Page 122 of The Ladies Least Likely

Yet the fear receded with Harriette at his side.

Along with the alarm and desire her dress and exposed skin and delicious scent aroused in him, he felt the old, steadying calm in her presence, as if the world had fallen into perspective.

He’d dreamed of this, in deepest night: of entering fancy parties armed with a gorgeously dressed Harriette who would whisper in his ear and make him feel the absurdity of it all, not the pain of inadequacy or fear of humiliation.

His mother could throw fits later about his squiring Harriette about, but tonight, for now, she was here.

She glanced up at him, and the gold lights in her eyes warned of impending mischief. Her red lips curved in a smile that brought out tiny grooves at the corners of her mouth. She’d had that impish pucker as a girl, but on her woman’s face, it was a powerful enchantment.

“Who’s bolting?” She straightened him with a quick, light touch, smoothing his coat over his shoulders, flicking at his neckcloth to adjust the folds, and rubbing her thumb over a silver button to erase a smudge. Then she brushed her hand over his temple, tucking a lock of hair under his wig.

He stood struck to stone by her attention, every nerve ending fired alive at her touch.

These were the simple attentions a woman paid a man she cared about, but he had never known them.

He had never had a woman at his side who cared about anything more than the price she would be paid for a night of companionship.

He met Harriette’s eyes and felt trapped in the lift of her dark lashes, the steady inquiry of her gaze.

If it were true that the eyes revealed the soul, then he saw all of Harriette Smythe, the girl she had been and the woman she’d become, and all that lay in between.

His heart slammed against the silver button she’d just touched, as if trying to throw itself into her hands.

The surge of blood in his head blocked out all the voices of the room, everything but her.

Harriette .

His pulse beat out a knowledge that dizzied him with its sudden surety. He felt unsteady, and he felt as if he’d just arrived at the fundamental truth of his life.

Harriette, at his side. That was all he needed. That was everything.

He stared at her lips, fighting back the blood pounding in his ear so he could hear her. “—future countess is here somewhere, Renwick. We’ll find her.”

She looked away, and the ground beneath him shifted. The rock of truth he stood on was his alone.

She didn’t want him.

She felt the old tenderness for him, that was clear, but she didn’t want him the way a woman longed for a man.

Well, whoever had wanted him? Ren thought, sliding down the black hole toward the despair that was his oldest and most familiar companion.

He followed like a block of wood as Harriette stepped forward, and because he wasn’t thinking about his foot, the cursed thing dragged along with him.

Behind him he heard the butler announcing them, and every eye turned just in time to watch him lurch into the drawing room.

Harriette stopped at once, beaming a polite smile around the crowd, waiting to let him steady himself against her. But the damage was done. Everyone had seen his weakness. He had only to open his mouth to seal his doom.

He froze in humiliation, the terrified boy he’d always been, but Harriette gently tugged him forward. “Charlotte Stanhope,” she murmured. “Grand-niece to the late Lord Chesterfield. You’ve read his Letters to his Son, I’m sure?”

“I heard they are full of im-im-immorality,” Ren stammered as the small knot of fashionably dressed women stared at their approach.

This was an agony past bearing. He watched the youngest sweep her eyes down his form and fasten on the foot he dragged forward to meet the other.

His moment of paralysis had stripped away every trick he’d mastered, every guise he’d learned to affect.

The young lady’s eyes darted back to his face with a look of horror, and Ren gritted his teeth. What did he care if every woman here scorned him? Harriette was trying to give him away to another. She didn’t want him herself. No other knowledge was able to enter his head around that.

The young lady gave him a brief curtsey as Harriette made introductions.

In a pretty silk robe the color of milky tea, with demure rosettes marching down lines of broad stripes, the Stanhope girl looked like a plain little wren next to Harriette’s exotic scarlet finch.

Her chaperone made some polite noises, and the ladies with them acknowledged Ren with the courtesy due an earl and their host. None of them turned to chat with Harriette, which struck him as odd, if they were acquainted.

The chaperone asked whether he had visited Sir William and Lady Catherine Hamilton in Naples.

Ren gulped. This was what he most hated about such gatherings: the questions that required answers. He could avoid dancing, but not the direct address.

“I sss-stayed some time with them at the Villa Angelica in Pu-Portici.”

