As Luck Would Have It (12 page)

She had real, honest-to-God friends.

The joyful headiness that accompanied that revelation was nearly overwhelming. Sophie had never had friends before. Not since her sister had died. These were young women her own age whose company she wanted to be in and who, in return, wanted her own. They included her in their jokes and tales, their secrets and dreams without awkwardness or artifice, and she felt accepted.

“Good Heavens,” Mirabelle cried, startling Sophie out of her reverie. “Look at the time!” She reached into her reticule and drew out a few coins which she placed on the table. “I’ll see you at your home, Kate. That should cover my share.”

Kate looked at the coins and sighed. “Won’t you let me—?”

She stopped at the sight of Mirabelle’s glare.

“Very well,” Kate muttered.

Sophie reached for her own bag. “Are you not returning with us, Mirabelle?”

Mirabelle shook her head. “No, I have another errand to run, but I won’t have you two late on my account. I’ll take a hackney back. And stop looking at me like that, Kate, I’ll take one of the footmen along with one of the maids, and your mother need never know.”

“I don’t mind waiting if you’d like,” Sophie offered.

“That’s kind of you, but I insist you return to your Mrs. Summers. She sounds a veritable hawk.”

“Usually,” Sophie said. “But she’s been remarkably lax of late.”

Mirabelle pressed a kiss on Kate’s cheek and then turned and did the same to Sophie. “I’ll see you tomorrow at tea then,” she said, and left.

It hadn’t been a request, but an open invitation. Sophie only barely managed to conceal the huge smile that would have reached from ear to ear and no doubt served to make her look half mad. She had friends.

Kate and Sophie settled their bills and headed out into the street to await their carriage. It really was a lovely day, sunny but with enough chill in the air that Sophie did not feel overheated in her layers of clothing.

“Our driver should be around any minute,” Kate remarked conversationally. “One of the…I say, what ever is that girl doing?”

Attempting to figure that out for herself, Sophie didn’t immediately answer. A young girl, or perhaps a woman—she was too swathed in rags for Sophie to make a reasonable determination of age—had skirted out to the very center of the street and crouched over the cobblestones. Her back was turned to the girls but even so, Sophie could see that she was digging at a gap between two stones with her fingers.

“Do you suppose she’s lost something?” Kate asked hopefully.

“I think she has, but I sincerely doubt it’s anything tangible,”
Sophie replied sadly. The woman was quite obviously mad. It was a common enough affliction, and there was precious little that could be done, or would be done, for women like the one in the street. She might be locked up in a third-rate asylum, which, considering how horrific first-rate asylums were rumored to be, would likely do more harm than good. Or perhaps she would just be run off and left to starve. Sophie wondered if she could approach the girl with the offer of assistance. At the very least, she could offer her enough money for a proper meal and a place to sleep.

She had no experience dealing with a madwoman, however, and wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. What if she were violent?

“This street is usually quite busy,” Kate murmured. “This can’t be safe.”

Kate was right. Bond Street was a favorite haunt for young unmarried ladies, and therefore, an ideal hunting ground for young gentlemen. Sophie had seen them parade up and down the street all morning, showing off their new mounts, their fancy carriages, their fast phaetons…like the one now careening around the corner.

Both the girls started and gasped at the sight.

“Look out!” Sophie yelled waving wildly at the oncoming phaeton.

“Get up, girl!” Kate cried at the crouching figure.

Neither took notice of the screeching girls on the sidewalk. The young man behind the reins was too busy craning his neck to see who might be watching his daring little drive, and the girl, well, there was simply no telling what she was doing.

“Get up!” Sophie yelled again and amazingly enough, the girl did. She turned to face the phaeton, and made absolutely no move to get out of its path.

“Dear God,” Kate whispered in horror.

Sophie didn’t hear her. She was already moving forward.

Ten

I
t would have been a spectacular display of heroics.

It would have been hailed as bravery personified.

It
would
have been, had not the girl decided to jump to safety of her own accord at the last possible second, leaving Sophie running full tilt and off balance.

