Slightly Dangerous (15 page)

She hated him with a passion. It was an alarming thought. She would have far preferred to be indifferent to him.

She should remain outside, she thought as she arrived at the house hot and breathless and disheveled. She should confront Hermione and Basil as soon as they returned. It was high time. She had been as distraught as they during the days following Oscar’s death and quite unable to defend herself properly against their accusations. But she was feeling hardly less distraught at this particular moment. And so, like the coward she sometimes was, she hurried up to her room, thankful that she met no one on the way.

She shut the door, threw herself across the narrow bed, and clutched fistfuls of the bedspread as she fought tears so that she would not have to appear at dinner with swollen eyelids and bloodshot eyes and blocked nasal passages. She had no one to blame but herself for all this, she knew. She should have refused to come. Even Melanie could not have forced her if she had said no and stuck with it.

A long time passed before she calmed down and sat up on the bed to observe her appearance in the looking glass. With a smile on her face she would perhaps look no different from usual. She smiled at her image to test her theory. Tragedy’s face looked back at her with grotesquely upward curved lips. She parted her lips and added a sparkle to her eyes.

There, she thought—she was as good as new, safe behind her defenses again. Strange—she had not known she still had them, that she still needed them. She had been free for two years and happy again. Well—almost happy.

She would survive intact to the end of the party, she decided firmly, until she could go home and hide her heart again in the comfortable routine of her daily life. After all, she had survived Oscar’s death.

W
ULFRIC FELT UNUSUALLY
discomposed—again. And for the same reason—again. He had almost
kissed
her, for God’s sake. A more inappropriate ending to a bothersome afternoon he could not imagine.

He had very badly miscalculated, though, he realized as he watched her run from him. In more than one way.

She was still angry with him over the offer he had made her.

Of course, he was more than a trifle annoyed himself. He did
not
believe that those two lengthy meetings between them had been wholly contrived on her part. But she
had
been a participant in that ridiculous contest and had doubtless prolonged their second encounter as long as possible. It had been her suggestion to go into the maze, after all. And he had followed her in like a puppet on a string. And then he had kissed her and made his impulsive offer.

It must have been some consolation to her when she ran from the maze to be able to rush back to claim victory and the prize.

His own ruffled feathers paled into insignificance, however, beside the fact that she had been deeply hurt by the asinine behavior of Elrick and his lady back there on the hill—as well she might. He had a previous acquaintance with those two and had never before found either of them unpleasant or indiscreet or foolishly spiteful. They had been all three today.

They had certainly aired the family linen before him in a manner that was quite unseemly. They resented her lowly origins, her vulgarity, her flirtatiousness—that word again. It came up with tedious regularity where she was concerned. He really did not want to know any of their feelings about her. He certainly did not
need
to know.

But something had obviously happened among the three of them—something concerning the death of Oscar Derrick. He did not for a moment believe that Christine Derrick had killed him, but there had been
something
to cause such lasting enmity. This afternoon he had been somehow caught in the middle of a sordid family squabble.

He deeply resented the imposition.

At the same time he had learned something interesting about Mrs. Derrick. She was made up of more than just sunshine and laughter. There was darkness in her too, deeply suppressed, though it had come bubbling to the surface while they had walked together just now. She had tried her best to provoke a quarrel with him.

He had almost succumbed—in a manner she would not have expected.

Her vulnerability was something he did not wish—or intend—to deal with. He had felt an attraction to her, he had kissed her, he had offered to make her his mistress, she had refused, and there was an end of the matter. Apart from what he had to confess was a lingering attraction to her person, he had no further interest in her or the dark complexities of her life.

And yet, annoyingly, he found his eyes drawn to her quite as much as ever during the second week of the house party.

She was a light-bringer despite the darkness he had glimpsed in her.

He was still unwillingly dazzled by that light.

8

W
ULFRIC WENT FISHING WITH
B
ARON
R
ENABLE AND
some of the other gentlemen a few mornings in succession. He sat in Renable’s library on several occasions with a small group of gentlemen, talking politics and international affairs and books. He played billiards more than once with the gentlemen who were similarly inclined. In the evenings he played cards, since only the older people were really interested in doing so. He participated in as few of the merrier events of the party as possible without being ill-mannered. He spent as much time alone as he possibly could—it was precious little. He counted the days, and almost the hours, until he might leave to return home.

There was one event he was not going to be able to escape, however, though at least it had been placed at the very end of the party as the culminating entertainment. There was to be a grand ball—or as grand as any such event could be in the country—as the official celebration of the betrothal between Miss Magnus and Sir Lewis Wiseman. A select group of neighbors had been invited, since twenty-four houseguests and two hosts could not decently fill a ballroom.

“Most of our invited guests have only a small claim to gentility,” Lady Renable explained to Wulfric a day or two before the event. “However, they like to be invited, and one does feel duty bound to condescend to them once or twice a year. I do hope you will not find the company too insipid.”

“I believe, ma’am,” he said, raising both his eyebrows and his quizzing glass, “your taste in guests as in all things is to be trusted.”

Why apologize for what could not be avoided? And why apologize to him alone? Why apologize at all? One thing about Bedwyns for which he would be eternally thankful was that they were not forever apologizing to one another.

Balls had never been his idea of pleasurable entertainment, though they sometimes had to be endured. This one was of that number. Since he could hardly shut himself into his bedchamber with a book, he dressed with his usual meticulous care, allowing his valet to spend longer than usual over the tying of his neckcloth, and descended to the ballroom at the appointed hour. He reserved the opening set with Lady Elrick, the second with Lady Renable, and hoped that after that he could decently withdraw to the card room.

