Winning the Wallflower: A Novella (7 page)

“The obvious poem to quote to you is ‘She walks in beauty like the night,’ ” Rathbone said, his eyes lingering on her hair. “But do you know, I am more fond of those poems in which he’s not quite so confident. The one in which he prays to be able to love, though he can’t be loved. Well, it’s something like that.”

“Byron is certainly beloved,” Lucy said, giving Rathbone a lavish smile because she had just realized that Cyrus was in the library as well. He was piling a plate with delicacies for the pretty Miss Edger. Cyrus had danced with her twice. Lucy forced her mind back to the subject. “He plays a romantic role in many young ladies’ imaginations. Though,” she added, thinking of Cyrus’s scorn, “Byron does seem rather self-indulgent at times.”

Rathbone grinned. “It’s very hard for the rest of us mere mortals,” he said. “My valet wants me to grow my hair and wear it in a romantic flop over my eyes, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to see clearly.”

He had a delightful grin. His face wasn’t at all closed, the way Cyrus’s was. She could tell exactly what he was feeling at this very moment. His eyes were sparkling, and she would have bet her entire new fortune that he was marveling at the fact that he’d never really paid attention to his friend Gordon’s sister.

She had been only a wallflower.

And now she wasn’t. At least, in his case and to his credit, it didn’t have much to do with her fortune, if at all. He had no need for money.

“I think Byron runs the risk of turning into a conceited caricature of himself,” she went on. “That poem about parting from his beloved, for example . . . the lament about the dew of the morning sinking into his brow was utterly absurd.”

Rathbone laughed again. “I should be terrified to show you one of my own poems.”

“You write?” she asked, genuinely delighted.

He nodded. “Sonnets.”

She liked the way he said it, without defensiveness or boasting. “Are you better than Byron?”

“No.”

She liked the way he said that too.

“But I could write a sonnet about you,” he said, his voice deepening a little. “Maybe I’ve just lacked for material.”

“You do me too much honor,” she said, rising. Cyrus and Miss Edger were still sitting together, talking over a plate of sugared grapes.
He
would never offer to write a poem. He wouldn’t even know what a sonnet was.

Rathbone leapt to his feet with gratifying eagerness. There was something awed and sweet in his eyes, as if he were thinking of marriage for the first time.

She smiled back as if she were feeling the same, and slid her hand under his arm. Muscles rippled under her fingers.

“Do you ride?” she asked, giving him a soulful smile. She could
feel
Cyrus’s eyes on her shoulder blades.

Olivia was right. It was a pleasure to flaunt the fact that Cyrus could no longer have her, not after he valued her at such a poor rate.

Her smile almost slipped at the truth of that . . . the notion that she was for sale to the highest bidder. But Rathbone was drawing her back to the ballroom, talking of Byron and horses, so she looked up at him and thought about informing her parents that she intended to become Lady Rathbone. Somehow the idea wasn’t disturbing at all.

Pole finally left with an entourage of fellow gamblers, which meant Lucy could rouse her mother. She had just collected her reticule when there was a touch on her elbow.

Her heart bounded like a foolish rabbit frightened from a hedge. “Oh, hello,” she said, managing a casual smile by some miracle.

“It’s you.”

C
HAPTER
N
INE

“Y
ou look a bit tired,” Cyrus remarked. They were standing to one side of the ballroom; the musicians played on, but many guests were drifting toward the entryway. “Surely Lady Towerton has not returned home without you?”

“My mother is napping. The excitement of having one of her daughters touched by King Midas led to a slight overindulgence in champagne.”

A thread of amusement crept into his eyes. “I did sense a rather unholy excitement in the crowds that surrounded you; perhaps it infected your mother.”

“My friend Olivia compared me to a golden idol,” Lucy said with a laugh.

“Idols are cold,” Cyrus said. He stood with his back to the room, so no one could see him run his fingers down her bare arm. “
You
are rather warm, Miss Towerton.”

She shivered at his touch—and then she frowned. “Mr. Ravensthorpe, you missed the chance to dally when we were betrothed. I believe because you were uninterested.”

Cyrus’s eyes darkened, and she raised her chin defiantly. She refused to be reduced to a silent fool merely because he had green eyes. Or long eyelashes. Or all those other delectable parts. The only thing that mattered was that he hadn’t wanted her enough to fight for her.

Fight for her? He hadn’t offered a single word in opposition.

“Lucy.” He said it quietly, but his fingers suddenly circled her wrist. “Surely you are tired of wearing gloves?”

“It’s my feet that are tired. If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Ravensthorpe, I must fetch my mother.”

“One moment.” He took her hands, and before she realized it, she was again seated behind the three potted palm trees where her evening with Olivia had started so many hours earlier, hidden from the slowly emptying ballroom. And he was kneeling before her, gloved hands drawing off one of her slippers.

