Page 8 of A Lady of Means (Roses and Rakes #1)

And Lady Moria left the lending library for the shops on Bond Street one companion greater, a companion she might come to regret making.

* * *

“Just the lady I was looking for! My favorite sister!”

Moria’s youngest sister sprang out to hug her as soon as she opened the front door to their residence. A liveried footman followed Moria inside the door of her family home, carrying her packages and bundle of books.

“I thought Kathleen was your favorite sister?” Moria questioned, taking off her gloves and hat and handing them to the housekeeper.

“I said she was the nicest, I never said she was my favorite.”

Moria observed her sister’s pink cheeks framed by a few red gold hairs trailing from her braid and an open smile. “Were you…waiting for me to return?”

Olivia tilted her head and looked off to the side. “Perhaps I had a particular reason.”

There was the usual mischievous light in Olivia’s green eyes and color in her cheeks.

Moria might have been known for her eye for fashion and garments, but Olivia needed little adornment.

Where Noelle and Kathleen were tall and lithe, Moria was average height, and Olivia was shorter and curvier, still the prettiest girl Moria had ever seen.

Especially when her passion for something glowed within her eyes.

“Don’t leave me in suspense, you little scamp.”

Olivia grasped Moria’s hand and towed her into the summerhouse.

In her wake, Ella, her lady’s maid, slipped a folded envelope in Moria’s other palm.

For a second, Moria worried that her sister had caught the exchange; but Olivia was too far ahead and in too excited a state to notice.

Finally, Olivia stopped and looked pointedly outside to their brother, who was talking with a suitor.

For a moment, her heart had started to race, then slowed when she saw it wasn’t the man Moria so badly wanted it to be.

Moria didn’t take her eyes off the two men as she sat on the window seat that afforded the best view, her sister curling beside her. “How long has the Earl of Drysdale been here?”

Olivia tapped her chin. “I’m not sure, I think he was waiting for you.”

“What do you think they’re discussing?”

“I’m sure a sheltered debutante like myself couldn’t hazard a guess.”

Moria looked at her dubiously.

Olivia continued. “When I debut, I’m sure the gentlemen of means will be entirely unaffected. I’ve enough quirks to keep them from taking a keen interest.”

Moria draped her other arm around her sister’s waist. “When you debut tomorrow night, the right man will notice your quirks only add to your limitless beauty.”

“What nonsense,” Olivia giggled, “Is that how your debut went?”

“Close. I have no quirks.”

Moria looked away from the view of Drysdale saying something that had Jasper tossing back his head and laughing. Lawrence was nowhere to be seen as usual. He’d been spending a lot of time at a rented townhouse after meeting a cyprian from Asia he’d decided to take into his keeping.

So Moria could share with Olivia the truth. “My debut…was an illusion I hadn’t known was false until I’d already sealed my fate. But you?” Moria squeezed her sister’s hand. “You deserve the debut of your dreams. And you will get it.”

Moria gave her a smile she hoped was reassuring as Olivia blinked back tears.

Olivia was beautiful and charming and most of all, Moria would make sure her debut was unforgettable.

Wasn’t such the way of older sisters? To get all of the angst and sorrow out of the way to protect the ones who came after? Perhaps she’d committed too soundly to the role, but no one had ever accused Moria of doing anything by half measures- fucking up included.

While Moria had known no limit to tragedy, her debut had been one starkly shining moment before it all went to hell. Admittedly, she’d played a solid hand in her own downfall; but she was only a girl after all, and she wasn’t strong enough to withstand the temptation she’d endured that night.

No, it was decidedly not her fault.

Not when the sound of her name on Marcus’ lips sounded different than it had every other time he’d said it in the past. As though, somehow, that night on the ballroom floor, he could infuse the word with feeling he couldn’t have before.

As though watching her debut, he finally saw the more of her that he’d neglected in all the years they’d been casual acquaintances and neighbors.

Marcus Huntingdon, recently titled Marquess of Thorne, took his position on the parquet dance floor in front of her.

His hands and eyes heated every part of her they came in contact with.

She had looked up at him with stuttering lashes and stuttering pulse, because by god, was he gorgeous, all golden and wreathed in candlelight.

