Page 4 of Bad Luck Bride (Scandal at the Savoy #3)

“Well enough, under the circumstances. Papa was quite pleased since we’d been away nearly a year. Speaking of fathers…” She paused, giving him a hopeful look. “I note you don’t mention yours. How is he?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Devlin replied with a shrug, pretending a lightness he didn’t quite feel. “He refused to see me and departed within an hour of my arrival for his hunting lodge in Scotland. Thomas showed me round the old place.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but he will come around eventually.”

“I’m sure he will, once Thomas tells him I’m engaged to you.”

“That’s more than we can say of my mother.”

As she spoke, a faint, almost imperceptible smile tipped the corners of her mouth, confirming his suspicion that Pamela relished twisting her mother’s tail whenever possible.

“Enough about our absolutely impossible families.” Devlin eased a bit closer to her. “What’s important is that I’m finally able to see you again. Pity I arrived from Yorkshire so late last night. Had I arrived earlier, I’d have come running to pay a call on you straightaway.”

Her smile widened. “I was so glad to see your invitation to lunch on my breakfast plate this morning.”

“And I’m glad you were free to accept.” He glanced past her. “Where is your mother, by the way? Isn’t she joining us?”

Pam heaved a sigh. “Yes, unfortunately. You and I can’t go to lunch alone, even if we are engaged.”

“That would be unthinkable,” he said with a pretense of gravity. “Capital offense.”

“It is for my mother,” Pam said, making a face. “But our luncheon reservation isn’t until half past twelve,” she added, brightening, “so Mama won’t be down for at least half an hour.”

“Well, then…” He paused, smiling a little, his gaze honing in on her small, rosebud mouth. “Dare I hope you sought me out for a little passionate necking in an empty corridor somewhere before Lady Walston joins us?”

Pamela blushed, looking the picture of maidenly modesty. “Devlin,” she said with reproof, “you mustn’t say such things.”

“Darling, you love it when I say such things.”

In the wake of that, Pamela proved herself no angel at all by slanting him a flirtatious look from beneath her lashes and saying, “Perhaps I do. But,” she added at once, shredding any hopes he might have been harboring of a deliciously illicit interlude, “that’s not why I came down early.

I must see the florist. I have a few questions about the wedding flowers before I decide which ones I want. ”

“You’re already choosing the flowers? But the wedding isn’t until June.”

“And that’s less than three months away, so I simply must make a decision now. Besides,” she went on before he could even get his mind to understand the need to choose one’s wedding flowers ten weeks in advance, “you need to pick a flower for yourself.”

He looked at her askance. “The groom has to have a bouquet, too?”

“Not for the wedding, silly. We’re going to lunch, remember? At Rules.” She tapped a fingertip against his lapel as he remained unenlightened. “And your buttonhole is empty.”

He looked down to find she was right. “So it is,” he conceded. “Too many years in the wilds, my dear.”

“You should hire a valet.”

He laughed. “My darling, whatever for? We’ll be returning to Egypt in just a few months.”

She frowned as if puzzled. “Longer than that. We’ll be in Italy for our honeymoon, you know.

And a gentleman,” she added before he could point out that a two-week honeymoon made their return to Cairo exactly three months hence, “especially once he is married, should always have a proper valet. Even in Africa, the rules of proper dress must be observed. And you can’t argue that having a valet wouldn’t be quite a convenience here in London. ”

Humoring her, he decided, was his best bet at this point, since he didn’t much care either way. “It would be handy,” he agreed. “Having been away so long, I sometimes forget the absurd requirements of fashion.”

“They aren’t absurd, Devlin. Not here, not when everything one does is seen and remarked upon.”

“Yes,” he said with feeling. “I’m well aware.”

Pam immediately looked stricken. “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s quite all right,” he interrupted. “Please, darling, don’t apologize.

I know I have to be on the straight and narrow these days, now that I’m about to be a married man.

And I’m happy to toe the line, for your sake.

So,” he added, offering his arm, “with my nefarious plan to spirit you away definitely off the table, shall we go see the florist together?”

Her stunning smile was his reward. “Excellent idea. I can help you choose a boutonniere.”

Out of nowhere, he felt a flash of irritation at the offer. That made no sense, of course, since they were engaged. Pamela had every right to a bit of wifely supervision where her future husband was concerned. And no one could argue that she did not have excellent taste.

She slid her arm through his, and together they crossed the opulent lobby.

As they entered the shop of the Savoy florist, the various scents of the flowers seemed overpowering, and the clouds of pink, yellow, and white blossoms all around them made Devlin wish, not for the first time, that he’d been able to talk Pam out of a wedding in England.