“You mustn’t!” she gasped. But it was too late.

Perhaps champagne had gone to her head as well.

But it did feel nice to sit down. “You really mustn’t,” she repeated, with absolutely no force in her voice. And then she sat back and rearranged her skirts so that her ankle was clearly visible. It was a nice ankle, a trim, rather delicate ankle for one as tall as she.

Cyrus looked up at her, and she suddenly realized that if a woman could flirt from under her eyelashes, so could a man. And Cyrus’s eyelashes were thick and dark. “Poor tired little feet,” he said, rubbing his thumb slowly across her instep. It felt so good that she gave an involuntary moan.

“My feet are anything but little,” she pointed out.

He raised an eyebrow. “They look very small to me.” Lucy had always thought her feet absurdly large, despite being proportionate to her large frame. But his hand was so large that her foot was delicate in comparison.

The look in his eyes should be outlawed, she thought. Or at least bottled and sold to forlorn maidens.

“Did you know that it’s begun to rain?” he asked. He drew off her other slipper.

“No,” she said, allowing her head to loll back on the chair. “That feels
so
good.” Another little moan escaped her lips.

“I could not allow my erstwhile fiancée to be in such discomfort.”

“Erstwhile?”

“Former fiancée has an unpleasant alliteration,” he said, sliding her slippers back on. “Let’s peek at the rain, and then you must wake your mother.”

They managed to slip through the doors leading to the gardens without attracting notice from the cluster of people bidding farewell to Lady Summers.

Just beyond the marble terrace the rain was falling like a silver sheet. It bounced off the marble balustrade, forming little fountains that caught the lamplight shining from over their shoulders.

“Lovely,” she breathed.

“Yes,” he said, and she turned to find that he was looking at her, rather than at the rain.

“Don’t,” she said, but without heat. “I’ve been dealt more extravagant compliments in the last few hours than I’ve had in my entire life. At least you did me the courtesy of being honest.”

“Your eyes are the same color as the rain,” he pointed out. “That’s not a compliment; it’s merely an observation.” He reached out and took a lock of her hair between his fingers. “A bit like your hair too. Except there are strands of honey here, like honey and moonlight and rain all mixed together.”

She did not look at him. Rain pattered on leaves in an unhurried, syncopated rhythm; she leaned back against the cool stone of the house to listen.

“I am curious; did you enjoy dancing with my cousin?”

Lucy turned her head to look at him. All of a sudden she realized that Cyrus was wearing a purple waistcoat, which made Pole’s diatribe on the subject more understandable. “I think I shall like being a duchess,” she said, mendaciously. “My closest friend is betrothed to one as well. It seems to be an agreeable state.”

He didn’t react, which meant that perhaps she hadn’t struck the right note.

“I love thick, unruly hair like His Grace’s,” she said, ladling more conviction into her voice.

She was wrong to think he wasn’t affected. The look in his eyes was pure rage, unadulterated, ruthless jealousy.

The truth dawned on her rather slowly; she had never been very good at unpicking emotional puzzles. Humiliation socked her in the stomach, followed quickly by a blaze of pure anger. “I now gather you have drawn me out here because I danced with your cousin. Can you truly be that competitive—and with a family member?”

“We are not competitive,” he stated. “We loathe each other. There’s a difference.”

Lucy sighed. When he appeared at her side and then escorted her first behind the palms and then to the terrace, she’d thought . . . she’d thought something foolish. She straightened and took one more greedy, quick look at him.

Then she met his eyes squarely and said, “You shouldn’t toy with people like this, Cyrus. It doesn’t reflect well on you.”

A frown flickered through his eyes.

“You asked me to marry you, knowing little of me, and caring nothing. So when I sent you away earlier tonight, you did not protest, or try to change my mind. But now, after your cousin has made his interest clear—which I assumed was due to my fortune, but I now see the fact that you and I were once betrothed also played a part—you return, you rub my feet, you take me to see the rain, you wax eloquent about my hair.”

His mouth opened and she raised her hand, stopping whatever weak protest he was about to make.

“I am a
person
, with feelings and emotions, not a game piece to move about a board in which you are playing against an entirely different opponent: your cousin, the Duke of Pole.”

He was scowling now, and he didn’t look so beautiful, rather to Lucy’s satisfaction. But he did look as if he was listening to her.

“Treat your next fiancée like a human being,” she told him, and turned to go.

She managed only one step before he stopped her. His hand was so large that it circled her upper arm.

“Don’t,” he said. His voice was rough and urgent, quite unlike the sleek, composed Mr. Ravensthorpe.

“Cyrus.” Her heart was pounding, her body tense, but she kept emotion out of her voice. “I would ask you to let me go.”