Oh, miserable, miserable; he sounded like a stuttering fool.

He focused on Harriette, who was watching him with rapt attention, so he did not have to see the distaste on the faces of the others.

“In fact I had the honor of accompanying Sir W—” He concentrated.

Harriette didn’t hurry him. “—Sir William on one of his visits to M-Mount Etna.” Ignore the others.

Focus on Harriette. “He is preparing his observations about volcanoes for publications, I believe.” He faced the chaperone as if he had been speaking to her all along.

“How interesting,” the chaperone murmured, sounding bored, though Ren had broken a sweat putting so many sentences together for strangers.

She stared at his leg as if she doubted his ability to move anywhere, much less clamber across uneven surfaces, and he felt a wave of fury at her scorn.

Couldn’t she see how hard he was trying?

As if she sensed his emotion, Harriette lightly squeezed his arm.

“I’ve studied the engravings Sir William has published of his substantial collection of antique vases.

” She smiled at Ren as if he were the most fascinating man in the room.

“But I would particularly like to see his collection of paintings.”

The other women met this effort with silence. It was not quite the cut direct; they simply pretended that she was not there.

This diverted Ren from his own agonies. Why would these ladies spurn Harriette? But she didn’t seem affected; indeed she didn’t seem to realize anything was wrong.

“I will take you to the Palazzo Sessa sometime,” he promised her.

“Sir William will be delighted to show you his collection. Wadies.” He nodded at them, smarting at his final slip, and drew away.

He let himself entertain for a moment, as consolation, the thought of travel abroad with Harriette.

Harriette with artistic crumbling ruins behind her or the dramatic profile of a volcano.

Harriette drenched in the golden sun of southern Italy.

Across the room, his mother paused in fawning upon the Duchess of Devonshire to give Ren a fulminating stare. He gripped Harriette tightly as she pulled him along to the next group. “Bess Hervey is the brunette,” she whispered. “Young, but considered uncommonly handsome.”

Handsome women made Ren’s throat tighten and his tongue swell in his mouth.

He concentrated on walking evenly as Harriette floated to another knot of gorgeously dressed women and made introductions.

It was the same with the Hervey girl and her contingent.

They met Ren with cautious courtesy and did not engage with his companion, though the Hervey girl watched Harriette out of the corner of her eye as if keeping an eye on a half-feral pet. The others clustered around Ren.

“Do you ride, your lordship?” asked one young thing, whose name he had forgotten immediately.

“A little,” he said. In truth, he felt much at his ease on horseback, where his clubfoot didn’t matter.

“Renwick cuts an excellent figure atop a horse,” said Harriette, who had never seen him ride. “Ren, you ought to take them riding sometime.”

“I’d much prefer driving in the park.” Another girl peeped at him above her fan. “I’m sure you have a very dashing vehicle?”

Ren’s neck itched beneath his neckcloth.

Was she flirting with him? Women did not flirt with him.

These girls moved too much, all flutter and rustling and the waving of fans and curls and whatever they had pinned in their wigs.

Beside him, Harriette stood completely still, like a steady column of flame, throwing a most distracting heat.

“I have a gig,” Ren meant to say, but just then one girl bent to one of the others and whispered to her behind her fan, pointing her stare at Harriette.

The second gaped, giggled, and then slapped a hand over her mouth.

Harriette pretended not to hear, nor to see that she was the object of their gossip, but Ren felt all the air leave his body.

“I have a g-g-g-g-g—” He tried to gasp out the word and couldn’t. Shame suffused him, but worse, when he turned to seek help from Harriette, he stepped on the train of Miss Hervey’s gown. An irate glare swept over her face, swiftly mastered, but Ren botched the apology, too.

“M-m-m-miss Herv—I—b-b” His airway closed, his mouth proving as disobedient as his leg. Raw humiliation burned across his brow.

“Why, there is Lady Bessington!” Harriette trilled. “You’ll excuse us, won’t you? I’ve been hoping to make Renwick known to her. She is a great patron of the arts.” She beamed at the group, extracting Ren from the scene of his shame.

“As if you’ve ever had a respectable patron,” one of the girls remarked under her breath as they moved on. Ren, shocked, tried to look over his shoulder to find the source of this contemptuous remark, but Harriette pulled him away.