that not even Rothersthorpe could fail to read the warning signs.
Oh, no. It looked as though there was going to be some kind of scene after all.
But at least it would not be of her making.
Not that Lord Rothersthorpe looked in the least bit daunted.
‘It has been a long time,’ he persisted. ‘Too long,’ he said with a rueful smile and thrust out his hand.
Lydia’s heart thundered in her breast while Robert stood quite still, looking at that outstretched hand. It was only when Robert finally took it, saying, ‘Yes, yes, it has’, that she realised she had been holding her breath. It slid from her in a wave of guilty disappointment. She hadn’t wanted Rose’s evening ruined by a scene, she really hadn’t. But a part of her would still very much have liked to see Rothersthorpe flattened by her stepson’s deadly right hook.
‘I cannot believe our paths have not crossed in all this time,’ Robert was saying as though he truly liked Rothersthorpe. When she’d been relying on him to dismiss him, the way he’d dismissed one penniless peer after another, during the few weeks Rose had been attending balls.
‘I do not spend much time in town these days,’ replied Lord Rothersthorpe. ‘And when I do come up, it is not to attend events such as this.’ He looked around the glittering ballroom with what, on another man’s face, she would have described as a sneer.
‘I have made a point of avoiding the company of most of the set I ran with at one time,’ he drawled. ‘A man has to develop standards at some point in his life.’
Standards? He had always laughed at people who claimed to have standards.
What on earth could have happened to make him sneer at his younger self?
And now that he was standing so close, she could see that there were subtle changes to his appearance which she had not noticed from a distance. Time had, of course, etched lines on his face. But they were not the ones she might have expected. Instead of seeing creases fanning out from his eyes, as though he laughed long and often, there were grooves bracketing his mouth, which made him look both hard and sober.
‘So, the rumours about you,’ said Robert, ‘are all true, then? You have reformed?’
Lord Rothersthorpe smiled. In one way, it did remind her of the way he’d used to smile, for one corner of his mouth tilted upwards more than the other. But although he’d moved his mouth in the exact same way, it was somehow as though he was merely going through the motions.
‘Not entirely,’ he said. ‘I still enjoy the company of pretty young ladies.’ He looked down at Rose in a way that made Lydia’s hackles rise. Had there been just the tiniest stress on the word young? And where had all his charm disappeared to? When she’d been a girl and Nicholas Hemingford had spoken such words, she would have defied any girl it was aimed at not to have melted right off her chair.
But this man, Lord Rothersthorpe, well, she couldn’t quite explain why, but he did not sound charming at all.
And when he said, ‘Will you not introduce me to your lovely companion?’ the expression on his face put Lydia in mind of a…of a…well, yes, of a pirate intent on plunder.
Her fear crystallised when Rose smiled back up at him, for Rose did not appear to find anything about him the least bit sinister. But then what girl, fresh from her schoolroom, could fail to be anything but fascinated when he turned those smiling blue eyes upon her so intently?
A painful sensation struck her midriff. Rose was as deaf to warnings as she’d been herself at that age. She couldn’t see the danger. And nor, apparently, could Robert, because he was performing the introduction.
‘This is my half-sister, Miss Rose Morgan,’ said Robert. ‘It is entirely on her account we have all uprooted ourselves and come to town this spring.’
‘Enchanted,’ said Rothersthorpe, bowing low over her hand. ‘London society will be all the better for having such a beauty adorn its ballrooms.’
‘And this is my stepmother, Mrs Morgan,’ continued Robert, while Lord Rothersthorpe continued to gaze at Rose. ‘Though, of course, you already know her.’
Rothersthorpe turned his head. The expression of admiration which he’d bestowed upon Rose vanished without trace.
‘I would hardly claim to know her,’ he replied, making her a curt bow. ‘Our paths crossed, briefly, almost a decade ago. I seem to recall that you came to town for the sole purpose of catching a husband?’
There was a distinct note of accusation in his voice, which was monstrously unfair. She could have snatched at those rambling words and held him to account for them. Instead, when he’d made it so obvious he regretted them the moment they’d left his lips, she’d let him escape.
‘You know very well that I did,’ she therefore replied. In fact, she’d told him quite plainly that if she didn’t find a husband before the end of the Season she was going to be in a pickle. And he’d brushed her concerns aside by making a jest about things never being so bad as you feared when the time came to face them.
‘And since,’ he said with a hard smile, ‘in those days, I was virtually penniless, that naturally meant you did not waste much of your time upon me.’
It had not been like that. Why was he twisting it to make it sound as though she’d been in the wrong?
‘Not when you made it so very clear that you did not wish to get married, my lord,’ she retorted, confusion temporarily diluting her annoyance. ‘No woman with an ounce of self-respect would wish to be accused of setting her cap at a man so clearly averse to the notion of getting leg-shackled.’
‘Touché.’ He raised his hands to acknowledge the hit. ‘It is true to say I was young and enjoying my freedom far too much to sacrifice it. However, now,’ he said, turning his attention back to Rose once more, his expression softening, ‘I have matured to the point where the prospect of matrimony no longer terrifies me. On the contrary, now that I am a respectable man of means, marrying is not only the next logical step for me to take, but one which I find most desirable.’
Lydia felt as though he’d slapped her. The prospect of marriage back then had terrified him. She’d seen it on his face, understood it from the way he’d vanished without trace after uttering what she might have interpreted as a proposal, if she hadn’t known him better.
Mrs Westerly’s words rang in her ears, for the second time that night. ‘You mark my words, when the time comes, he will marry an heiress…’
An heiress. She looked at the predatory way he was examining Rose. Rose, who was not only incredibly wealthy, but extremely pretty too.
Had it been only this evening, before setting out, that she’d decided she’d never been in better looks? Oh, she’d dismissed Rose’s comment that she looked like a fairy princess as the nonsense it was. She was too curvaceous nowadays to warrant that description. Not that she minded. She’d been positively scrawny when she’d been Rose’s age. Worn down by cares that the Colonel had lifted from her shoulders. From the moment she’d married him, her health had begun to improve. And bearing and feeding a child had even bequeathed her a bosom of which she was positively proud.
She