“Have you always been this earth shattering?” he asked, his voice a sultry timbre against her ear a heartbeat before he pulled back to a respectable distance. His eyes were alight with something. Admiration? Pride? Lust? Some toxic combination of the three?

Moria placed on a practiced mask. “You’re just now noticing?” she shot back with a raised brow.

To which, he tilted his head back in a laugh that made the others around them turn to look their way.

No one was looking at them with scorn over such flirtatious familiarity, they were looking on with envy.

The elite ton of London were hard-pressed to find a couple as…

earth shattering…as the Marquess of Thorne and its newly crowned incomparable, Lady Moria Pembrooke.

She felt every eye on her in her whole body, but most of all, his. She felt them everywhere, even the places he wasn’t looking that she wanted him to.

“Damn me to hell for it, but yes. And I can’t look away, Lady Moria.”

For the rest of the dance, he held her like water that might escape his grasp if he clung too hard, and then immediately requested a second dance as soon as it was over.

Moria had only dreamed the night of her debut could be spectacular enough that she’d finally garner the attention of her neighbor Marcus, or that all heads would swivel in her direction upon her every move.

Moria had learned, after that night, that for even or maybe especially the women of her station, there were only so many moments one got that sparkled before the glitter turned to rust.

* * *

Her memories were interrupted as The Letter was pulled from her grasp by her interfering younger sister. Moria tightened her hold on the envelope, glancing back at the two men outside to ascertain they were still deep in conversation.

“Who’s the sender of this letter you’re hiding, Moria?” Olivia was looking at her in such a way that Moria could see every cog and gear in her mind turning.

Moria pocketed the letter for later. The words in his letters weren’t made for sharing like so much of her life had always been. They were only for her, he was only for her. She was hoarding all of his goodness to herself, and it was selfish, she’d admit, but god, could she not be selfish one time?

“I don’t have to inform you of every acquaintance I write to.”

“This acquaintance still writes to you even though you are terrible at corresponding back?”

She was, admittedly, quite terrible at correspondence with everyone else.

Somehow her comings and goings had come to revolve around his letters, somehow she was able to pour so much she kept locked inside a vault most of the time for others into the pages she sent to him.

Olivia would no doubt make a meal of this.

Moria felt the back of her neck itch and felt her fingers twitch to scratch at it. She could bluff her way in ballrooms and masquerades and places she had no business being, but her little sister made her itch uncomfortably under her stare. Unbelievable.

“I’m only terrible at corresponding with people who have nothing interesting to say. It isn’t my fault that most of the correspondents of our acquaintance fall into such a category.”

She picked up a pitcher on a sideboard nearby and poured herself a glass of water, suddenly unaccountably thirsty. Olivia looked at her like she could read the words through the concealing pocket of her dress.

“And what makes this particular…correspondent…so titillating?”

Moria spat the contents of her water goblet across the table. Olivia threw back her head in a raucous and unladylike laugh. Of course, Jasper chose that moment to enter with the Earl of Drysdale following on his heels.

“I’m afraid to even ask what the two of you are talking about,” The latter said, eyeing Moria like a piece of forbidden fruit, hands shoved in his pockets, hair perfectly unkempt.

He wasn’t forever. She wasn’t sure she had yet to find a man who was, only one she was willing to wager could be.

Drysdale was enjoyable to look at, easy to be around.

The contents of him weren’t half as deep as the man in her letters and sometimes it was a good, diverting thing; and sometimes she could feel her own heart cleave down the middle for missing a man with tattooed hands and a gentle soul.

Jasper nodded his acquiescence as he took a biscuit on a saucer from Olivia and sat down next to her at the tea table by a large wall of windows. Drysdale remained standing.

“Drysdale? Staying for tea?” Jasper said, motioning to the table.

“The view must be better over there,” Olivia said in a stage whisper.

Drysdale covered his laugh with a hand and Jasper shot the youngest Pembrooke a censorious glare. “You are, as ever, one of the most astute Pembrookes, Lady Olivia.”

Olivia beamed. “It isn’t a close race.”

Both Moria and Jasper collapsed into laughter, Moria giving her brother’s arm a firm squeeze to brace herself through her laughter. Drysdale met her eyes as he came to sit next to her, smiling at her, at the easy way her family joked with each other.

All she could think was that while he was the perfect teatime adornment—handsome and good natured and warm— her heart was calling another man's name.