Page 62

“Not much, no. It’s my opinion that they’re too young for London, though my eldest sister Margaret does not happen to share that opinion.”

His lips curved in a rueful smile that lured an answering smile from Emmeline’s lips.

“Henrietta and Sarah, my two younger sisters adore the country, but Margaret finds it terribly dull.” His brows drew together as if he were baffled by the vicissitudes of a young lady’s mind. He was such a picture of the doting but puzzled elder brother, a trill of sudden laughter escaped Emmeline.

He jerked towards her as if surprised, a quick grin rising to his lips. “You have a lovely laugh, Miss Templeton. Has anyone ever told you that?”

No one but Emmeline’s father and sisters had ever told her she had a lovely anything .

That same rush of warmth suffused her, tingling through her veins until she fairly vibrated with pleasure.

She raised her eyes to his, he met her gaze, and for the time it took for Emmeline’s heart to beat once…

twice…a third time…neither of them looked away.

At last, Lord Melrose dropped his gaze, and as soon as those lovely cornflower blue eyes released her from their thrall, Emmeline recalled with a pang that she wasn’t meant to be drowning in Lord Melrose’s eyes.

But they were well into the rose arbors by now, the blooms surrounding them heavy with fragrance, and so thick Emmeline could no longer see the entrance behind them, or the exit ahead.

It was as if Juliet, Lord Cross, and Lady Fosberry had vanished, leaving her alone in a cocoon of silken petals with Lord Melrose.

“There’s a bench, just there.” He nodded to a low stone bench nestled under an arch smothered with pale, creamy roses that released a refreshing scent of wintergreen. “Shall we rest for a while?”

Emmeline knew she should refuse. That she should take him back to Juliet, and attempt to manage it so he and her sister were seated beside each other in the carriage for the ride back to Hampstead Heath.

But that wasn’t what she did.

She meant to. Indeed, she opened her mouth to do just that, but somehow, she found she couldn’t push the refusal past her lips.

It was one afternoon only, and she did so want to see the roses.

“I’d watch my back if I were you, Melrose. Lady Christine doesn’t carry a muff pistol, does she?”

Johnathan was sprawled in front of the fire in his study, staring down at the last swallow of port in his tumbler, his mind on…nothing whatsoever, but he roused himself at Cross’s words.

“Lady Christine?” Good Lord, he’d nearly forgotten about her. Odd, that he could so easily forget about the lady he’d been resigned to marrying at the start of the season. “What’s the matter with her? It’s not the silver hairbrush again, is it?”

Cross peered over the top of his paper, one dark eyebrow aloft. “You can’t be that obtuse, Melrose. She’s furious that…” He glanced back at the paper. “‘A shameless seductress in a lavender gown’ has upended her betrothal, and ruined all her happiness.’”

Good Lord, would the fuss over a betrothal that never existed ever end? He hadn’t once shown a partiality for Lady Christine, much less asked her to marry him. “Lady Christine and I were never betrothed.”

“No, but all of London expected you would be, and among them Lady Dingley, who declares her daughter is...” Cross read aloud from the paper again. “‘So humiliated she can’t ever show her face in society again.’”

Johnathan rolled his eyes. “I don’t know what she’s on about. Lord Cudworth is Lady Christine’s for the plucking.”

“Ah, but Lord Cudworth isn’t the Nonesuch, and is, at least according to the papers, a poor replacement for him.”

“This is all according to the papers, is it?” Johnathan let out a derisive snort. “It’s nonsense, Cross. The Times claims Lady Christine attended Lord Lambeth’s ball just last night, and danced every dance. They went on at tedious length about her gown, too.”

Cross tossed the paper aside. “Lady Dingley vows revenge, Melrose.”

“That’s absurd. Revenge against whom?”

“Against the shameless seductress in the lavender gown, of course,” Cross said with a sigh, as if Johnathan were trying his patience.

“What makes Lady Christine think she’ll ever find out the identity of the lady? I haven’t, and I’m the one who kissed her.” It had been two days, and Johnathan still couldn’t be certain which sister—Emmeline, or Juliet Templeton—was the Lady in Lavender.

Of the two of them, Juliet Templeton made the most sense. She was bolder than her sister, and she’d been in the ballroom that evening dressed in some shade of purple silk. A shade darker than lavender, yes, but one couldn’t trust Cudworth to know the difference.

Yes, rationally speaking, Juliet Templeton was the obvious choice, but there was something about Emmeline Templeton…

He couldn’t resist her shy smile, that adorable blush and her lovely, smoky blue eyes. Her cleverness, her earnestness, her lack of artifice puzzled, intrigued, and charmed him all at once.

Of the two sisters, Emmeline was the one who made his heart quicken in his chest, but he couldn’t be certain it was she, and not her sister who was the Lady in Lavender.

It would hardly endear him to either one of them to admit it though, or God forbid, if he should offer for one and it turned out to be the other?—

“A lady scorned has resources beyond what you could ever imagine, Melrose.”

“Oh?” Johnathan forced his attention back to Cross, who was still going on about Lady Dingley. “What resources are those?”

“The most diabolical resources of all, namely, the other ladies in London, all of whom profess themselves highly offended by the Lady in Lavender.”

“Let them be offended, then. I don’t see what business it is of theirs.”

