Scandalous Brides: In Scandal in Venice\The Spanish Bride (6 page)

Wonderful,
Elizabeth thought wryly, turning away from their giggling and smiling.
Two unrepentant flirts in one household.
And Georgie had even known his surname!

But the jealousy quickly melted away under her friend’s familiar smile, her airy kiss on Elizabeth’s cheek. “Now, dear, I must be off. After you have your tea, Bianca can show Nicholas to his room.”

“R—room?” Elizabeth stuttered. Nicholas was to sleep
here,
under the same roof?

Oh, dear.

“Is that quite proper?” she asked.

“Oh, Lizzie, we are already a scandal! This one tiny thing cannot do us harm. And it is just the small room on the third floor. It will make things ever so much more
convenient,
will it not, Nicholas?” Georgina winked—winked!—at him.

“Oh, quite, Mrs. Beaumont.” He winked back.

Bianca wriggled and giggled.

Elizabeth almost moaned.

Then she laughed hysterically when the drawing room door banged open to reveal Stephen, whose face was every bit as red as his hair, except for some modeling clay stuck to his forehead.

“You!” he roared, pointing a trembling finger at the tea-sipping Nicholas. “What are
you
doing here, annoying these ladies?”

“Stevie, dear,” Georgina clucked. “He is hardly annoying us. He is Elizabeth’s new secretary.” Then she poured herself a cup of tea, and sat back to watch
commedia dell’arte
being played out in her very own drawing room.

Bianca snickered.

There was only one thing for a sensible girl like Elizabeth to do. She caught up her skirts and ran to the kitchen to fetch a pitcher of ice water to fling over their heads before they could destroy her drawing room.

Nicholas leaned back on the narrow bed of his third-story room, examining the calling card Georgina Beaumont had pressed into his hand the night before—the card that had begun this entire crazy odyssey of playing secretary. It was almost dawn, and the drunken party who had congregated in the alleyway below his window had at last departed, leaving him alone in the grayish silence just before light.

God’s blood, but this task had been meant to be so very simple! A spoiled miss who had imprudently fled the protection of her stepbrother, was to be found and summarily returned to where her best interests would be looked after. He was merely to snatch up the silly girl and deposit her back on Peter’s doorstep before he could have time to become at all deeply involved in this Everdean family drama. His debt to Peter, long unpaid, would be canceled when he delivered the girl, and he could return to his old life in the gaming rooms and courtesans’ boudoirs of London.

He had a good life. He did. He was wealthy, a member of several interesting if disreputable clubs, and despite his scar women were drawn to him. He was the despair of his high-stickler stepmama and the father who only wanted to forget the reminder of his wicked youth that Nicholas was. He needed no complications, even when the complication was as delectable as Lady Elizabeth.

Nicholas reached beneath his pillow and withdrew the miniature that Peter had entrusted him with. Even in the dim half-light her painted eyes glowed a pale silver, as misty and deceptive as a Yorkshire moor or a London morning.

He could not deceive himself much longer. He had thought this would be the most simple of tasks, a jaunt across Italy, a mere trifle after years of warfare in Spain. An elfin beauty Elizabeth might be, and not silly and spoiled as he had thought. But she was still Peter’s sister, and for some unfathomable reason, he wanted her back in his house. It was Nicholas’s task—his
only
task—to see that that happened.

And playing at being a secretary seemed the simplest way to accomplish that.

Chapter Five

W
hen Nicholas came downstairs for breakfast he was still a bit pale from his thought-filled night. Yet he managed a gallant bow and a bright smile.

“Good morning, Mrs. Beaumont. Miss Cheswood,” he greeted. “It is obvious that nothing disturbed your beauty sleep. Venice could have no two fairer flowers in any of its gardens, by my faith.”

It was a weak bon mot at best, but it made the women laugh, particularly Georgina. She waved him to the empty place setting at the small table, which was laden with plates of toast, pots of tea and chocolate, and small jars of marmalades and jellies.

“La, sir!” she said. “You obviously share my liking for the novels of the Minerva Press. I vow I read those very words in
Lady Charlotte’s Revenge.
Quite an excellent work. Have you read it?”

“I fear I have not.”

