Always a Rogue, Forever Her Love (20 page)

“I see the way you study her, Jonathan,” his mother said quietly.

He met her gaze over the rim of his glass. “Oh, and how is that?”

She folded her arms across her chest. “I’ll not indulge your attempt to bait me. Be warned, you are one scandalous action away from having to find your sisters a new governess.”

The hell he was. He had little intention of sending Juliet anywhere. She was exactly where she belonged. “Is that all, Mother?” he said impatiently.

“We have the dinner party this evening. I expect you there. I’ve put a good deal of effort into planning the evening.”

He yawned. “How could I ever miss such an important event?”

She narrowed her eyes at his sardonic question. “I’d have you take an interest in the gentleman Patrina has set her sights upon. She’s not told me his name, but she is growing desperate—”

He scoffed. “Desperate? She’s but nineteen.”

“Nearly twenty.”

“Still a young lady,” he insisted. “Hardly close to being on the shelf.”

His mother went on as though he’d not spoken, roundly dismissing his opinion. “I worry she’ll be rash in giving away her heart to some undeserving scoundrel.”

Jonathan sighed. Patrina, not only the eldest of his sisters, happened to also be the most rationale and clear-headed of the Tidemore girls. “You do Patrina a disservice with your ill-opinion of her judgment.”

Mother’s lips tightened. “She’ll enter a third Season unwed if we do not have more of a care, Jonathan. She’s growing desperate—”

“This is only her second Season, Mother.”

“Well, all the diamonds of the first water make matches within their first Season. As her brother, it is your role to help arrange a match—”

“Oh, is that my role?” He’d played escort at more respectable events than he’d ever cared to attend. Drank too many glasses of overly sweet ratafia at Almack’s.

“It is,” she tossed back.

For the past twelve years he’d assumed the role of earl, brother, and defacto father. He’d taken his responsibilities seriously and cared for his sisters and mother, but damn it, he was bloody well tired of everyone’s life hanging upon his shoulders. Not when they stood in the way of what he really wanted. Nay,
who
he really wanted. “I suspected finding a suitable husband was more a dear mama’s responsibility.”

“Very well, it is both of our responsibility. I thought the Marquess of Westfield would make her a splendid match.”

He snorted. “Westfield is a rogue.” Not vastly different in his interests and pursuits than Jonathan, it would seem even as his family found him wanting, they’d found the marquess ideal matrimonial material.

“Westfield is heir to a dukedom.”

Jonathan took a sip of his whiskey, grimacing at the trail it blazed down his throat. “I never took you for a title-grasping mama.” Determined, hopeful for an ideal match for her daughters, but never title-grasping.

She bristled at his deliberate insult. “All mothers aspire to a grand title, Jonathan. That is the way of our world.”

Yes, they lived in a world in which earls were not expected to wed spirited governesses but instead expected to settle for a perfectly dull, proper bride.

“I expect as you’re in the market for a wife…”

“Am I?”

She glowered, but continued speaking over him. “…that you’ll favor Lady Beatrice with the proper attention befitting a young lady of her station.”

Oh, it appeared the conversation had come round to Lady Beatrice. Wager won. He spread his arms and bowed low. “I am ever the dutiful son.”

She either failed to note, or blatantly ignored, his sarcasm.

“Is there anything further you care to discuss?”

Mother sighed. “That is all. Please, promise to think on what I’ve said.”

“Which particular piece should I consider?”

“All of it.” She snapped her skirts, and swept from the room.

Jonathan breathed a sweet sigh of relief and sought out the comfortable, familiar folds of the leather chair behind his desk. He sank into the seat, and closed his eyes.

“Is she gone?”

He jerked upright and quickly surveyed the room. Poppy peeked her head out from behind the gold damask curtains, which covered the full-length windows. “How long have you been there, Poppy?” He sent a prayer of thanks skyward that he wasn’t one of those sorts who talked to himself.

She wandered out from her hiding spot, and lifted on shoulder in a shrug. “A long while.”

“Shouldn’t you be in your lessons?” At the thought of Juliet above stairs, his heart clenched with a sudden desire to see her.

“I told Miss Marsh I wasn’t feeling well.”