After fourteen years away, being here made him feel smothered, trapped, and strangely off-balance.

“Why don’t you look at these stems while I see Monsieur Lavigne?” Pamela suggested.

She gestured to a wrought-iron rack nearby, where single stems of flowers reposed in galvanized pails of water, waiting to adorn the lapels of London’s dandies.

He studied them, feigning vast interest as Pamela walked away toward the back of the shop, going up and down the rows.

Bachelor’s buttons, rosebuds, gardenias.

He stopped, and in his mind, an image of a white gardenia in a girl’s copper-colored hair flashed through his mind.

He shoved it out again and moved on to the diminutive pink, white, and red carnations in the next row.

He selected a red carnation from the pail nearest him, but then he remembered vaguely that red carnations were only acceptable if your mother was alive.

Or maybe that was white? Uncertain, he fingered the carnation, cursing himself for procrastinating about hiring a valet.

But then, it had been easy to procrastinate during his two months at Stonygates when he’d had one of his father’s footmen to do for him.

Now, however, with the season coming, and the wedding, he’d best get on with finding someone.

Because Pam was right: in London, everything, even the wrong flower in a man’s buttonhole, was cause for comment.

And he’d been cause for comment enough already in his life.

Best to err on the side of caution, he decided as he put the red carnation back and reached for a bright blue bachelor’s button instead.

He’d barely pulled it out of the bucket, however, before a feminine voice floated to his ears.

It was not Pamela’s voice, but it was familiar—a voice from long ago, a voice that went with red hair and gardenias, a voice he knew as well as he knew his name, even though he hadn’t heard it, except in dreams, for nearly fourteen years.

Devlin froze, suddenly paralyzed.

“I want to have a look at the gardenias,” the voice said, coming to him over a trellis densely packed with vines of pink bougainvillea. “I might want one for my hat. Why don’t you go and have the doorman order us a cab? I’ll follow you in a minute.”

It’s not possible , he told himself, his fingers clenching around the dripping stem in his hand, his guts tightening with dismay. I’m imagining things .

That rather desperate thought had barely crossed his mind before the owner of the voice came around the trellis, and as she stopped a few feet away, the sight of her shredded any optimistic notion that he’d been imagining things.

Standing amid buckets and bouquets, her flaming hair a vivid contrast to the pink flowers and greenery all around her, was the woman it had taken him many long, hard years and the kisses of many other women to forget.

Kay.

There was no mistaking those bright curls peeking out from under a wide-brimmed hat of pale yellow straw, or those strangely beautiful silvery-green eyes surrounded by dark red lashes, or that pale, porcelain skin.

And there was definitely no mistaking the freckles spattered across her nose and cheeks that always made her look as if a mischievous fairy had come along in the night and dusted her face with brown sugar.

She didn’t look exactly the same, however. She was thinner than the girl he remembered, he realized as he glanced down over a fashionably slim figure in blue wool.

What a pity.

She probably wouldn’t agree with him there.

Kay had always hated her curves. Why that was so, he’d never understood, but then, most women had ridiculous ideas about what constituted feminine beauty.

Torching their hair with hot curling tongs, picking at their food like finicky little birds, squeezing and pinching their waistlines with corsets until they looked like wasps, bleaching away their pretty freckles with lemon juice.

For Kay, of course, using hot tongs had never been necessary. Her hair had always been a mass of unruly corkscrew curls. And using lemon juice would have been a futile endeavor, for her freckles were everywhere. Her shoulders, her arms, cresting the tops of her breasts—

Memories assailed him, of brushing brilliant copper tresses back from her shoulders, of tracing star constellations across the golden-brown dots along her clavicle above the edge of her white chemise, kissing the ones scattered across her shoulders.

With those memories came an onslaught of other emotions, emotions he hadn’t felt for years, emotions he thought he’d conquered and killed long ago.

Desire, anger, frustration, pain—they caught him unawares, like a knife in the dark, slipped between his ribs, piercing his lungs, robbing him of the ability to think or even breathe.

He looked up, watching her big sage-colored eyes narrow to slits, demonstrating that he wasn’t the only one thinking of the past, though if her face was anything to go by, the biggest thing it made her feel was contempt.

The lips of her wide, generous mouth were pressed together in a tight, unforgiving line.

Her pert freckled nose was wrinkled up as if she’d caught a bad smell.

One auburn eyebrow arched upward in unmistakable disdain.

Damn it all , he thought, the knife twisting deep inside his chest. Damn it all to hell .