Regency Rumour: Never Trust a Rake / Reforming the Viscount. ANNIE BURROWS
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her aunt’s house, to her surprise he tossed the reins to his tiger, sprang down and caught up with her before she’d set foot on the first step.
‘Miss Gibson,’ he said sharply.
She sighed. What now?
‘You are such a simpleton,’ he said, glancing down the street as though he was already itching to be away. ‘You don’t know what you are saying, to turn down my offer of assistance. And though you have made me very angry, I cannot leave things between us like this.’ He wouldn’t mind making her pay for her rudeness to him by leaving her to the mercy of the gossipmongers. But he did not want her to come to complete shipwreck. She was so naïve, and … and green, believing in goodness and decency, and telling the truth and shaming the devil.
He seized her hand and looked directly into her eyes, his expression, for once, neither mocking nor dismissive, but earnest.
‘You came rushing to my help, that night on Miss Twining’s terrace, even though I did not need it. I find,’ he said with a perplexed frown, ‘that I cannot turn my back on such a foolhardy, gallant gesture.’
More than half of his anger with her, he had realised during the drive back to Bloomsbury, was due to the fact she did not appreciate how rare it was for him to want to put himself out for anyone. The rest, well …
‘I think,’ he said, ‘that in some ways we are very much alike. You have a good deal of pride. It is why you hid behind the plant pots to cry, rather than go running to your aunt. Why you spurn the offer of help from me, a man you hardly know, rather than admitting you stand in need of it.’
He was doing it again. Assuming he knew all about her.
And the most annoying thing of all was the fact that he was pretty near the mark.
‘Do not be too proud,’ he said with an infuriatingly sympathetic smile, ‘to turn to me should you ever really need it.’
‘Oh, I’m sure I shan’t.’
‘Yes, but if you should, I will be there. Remember that.’
‘Well, then, thank you, my lord.’ She pulled her hand from his and nodded to him, setting her ostrich feathers quivering wildly.
‘And good day.’
She turned and pounded up the steps to the front door as though the devil himself was after her.
That was clearly what she thought. He frowned. It was perhaps better for her to stay away from a man like him. They came from different worlds.
If she stepped into his, she would soon lose that delightful innocence, that childlike belief in good and evil.
His face set in harsh lines, he mounted up behind his team and set his curricle in motion. The best way for him to protect her probably would be to stay well away from her.
Upon reflection, he supposed he should not have taken her out in public and exposed her to speculation today.
Damn it all, but now he’d set the ball rolling, there was nothing he could do to call off the hounds that would surely pursue her for their sport.
He had told her he would keep away from her and he would do so. But that did not mean he could not exert his influence discreetly. There were plenty of ways he could ensure she was protected, now he came to think of it, which would not involve direct contact.
His lips lifted into a smile of utter devilment, as he began to draw up his plans. How long would it be before she began to detect his hand, gently pulling the strings behind the scenes, and came to him to express her gratitude?
He chuckled at the unlikelihood of her ever doing anything so tame. Knowing her, it would be far more likely she would come marching up to him, ostrich feathers bobbing in indignation, to demand that he leave her alone.
Either way, he would have made her come to him the next time. And for some reason he didn’t care to examine too closely, that was what mattered the most.
It was two weeks before she saw him again.
She had been some twenty minutes in the house of Lord Danbury, where she’d been invited, much to her surprise, by his daughter Lady Susan Pettiffer. Her party had spent most of that time removing their coats and changing their shoes in the ladies’ withdrawing room, greeting their host, and wandering through as many rooms as they could—on the pretext of seeing if there was anyone they knew—so that her aunt could examine how each and every room in the earl’s sumptuous town house was decorated and furnished.
They had just secured a place on a sofa in one of the upstairs drawing rooms when the entire atmosphere became charged. It was a bit like the tingle she sometimes felt in the air when she was out walking on the hills and a thunderstorm was fast approaching. Then the ladies started discreetly preening and several of the men checked their neckcloths in the glass over the mantel, if they were near enough, and those who weren’t began to speak in more ponderous tones.
Lord Deben had entered the room.
Her aunt gripped her wrist. Ever since he had taken her out for that drive, Aunt Ledbetter had been expecting him to call again. Or, at the very least, to send a posy. In vain had Henrietta assured her there had been nothing romantic about him showing interest in her. ‘But you are just the sort of girl a man like that would like,’ she had said, over and over again. ‘They live a lot in the country, the aristocracy.’
‘Please, do not refine too much upon the fact that he happens to be here tonight. He has probably forgotten all about me by now,’ she turned to her aunt to say.
‘Nonsense. He just has not noticed you yet,’ replied her aunt.
‘Don’t wave, don’t wave,’ Henrietta hissed out of the corner of her mouth, when it looked as though her aunt was about to do just that. ‘If he wants to pretend he has not seen us,’ she muttered angrily, for how he could have failed to see them, when the sofa upon which they sat was in full view of the door through which he had just walked, she could not imagine, ‘then he must not want to recognise us tonight.’
Her aunt subsided immediately. It was one thing for a member of the ton to call at one’s house, quite another for that same aristocrat to deign to recognise one in public.
Henrietta flicked open her fan and plied it over her aunt’s heated cheeks. The excitement of getting an invitation to a household such as this quite eclipsed the coup of getting her Mildred into a mere Miss Twining’s come-out ball. Although, in a way, they owed that, too, to Julia. She had called, with Lady Susan in tow, only a day or so ago, to enquire whether she had quite recovered from whatever had afflicted her during her come-out ball. ‘Because,’ Julia had said disingenuously, ‘I was beginning to fear it might be something serious, since I have not seen you anywhere since.’ As they’d been leaving, Lady Susan had asked if she would be interested in attending what she described as ‘a very informal rout’.
Aunt Ledbetter had very nearly expired from excitement on the spot.
‘Shall I fetch you some lemonade, aunt?’ There were so many more important people thronging the house that the footmen circulating with trays of refreshments had bypassed them several times. And she was only too willing to leave the room in which Lord Deben was holding court, to go in search of a waiter willing to serve them.
‘No, dear, I need something considerably stronger,’ said her aunt. ‘Lemonade for Mildred, though.’
Henrietta snapped her fan shut and deliberately avoided looking in Lord Deben’s direction. She hadn’t liked the way he’d kept invading her thoughts over the past fortnight. She hadn’t liked the way her spirits had lifted when she detected some sign that he might have been working on her behalf, in the background, in spite of the way they had parted. Although he’d probably, no, definitely