“The gossips make everything their business, Melrose. They’ve come up with a list between them, with the name of every chit at Lady Fosberry’s ball who was wearing any shade of purple you can possibly imagine.”

“A list of young ladies in lavender won’t do them much good, Cross, unless they can pinpoint which of them was the one seen leaving the library.”

“They’ve gotten a description of her gown from Lord Cudworth, and they intend to take it to Madame Toussaint, who supplied gowns to nearly every young lady in London this season, and find her out that way.”

“Lord Cudworth doesn’t know a damn thing about gowns,” Johnathan muttered, but an uneasy feeling was gnawing at him.

It wasn’t a bad idea, all told. He turned his gaze back to fire, mulling over this new information. Yes, it was a good idea—rather too good. They’d find out the lady’s identity soon enough, and she’d be flayed open on the dagger’s edge of every vicious tongue in London.

Unless he found her first.

If he and his mystery lady weren’t already betrothed by the time the gossips discovered who she was, there was every chance they’d drive her from London with their venom, in just the same way the Templeton sisters had been driven out, clutching the shreds of their ruined reputations around them like tattered clothing.

Emmeline Templeton’s face flashed in his mind then, the shy curve of her lips, and the husky laugh that had so surprised him this afternoon.

He didn’t like to think of how that smile must have dimmed when, through no fault of their own, the Templeton sisters had landed on the wrong side of the ton .

“You didn’t seem to have much to say during our outing today,” Johnathan said, determined to change the subject.

“When have you ever known me to be loquacious, Melrose?”

“Never.” Cross wasn’t one for polite chitchat, but he’d been unusually quiet today.

“I didn’t speak much because Juliet Templeton didn’t cease talking long enough for me to get a word in. I’ve never seen a woman with a more wearisome tongue.”

“But such a pretty face.” Johnathan shot a sly look at Cross.

“I didn’t notice.”

“Of course you bloody did! You’re a man, aren’t you? I don’t know why you bother to deny it, Cross. It’s perfectly acceptable to admire a lady without becoming betrothed to her.”

“God forbid I ever become betrothed to Juliet Templeton. I’d never have another moment’s peace.”

“You could do with less peace. You haven’t got nearly enough to plague you. It’s not good for a man to get his own way too often.”

Cross rolled his eyes. “This, from you ? I’d say you get your way often enough, Melrose.”

“Not a bit of it. Have you forgotten I have three sisters?”

Cross chuckled, and they both fell into a silence made comfortable by a long friendship, each lost in their own musings, until Johnathan disrupted the moment of peace. “I’m going to marry her, Cross. The Lady in Lavender. I’m going to marry her.”

He’d made up his mind to it the same night he’d kissed her, mere moments after she’d fled, and left him alone in the library, her scent still wrapped around him.

Cross sighed, but he didn’t seem surprised. “Yes, I suppose you don’t have much choice.”

No, he didn’t—not unless he wished to be condemned as a rake and a scoundrel—but that wasn’t the reason Johnathan was so determined to make the Lady in Lavender his countess.

He turned the tumbler in his hand, gazing at the play of firelight over the last swallow of rich, dark-red port, glittering like a ruby through the thick crystal. The night of Lady Fosberry’s ball, when he’d been so deep in his cups, he’d thought his uncharacteristic drunkenness a minor rebellion.

In truth, it had been the first in a series of unexpected moments that had altered the entire course of his life, like the first drops of rain preceding a storm that swept all before it, and left everything in its wake forever changed.

Had he not been in his cups, he never would have chased after Lady Susanna, and ended up kissing the Lady in Lavender.

It was strange, the way a man’s entire life could change in the space of a single evening, but wasn’t the mere fact of it having happened evidence that he and the Lady in Lavender were destined for each other?

Surely, fate wouldn’t have allowed such an extraordinary chain of circumstances to unfold otherwise?

Johnathan had never thought of himself as a romantic, but perhaps no man ever did until the fates smiled on him, and threw him into the path of the one woman who tipped his world on its axis. That he didn’t know her name, and hadn’t even seen her face, made not the slightest difference at all.

“I only hope the Lady in Lavender will make a proper Countess of Melrose. You have your sisters to think of.”

“There’s never a time when I don’t think of them, Cross.”

“I know.” Cross tossed back the rest of his port. “What’s your opinion of Emmeline Templeton? She’s a quiet young lady, unlike her sister, but she seemed happy enough to talk to you today.”

“She’s…” Johnathan paused, uncertain how to put into words what Emmeline Templeton was. Nothing like any other lady he’d ever known, and not as he’d imagined any lady ever could be, before their visit to Lady Fosberry’s drawing room yesterday.

He was still missing a great many of the pieces that made up the puzzle of Emmeline Templeton, but the more time he spent with her, the more determined he was to find them.

Those eyes, and that guilty flush…

“Unexpected.” It wasn’t quite the right word, but it was the best Johnathan could do. “She’s unexpected.”

It wasn’t until he’d retired to his bedchamber that night, and was staring up at the canopy over his head that Johnathan realized he’d spent hardly any time talking to Juliet Templeton.

He’d meant to do so in hopes of solving the mystery of which Templeton sister was the Lady in Lavender, but somehow, he’d forgotten all about it.