She had thrown herself forward in an attempt to grab the girl and hurl them both to safety by means of brute force. Now she was hurtling quite alone with her feet moving too fast to stop and too slow to catch up with the top half of her body. She felt a burst of air as the phaeton raced past, missing her by inches. She should really just fall. She knew she should. Eventually, she would have to. There was no pulling out of it now, and if she didn’t fall, the only other way she could possibly stop would be to—

Sophie caught a glimpse of the carriage door before she hit it. Then everything went black. Her legs gave out from under her. She anticipated the hard impact of the cobblestone on her knees and had a brief hope it would distract her from the blinding pain of her forehead. It never came. Instead she landed on something soft, warm and…

Oh no. Please no, please no, please!

When the smell hit, Sophie realized no amount of begging was going to save her.

She felt Kate tug her arm. “Get up, Sophie, you’re kneeling in horse—”

“I know!”

Sophie ignored the snickers and outright laughs of the crowd beginning to circle, and allowed Kate to help her to her feet and assist her to the sidewalk. She forced her eyes open.

“Are you hurt?” Kate asked with quite the most sympathetic expression Sophie had ever seen.

“No,” Sophie replied miserably.
And why the devil not?
Surely, if one were going to throw oneself headfirst into the side of a carriage, one should expect to be rendered unconscious.

Preferably for several days.

“Are you sure?” Kate continued staring at her forehead. “You took a rather nasty blow to the head and were babbling something awful there for a moment.”

“I was swearing.”

“Really? In what language?”

“Mandarin, I think.”

“Oh.”

“Do stop staring at my forehead, Kate, I’m quite all right. I just want to leave.”

“Oh, I believe you, that you’re all right that is. It’s…it’s just that you seem to have struck the earl’s coat of arms on the carriage door and you now have the most astonishing imprint of a fleur-delis”—Kate pointed to Sophie’s forehead, slightly left of center—“right there.”

Sophie touched the offending spot gingerly and groaned. Really, could things get any worse?

Kate titled her head objectively. “I wonder if it will bruise like—oh, look, here comes Alex.”

Oh. Dear. God.

Sophie felt her fingers fall from her forehead. She didn’t suppose there was any real chance he had failed to witness her humiliating episode. He was coming from a shop on the corner that, naturally, had two large windows facing both streets.

“Let’s just wave and go,” Sophie whispered in a panic.

“We’ll do no such thing,” Kate sniffed. “It’s cowardly.”

Sophie looked down at her manure-smeared gown and made a decision.

“I can reconcile myself to that.”

“Pfft, you’d only regret it later,” Kate stated firmly. “Besides, at least a dozen members of the
ton
are here, several of them notorious gossips, and
all
of them will now witness the Duke of Rockeforte coming to see to your welfare. It will go a long way to repair any damage done to your reputation by your little mishap. Now chin up and smile.” Kate’s speech had come out low and rushed in an attempt to finish before Alex arrived.

“Are you hurt, Sophie?” Alex looked concerned rather than amused. Sophie wasn’t sure if that fact made her more embarrassed or less.

“No, I’m quite well,” she mumbled.

“What is your full name?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your full name,” Alex repeated. “What is it?”

“You can’t be serious,” she scoffed.

He took her face in both his hands and leaned down closely, too closely. Really, they were in a crowd of people. Most of them were beginning to disperse, but all the same what could he be thinking? She saw his eyes catch on her forehead for a moment before his gaze met her own.

“Your full Christian name, Sophie,” he prompted.

“Oh for the love of—Sophia Marie Rose Everton, Countess of Pealmont, if you want to be fastidious about it. Are you quite satisfied?”

She saw his eyebrows raise and he straightened up an inch. “Countess?”

“She was speaking in a foreign language earlier,” Kate supplied in a low whisper.

“I’m perfectly lucid,” Sophie insisted. “And I do happen to be a countess. I received the honorary title as a child for fishing King George out of my father’s pond, but it was so silly,
and he’d only fallen in because I’d…never mind, may we leave now?”

She placed the question to Kate, but it was Alex who answered.

“We’ll take my carriage. Fetch your abigail, Kate.”

