Regency Rumour: Never Trust a Rake / Reforming the Viscount. ANNIE BURROWS
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ball whose name escapes me for the moment. Hence the abduction.’ He turned and bestowed a lazy smile upon her.
She felt a funny jolt in her stomach. There was something in that look that almost compelled her to smile back. Which was absurd, since she was very cross with him.
Reminding herself that he could not even recall the name of the girl she’d hoped might have become a friend was just what she needed to bolster her resentment.
‘On Tuesday night,’ she therefore retorted, ‘I was at a dance held by the Mountjoys. They are vintners. I don’t suppose you know them. And last night we went to the theatre in a party with most of the people who were sitting around the drawing room just now.’
‘Mountjoy …’ he mused. ‘I think I do know of them. I have a feeling they supply my cellars at Deben House.’
‘I shouldn’t be a bit surprised. They boast of having the patronage of several of the more well-heeled members of the ton, though not the entrée into their homes.’
‘Ah,’ he said.
‘And before you ask how I came to be at such an exalted affair as Miss Twining’s come-out ball, it was entirely due to the offices of my brother Hubert, who serves in the same regiment as her brother Charlie. Charlie wrote to her, asking if she wouldn’t mind calling on me, because I wasn’t likely to know anyone in town just at first.’
Not that he’d thought of it as an exalted affair. To judge from the look on his face, he’d regarded attendance as a tedious duty, probably undertaken out of some kind of obligation to the elderly lady he’d been escorting.
While for her it had been an evening that should have brought nothing but delight.
Well, neither of them had got quite what they’d expected.
At the time he’d walked in looking all cynical and bored, she’d still been full of hope she might run into Richard there. Miss Twining was bound to have sent him an invitation, since he, too, was friendly with her brother Charlie. And she was fairly sure that he would have called in for half an hour, at least, to ‘do the pretty’, even if he did not stay to dance. She had so hoped that, seeing her all dressed up in her London finery, with her hair so stylishly cut, her brother Hubert’s best friend would at long last see that she had grown up. See her as a woman, to be taken seriously, and not just one of his childhood playmates that he could casually brush aside.
‘Had I known how you are circumstanced,’ said Lord Deben, interrupting her gloomy reflections of that fateful night, ‘I would have called upon you sooner.’
‘But you did know how I am circumstanced. Lady Chigwell took great pains to let you know that she considered I was intruding amongst my betters.’
‘I assumed that was spite talking and discounted it. Particularly when I looked you up and discovered that you have a much more impressive pedigree than Lady Chigwell, whose husband’s title, such as it is, is a mere two generations old.’
‘You looked me up …?’
‘Of course. I had no intention of asking around and raising people’s curiosity about why I wished to know more about you. When I found that you are Miss Gibson of Shoebury Manor in Much Wakering and that your father is Sir Henry Gibson, scientist and scholar, member of the Royal Society, I naturally assumed you would be attending the kind of events most débutantes of your age enjoy when they come up to town for their Season.’ His mouth twisted with distaste. ‘Had I known that you would not, no power on earth would have compelled me to attend any of them.’
He’d spent two consecutive evenings haunting places he did not want to go to, merely because he had thought she might be there? And now she was obliging him to drive round the park, at the fashionable hour, while she was dressed in such spectacularly vulgar style?
For the first time in days, she felt almost cheerful.
‘What a lot of time you have wasted on my account,’ she said, with a satisfied gleam in her eye.
‘Well, it is not because I have been struck by a coup de foudre,’ he said sharply. ‘Do not take it into your head that I have an interest in you for any sentimental or … romantic reason,’ he said with a curl to his lip as he glanced at her out of the corner of his eye.
‘I wouldn’t!’ The coxcomb! Did he really believe that every female in London sighed after him, just because Miss Waverley had flung herself at him?
‘Let me tell you that I wouldn’t want to attract that kind of attention from a man as unpleasant and rude as you,’ she retorted hotly. ‘In fact, I didn’t want to come out for a drive with you today at all. And I wouldn’t have, either, if it wouldn’t have meant embarrassing my aunt.’
His full lips tightened in displeasure. Nobody spoke to him like that. Nobody.
‘It is as well I gave you little choice, then, is it not?’
‘I do not see that at all. I do not see that there is any reason for you to have looked for me, or investigated my background, or dragged me out of the house today …’
‘When you were clearly enjoying the company so much,’ he sneered.
She blinked. Had her misery been that obvious?
‘It was nothing to do with the company. They are all perfectly lovely people, who have very generously opened their home to me …’
He frowned. He had dismissed the suspicion that she had taken him in aversion on that accursed terrace, assuming she was just angry at the whole world, because of some injustice being perpetrated upon her. But he could not hold on to that assumption any longer. From his preliminary investigation into her background, and that of her father, and the people with whom she was living, he could find no reason why anyone should attempt to coerce her into marriage. He had not yet managed to find out why she was living with a set of cits in Bloomsbury, when she had perfectly respectable relations who could have presented her at court, but she clearly felt no ill will towards them for not being able to launch her into society. She had just referred to them as perfectly lovely people, putting such stress on the pronoun that he could not mistake her implication that she excluded him from the set of people she liked.
In short, his first impression had been correct. She really did not like him at all. His scowl landed at random upon the driver of a very showy high-perch phaeton going in the opposite direction, causing the young man such consternation he very nearly ran his team off the road.
‘Then I can only deduce that whatever is still making you look as though you are on the verge of going into a decline had its origins at Miss Twining’s ball.’
His scowl intensified. He was inured to enduring this level of antagonism from his siblings, but he had no experience of prolonging an interaction with a person to whom he was not bound by ties of family who held him in dislike. It was problematical. He was not going to rescind his decision to provide a bulwark against whatever malice Miss Waverley chose to unleash upon her, but he had taken it for granted she would have received his offer of assistance with becoming gratitude. After all, he was about to bestow a singular honour upon her. Never, in his entire life, had he gone to so much trouble on another person’s behalf.
The usual pattern was for people to seek him out. If they didn’t bore him too dreadfully, he generally permitted them limited access to his circle, while he waited to discover what their motives were for attempting to get near him.
He turned his glare sideways, where she sat with that beak of a nose in the air, completely shutting him out.
The corners of his mouth turned down, as he bit back a string of oaths. What the devil had got into him? He did not want her to fawn over him, did he? He despised toadeaters.
It must just be that he was not used to having to expend any effort in getting people to like him. He didn’t quite know how to go about it—
Hold hard—like him? Why the devil should he be concerned whether this