adorée. She stared rapt into Lord Erland’s cool eyes and suffered a distinct giddiness. It increased to total turbulence when he bent his head and kissed her lips. “I only await your word,” said he.

Adorée considered the Earl’s cousin and her own niece, Miss Lennox and Lord Roxbury, Innis and Eleazar Hyde. Damning the lot of them to perdition, she wrenched herself out of the Earl’s arms. “You’ll wait a prodigiously long time,” Lady Bliss retorted gloomily.

Chapter Twenty

The next morning saw Miss Lennox making her way to the book room. She knew of Lord Erland’s call; she knew also that Lady Bliss had granted the Earl a private interview, at the close of which she had stumbled in a stricken manner up the stairs and barricaded herself within her room. Miss Lennox was not surprised; Miss Lennox thought, in light of the respective reputations of Lady Bliss and Lord Erland, that Adorée should be discomposed was inevitable. Too, she thought that Adorée was want-witted, and in need of some stem advice.

Adorée was curled up in the most charming state of indolence on the sofa, plucking petals from the wilted roses— which she refused to have removed from the house—as if they were daisies and from them she might learn whether she was loved. The fruits of this enterprise were strewn about the floor. Today Lady Bliss wore a morning gown of flower-dotted muslin that strongly resembled a bed dress, and her dark hair was tucked under a large round mob cap of cambric gathered into a band and edged with a frill. It tied under her pretty chin. Save for the shadows beneath her gray eyes, she looked absurdly young.

She also looked extremely dazed, as if she had been allowed to glimpse vistas as yet unexplored, and had not yet returned entirely to reality. Jynx cleared her throat and set a cup of chocolate before her hostess. “Ah, my dear, good morning!” said Lady Bliss vaguely. “A lovely hour, is it not? I anticipate a splendid day.”

“You are,” Jynx replied repressively, as she sat down in a chair, “in very good spirits.”

“Am I?” Adorée looked doubtful.

Miss Lennox was fascinated, and rather disheartened, to discover that Lady Bliss in love was even more scatter-brained than in her normal state. That Lady Bliss fancied herself in love was not in doubt; she had launched upon an eloquent and soulful dissertation, which was lush with such phrases as
la genie de l’amour
and
preux chevaliers
and
chemin de velours.
The primrose path, indeed! Miss Lennox opened her mouth.

“Oh!” wailed Adorée. “I should not speak so to you, but I cannot help myself. How frustrating it is. You will not wish to hear about my conversation with Nicky—but indeed I have lost my heart! I do not always say that,” added Adorée, “though you might think I do. I may be impractical and impetuous, my dear, but I don’t hand out false coin. Why should I? I’m not in my dotage yet!”

“You seem,” Miss Lennox ventured, “to be quite taken with Lord Erland.”

“Taken with him?
À la folie!
I always develop decided partialities for gentlemen who sweep me off my feet.” Adorée did not appear especially delighted by the fact. “And so Nicky would have done, but I did not let him, and I wish very much that I did
not
have scruples, because life would be ‘ much pleasanter. Oh! I should not have said that, either! It is all so difficult!”

 In truth, it was, but Jynx had not yet been driven to despair. She assured her hostess that her maidenly sensibilities were in no danger of being wounded. “Did you,” she asked, before Lady Bliss could once more embark upon a discussion of romance, love, and the world well lost, “speak to Lord Erland about Percy?”

“Percy?” Adorée looked blank, then utterly appalled. “We didn’t discuss it. Actually, my dear Miss Lennox, I didn’t even think of him.”

Clearly it was midsummer moon with her hostess, reflected Jynx. Lady Bliss was reckless and tempestuous and beautiful, and in addition she possessed not an ounce of common sense. The lady was engaged in speech once more. One moment she announced that Lord Erland was a deferent and amusing companion, who was supremely self-possessed; the next she averred that he was a great deal
too
sure of himself. “And well he might be!” she concluded, and for emphasis pounded the table with the decapitated rose-stem that she still held. “Which only proves that one should not trust to one’s luck, for fortune has brought me Nicky.”

Miss Lennox was reluctant to interrupt these intriguing, if inexplicable, confidences; but if anything coherent was to be heard from Lady Bliss, interruption there must be. “What,” she inquired hesitantly, “about Lord Roxbury?”

“Shannon? What about him? You will not understand, perhaps, but I never cared a button for Shannon, nor he for me.” Adorée realized the oddity of that remark, and blushed. “I mean I
cared
for him, as I care for
all
my gentlemen, but I didn’t love him.”

Jynx had been sidetracked.
“All
of them?” she echoed, with scantily disguised disbelief.

“All.”
Adorée’s glance was reproving. “I hope I am not so lost to propriety as to flirt with gentlemen whom I do not like!” Miss Lennox attempted to equate propriety with Lady Bliss, and remained silent. “As for Shannon, I have tried to tell you before that he has offered me not even the tiniest compliment for some time. I will not insult you, my dear, by claiming that he never did—not that it ever signified!—but to the best of my knowledge, Shannon has been since the announcement of your betrothal as loyal as a nun.”

“But I saw him kissing you!” Jynx was stricken by this intimation that the viscount might not be a profligate. “He paid off your debts!”

“Pooh! The first was a mere bagatelle. All the gentlemen kiss me, Jynx. Too, I had just learned that your father had sent the Runners out after you, and I was disturbed!” An untimely awareness that those dauntless individuals were still seeking Miss Lennox struck her, and she pushed it aside. “And Shannon only paid my bills in return for a service that I undertook for him.”

Miss Lennox’s suspicions were not so easily allayed. She expressed a firm intention of knowing precisely what those services entailed. Lady Bliss regarded her stubborn houseguest, and silently damned that houseguests’s determination to interfere with her ruminations, and complied. “So you see,” she concluded, “that it was nothing exceptionable. Shannon has always meant well by you.”

“Oh?” Jynx’s anger gave her a demented look. “It is unexceptionable that he set you to spying on me? I tell you, I am quite out of charity with the—the fiend!”

“You are making,” Lady Bliss said sternly, “a mountain out of a molehill. Shannon has always acted in your best interests, and he has a sincere fondness for you. You would do much better to go on home, and tell him you are sorry, and be done with all this.” She gazed upon Miss Lennox, whose cheeks were flushed. “You must admit that I have some experience in these little matters. When dealing with the gentlemen it is their
motivation
you must consider, and not the means they employ to achieve their ends.”

Miss Lennox was willing to concede Lady Bliss’s experience; she did not, however, admire Adorée’s logic, in which she glimpsed any number of fallacies. “I do not wish to go home,” she retorted, most belligerently. “Nor do I want to be a charge on you, or to cause you problems, and if I am or have I will go elsewhere!”