Sophie almost argued, but the last thing she wanted to do was continue standing on the crowded sidewalk covered in horse dung. She could suffer through one carriage ride with the high-handed Duke of Rockeforte to get away from the scene of her embarrassment, even if it was the
second
-to-last thing she wanted to do.

Once in the carriage, Kate seemed to sense that something was amiss between her two friends. After her few attempts at friendly conversation were greeted with monosyllabic answers, she gave up and took to studying her companions as they tried very hard not to look at each other. She must have come to some sort of conclusion, because when she alighted from the carriage with her maid at her mother’s home she turned and gave Sophie a kiss on the cheek and a reassuring smile. “I’ll send your driver behind you.” Alex, on the other hand, received a suspicious glare for a farewell.

Alex watched Kate go into the house. Apparently, he had moved down the pecking order of Kate’s friends.

“You told her,” he said to Sophie, knocking on the roof to start the carriage.

“Oh,
yes
,” Sophie drawled, keeping her eyes firmly trained on the passing scenery. “I can think of nothing more sensible than regaling Kate, whom I’ve only very recently gotten to know, with tales of my humiliation at the hands of one of her oldest and most beloved friends. A cunning plan indeed.”

Alex grimaced. It had been a ridiculous assumption. “My apologies,” he mumbled.

Sophie’s head snapped around. “For what, exactly? Treating me like a common doxy? Laughing at me? Insulting me now? You’ll need to be a bit more specific, I’m afraid.”

“If you’ll grant it to me,” he began in what he very much hoped was a properly conciliatory tone, “I should very much like the chance to apologize for all of it.”

Sophie made a scoffing noise in the back of her throat. “You’d need more contrition than you could fit into the duration of this carriage ride, Your Grace. In fact, we could go straight through to Dover—”

“Sophie.”

“It is Miss Everton,” she said peevishly.

“I thought it was Lady Pealmont.”

“As I’ve no interest in speaking with you, I can’t see how it matters.”

Alex took a deep breath and decided to ignore that. “I am sorry,” he said clearly. “I am well and truly sorry. I behaved terribly last night, but I had no intention of insulting you in any manner.”

“Then why did you?” she cried.

“I didn’t!” Alex bit off before he could stop himself. He took another deep breath. “Insult you on purpose, that is. My behavior last night was, without doubt, offensive, but not intended as an insult.”

“Well, you did a remarkable job disguising that rather pertinent fact,” she grumbled.

“You should have given me the chance to explain,” he snapped.

“You shouldn’t have behaved in a manner that required explanation,” she rejoined.

“I am aware of that. But as much as I might like to, and I
very much
would, I cannot undo the past.”

“Would you really?” she asked quietly.

“I…really what?”

“Undo the past, if you could? At least this one part of it?”

“Only part of the one part of it.” Good Lord, had he really just said that?

“Oh.” Sophie seemed to consider this for a moment. “Which part?”

“You know very well which part.”

“No,” Sophie stated clearly. “I don’t know. At least not ‘very well.’ I could assume from our conversation that you are referring to your laughing, but since you
did
laugh, and I certainly hadn’t seen
that
coming, I think it best I assume nothing where you’re concerned.”

“Then don’t assume my guilt.”

“You
did
laugh. I was there, remember?”

“Yes,” Alex growled, “I did laugh. It was very, very badly done of me. Yes, I would take it back if I could. But truly, there are only so many ways I can tell you I had no intentions of insulting you, and only so many times I can apologize for having done so, before I—”

“So you wouldn’t take back the kiss?”

“What?”

“I believe you heard me.”

Alex had no idea when he had lost control of the conversation, although he thought it a fair bet to place that event somewhere in the vicinity of when Sophie had first opened her mouth. He certainly had no clue as to when he had lost all comprehension of
what
was being discussed, because he had
thought
they were speaking of his having laughed, and here she was asking about the kiss. He did know, however, that he was very, very uncomfortable with this unfamiliar feeling of bewilderment, and it was on the tip of his tongue to say something flip, to knock the scales in his favor. But something in the way she was looking at him gave him pause.