Page 32

Chapter

SIXTEEN

“Not long now, Lady Harper, I promise. Please return to your room until you are summoned. We don’t want to spoil Lord Wennington’s surprise now, do we?

I am sure your daughter’s perfect coiffure will last until then.

” Lottie ushered the fretting mother up the stairs with a tight smile before she glanced at the hallway clock again.

It was already twenty minutes to eight and Lord Wennington should have been home an hour ago. Why wasn’t he?

“Any sign?” Lady Wennington stopped pacing as soon as Lottie entered the dining room.

“Not yet, my lady, and your guests are getting restless. Trying to keep them all hidden is becoming a bit like herding cats in fog. No sooner do I send one back to their room, another appears on the landing.”

With impeccable timing, Longbottom, who was trying his best to keep the surprise intact from the back of the house, slammed into the dining room too. His expression every bit as frazzled as Lottie felt.

“Your difficult French chef is adamant that his culinary masterpiece cannot be held until half past eight, Lady Frinton, and will be serving the first course at a quarter past as originally planned whether there are guests to eat it or not.” From her butler’s clipped tone, it was clear that words had been said.

“He told me to tell you that he would rather quit than compromise the delicate quality of his soufflés au quatre fromages, which are already in the oven.”

“Oh, poo!” Lady Frinton blew a raspberry. “Unyielding, my backside! Francois has threatened to quit at least a thousand times this last year alone. Go back and tell him to jolly well take the things out of the oven or I’ll head to the kitchen myself to give him what for.”

“I wish you would, my lady, as I’m this close to…” Longbottom made a brief fist before he clicked his heels together and bowed. “Very good, my lady.” He shot Lottie a glare as he spun on his heel. One that very much suggested that even he had reached the end of his tether this evening.

“Where the devil is my son!” Lady Wennington was peeking out of the curtains now for any signs of life outside. “He knows dinner is always at eight sharp. Always!”

“He might have a good excuse. Or be injured in some way—” Lottie’s concerned reasoning was cut off by a raised palm.

“He had better be close to death, the ingrate, because if he isn’t, he soon will be!” As his irate mother began to pace again, another mother poked her head around the dining room door.

“Any news on when we all need to come down?”

“Not yet, Mrs. Maybury.” Lottie smiled through intensely gritted teeth.

“I told you that I would personally come and fetch you when the time has come.” It took all her strength not to add the word “twice.” “Hurry back to your room now, if you please.” As soon as the woman left, she turned to Lady Frinton.

“If we leave them up there much longer, not only will your surprise be ruined, there will be mutiny.”

“Agreed. What’s our contingency plan?”

At first Lottie assumed that Lady Wennington had that answer, but when both ladies stared at her, she realized they didn’t. “We don’t have a contingency plan, do we?”

“We don’t,” said Lady Frinton, bristling, “but I had hoped you would have had the foresight to prepare one, Travers, as that is what I am paying you for. I don’t have a dog to bark myself, gal.”

Dumbfounded, Lottie gaped, then huffed. It was pointless arguing over it as someone had to do something to salvage the situation and it clearly wasn’t going to be these two.

They had made camp here in the dining room over an hour ago and had done nothing but issue unhelpful instructions ever since.

“Lady Wennington, would it be possible to begin to amass the guests in here without bringing them down the main staircase where your son might see them?”

She nodded. “There is, but it is a convoluted route down the servants’ stairs and through the kitchen.” She pointed to the discreet door in the paneling. “That will bring them out here.”

“Longbottom will know the route.” Lady Frinton said that with all the assurance of one who thought her butler knew everything. “Get it done and we’ll play the rest by ear once Guy deigns to grace us with his presence.”

Muttering under her breath, Lottie went to the kitchen to fetch Longbottom and found him in the midst of a whispered shouting match with the temperamental Francois.

“Do you ’ave any idea what happens to whipped ?ufs if they are interrupted during cooking, Monsieur Longbottom? Pfffft! They sink! Then it is au revoir soufflé !”

“Then serve the guests soup instead!” Longbottom was snarling now. “Soup is what every other cook makes as a first course!”