“I shall lend you a copy.” Georgina poured out a cup of tea and passed it to him. “And did we not say you must call us Georgina and Elizabeth?”

“Indeed you must,” said Elizabeth. She was engaged in buttering her toast, but paused to smile at him. “As you can see, we are hardly formal here.”

Indeed they were not. Nicholas studied the small, sunny breakfast room while he sipped at the strong tea. Blank canvases were stacked along the walls, amid empty crates waiting for completed paintings to be packed in them and sent off to patrons. Plates and glasses were piled haphazardly on the sideboard, and linens peeked out of its almost-closed drawers.

Even the women’s garments were unconventional. Georgina actually wore a dressing gown of burgundy velvet and had stuffed her auburn curls up into a snood, while Elizabeth was slightly more dressed in a yellow muslin round gown and paisley shawl.

Nicholas had never been in such a household. Even an army tent was carefully organized and regimented, and his mistresses’ houses had been untidy and informal in a very studied way, their hair carefully coiffed even when they wore lingerie.

This home was strange, almost exotic.

It was wonderful.

“We were just discussing your first task,” Elizabeth said, interrupting his ruminations.

“Oh, yes?” he answered. He smiled at her over the rim of his teacup.

She smiled in return, and blushed a very becoming peach. She even seemed more at ease with him this morning, after dousing him with water yesterday. Her eyes were clear and bright, her manner full of assurance.

She might very well be shy in matters of flirtation, but she was obviously a woman in full charge of her work. When she spoke of it, or even prepared to speak of it as she now did, her shoulders straightened and her cheeks grew bright with excitement.

“Yes,” Elizabeth answered. “I did a very large charcoal sketch some months ago for Signor Visconti, of his children. I have not yet received the promised payment. If you can collect it, you will have made a very promising beginning indeed.” She pushed a small stack of papers toward him. “Here is the contract, and a description of all dealings I have had with Signor Visconti.”

Nicholas nodded, and placed the papers carefully inside his jacket. “I will see to it at once.”

“You should be warned,” Elizabeth added, “that Signor Visconti is a dreadful old miser. He would rather crawl on broken glass than part with a single sou.”

“He is also an old lecher,” interjected Georgina. “He pinched my backside at a ball last month, and I could not sit for a full day!”

Nicholas laughed. “Do not fear, fair ladies! I am certain I can deal very effectively with both the miser
and
the lecher.”

“Well,” said Elizabeth, “I shall certainly be eternally grateful if you do.”

Nicholas merely smiled.

Elizabeth was acutely conscious of Nicholas hovering at her shoulder, watching her as she painted, for several long moments before she lowered the brush and turned to face him.

Her hand was trembling far too much, and the leaves on the sun-drenched trees of the canvas were beginning to look rain-hazy.

“Yes?” she said, trying not to appear too calf-eyed as she looked up at him.

“That is a lovely portrait,” he answered. “It is almost complete?”

“Yes.” Elizabeth eyed the little girl’s likeness proudly. It was indeed some of her finest work yet. The child’s mischief shone in the glowing colors. “Fortunately. Beatrice is a beautiful girl, but I do not think she is destined to be an artist’s model. She is rather...”

“Hoydenish?”

“No!” Elizabeth laughed. “I believe ‘spirited’ was the word I wanted, but hoydenish is even more accurate. This portrait would have been finished a fortnight ago if she had not been up and into mischief every five minutes.”

“If her doting mama had disciplined her, instead of sitting in the corner eating bonbons...”

Elizabeth nodded wryly at the memory of Signora Farinelli’s complete ineffectiveness. “I suppose, however, that it is a fond mama’s way to be indulgent. Perhaps even overindulgent at times.”

Nicholas’s handsome face hardened, and he turned away. “Some mamas, perhaps.”

Elizabeth’s curiosity was piqued. “Yes. I know mine was, terribly. She let me wear party frocks all day long if I liked, and even let me drink from her wineglass at supper.”

“Hmm.”

“Yes. I was such a horrid brat.” She wiped her hands on a rag and went to stand beside him, watching as he rifled through a pile of her sketches. “What was your mama like?”

He did not look up. “My mama?”

