Slightly Tempted (27 page)

A ball was a different matter entirely, of course. She would discover there whether the scandal had affected her standing in the beau monde. Not that she really cared. If theton was tired of her, then she was mortally weary of them-or so she told herself. She could not wait for the Season to be over so that she could return home to the sanity of Lindsey Hall.

Except, she admitted to herself in unguarded moments, that it was also going to seem flat and dull after all that had happened since she left there in the spring.

She dressed carefully for the ball. She could not wear any of her loveliest gowns, of course-but most of those were white anyway, and she despised them. And she would not be allowed to dance-but dancing with all the callow youth with which London ballrooms tended to abound had never held any great appeal for her. She watched her new maid dress her hair in a high topknot, from which curls and ringlets cascaded, some to trail along her neck and over her temples, and decided that she liked the girl's work.

She would not be able to dance. She thought wistfully of waltzing beneath the swaying lamps and the stars in the Forest of Soignés and felt guilty that she could want to waltz again when Alleyne was so recently gone. He had been at that picnic. He had scolded her roundly for allowing the Earl of Rosthorn to pay her such particular attention.

She still could not believe that she would never see him again.

Eve and Aidan rode in the ducal town carriage with their backs to the horses while Morgan sat beside Wulfric on the other seat. She wondered as the other three conversed if Wulf knew that Lord Rosthorn had been invited tonight.

She was, she had been realizing with the greatest reluctance over the past few days, ever so slightly in love with him. No, perhaps even that was self-deception. She had been attracted to him from the start. And then, when she had found an intelligent, compassionate man behind the rakish facade, she had come to like and respect him. And finally, when she had turned to him in the passion of her grief over Alleyne, they had shared the deepest intimacy of all. It was not that alone that had made her fall in love with him, but it had certainly made her realize that she had been deceiving herself by thinking of him only as a friend. He was a great deal more than a friend.

The carriage rolled to a halt behind a line of others drawing up to the entrance doors to Joshua's mansion on Berkeley Square.

"Freyja and our aunt Rochester will no doubt have arranged for several young gentlemen to make your acquaintance this evening, Morgan," Wulfric said. "Our consequence is, of course, too great for a little gossip to have made you entirely ineligible. You may not dance, but you may walk or converse with such partners."

"Provided none of them is the Earl of Rosthorn, I suppose," she said.

He turned his head and looked at her with raised eyebrows.

"Hehas been invited," she told him, "with the countess and Miss Clifton, his cousin."

"Ah," he said softly. "It is interesting that no one saw fit to inform me of this fact until now."

"Why should anyone?" she asked him. "This is Freyja and Joshua's ball."

"Quite so," he said, his voice softer still.

The Earl of Rosthorn had not answered her question, she realized, but had skirted around it and changed the subject. She had asked him why Wulfric hated him.

"It is as well, Wulf," Aidan said, "for Rosthorn and Morgan to be seen together at an event of this nature so that the last shreds of scandal may be dispelled."

A footman was opening the carriage door and setting down the steps. Wulfric handed Morgan down onto the red carpet that had been rolled out over the steps and across the pavement. She avoided looking into his keen silver eyes. She lifted her chin and smiled as he led her inside and along the receiving line and into the ballroom, where he deposited her in the safekeeping of their aunt Rochester, who was looking even more formidable than usual dressed in black satin, with a monstrous black turban and plumes. Even the long handle of her jeweled lorgnette was black.

Morgan settled in for what she fully expected to be a tedious evening. And indeed it did not start well. Her aunt presented her with two partners in a row who were just the sort of gangly, pimply, stammering youths she had anticipated meeting during her first Season-gentlemen of her own age or no more than a year or two older, with whom she was expected to be comfortable and whom she was expected to consider seriously as marriage partners.

It was quite enough to make her want to scream, especially as she could not even make the time pass quickly by dancing but was forced to sit on a sofa with each of them in turn, making labored conversation about such inconsequential matters that she twice forgot what she was talking about in the middle of a sentence. Yet politeness compelled her to smile and fan her face and look for all the world as if she had never been so well entertained in her life.

It was the middle of the second set when the Earl of Rosthorn arrived with his mother and cousin. He was looking very splendid indeed, Morgan saw, in gray and silver and black. But she could not even allow herself the luxury of feasting her eyes on him. She was very aware of the buzz of heightened interest in the ballroom. It had been bad enough when she arrived, but now the two partners in crime of recent scandal were there together. Freyja's ball was bound to be declared a resounding success tomorrow.

The earl disappeared from the room while his mother and cousin joined a group within it. But at the end of the set he reappeared and brought his mother across the ballroom to greet Aunt Rochester.

"Oh, it is you, is it, Lisette?" Aunt Rochester said, raising her lorgnette to her eye while Lord Rosthorn bowed. "I have not seen you this Season. I supposed you had stayed at Windrush. However do you keep yourself looking so young?"

"You are kind," Lady Rosthorn said. "But you must not look too, too closely,mon amie, especially in the daylight. May I take this seat beside you? Henrietta is with friends. Lady Morgan,mon enfant, even in black you outshine every other lady at the ball. Do let me kiss your cheek." Having done so, she turned back to Lady Rochester. "May I have the pleasure of presenting my son, the Earl of Rosthorn?"

Aunt Rochester regarded him through her lorgnette, and her hair plumes nodded forward perhaps an inch.

"You are the scamp who hired a maid for my niece without thinking to ask her if she suffered from seasickness, are you?" she asked. "And then stood on deck with my niece yourself while the girl heaved out her stomach below?"

"Alas, ma'am," he said, "I am guilty. But what was I to do? Remain belowdecks myself and pretend to be suffering from seasickness too? Leave Lady Morgan in Brussels in the care of a lady who was about to be summoned to join her husband in Paris? Lady Morgan needed to be returned to the bosom of her family."

