Page 8 of Bad Luck Bride (Scandal at the Savoy #3)

She laughed, shaking her head as if he were a hopeless business. “Far too plebeian.”

“I’m so glad I have you to steer me in the proper direction about these things,” he said, returning the bachelor’s button to its place and selecting a small white carnation instead. When he shot her an inquiring glance, she nodded approval, and he broke the stem to shorten it.

“Are you?” she asked, as he tucked the flower into the buttonhole of his morning coat.

“Am I what?”

“Are you glad?” she asked, adjusting the stem, then letting her hand linger against his chest. “Truly?”

Encouraged, he leaned closer. “Are you certain we have to go to lunch?” he murmured. “I prefer my idea of some passionate necking.”

He planted a kiss on her perfect retroussé nose, causing her to cast an apprehensive glance around the shop. “Devlin,” she chided, though he could tell she wasn’t really displeased. “You shouldn’t do things like that.”

“Why not?” he countered, catching her hand in his as it fell to her side. “Because people will see? Let them.”

“But—”

“We are engaged, after all.”

“But no one knows that. We haven’t announced it yet.”

“Now that we are both here in town, I think it’s time we did.”

“Mama won’t like it,” Pamela warned, but even as she spoke, it was clear the notion was not unpleasing to her. “She’s been so insistent we not announce it until the season starts. I fear she’s stalling, hoping I’ll change my mind about marrying you.”

“No doubt,” he agreed, supposing wryly he ought to be used to a lack of parental approval by this time. “Is she—” He paused, meeting her eyes. “Is she justified in that hope?”

“Devlin! You know she’s not.” Her lower lip jutted out a little, showing hints of a rebellious streak in her nature. “Mama loves arranging my life to suit her, but I have no intention of allowing it.”

A feeling he knew well. Lifting her hand, he pressed a kiss to her gloved fingers. “Then let’s put the announcement in the papers so that everyone, including your mother, will know it’s official.”

Her wide, radiant smile was his reward. “This week?”

“Perfect.”

He paid for his purchase, and as they left the florist, he was relieved to note that all the tumultuous emotions evoked by his encounter with Kay had disintegrated. Pain and anger were gone. Sanity had returned.

The only thing he felt now was a strange lightness of heart, and he realized that unbeknownst to himself, he’d been on tenterhooks about his inevitable encounter with Kay from the moment he’d set foot in England again.

But that particular moment had come and gone, and now that it was over, he could be sure that she was well and truly in the past.

So what, he thought, if they couldn’t avoid her?

So what if she was marrying a man Devlin had business dealings with?

As Pam had rightly pointed out, it didn’t affect them.

And it would only be for the next few months, anyway, and then he and Pam would be going back to Africa.

As for Kay, she could marry an American millionaire nearly twice her age, or her titled cousin, or a toad covered in warts, for all he cared.

Nonetheless, he took a quick glance around as he and Pamela reentered the lobby, and he gave a sigh of relief that Kay was nowhere in sight. The past might at last be buried, but the less he and Kay Matheson saw of each other during the next few months, the better for everyone’s peace of mind.

Despite Magdelene’s efforts, Mrs. Carte made it clear that there would be no banqueting room at the Savoy for Kay’s wedding dinner, a fact that was no surprise to Kay. Her mother, however, still seemed unable to accept it.

“I just don’t understand why the woman can’t honor whatever plan Delia had in mind for us,” Magdelene said for perhaps the tenth time that afternoon. “It was the Savoy’s muddle, after all. They ought to feel obliged to make up for it.”

Preoccupied with her own thoughts, Kay scarcely heard.

Devlin was back.

Hours later, that fact seemed even more appalling than it had when she’d first set eyes on him in the flower shop.

The shock of running into him so unexpectedly after so long had struck her with the force of a lightning bolt, and being introduced to his fiancée hadn’t helped her recover.

Somehow, however, amid the polite conversation she’d been forced to make and the pretense of amiability she’d been forced to don, a feeling of numbness had overcome her initial shock, and by the time she and Jo had stepped out of the hotel and into their waiting carriage, the whole ghastly episode had seemed like nothing more than a dream, enabling her to believe her assurance to her sister that she was quite all right.

But was she?

Kay bit her lip, staring down with unseeing eyes at the book of fashion plates in her lap as her mother’s voice droned on beside her.