Jonathan leaned back in his seat. He kicked his feet out, and propped them on the edge of his desk. “Why would you do that?” He imagined if Juliet were his governess, he’d relish every single moment in the lady’s presence. Particularly the dance instructions.

Poppy plopped herself into one of the leather winged back chairs at the foot of his desk. “Prudence is being horrid.”

Not for the first time, he pitied Juliet the unenviable task of seeing to the girls’ instruction. God love the woman, she’d never see the return of her cottage, unless it was a magnanimous effort on his behalf. Only, he had little interest in being magnanimous where she was concerned, as the end result would be her departure for that blasted little cottage. “Did you tell Miss Marsh?” He trusted her implicitly enough to know she’d be able to properly handle the row between his sisters.

Poppy swung her legs back and forth, more like the small girl she once had been and not this young lady on the cusp of childhood and womanhood all at the same time. “Not to me, Sin.”

“Jonathan,” he corrected.

“She’s being awful to Miss Marsh.” A frown turned her usual smiling lips. “Said some horrid things about Miss Marsh’s leg.”

“Her leg,” he said blankly. He’d indulged his sisters, and quite loved them, but the idea of Prudence being deliberately cruel to Juliet over her crippled leg enraged him to the point he wanted to pack her off for the country until she learned to be a kinder, more gentler soul.

Poppy nodded in rapid succession. “Miss Marsh just smiled through Pru’s nastiness.”

“Did she?” God was there another like her in all the world? Most women would have been reduced to tears for not only the injury she’d sustained as a girl, but the world’s unfair treatment for it.

“Oh, yes, and it only made Pru all the madder,” Poppy went on. “Said horrid things about Miss Marsh’s brother.”

Well, Juliet’s brother was deserving of all those horrid charges leveled by Prudence, still he didn’t care to have Juliet in the position of having to defend the cad. “Did she?”

She shifted sideways in her seat, and stretched her legs over the arm of her chair, rumpling her skirts. “I imagine you’ve been very angry with us at very many points in our lives.”

His lips twitched with the first real amusement he’d felt in days. “Assuredly,” he said with a mock seriousness that made her frown.

“You still would never do such a thing, no matter how angry you were with us,” she replied with matter-of-factness.

Jonathan lowered his legs to the floor, as his grin died as swift as it had appeared. “What would I never do?” He planted his elbows on the surface of his desk and leaned closer.

Poppy plucked one of her black curls and twined it in a circle about her finger. She opened her mouth, and then closed it, an uncharacteristic guardedness in her expressive hazel eyes. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to speak on it.” There was somberness to her admission.

His elbows dug hard into the surface of his desk. “Speak on what, Poppy?” She might be the youngest of his sisters, but with her dramatic way of conveying information, she was by far the most maddening of all the Tidemore girls.

She shook her head, and promptly released the curl she played with. “Oh, I mustn’t betray the secrets of the schoolroom. What manner of young lady would I be if I were as disloyal as that? Like Pru,” she muttered.

A gentle pride at the woman she was becoming filled Jonathan. Poppy had been a mere babe when Father had passed, and had never known the dedicated, oft-smiling former Earl of Sinclair. Jonathan hoped just some of his influence in her life had shaped her into this. Prudence on the other hand… “Out with it,” he ordered, all out of patience.

She swung her legs back to the floor on a long sigh. “Oh, fine, then. Pru mocked Miss Marsh for getting tossed from the tree by her brother.”

His brow wrinkled. “Whyever would Prudence say such a thing? What would possess her to…?” His words died on a swift exhale.

He’d pushed her. That bloody bastard, Sir Albert Marshville, cowardly-fiend, had tossed Juliet to the ground, shattering her leg.

“What manner of brother does such a thing, Sin?”

One that Jonathan wanted to hunt down and bloody senseless with the punishing fury of his fists.

Poppy stared at him, her wide eyes conveying hope of an answer to a question she could not make sense of.

“I don’t know, Poppy. Certainly not a nice one,” he said quietly.

She nodded and hopped to her feet. “I should return above stairs and be sure Pru isn’t any more horrid than she already was.”

Ah, God love Poppy.

She reached the door and turned suddenly back around. “I like her, Sin. I like her a good deal. I heard what Mama said to you, and I know what Pru said to Mama about you and Miss Marsh.”

