The Heart of a Scoundrel (13 page)

Andrew enfolded her in his embrace. “Still unwed?”

She pinched him on the arm and stepped back. “You’re insufferable.”

Justina giggled. “I do not expect she’ll be unwed for long.”

Phoebe glared her into silence. Her efforts proved futile.

As one who’d delighted in vexing his two sisters, Andrew winged a blond eyebrow upward. “Oh?”

“There is a gentleman who has captured her notice.”

Heat scorched Phoebe’s neck and burned a trail up her cheeks. “There is no—” She promptly pressed her lips together. By Edmund’s own request just earlier that morning, he had every intention of launching a courtship and, as such, his presence would no longer be a secret to her brother or any of polite Society.

Andrew’s teasing grin slipped and he studied her with more maturity than she’d come to expect of him through the years. “You’re flying your colors, Phoebe.”

“My colors?” She furrowed her brow and looked questioningly to her sister, but Justina only lifted her shoulders in a little shrug. An equally befuddled expression marred her face.

The only Barrett son demonstrated the same relentless determination that he had with spillikins. “Come now, are you intending to become a tenant for life?”

An inelegant snort escaped her. He’d gone off to university and returned speaking a foreign language. “A
what
?” She buried a laugh in her fingers. But then, wasn’t that the way of young men?

Folding his arms across his wiry chest, he stared expectantly back at her. “Married,” he said, in the tones their nursemaid had practiced upon them as young children in the nursery. “
Wedded
.” Andrew took a step closer and tapped her on the nose. “And you’ve still not answered just who it is—”

At his subtle movement, a scent, a mixture of lavender and spiced wood wafted about, tickling her nose. “He’s…” She sniffed the air. “Egads, whatever are you wearing?” Phoebe scrubbed her nose in a bid to drive back a sneeze. “Achoo.”

Their sister’s unrestrained laugh filled the room and Andrew bristled with indignation. “This is all the scent.”

“All the what scent? The one to drive young ladies into a fit of sneezing?” Phoebe joined in her sister’s merriment.

Despite his eighteen, very nearly nineteen, years, he jutted his lower lip out the way he’d done as a young boy, unwanting to share his toy soldiers with two blood-thirsty sisters. Through her mirth, she took him in. Nearly a foot taller than her, at some point he’d grown from chubby young boy into this lean, tall figure she hardly recognized. “Oh, come, I’m only teasing.” She leaned up on tiptoe and ruffled his blond locks, arranged in the “frightened owl” fashion. Amusement tugged at her lips. “Er…”

“It is hair wax.” By the defensive note, she suspected she should let the matter rest.

“I feel that.” Then, having delighted in teasing one another through the years, she couldn’t very well cease now. “I feel a very good deal of that wax.” Phoebe dusted her hands together to rid her palms of the residue. He danced out of her reach, which only drew attention to the garish, canary yellow satin breeches. A groan escaped her as she took him in.

“What?” he sniffed the air, as if in search of that scent that had called attention to the transformation that had overtaken him this past semester at university.

“You’re a dandy,” she wailed, covering her eyes with her palm and shaking her head back and forth.

“Who is a dandy?” their mother called from the doorway, bringing the trio of siblings’ attention to the entrance of the room.

“Mama,” he took a quick step forward as though eager for a motherly hug as he’d been as a child, but remembered himself.

“Andrew,” she cried out and rushed forward.

He cleared his throat. “Mama.” Giving his garish lapels a tug, he rocked back on his heels. Phoebe stole a peek down, assessing those heels. Heels. Not boots. She sighed. Yes, a dandy, indeed.

Then, mothers were permitted liberties young men would never afford another. Mama clasped his face between her palms and leaned up on tiptoe and planted a kiss upon his cheek. “You’ve come home.”

His nose twitched. The movement so subtle anyone else might have failed to see, but she’d known Andrew better than anyone. “
Why
are you home?”

