Regency 03 - Deception (16 page)

Someone’s foot connected with his shin under the
table. He jerked abruptly and his head hit the tabletop. Slowly
lifting his head, he realized he must have nodded off. How long had
he slept? Then he saw the frigid glare of Adam Prestwich.

“
What the bloody hell are you
doing here?” he snapped at his cousin’s husband.

“
I could ask you the same thing,”
Adam replied evenly. “I saw Winters leave. How much did you
lose?”

He must not have been unconscious for very long
then. “That is none of your affair,” he muttered as he rubbed the
fast forming lump on his forehead.

“
Yes, it is,” Adam sighed. “I am
probably the one who will have to pay the debt, you see, since you
are hell-bent on marrying Rory.”

“
The devil you’ll pay!”
Over my
dead body.

“
That may very well be if you keep
on in this vein,” Adam commented dryly.

Levi gave him a stunned look. Did he read his
mind?

Adam chuckled. “No, I cannot read your mind, thank
God. I would be half scared out of my wits were I able to. You are
verbalizing every odd thought that seems to enter your fuzzy
brain.”

Levi grunted.

“
Well?”

“
Devil it, Adam, leave me to die
in peace.”

The baronet laughed. “Much as I would like to oblige
you, your cousin would murder me in my bed. Well, her bed, at any
rate.”

Prestwich came around the table and helped Levi to
his feet. The earl shook him off and stumbled to the door on his
own. He took up his hat, gloves, and cane and walked out into the
darkened street.

He stopped, gazing around, confused. Adam chuckled
again and took his arm. “This way, old fellow,” he said as he led
him in the direction of Park Lane. He waved his coachman home
telling him they’d walk.

“
Who told you about Rory?” Levi
asked through the fog in his brain.

“
You did at Lady Osmond’s,” Adam
replied. “Then your estimable mama complained about it just this
evening at dinner.”

“
Estimable, hell! Mama’s a shrew,”
Levi grunted. “I don’t know how she could possibly be related to
Aunt Millicent.”

Adam cocked a brow at him. “Aunt Millicent?”

The earl nodded drunkenly. “Bri’s mama. She was the
sweetest, gentlest lady.” He gave his companion a funny look. “Why
did you not know?” Returning his gaze to the cobbles below, he
added, “Mama is a witch.”

Adam smiled at Levi’s inebriated ramblings. “Bri
never speaks of her parents. Or any of her family, for that
matter.” He frowned. “Never.”

Shrugging, Adam reached out to steady his friend as
that man stumbled…again. He had nothing to say to Levi’s comment
about Lady Greville. What could one really say to a bluntly stated
and highly insulting truth?

“
Rory will not marry me, you
know,” Levi remarked after a moment of blessed silence.

“
Indeed.”

“
She will not. She is stubborn.”
He tripped over his own foot. “Bloody hell! Did you see that?
Jumped right out at me,” he declared indignantly. He scowled quite
viciously at the offending appendage.

Adam held back his laughter and merely agreed with
his companion.

The earl fell silent again and thankfully remained
that way until they reached Lockwood House. “Why is it called
Lockwood House?” he asked as he stood looking up at the impressive
façade.

“
Because the Earl of Lockwood
owned it before he died and he had no heir so it was sold and I
bought it,” Adam told him. “Now, come along. We need to get some
coffee in you.”

Ten minutes later the two men sat in the kitchen
drinking coffee. Adam waited until his cousin-by-marriage was
fairly sober before he started in on him.

“
So why were you in Brooks’s
playing with Winters again?”

Levi groaned. He had hoped Adam would let it drop.
He just wanted to seek his bed and try to forget his latest act of
sheer stupidity. He hadn’t drunk nearly enough to blot out his
evening and he wanted nothing more than to forget certain
things.

“
Would you believe me if I told
you I was bored?” he asked hopefully.

“
No.”

“
Stupid?”

“
Probably.”

“
Trying to destroy
everything?”

Adam stared at him thoughtfully. “That is far more
believable. Define
everything
.”