“I was hopeful I would find a bride without fuss. I didn’t think—I just thought you were sensible. Quiet. My proposal had
nothing
to do with my cousin.”

“Of course it didn’t. At that point he had no more interest in me than you did. You chose your bride on the basis of lack of ‘fuss’?” She turned back, just enough so that she could see his face. “What did you mean by fuss?”

His mouth twitched. “Overwrought emotion. Sometimes in the past, women have—”

He stopped, a look of agonized embarrassment on his face. “I sound like a pompous ass.”

Lucy laughed, genuinely amused. “Has it never occurred to you that you
are
a pompous ass?”

“That terrible?” He sounded shocked.

She arched an eyebrow. “You chose a plain girl from an acceptable bloodline because you thought it would be easier for you, and that she would be so grateful that you wouldn’t have to bore yourself by wooing her.” There was something a little savage in her tone, but she didn’t choke it back. “Yes, Mr. Ravensthorpe, I
do
think you’re a pompous ass. Wouldn’t you agree?”

There was a moment of silence and she could hear birdsong again. She’d always thought that birds didn’t sing during the rain.

“I never thought of you as plain,” he said painstakingly. “That was no more a factor in my proposal than was my cousin.”

She shrugged. “It hardly matters now.”

His hand tightened on her arm. “It does matter. I thought of you as unlikely to fall in love with me.”

“
That
is certainly true,” Lucy said, delivering her lie with tremendous aplomb. Really, she ought to go on the stage.

“I realize now it was not a good reason to choose a bride,” he said.

“You’ll need to woo the next lady,” she said, a bit more gently. “Be kinder and a little less pompous and I’m sure you’ll have no difficulty finding a new fiancée. You might even be able to keep her.”

His eyes burned with an emotion she couldn’t interpret. “I just wanted to have a tranquil marriage. It seemed a reasonable desire.”

“Someone who would adore you too much to challenge you, no matter how overwrought you and your cousin grew in your little war? Do you—did
he
—think that I wouldn’t notice that His Grace talked of your waistcoat the entire time he danced with me? Or that you are only talking to me now because the world judges it likely that I shall be the next Duchess of Pole?”

“Do you always say what you think, no matter how uncomfortable?”

She pulled away from his hand. “Life is much simpler when people are honest about their motives.”

The silence stretched and grew awkward before he responded. “I thought that a woman whom every man wanted would be likely to create a scandal,” he said finally and then he shrugged. “And I didn’t want anyone who might fall in love with me, or even worse, with another man.”

She shook her head. “You are so odd. I have no idea why you concluded that I will never fall in love—with you or anyone else.”

“Obviously I misjudged you in many respects.”

“I
will
fall in love,” she declared. “I
will
love my husband.” She could feel heat rising into her cheeks, but from anger, not embarrassment. “And do you know, Cyrus, I think there will come a day when you honestly regret the foolish way you are choosing a spouse!”

“I agree with you.”

Lucy could think of nothing to say to reply to that, so she started to turn again, and once again he made a swift grab at her. This time he didn’t merely catch her arm; he pulled her to him with the same ferocity he had in Lady Summers’s sitting room earlier in the evening.

She gasped, and he took advantage of her open mouth. He kissed her slowly, so slowly that her blood heated and she found herself leaning into him, filled with pleasure, her fingers shaking. It was a truly scandalous kiss, this meeting of tongues . . . mating of tongues? She’d never heard of such a thing.

And yet she suddenly knew why a kiss could signal that a woman was ruined.
She
was ruined. His hands weren’t even moving over her body and yet she trembled at the touch of his mouth, soft, velvet, demanding.

He drew back, cupping his hands about her cheeks. “When I was thinking of wallflowers, I wasn’t looking at anyone in particular. Had I looked, I would have seen that your face is a perfect triangle, with a mouth so kissable that I’m amazed every man in London isn’t at your feet.”

Lucy caught her breath, tried to get her unruly body under control. She had to be graceful and poised. Not show how he undid her, how weak her knees were. Somewhere, she found a measure of composure and said, with just the right shading of amusement, “You are absurd.” She rolled her eyes for good measure.

“I was absurd to have overlooked you, perhaps,” he said, his lips tracing the line of her cheek.

“You did no more than every other man in London.” But she added quickly, “I sound like a whimpering baby. I didn’t mean it. I’m being stupid.”

A rueful grin curved his lips. “I’m not sure, Lucy, that it’s
in
you to be stupid, is it? Do you hide your intelligence all the time, or was it only for my benefit?”

“I am not so intelligent,” she said, frowning at him. “I’m quite average.”

“I did keep wondering why I could never win a game of backgammon, or cards, or any sort of game, in fact.” His eyes narrowed. “You mentally calculate the odds, don’t you?”

She gave a little shrug. “It’s not hard to do. People are lazy.”