Crimson splotches of color stained his cheeks. “Can a son not return to see his mother?” He looked to his sisters. “Or a brother return to see his sisters?”

Justina skipped over and claimed his hand. “Do come sit,” she urged, tugging him over to the sofa. “I want to hear all your stories of university and the dashing, wonderful, young men you’ve met.”

Puffing his chest out with pride, Andrew claimed a seat and proceeded to speak on all the noblemen he’d come to call friend. Mama sat in the mahogany shell chair and seemed the only one to note that Phoebe remained standing. “Will you not sit?”

“I wished to read, Mama,” she replied.

Andrew ceased mid-sentence, a grin on his lips. “Your Captain Cook?”

Yes, her Captain Cook, but now another gentleman, one very much alive, occupied the better part of her thoughts these past three days. She inclined her head. “The very same. Will you excuse me?”

Just then, Justina asked her brother a question, calling his attention back and Phoebe slipped from the room. The tread of her slippers marked a silent path upon the carpeted corridors as she made her way to the pink parlor. She slipped inside. The stack of books neatly arranged into a pile on the mahogany, rose-inlaid table beckoned her. Not breaking stride, she swept the leather volume atop the small heap and carried it across the room.

Fanning the pages with her fingers, Phoebe slid onto the windowseat.

May I have permission to court you…?

The notorious nobleman, Edmund, Lord Rutland, wanted to court her. She’d resolved early on to never wed a reprobate such as her father and yet this man, with his tortured eyes and ability to speak of hope and share in her love of travel, had proven himself to be so very different than her father. For her friends’ warnings and Society’s whispers, she wanted to know more of him, ached to know all there was to know, and then learn those whispery secrets he kept even from himself, buried in the corners of his soul he didn’t realize existed within him.

Phoebe drew her legs to her chest and knocked her head against the leather volume. What madness had he wrought upon her that he’d so fully captivated her and ensnared her senses? A knock sounded at the door. “You’ve a visitor,” Manfred said from the entrance of the room, bringing her head up.

Likely Honoria arrived to debate once more the merits of Edmund’s worth. Drawing in a slow breath, she braced for the impending argument. “Honor—” The greeting died upon her lips at the sudden, unexpected appearance of the tall, commanding marquess. “Edmund,” she whispered.

A scowl formed on the normally stoic servant’s face. Edmund had clearly grown accustomed to those glowers of disapproval through the years, for he stepped past the other man and entered the room, a small package tucked under his arm. He passed a quick gaze about and then finding the parlor empty but for her, he fixed his intense stare upon her.

Phoebe hopped belatedly to her feet and dropped a curtsy.

A wry grin pulled at his hard lips. “Come, Phoebe, there is no need for such formality between us.” He winged an eyebrow upward. “Were you expecting another?” Even with the space between them, she detected the dark flare of emotion light his eyes.

Was he jealous? “Just my friend, Honoria,” she assured him. Her mind spun at his sudden appearance.

The flecks of gold glinted with a hardness that gave her pause, sending off a distant warning bell. She smoothed her palms over the front of her skirts, unable to account for his cool response to her admission, as in this moment he was transformed into the dark, dangerous figure her friends had warned her against. “M-my lord?”

His smile was back in place and he strolled over with long, slow steps. He tossed the small package upon a nearby table while not breaking his forward stride. Phoebe dropped her gaze, noting the slight hitch of his right leg. For the effortless grace with which he moved, there was a hint of a limp. How had she not noticed such a small but important detail about him before now? He came to a stop before her.

When she raised her stare to meet his, he peered at her through thick, dark, hooded lashes; the icy glint in his eyes at odds with the words upon his lips. Again, this stranger did not match with the grinning man she’d come to know.
But do I really know him? We’ve met but a handful of times.
And still for those three meetings, now four, there was a sense of knowing.

He captured her chin between his thumb and forefinger. “A lady bold enough to wander on Lady Delenworth’s terrace in the midst of a ball and who seeks out curiosity shops surely will ask the question.”