The earl shrugged. “My life, I suppose. Have you
never wanted to just blot out your entire existence? To forget that
you have to wake the next morning and go about as if nothing at all
happened the night before? Wish that you could go back and right a
terrible wrong while at the same time wishing you could have
finished what you started?”

“
Let me see if I understand you,”
Adam said as he leaned forward with his elbows on the table, one
hand locked around a cup of coffee. “You want to change what
happened in that antechamber that night but at the same time you
regret that you didn’t get to make love to Rory. And now, since you
have neither, you want nothing more than to simply cease to
exist?”

“
Something like that.”

“
You are a damned coward!” Adam
exploded. He slammed his fist on the table making the earl jump.
“Have you even asked her to marry you, you nodcock? How do you know
she’ll refuse unless you ask?”

Levi stared at Adam as if the man suddenly sprouted
a second head. “And were you so very confident when you asked Bri
to marry you?” he almost whispered.

“
Well, no,” Adam admitted. “I was
quite positive she would darken my daylights. But I still did
it.”

“
Your situation with Bri is
nothing like mine with Rory. Rory is…well, she…she is…I don’t know.
It is just different, that is all,” he finished lamely.

“
Well said, Vi,” Adam
mocked. “Go see her tomorrow. If she agrees to see you, ask her to
marry you. You are going to be miserable until you do. Trust me.”
He took a sip of his coffee and leaned back. “Now tell me what you
owe Winters.”

*

Nearly two weeks after her meeting with Desmond
Forester, Aurora still refused to see Lord Greville. She had Miss
Ellison thank him for his timely appearance in the park that day.
Then she tried to forget he existed.

Which, naturally, was impossible. She thought about
him constantly. Worse, she dreamed about him. She dreamed about
being with him at Lady Osmond’s and dreamed the natural conclusion.
She ached for him.

She received a note from Forester. He informed her
again that he was willing to marry her and he didn’t care how many
men she’d been with. He reminded her of his threat to expose
her.

Aurora burned the note and wished it were him.

She read the papers and kept up with Society gossip.
She wouldn’t admit even to herself that she was looking for a
certain name.

She took to wearing plain clothing whenever she had
to leave the house and somehow managed to escape whenever she saw
someone she’d rather not speak to.

But it was inevitable that she would run into Levi
Greville again. Well, perhaps not, actually. It can hardly be
called inevitable when someone climbs into a person’s bedchamber in
the middle of the night. Totty-headed would be more
appropriate.

Aurora was not yet asleep. Sitting up in bed, she
held a novel in her hands, her mind fully absorbed in the heroine’s
plight rather than her own.

“
She shuddered, tossed about in
her bed, and envied every quiet sleeper. The storm still raged, and
various were the noises, more terrific even than the wind, which
struck at intervals on her startled ear. The very curtains of her
bed seemed at one moment in motion, and at another the lock of her
door was agitated, as if by the attempt of somebody to enter.
Hollow murmurs seemed to creep along the gallery, and more than
once her blood was chilled by the sound of distant moans. Hour
after hour passed away, and the wearied Catherine had heard three
proclaimed by all the clocks in the house, before the tempest
subsided—”

Aurora jumped. What was that? She shook her head,
disbelieving her own ears. Resolved to finish the chapter, she
returned her gaze to the novel in her hands.

Something creaked in her sitting room, the eerie
sound shivering over her. The book tumbled from her nerveless
fingers, forgotten.

Drawing in a deep breath, she forced her heart to
slow its erratic beat and rose to her feet. When she had selected
Northanger Abbey
as a suitable book to read before bed, she
had assumed it would not be as spine-tingling as any Gothic novel.
She would not then be shaking in her—she glanced down and realized
her feet were very bare. She felt a little like she was Catherine
Morland, dropped right in the middle of a Gothic adventure.

Her composure restored with that simple
acknowledgment and the absurdity of it all, Aurora wrapped her robe
around her cotton nightrail and approached the door to the sitting
room on silent feet. She heard a muttered oath and nearly
laughed.