“Yes. Come now, you must have had one. I have serious doubts you sprang from your father’s head fully grown, like Athena, and I am long past the age where I will be placated by stories of cabbage patches and storks.”

That finally won a reluctant smile from him. “Yes, I had a mama, for whatever she was worth. She was not very much at home.”

“Oh.” Elizabeth sighed sympathetically. “And I suppose you were sent off to a school very young, too.”

“Oh, yes. A horrid school where they beat us with birch branches and forced us to take cold baths.”

Elizabeth glanced suspiciously at the dimple that had appeared in his cheek. “I do believe you are telling me a Banbury tale, Nicholas!”

“Indeed I am. There were only ever warm baths at my school.”

She sat down on the red velvet chaise she used for models, and drew him down beside her. “What school did you go to?”

“Not one you ever would have heard of.”

Elizabeth did not hear the evasive tone in his voice at all. She was far too busy admiring how good his dark hair looked against the red velvet, and how very beautiful his long-fingered hands were. With his hair falling in waves to his shoulders he looked like some pagan god of old. Dionysus at the feast.

How she wanted to paint him! She would place him in some ancient ruins, wearing only a coronet of laurel leaves....

A giggle escaped before she could catch it.

“Is there something amusing?” he asked.

“No! No, I merely, well, um.”

“What is it, Elizabeth?”

“Have you ever had your portrait painted, Nicholas?”

“You asked me that the night we met.”

“Yes, but we were... interrupted, before you could answer.”

“Well, I have not. Except once in miniature.”

“For a girl who waited while you went away to war?” A jealous pang pierced her heart.

His dimple froze, and disappeared. “What makes you think I was at war?”

Elizabeth shrugged. “That is usually the purpose of a miniature, in these times. And I have thought that you have something of the bearing of a soldier, even if you never sit up straight. And there is your scar.”

She prodded at his slouched shoulders, and he immediately shot up poker-straight.

“Yes,” he said, “I was at war. But that was a very long time ago, and I have applied myself most diligently to forgetting it.”

“Yes. Of course.”

They fell silent, listening to the sounds from the street and Bianca singing in the next room. Elizabeth was all-too conscious of the sound of his breathing, of the warmth of his leg against hers. She imagined reaching her hand out to him, touching the silky fall of his hair, pressing her lips to the dimple in his cheek....

She leaped up from the chaise.

“I ... I just remembered an ... an appointment.” She gasped, not looking at him. “Very important. I must be going right away.”

He stood up next to her, the sketches he had been looking at still in his hand. “I wanted to speak to you about the accounts.”

“Yes, but I simply cannot now. I ... I have to go!” She turned on her heel and whirled out of the room.

Nicholas watched her go, a bemused expression on his face.

“I asked Nicholas to accompany us to the opera, Lizzie.”

Elizabeth paused in brushing the snarls from her black hair to turn and look at Georgina. Her friend was lounging on Elizabeth’s bed, already dressed in her gown of gold tissue over bronze-colored satin, and eating chocolates.

“You did what?” Elizabeth said, her brow raised. “You asked him to go with us to the opera? But Stephen is escorting us! After the other day...”

Georgina kicked her bronze satin shoes in delight. “Wasn’t it glorious, dear? Two men fighting over you, in our very own drawing room. It is just too bad you had to break it up like that, ruining the carpet with all that water.”

Elizabeth tugged harder at the brush, yanking out several knots of hair in the process. “They smashed up two chairs, Georgie! And they are not even
our
chairs to break.”

“Oh, pooh! They seem great friends now, Lizzie. Did you not see them talking at Lady Lonsdale’s tea this afternoon? I only hope they can sober up enough to get us to the opera in one piece.” Georgina slid off the bed and came to take over the brushing. “Here, let me do that or you will soon be quite bald, and that would never do. Not with the dashing Nicholas about.”

Elizabeth smiled faintly, soothed by the hypnotic glide of the brush through her hair. “He is handsome, is he not?”

“Mais oui!
I knew he would be perfect for you.”

“Um-hm.” Elizabeth couldn’t help teasing just a bit. “He is going to straighten out accounts for me. Very useful.”

“Pah! Lizzie, if you think all a man like that is useful for is accounts then you do not deserve him. I have half a mind to steal him from you.”