Dark Angel / Lord Carew's Bride (2 page)

Samantha wrinkled her nose and laughed again. “But this is London,” she said, “not the country.”

“And so the crushed-toe malady is about to spread to London,” Jennifer said, looking in affectionate envy, as she frequently did, at her cousin’s perfect beauty—short and shining blond curls, large blue eyes framed by long lashes darker than her hair, delicate porcelain complexion saved from even the remotest danger of insipidity by the natural blush of color in her cheeks. And Sam was small without being diminutive and well shaped without being either voluptuous or its opposite. Jennifer often regretted her own more vivid—and less ladylike—self. Gentlemen admired her dark red hair, which she had never been able to bear to have cut even when short hair became fashionable, and her dark eyes and her long legs and generous figure. But she often had the uncomfortable notion that she looked more like an actress or courtesan—not that she had ever seen either—than a lady. She longed to look and be the perfect lady. And she never really craved gentlemen’s admiration.

Except Lord Kersey’s—Lionel’s. She had never spoken his name aloud to anyone, though she sometimes whispered it to herself, and in her heart and her dreams he was Lionel. He was going to be her husband. Soon. Before the Season was out. He was going to make his formal offer within the next few days or weeks and then after her presentation at court and her come-out ball their wedding was to be arranged. It was to be at St. George’s in Hanover Square. After that she would have to be presented at court all over again as a married lady.

Soon. Very soon now. It had been such a long wait. Five endless years.

“Oh, Jenny, this must be it.” The carriage had turned sharply into a large and elegant square and was slowing outside one of its mansions. “This must be Berkeley Square.”

They had indeed reached their destination. The double front doors were opened wide even as they watched and liveried servants spilled forth. Others jumped down from the baggage coach that had followed closely behind their traveling carriage throughout the journey. One of them lifted two maidservants down while the coachman himself was handing the young ladies down the steps of their carriage. It seemed a great deal of fuss and bustle for the arrival of two rather insignificant persons, Jennifer thought in some amusement. She had spent all her twenty years in the relative informality of country living.

But she was very willing to adapt. Soon she would
be a married lady, the Viscountess Kersey, and would be lady of her own London home and country estate. It was a heady thought for someone who was only just now arriving in London for the first time. She was so very old to be doing that, so very old not to be officially out. But two years ago when she was eighteen and her come-out was planned and also the engagement and marriage that had been arranged three years before that by her papa and the Earl of Rushford, Viscount Kersey’s father, the viscount had been detained in the north of England by the severe illness of an uncle. Jennifer had shed many a tear that spring and summer, not so much at the lost Season as at the delay in her marriage. She had seen Lord Kersey so few times. And then last year disaster had struck again in the form of the death of her grandmother in January. There had been no question of either a Season or a wedding.

And so here she was, arriving in London for the first time at the advanced age of twenty. The only consolation was that her cousin Samantha, who had been living with them for four years, since the passing of her own parents, was now eighteen and able to come out at the same time as Jennifer. It would be good to have company and a confidante. And a bridesmaid at her wedding.

It had seemed an eternity, Jennifer thought, stopping a moment to gaze up at her father’s London house. She had not even seen Lord Kersey for over a year and even then only very briefly and formally in the presence of others at various Christmas parties and assemblies. She
had dreamed of him every night since and had daydreamed about him every day. She had loved him passionately and singlemindedly for five years. Soon dreams would be reality.

Her father’s butler bowed to them with stiff deference from the doorway and conducted them to the library, where Jennifer’s father, Viscount Nordal, was awaiting them, standing formally before the desk, his hands clasped behind his back. He would, of course, have heard the commotion of their arrival, but it would have been out of character for Papa to have come out to meet them.

Samantha rushed toward him so that he was forced to bring his arms forward to hug her. “Uncle Gerald!” she exclaimed. “We have been speechless with the splendor of all we have seen. Have we not, Jenny? All we could do was peer out of the carriage windows and gawk with hanging jaws. Was it not so, Jenny? How lovely it is to see you again. Are you well?”

“I gather the speechlessness was not a permanent affliction,” he said with a rare sally into humor. He turned from her to hug his daughter. “Yes, quite well, I thank you, Samantha. It is a relief to know you have both arrived safely. I have been wondering if I should have come for you myself. It does not do for young ladies to travel alone.”

“Alone?” Samantha chuckled. “We had a veritable army with us, Uncle. Any highwayman would have taken one look and decided in despair that it would be certain suicide to risk an attack. A pity. I have always
dreamed of being borne off by a handsome highwayman.” She laughed lightly to dispel her uncle’s frown.

“Well,” he said, looking closely at both of them, “you will do. You both look healthy and pretty enough. A trifle rustic, of course. I have a modiste coming here tomorrow morning. Agatha arranged it. She has come to stay and take charge of all the faradiddle of your presentations and the rest of it. You are to mind her. She will know what is what so that you are both suitably decked out for the Season and so that you will both know how to go on.”

Jennifer and Samantha exchanged rueful smiles.

“Well,” Lord Nordal said dismissively, “you will be tired after your journey, I daresay, and will be glad to rest for a while.”

“Aunt Agatha!” Samantha said a short while later as she and Jennifer were being conducted to their rooms by the housekeeper. “The dragon herself. I always have difficulty understanding how she and Mama could have been sisters. Will we have any enjoyment out of this Season, Jenny?”

“Far more than we would without her,” Jennifer said. “Without Aunt Agatha, who would take us about, Sam, and introduce us to Society? Who would see to it that we receive and accept the proper invitations? And who would see to it that we have partners at the balls we attend and escorts to the theater and opera? Papa? Can you really see Papa so exerting himself?”