The young ladies, he noticed as he strolled to where Mowbury was standing, looking awkward, if not downright miserable, were all decked out in their most opulent finery, jewels sparkling in the candlelight, plumes nodding above elaborately styled hair—perhaps a deliberate ruse to distinguish themselves from the less gorgeously clad neighbors, who had already begun to arrive.

“I reminded Melanie that I was born with two left feet,” Mowbury told him, “but she would insist that I put in an appearance here and dance with
someone
. I have asked Christine—Mrs. Derrick. She was married to my cousin, you know, and is a decent sort, I have always thought, even though Hermione and Elrick don’t seem to like her, do they? Tiresome things, balls, Bewcastle.”

She was across the room, talking with three ladies and a gentleman—Mrs. Derrick, that was. Wulfric recognized the vicar and his wife and assumed that the other two ladies were her mother and eldest sister. Mrs. Derrick certainly had been blessed with all the looks in that family, he thought. The vicar’s wife was unremarkable. The eldest sister was downright plain.

Mrs. Derrick was wearing a cream-colored evening gown with a single flounce at the hem and matching frills at the edges of the short, puffed sleeves. The neckline was deep though not immodest. Her short curls, brushed to a sheen, were threaded with pink ribbon to match the length about the high waistline of her gown. The ribbons were her only adornment apart from the closed fan she carried in one gloved hand. She wore no jewels, no turban, no plumes. The gown itself was not by any means in the first stare of fashion.

She made her fellow houseguests look rather ridiculously fussy.

“So Mrs. Derrick has agreed to dance the opening set with you,” he said.

“She has.” Mowbury grimaced. “I promised not to tread all over her toes. But she will just laugh at me if I do and tell me they needed flattening anyway, or some such thing. She is a good sport.”

Kitredge, whose portly form was positively squeaking inside his stays, had joined her and was being presented to her family. For a moment his plump, beringed hand rested against the small of her back. Wulfric’s fingers curled about the handle of his jeweled evening quizzing glass. The earl’s hand fell away as she changed her position a little to smile up at him. She nodded and Kitredge moved away. The second set had been promised, Wulfric guessed.

He let his glass fall on its silken ribbon.

C
HRISTINE HAD ALWAYS
enjoyed dancing. She had not always enjoyed
balls
—not for the last few years of her marriage anyway. Oscar had started to object to her dancing with other gentlemen, though she had tried pointing out to him that the whole point of a ball was to dance with a variety of partners. He could not dance with her himself all night. It would not have been good etiquette. Besides, he had liked to spend time in the card room or socializing with his male friends, and then she had been caught in the dilemma of either being a wallflower by her own choice or displeasing her husband.

She really had found marriage far more of a trial than she had ever expected. For all his extraordinary good looks, Oscar had been very unsure of himself—and of her. He had become increasingly possessive and dependent. She had loved him dearly, but it had been hard not to resent his lack of trust in her. She even feared she had fallen out of love with him before the end, when his accusations had become more hurtful and even insulting.

But those difficult, unhappy days were over, and tonight she was free to dance every set if she wished—and if enough gentlemen asked her. She laughed her way through the opening set, guiding Hector through the patterns of the country dance and rescuing him more than once when he would have gone prancing off in one direction while all the other gentlemen were gliding gracefully in the other. He thanked her profusely afterward and even forgot himself sufficiently to kiss her hand.

She danced cheerfully through the second set with a sweating Earl of Kitredge and steered the conversation firmly away from the flirtatious banter with which he had been regaling her for the past week. When he would have drawn her through the French doors into the garden in order to enjoy the cool evening air for a few minutes, she assured him that it would break her heart to miss one single step of one single dance during such a splendid ball.

She danced with Mr. Ronald Culver—she had learned to distinguish him from his twin—and with Mr. Cobley, one of Bertie’s tenant farmers, who had asked her three times during the past year and a half to marry him, and laughed and talked a great deal.

She noticed with some satisfaction that Hazel had been asked to dance each set and that even Eleanor, who despised dancing, had been persuaded to take the floor for two sets.

She smiled with warm pleasure whenever she saw Audrey and Sir Lewis Wiseman together. Although they were not at all ostentatious in their affection for each other, they nevertheless seemed very well suited. They were happy together. Happiness was such a rare commodity. She
hoped
it would last for them. She had always been fond of Audrey, who had been little more than a child when Christine had married Oscar.

Tomorrow, she recalled, she would be going home. What a glorious thought that was, even though in many ways the party had been enjoyable and most of the guests amiable. But three of them had not been, and that had made all the difference. There had been a terrible tension between Christine on the one hand and Hermione and Basil on the other since the day of the picnic. They had avoided one another whenever possible, though every day Christine had resolved to corner them somewhere and have out with them whatever it was that needed to be had out. But it was difficult at a house party to find a private moment—or perhaps she had not tried too hard. And the Duke of Bewcastle had offered to make her his mistress—and then had been witness to her humiliation at the hands of her brother- and sister-in-law and to her show of bad temper and spite and indiscretion afterward. It was all very disturbing indeed.

She could hardly wait to get home.

Never, never,
never
again would she allow herself to be drawn into any entertainment that involved the
ton
in general and Hermione and Basil in particular. She did not include the duke in her resolution since there was no possible chance that they would ever meet again.

For which happy fact she would be eternally grateful.

Nevertheless, all the time in the ballroom—every single moment—she was aware of the Duke of Bewcastle, looking severe and immaculate and positively satanic in black evening coat and silk knee breeches with silver waistcoat and very white stockings and linen and lace. He also looked as if he despised every mortal with whom he was doomed to spend this final evening of a house party that appeared to have brought him no pleasure at all. It probably appalled him to be forced to share a ballroom with people who, though they all had some claim to gentility, were nowhere near his own elevated social rank. Her mother and Eleanor, for example.