At that, she wet her lips, suddenly uneasy around him in a way she’d not been since their first unexpected meeting. “Th-the question?” Yet, for the unease, a pain tugged at her heart, as she confronted the truth: the indomitable, proud Marquess of Rutland feared by all, talked about in shocked and scandalized whispers, was insecure of his injured leg. No different than a wounded creature, snarling its fury while secretly nursing its hurts. Coward that she was, she asked, “What are you doing here?”

Edmund brushed his thumb over her lip with an impropriety surely deserving of a slap across his cheek. “Tsk, tsk, I’d taken you for a woman of courage.” He released her and stepped past her, disappointment stamped in the chiseled planes of his face. He stood at her shoulder, peering out the windows, down into the streets below. “What happened to your leg?” At her quietly spoken question, he stiffened. It was not merely morbid curiosity but rather an almost physical need to glean every last detail that had shaped him into this man he’d become.

When he looked back to her once again, there was a grudging respect in his eyes. “I dueled for a lady’s heart.”

At the unexpectedness of those words, Phoebe’s breath hitched painfully and she preferred the not knowing, blissful ignorance of Society’s tales of the dark Marquess of Rutland. An empty, mirthless grin turned his lips ever so slightly at the corner; all the more telling for the bitterness there. For if his heart was no longer engaged, there would be no stinging resentment. She stretched a hand out to him. “I am so very sorry, Edmund.”

*

The lady’s fragile heart showed itself once more.

Yet, this telling of Margaret’s betrayal had not been a crafty attempt to slip even further into Phoebe’s affections. The stories of his past, of the one woman he’d trusted was not a part he opened to anyone. Ultimately, Margaret had revealed a weakness in him that he’d since striven to strike from the remembrance of Society members who happened to recall a distant time when he’d foolishly allowed himself that momentary lapse and hoped for the elusive dream of happiness.

Staring out the window, his back presented to Phoebe, he fought for the stable footing he’d become accustomed to through the years; one in which he didn’t feel the sting of hurt, embarrassment, shame—any of it. To be emotionally deadened was far safer, far more preferable than…this being flayed open and exposed before a young lady who really was nothing more than a stranger.

Gentle fingers slid into his and he started, staring numbly down at their interlocked digits. The olive hue of Phoebe’s skin spoke to her Roman ancestry. Her hand, delicate and soft, and yet possessed of an inexplicable strength, drew him. Something shifted in his chest.
Pull away, you blasted, pathetic lackwit.
The muscles of his stomach clenched and he could no sooner relinquish the connection than he could sever off his duel-scarred leg.

Perhaps in this scheme of revenge he’d drawn her into, he was the only weak one, for she came closer, when his mind rebelled and urged retreat, and then Phoebe stopped so her chest brushed against his.

“Do you still love her?”

By the tentativeness in those words his answer mattered very much to her and he thrilled at that for reasons that moved beyond his plans for Miss Fairfax. “I do not love her.” The harsh, guttural response intended to send her fleeing only brought her head back and a contemplative glimmer lit her eyes.

A sad, little smile pulled at her lips. “Oh, Edmund, surely you realize if that were true you’d not be so very angry still.”

By the wistfulness in the lines of her heart-shaped face, she certainly believed the veracity of her own statement. Yet… He frowned. Who he was and who he’d become had nothing to do with Margaret, but rather a collection of experiences that went back to a dark, gloomy, and very real childhood. “I assure you, I do not love her.” Or anyone. Love was dangerous. Love destroyed.

“I believe you try to convince yourself as much.”

Her adamancy set his teeth on edge and he stepped away from her. “You speak as though you know me and yet what do you really know?” Nothing. She knew nothing. Not even the miserable creatures who’d given him life had known him…or cared to. A muscle ticked at the corner of his eye.

She arched a thin, brown eyebrow. “I know enough.”