Samantha chuckled with her at the mental image of her stern and humorless uncle playing the part of social
organizer for their Season. “I suppose you are right,” she said. “Yes, she will see to it that we have partners, will she not? She will see to it that my worst nightmare will not be realized. Dear Aunt Aggy. Not that you have to worry about partners, Jenny. You will have Lord Kersey.”

The very thought was enough to turn Jennifer’s heart over in a somersault. Dancing with Lionel. Attending the theater with Lionel. Perhaps being alone with Lionel for a few moments whenever it could be arranged and exchanging kisses with him. Kisses—her knees had turned to jelly at Christmas last year when he had kissed her hand. Would her knees bear her up if—no,
when
—he kissed her lips?

“But not all the time,” she said. “It would be most indecorous to dance with the same partner more than twice at one ball, Sam, even if he were one’s betrothed. You know that.”

“Perhaps you will meet someone even more handsome, then,” Samantha said. “And someone who is not cold.”

Jennifer felt the old indignation against her cousin’s assessment of Lord Kersey. He was very blond and very blue-eyed and had features of chiseled excellence. And to Samantha he seemed cold—although she shared his coloring. Of course, the warmth of her complexion would always save Sam from such an accusation even apart from the liveliness of her face and the eagerness with which she approached life.

Lord Kersey—Lionel—was not cold. Sam, of course, had never had the full force of his smile directed her way.
It was a smile of devastating attractiveness. It was a smile that had enslaved Jennifer ever since at the age of fifteen she had met for the first time the husband her father had picked out for her. She had never resented the arranged match. Never once. She had fallen in love with her intended husband at first sight and had remained in love with him ever since.

“If I do meet someone more handsome,” she said as they reached the top of the stairs and were led in the direction of their rooms, “I shall pass him on to you, Sam. If he has not seen you first, that is, and fallen prostrate at your feet.”

“What a delightful idea,” Samantha said.

“Not that it would be possible to meet anyone more handsome than Lord Kersey, of course,” Jennifer said.

“I will grant you that,” Samantha agreed. “But maybe somewhere in this vast metropolis there is a gentleman who is equally handsome and who admires blond hair and blue eyes and insignificant stature and a nondescript figure.”

Jennifer laughed and turned to enter the room the housekeeper was indicating as hers. “And Sam,” she said just before they parted, “do be careful not to call our aunt Aunt Aggy to her face. Do you remember her expression when you did so last year at Grandmama’s funeral?”

Samantha chuckled and pulled a face.

“S
TUBBORNNESS WILL BE YOUR
undoing one of these days, Gabe,” Sir Albert Boyle remarked to his companion as they rode in Hyde Park unfashionably early in the afternoon. “But I must say I am glad you are back in town for all that. It has been dull without you for the last two years.”

“But you will note that I do not quite have the courage to take to Rotten Row at five o’clock on my first full day back,” Gabriel Fisher, the Earl of Thornhill, said dryly. “Perhaps tomorrow.
Probably
tomorrow. I’ll be damned before I’ll stay away altogether, Bertie, merely because I can anticipate being looked at askance and watching very proper matrons draw their sweet young charges behind their skirts and away from my contaminating influence. It is a pity hooped skirts fell out of fashion several decades ago. They would be able to hide their daughters more effectively.”

“It may not be half as bad as you expect,” his friend said. “And you could always proclaim the truth, you know.”

“The truth?” The earl laughed without any trace of humor. “How do you know that the truth has not been told, Bertie? How do you know that I am not the heinous villain I have been made out to be?”

“I know you,” Sir Albert said. “Remember?”

“And so you do,” the earl said, fixing his eyes on the approaching figures of two young ladies, still some distance away, who were strolling beneath frilly parasols, their maids walking at a discreet distance behind them. “People may believe what they will, Bertie. To hell with
the
ton
and their scandalmongering. Besides, it is altogether possible that I will be more in demand this year than I have ever been before.”

“Scandal does often add fascination when it attaches to a man’s name,” his friend agreed. “And of course the fact that you are now an earl whereas two years ago you were a mere baron will help. And as rich as Croesus to boot. At least, I assume you are. That is how you always used to describe your father.”

The Earl of Thornhill was apparently paying no attention. His eyes were narrowed. “You will never know, Bertie,” he said, “how I have pined during the past year and a half on the Continent for the sight of an English beauty. There is nothing to compare in Italy or France or Switzerland, you know, or anywhere else either. Tall and short. Dark and fair. Well endowed and more delicate. But each exquisite in her own very English way. Will they pretend not to notice us, do you think, and direct their eyes downward? Or will they look up? Will they blush? Will they smile?”

“Or frown,” Sir Albert said, laughing as he followed the direction of his friend’s gaze. “Exquisite, yes. And strangers, unfortunately. Of course at this time of year London is always full of strangers. After a few weeks one will have seen them a dozen times at a dozen different entertainments.”

“Frown? I think not,” the earl said softly as their horses took them closer to the two ladies, who really should have waited a few hours if they hoped to be ogled as they deserved to be, he thought. He swept off his hat
and inclined his head, almost forcing them to raise their eyes.

The small blonde blushed. Very prettily. She was true English beauty personified. The sort of beauty one dreamed of acquiring in a bride when one’s thoughts must eventually bend that way. The tall dark-haired girl did not blush. Her hair, he noted with interest, was not dark brown, as he had first thought. When the light of the sun caught it as she raised her head and the brim of her bonnet no longer shaded it, he saw that it was a dark, rich red. And her eyes were dark and large. Her figure—well, if the other girl could turn the thoughts of even a fancy-free twenty-six-year-old to matrimony, then this one could turn the thoughts in another direction altogether. She was the sort of British beauty he had dreamed through tedious months of duty and a type of self-exile abroad of having naked beneath him on a bed.