“Impossible woman. Why, she would not even tell me the identity of the party who managed to steal the Pinafore Room out from under us. I dropped hint after hint, to no avail.”

Kay’s feeling of numbness had persisted during their cab ride to Mrs. Carte’s office and all through lunch with their mother at the Criterion, but now, with Jo in one of the fitting rooms at Lucile being measured for her bridesmaid’s gown, and herself ensconced in the dressmaker’s main showroom with nothing but her mother’s faintly complaining voice to distract her, memories of the past were coming back in force, burning away the fog of numbness and exposing deeper emotions—emotions she hadn’t felt for years, ones she had hoped never to feel again.

The agony of divided loyalties ripping her apart when she’d defied her family and eloped with Devlin to Gretna Green.

The resentment and the relief when her friends had pulled her back from the brink of that irrevocable decision.

The pain of looking into Devlin’s blue eyes when he’d stood with her in the room of that roadside inn with her friends standing by, and the last words he’d said to her.

If you don’t come away with me now, you never will.

He’d been right about that. What he hadn’t told her was that he never intended to give her another chance to try.

“Delia must have said something to the woman, surely. I wonder if I should cable Delia in Paris and ask her. What do you think, dear?”

Knowing a question had been asked of her, Kay roused herself just enough to offer a reply. “Oh, absolutely, Mother.”

Satisfied, Magdelene prattled on, and Kay resumed ruminations of the past.

She could still vividly recall those awful months after her return home and Devlin’s departure for Africa.

Her father’s anger and disappointment, her mother’s tearful recriminations, her banishment to the family’s most distant estate in Wales, and the dreary winter months she’d spent there with no one but her mother and baby sister for company.

She’d tried to be strong, holding on for two years with nothing to sustain her but faith that Devlin would write, that he’d tell her when he’d be coming back to court her properly and honorably, her insistence to her father that she would wait for the man she loved to the end of time…

but then her exasperated father had shown her irrefutable proof of her lover’s betrayal, and her faith had been shattered.

The pain of heartbreak that had followed in the wake of that discovery seemed as fresh now as it had the day her father had shown her the canceled bank draft he’d written with Devlin’s signature of endorsement on the back.

Two thousand pounds. Devlin had given her up, deserted her, and sold her love for two thousand pounds.

From out of nowhere, a sob rose up. She tried to catch it back, pressing a gloved hand over her mouth, but it was too late.

“Kay, darling, what is it?” Magdelene asked, turning on the velvet settee to look at her. “Are you all right?”

“Of course,” she said at once, trying to regain the numbness she’d felt in the cab with Jo, but it was too late for that, so the only thing to do was invent an excuse. “I have a bit of a headache, Mama. That’s all.”

Fortunately, Magdelene accepted this explanation without question. “So that’s why you’ve been so quiet and diffident this afternoon,” she said with a nod. “I knew something was wrong.”

Magdelene, of course, had no idea of the cause.

In the cab on the way to Mrs. Carte’s office, Kay and Jo had agreed not to tell their mother about the encounter with Devlin.

Upon hearing of it, Magdelene would have given in to her innate need for drama and collapsed in a faint.

Upon being revived with smelling salts, she’d have then wailed about That Horrible Man, cried about Kay’s past shame and disgrace, and made dire predictions that all her good work to restore Kay’s reputation would surely be undone by some nefarious deed on Devlin’s part.

Not wanting to endure any of that, Kay and Jo had decided to let Mama find out from someone else that Devlin Sharpe was back in town.

“Yes,” Kay agreed, putting a hand to her head and wincing in what she hoped was a convincing show of pain. “I really could do with a phenacetin powder and a cold compress.”

“Oh, my dear! I do hope you’ll be all right by this evening.”

“This evening?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten? Dear Wilson is taking us to the opera at Covent Garden tonight. He told us about it yesterday when he arrived back from New York.”

Since admitting the fact that she’d forgotten her own fiancé had just returned after a three-month absence would probably earn her a disappointed look and a lecture, she knew dissembling was her best course.

“Silly Mama, of course I haven’t forgotten,” she lied, pasting on a wan smile.

“It’s just this beastly headache making me woolly-headed.

I’m sure I’ll be fine by tonight, if I could just lie down for a bit. Perhaps—”