A dull heat burned his neck as he struggled to recall the specifics of the charges leveled at him by their mother. There had been the talk of improper looks and seduction. Through it all, Poppy had remained shuttered away, listening on with neither him nor Mother aware of her presence. “And?”

“And I do not believe I could ever forgive you if you allow Mother to send her away.”

He considered the pretense under which he’d hired Juliet as a governess for his sisters. All the while he’d intended to set her up as his mistress. That was before he’d come to know her. And now, Poppy forced him to confront the temporariness of Juliet’s time here. His stomach tightened. “Well, then that would make two of us. I would never forgive myself.”

Her smile widened, and he realized he’d given the correct answer to whatever test she’d been secretly conducting. She blew him a quick kiss.

He caught it in his hand and placed the imaginary kiss on his cheek. “Now, off with you. I imagine Penelope is of little help to Miss Marsh when Prudence is in one of her tempers. You’ve made me proud.”

She hurried out of the room.

Jonathan stared at the empty doorway long after Poppy had scurried off. He considered the ugly, horrible truth that one day Juliet would leave and his life would never be the same.

Chapter 15

Never before had Jonathan noted the utter ridiculousness of dinner rituals with their very specific seating arrangements and elaborate five courses. Until now. Somewhere around course three, when the liveried footman had served Cook’s loin of veal in a béchamel sauce.

He glanced across the table to where his mother sat glowering at him from her spot beside the Duke of Hawkridge. Something the duke said required her attention and spared Jonathan from any more of her black scowls.

“Everything is delicious, my lord,” a pleasing demure voice murmured from at his side.

He started and shifted his attention to Lady Beatrice Dennington. The young lady appeared to wear a perpetual blush. “And the company is especially pleasing,” he returned. The color deepened in Lady Beatrice’s cheeks at his flirtatious response.

Her eyes fell to her plate, and he used the opportunity to study her with an objective eye. A flawless English beauty with golden ringlets and pale blue eyes, she possessed the soft curves he’d always favored in the women he’d taken to his bed.

Except, it was hard to appreciate the sun’s mere rays when the sky had already been set ablaze by a crimson sunset.
Damn you, Juliet Marshville, what have you done to me?
She’d tossed his world into upheaval.

Lady Beatrice picked her gaze up and met his with a surprising directness he’d not expected from such a lady. “You are indeed, correct, my lord. The company is particularly pleasing.”

Jonathan called forth the roguish rejoinder, which usually came so easy for him but came up remarkably empty. He cleared his throat and shifted his attention back to his plate. He sliced a piece of veal, speared it with his fork and popped the moist piece into his mouth.

“That was rather poorly done of you,” a soft voice whispered at his opposite side.

He choked on his bite and reached for his glass of wine.

“Forgive me,” Emmaline said with a wicked smile. “That wasn’t at all well done of
me
. You looked to be in need of rescuing, though.”

Jonathan gave his undivided attention to Drake’s wife, grateful to her for sparing him from more of the awkward flirtation with Lady Beatrice. “That obvious,” he said under his breath.

She nodded. “That obvious.” Emmaline leaned closer, and spoke from the side of her mouth. “She’d make you a lovely wife. Polite, pretty, and proper.”

“Ah, yes, all the essential p’s for a respectable match,” he returned dryly. “Mustn’t forget the most important of the p’s. She must be a member of the peerage.”

Emmaline laughed, earning a series of disapproving stares from the more reserved members of the dinner party. Her husband Drake, on the other hand, seated across the table from her, grinned. The couple shared an intimate look, and Jonathan, feeling like an interloper on the stolen moment, glanced away. Emmaline cleared her throat, and Jonathan shifted his attention back to the young lady. “Must she, though, Jonathan? Must she be a member of the peerage?” There was something probing in both the expression in her eyes, and the question itself.

He reached for his glass and took a sip of wine. He considered Emmaline’s question. The specifics of one’s lineage was a driving force in the deliberately arranged matches amongst the
ton
. For Jonathan, however, such a thing hadn’t mattered when he’d courted Miss Abigail Stone, the American-born granddaughter of the Duke of Somerset.