"Lord Rosthorn was extraordinarily kind to me, Aunt," Morgan said, aware again that though no one seemed to be paying their little group any particular attention, in reality everyone was drinking in every detail. It was a skill at which members of theton were particularly adept-being able to do two things at once. It was how the gossip mill was constantly fed.

"Ma'am." The earl bowed to her aunt. "With your permission I will ask Lady Morgan to stroll about the ballroom with me."

Wulfric was not in the room, Morgan noticed in one hasty glance about. She held her breath as she nonchalantly plied her fan to cool her cheeks. Aunt Rochester was a far more formidable chaperon than Lady Caddick had been.

"Very well, young man," she said after scrutinizing him closely through her lorgnette again-a pure affectation, of course, as was Wulfric's quizzing glass. Their naked eyes missed very little. "I will be watching."

"Lady Morgan?" The earl bowed to her. His expression was sober and polite, but she knew him quite well enough to recognize the laughter lurking in his eyes.

"Thank you, Lord Rosthorn." She snapped her fan closed and took his arm, careful to keep her own expression cool, slightly bored, slightly haughty.

"You are having a wonderful time,chérie ?" he asked.

"I am ready to expire of boredom," she told him. "Amuse me."

"Alas," he said, "I fear I must break your heart instead. This next set is to be a waltz."

"Oh." She sighed. "Too cruel."

After the excruciating boredom and inactivity of the last hour or so, her feet itched to dance.

"We will stroll like a couple of gouty octogenarians," he said, "and tell each other what a scandalous dance the waltz is."

She smiled at him. "I like the Countess of Rosthorn," she told him. "She is charming and amiable."

"And she likesyou, chérie ." He bent his head a little closer to hers. "Now that I have come home, she is eager to see me settle down with a wife and set up my nursery."

"Indeed?" Morgan felt her cheeks flush. Was he flirting with her again-and quite outrageously?

"Yes, indeed," he told her. "Mothers can be remarkably uncomfortable persons to be around, I am discovering. She believes that thirty is altogether too advanced an age for a man with a title and a fortune to remain a bachelor."

"Indeed?" He was thirty. Twelve years older than she. It should have seemed like too wide an age gap.

"And she does not believe that eighteen is too young for the bride of such a man," he said.

"Lord Rosthorn," she said, "your conversation is bordering on the improper."

"Is it,chérie ?" He dipped his head a little closer yet. "Just because your brother has said no? Even though we have been dear friends? And lovers?"

His accent was suddenly very French indeed.

"You would be better employed," she said sharply, "paying your addresses where they are more welcome, Lord Rosthorn. And to a lady you can love."

"Ah, but my mother believes," he said, "that I loveyou . So does Henrietta. I begin to believe that perhaps they are right,chérie ."

Morgan could feel her heart beating against her ribs. She could hear her pulse throbbing in her ears. She could see that the ballroom floor had filled with dancers and that the music was about to begin. Chastity was going to waltz with Lord Meecham. They were smiling warmly into each other's eyes, oblivious to all around them. Morgan was so glad Chastity had found love this spring. She had had a difficult, lonely girlhood.

"This is not the time or place for such talk, Lord Rosthorn," she said. "How Iwish I could dance." The music had begun.

"You can," he said, stopping close to the doors. "If you wish,chérie, we will waltz."

"No," she said. "You know I cannot."

"Not here in public," he agreed. "But in private?"

She looked at him with raised eyebrows and plied her fan again as the dancers twirled past.

"There is an anteroom beside the refreshment room," he said, "that is not in use. We could waltz together in there without anyone being any the wiser. If our absence is noted, it will be assumed that I have taken you for a glass of lemonade."

"But Aunt Rochester will miss me," she said.

She was horribly tempted, though. Not just because she longed to waltz and not just because he was the Earl of Rosthorn and she had just realized that perhaps he was falling in love with her as she was falling for him. She was also bored. She was feeling hemmed in by propriety and strict chaperonage again after the freedom and sense of purpose and responsibility she had known in Brussels. It seemed to her that the last weeks of heavy grief had been endless. And it would be just for a very short while. No one would ever know.

She couldwaltz again. Right now. With the Earl of Rosthorn.

"Come,chérie, " he said, his head moving closer to hers again, his eyes smiling lazily. "Come and waltz with me."

She took his arm again, and he whisked her out through the doors before she could persuade herself to observe a more strict decorum.

IT WAS A SQUARE ROOM, NOT VERY LARGE, WITH Asofa and a few chairs arranged around the perimeter. Gervase had discovered it earlier and guessed that it had been set aside for those guests who would wish to rest in quiet for a short while. He had extinguished the candles and shut the door. It had been a fortunate find. A private room would serve better than the balcony, his original choice.

He lit the candles on the mantelpiece now and turned to Lady Morgan. Behind her he had left the door slightly ajar. What he should do, he thought as she smiled at him, was take her back to the ballroom right now at this very moment before someone opened that door and it was too late. He liked her too much for this. She had done nothing to deserve this.

"Listen," he said instead, holding out his arms to her. "It is not a fast melody. We can contrive to dance it in here, I believe, without bumping into furniture and bouncing off walls."

She came closer, laughing softly as she did so, and he set his right hand behind her waist and took her right hand in his. She set her other hand on his shoulder. The intimacy of the waltz position felt at least twice as intimate in this private setting. He could smell violets. He was reminded of the last time they had been alone in a room together.

They danced in silence, lights and music and voices and laughter mingling beyond the slightly open door, dim candlelight and intimacy within. She tilted back her head and smiled at him again. He smiled back. Perhaps no one would come. Perhaps after all he would be released from the consequences of this terrible thing he was doing.