A comment that made the chef twitch uncontrollably. “Francois Cadieux would never serve something so predictable and insipide as soup at a banquet!” He shook his semi-clenched hand in the butler’s face. “Besides, I ’ave not prepared any!”

“I have.” That came from Lady Wennington’s poor cook who was clearly at the end of her tether too. “Not enough but if I stretch it with some stock and cream, it will taste good enough. I’ll put it on to heat.”

“ Non! Good enough is never good enough!”

“Sorry to interrupt—” Before Francois’s head exploded, Lottie grabbed Longbottom. “But we now have another job.”

“Please say that it’s running screaming for the hills, Lottie, because if it isn’t, I might just run screaming for them anyway.”

“I wish it was, but sadly we need to go urgently herd some cats.”

She explained her plan en route. They both agreed that retrieving the guests room by room would be too slow but trying to maneuver them all at once was madness.

Especially as there seemed to be some competition between the fifteen unmarried young ladies who had been invited to tempt the birthday boy down the aisle and she did not trust them not to try and sabotage one another in some way.

There could be no accidentally-on-purpose torn frocks or dawdling with him due home at any moment.

Therefore, they had decided on three families at a time, which meant that they had to successfully orchestrate five clandestine trips through the bowels of the house to get everyone unseen to the dining room.

“If I keep a lookout downstairs in the hallway for his lordship, I can distract him while you get everyone off the landing. Do not move anyone until I give you the signal.” For ease, they had kept the signals simple.

Lottie’s hands would be clasped behind her back if the master of the house was in sight, and in front of her if the coast was clear.

For the next fifteen minutes, as she ignored the crushing guilt that came from her clandestine part of this and her increasing dread at his reaction, Lottie alternated between loitering at the bottom of the stairs for Longbottom and pacing before the front door, waiting for Lord Wennington’s return.

All the while praying that he wouldn’t return on her watch because she still had no earthly idea how to react around him after she had done everything in her power to convince him to kiss her last night and he hadn’t.

With hindsight, she was also mortified at her outrageous come-hither behavior to convince him to.

He’d looked thoroughly horrified by it all as he’d extricated himself and couldn’t bring himself to meet her gaze after.

She had never seen a man spear his carrots with such determined focus as Lord Wennington had during dinner.

But his brows had been exceedingly furrowed and his jaw exceptionally tight.

She could only imagine what he had been thinking, and it obviously wasn’t good.

She wasn’t the least bit surprised that an eligible viscount hadn’t been inclined to kiss a companion of any caliber, let alone one with bee stings for breasts who did not possess a single modicum of decorum at all.

Especially one as noble as Lord Wennington.

That humiliation made her toes curl inside her evening slippers.

“Pssst…” Longbottom’s hushed call from above startled her. “I’m about to take the last lot, Lottie.”

“Excellent. Fetch me when it’s done.” She kept one eye on the front door as the last gaggle of overexcited young ladies and their parents scurried across the landing, wondering, not for the first time today, what Lady Frinton and his mother had been thinking when they had chosen these particular young ladies for him in the first place.

Lottie might not be Lord Wennington’s cup of tea or in his league, but she knew him well enough to know that none of those giggling, fawning ninnies were either.

They were all very pretty, one or two were stunning, but they didn’t seem to have much else going for them.

Most were as insipide as the soup Francois refused to serve and seemed to only care about pointless nonsense like gowns or dancing slippers or the perfect state of their coiffures .

Whereas he was a man of complex layers. One who loved the great outdoors and horses and agriculture.

He was all about the country and those silly girls only seemed to care about London and the countless balls they apparently spent their entire existence attending there.

In short, not right for him at all, in her humble opinion.

But what did she know? Maybe eligible viscounts were predisposed to prefer aristocratic nincompoops over farmers’ daughters. Maybe, amongst all his complex layers, Lord Wennington had the overwhelming urge to maintain the blue in his bloodline?

She jumped out of her skin for a second time as the front door opened and there he was. He strode in, distracted, then stopped dead when he saw her. By the way his face instantly blanched of all color, he was clearly still appalled by last night. “Miss Travers… I… um… I…”