lips.”
Lucy was forced to don another gown, as her maid, once she caught sight of her mistress some half hour later, had dissolved into tears and retired to her cot, in no condition to wield a hot iron.
THEY WERE ALL ENSCONCED around the gleaming mahogany table; the Earl of Bourne and his Jennie, Rachel Gladwin alongside young Dexter Rutherford—there to make up the numbers when Sir Henry pleaded another commit-ment—Lord and Lady Thorpe at the head and foot of the table, and Tristan Rule and Mary Lawrence smack beside each other on one side, just as Lucy had cunningly engineered the thing earlier.
Jennie was still wearing a benevolent smile, as she hadn’t as yet had either the benefit of her husband’s opinion on her matchmaking scheme or been able to speak alone with Lucy, who was not looking quite so chipper. Indeed Lucy was looking almost solemn, and had been ever since Miss Lawrence, beautifully attired in pale green silk, had greeted the sight of Tristan Rule with an unenthusiastic “Oh, you’re here.”
For her part, Rachel, who had recently taken to plotting her first attempt at a novel of her own, had decided to view the barely veiled hostility her charge directed at her nephew as ink for her scribbling pen. How interesting it would be, she thought as she helped herself to a portion of stewed carp, to have a heroine who insists on ignoring her attraction for the hero. Perhaps, she mused idly, I shall have my heroine outrage her mercenary guardian by refusing to stand up with the hero at her come-out ball. Would Maria Edgeworth approve? Was it too farfetched? Rachel shrugged her shoulders and took another bite of carp.
If Mary had been privy to her companion’s thoughts, she might have added her bit to the story, a little plot twist that had the heroine surreptitiously slipping a bit of poison into the hero’s fricassee of tripe and then running off to the Continent to become the reigning toast of Paris. But then Mary’s mind was at the moment too overcrowded with thoughts of the man sitting so intrudingly close to her right side to have much heart for solving anyone’s problems but her own.
Look at him, she instructed herself as she ignored her filled plate. He even cuts his meat with a cool, meticulous care that makes my flesh crawl. And those hands—those hard, tanned hands with their long, straight fingers. Everything about him screams leashed power. Ruthless. How apt. Energy seems to flow from him like a never-ending stream. Rachel may think that he’s interested in me. My suitors may think he’s trying to cut them out for my hand. But I know better. I can feel the animosity that charges the air whenever he looks at me. Why does he dislike me so? Why is he making it his business to unnerve me with his unwanted, discomforting presence? And why, dear God, why must he be so maddeningly intriguing, so damnably handsome?
While Mary sat staring at her plate, precisely as if the fish that lay there had just winked in her direction, Tristan Rule was building himself into a temper—not a new experience, granted, but he could not in his memory recall another instance when a female of the species had been able to crawl so deeply under his skin. Maybe it was that bloody black velvet ribbon she had tied tightly around her neck, just like the ladies of a generation ago had worn red ribbons in sympathy with the French nobility that had lost their heads on Madame Guillotine.
Fashion, his saner self told him. Nothing of the kind, his suspicious self contradicted. That ribbon is just one more nail in her coffin, one more revealing slip that another, less discerning man, might overlook. She was mocking those dead Frenchmen, no more, no less. But it would take more than a bit of ribbon and an inconclusive inquiry into Miss Lawrence’s background to convince Sir Henry that he had been made the victim of a Bonapartist sympathizer. It was time he made a move, time he took a more positive step than merely to observe her as she pulled the wool over society’s eyes with her portrayal of a young miss in her first Season. He was determined to unmask her for what she was. Why in the fiend’s name, he snarled inwardly, did she have to be so beautiful?
“I had not known that you would be here this evening, sir.”
Tristan’s fork halted halfway to his mouth as Mary’s softly spoken words startled him. As she had made such a point of ignoring him while they waited for dinner to be announced, he had resigned himself to having his ear bent all through the meal by Dexter, who sat across from him but wasn’t about to let any silly dictate of good manners keep him from talking nineteen to the dozen across the table if he so chose. “You didn’t?” was all he responded, eyeing her smiling face closely as he sought to understand her seeming friendliness.
“No,” she answered, her voice still quite low. “I saw you striding through the drizzle the other day in the park and had figured you to have developed lung fever at the very least by now.”
Tristan decided to take her words literally. “What would make you think a bit of spring drizzle could lay me up by the heels?”
Mary shrugged delicately, almost Gallically, in Tristan’s biased opinion. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess that it’s just that you are of an age that I would have expected you to have served in the war if you weren’t afflicted with a weak chest or some other such hidden weakness. Lord Bourne served on the Peninsula, you know, and Lord Thorpe was very involved with the war effort in Parliament. But you—why, if rumors are to be believed, you spent the last several years traipsing about the Continent like some sort of sightseer. In places far removed from the fighting, that is.”
Tristan laid his fork carefully on the edge of his plate. Turning his head slowly in her direction once more, he smiled dangerously, his straight white teeth clenched. “If you were a man, I would call you out for that, you know,” he said in his low, husky voice, a voice that went well with his chiseled features, dark eyes, and darker hair.
Another woman would have fainted. Lord, any sane woman wouldn’t have taunted him so in the first place! But Mary Lawrence was made of sterner, if somewhat more foolhardy, stuff. She kept her chin high and didn’t so much as blink. “Name your seconds, sir,” she dared recklessly, ignoring her rapidly beating heart. “Although you neatly circumvented serving in the war, I have no doubt you’ve stomach enough to shoot a woman.”
Now Tristan’s smile was downright evil. “Too messy by half, madam. I prefer to impale my opponents on my sword. Now, madam, if you’re still game…?”
There was no pretending she didn’t catch the double entendre hidden in his words, and no way she could slap his face at Lucy’s table without creating a scene that would have Rachel wringing a peal over her head for a sennight. Her gaze locked with his for a few moments more, brazening it out before her eyes shifted nervously back to the fish on her plate.
She waited until Lord Rule had resumed his meal before speaking again. Just as he had deposited a medium-size bite of succulent fish in his mouth she shared a bit of unusual knowledge with the rest of the company. “Did you know that many tradesmen inflate their meat—and most especially their fish by having gin drinkers blow into the bodies? Indeed, and much of the seafood and meat that reaches our tables looking so thick and juicy has been made that way by having the poor animals heated or beaten while still alive in order to swell the meat. Isn’t that interesting?”
The meal ended shortly after that, as the rest of the diners had somehow lost their appetites (indeed, Dexter, who had fled abruptly from the table, lost even more than that), which, while the thought of ruining Lucy’s dinner party sat heavily on her mind, did at least serve one of the ends Mary had intended—getting herself shed of Tristan Rule’s embarrassing presence before he drove her into strong hysterics.
Rachel had said he was a hot-tempered sort, prone to short, violent explosions of wrath. Putting all her eggs in one basket at the dinner table in hopes of having the man lose his composure, and therefore some of the esteem in which it seemed the rest of the company held him, had been the second reason for her outburst,