Flinging the door wide, she exclaimed, “Levi
Greville, what are you about?” She was far too amused to be afraid
or even scandalized.

Startled, Levi stepped back and tripped over a
little footstool. He landed on his backside with a thud, clutching
a fistful of crushed daisies in one hand. Aurora tried to hold back
her laughter at such an incongruous sight but was unable to stop
one small chortle from escaping. Her midnight guest’s answering
grimace made her hilarity that much harder to contain.

Standing, he dropped the mutilated flowers on the
table. Fists on his hips, he tried to glare at her but his lips
twitched and soon he was laughing, albeit quietly.

“
Oh, laugh, Rory, do. You are like
to explode, else,” he told her through his own chuckles.

Aurora did laugh but the fact that Levi was standing
in her sitting room, only a few feet from her bedroom, and only a
few feet more from her bed, suddenly robbed her of breath and she
gasped.

“
What are you doing here?” she
asked.

Levi sighed. “I need to speak with you, Rory.”

“
No.”

“
Why the devil not?” he asked in
exasperation. “I have been worried to death about you wondering
what you were doing and how you were enduring the gossip. You will
see no one, except Miss Ellison, and you rarely leave the house.
When you do, you are constantly looking over your shoulder. When
you see anyone you know, you flee. What in hell is going
on?”

“
There is no need for such
language, my lord,” she retorted primly.

Levi merely folded his arms over his broad chest and
stared at her. When she just stared stubbornly back, he said, “I am
not leaving until you tell me why you refuse to see me.”

Aurora weighed her options carefully. She could
scream and have him forcibly ejected and further ruin her
reputation—could she
further
ruin her reputation?—or she
could sit down with him and calmly tell him to leave her alone
thereby making herself miserable for the rest of her life.
Decisions, decisions.

“
Sit down,” she
replied.

The earl sat on a chair near the window, one of two
placed by the table upon which the wilting daisies rested. “Will
you light another candle?” he asked.

“
Are you afraid of the dark?” she
teased. He raised one eyebrow imperiously. “Yes, Lord Greville, I
was planning to light another candle. Maybe two,” she murmured
thoughtfully.

The candles were lit, shedding a warm glow over them
as they sat across from each other. “Much better,” Levi sighed.

Aurora looked at him in astonishment. “You are
afraid of the dark,” she accused, gathering the flowers into a
small pile.

“
No, I am not,” he denied. Then he
shrugged. “I am afraid of the things that lurk in the
dark.”

“
A big strong man like you?” she
scoffed. “How can you be afraid of anything?”

“
I am afraid of a lot of things,”
he murmured as he stared at her.

“
Such as?”

“
Sprites, for one thing.” He
smiled.

It was that absolutely beautiful, boyishly handsome,
utterly seductive smile, all dimples and white teeth, a tipping up
of lips that hinted at sensual delights.

Aurora’s heart picked up speed, her fingers curling
around the daisies, further crushing the poor blooms. Such a shame,
too, pretty little things that they were. “Sprites?” she finally
managed to say, forcing her fingers to release their death
grip.

“
Well, not all sprites, just you,”
he admitted. “More your mind, I think.” He cocked his head to one
side and studied her. “I fear what your answer will be to what I am
going to say to you.”

“
Oh, no,” she whispered, dropping
the flowers altogether to prevent more damage. “Please don’t, Levi.
It would be suicidal.”

“
Blast. Sprites can read minds,”
he muttered.

“
What?”

“
Sprites can read minds,” he told
her patiently. “I was thinking about killing myself if you told me
no.”

She almost believed him. Almost. As she was about to
exclaim in dismay over such a waste, and maybe throw in a carefully
worded reprimand or two, the glow of the candle revealed the
twinkle in his eye. “You beast,” she said on a laugh.

“
Quite,” he agreed good-naturedly.
“Are you going to marry me then, my beautiful, green-eyed
sprite?”