The True Love Wedding Dress (14 page)

But Alex Thorpe could be pushed too hard.

“In or out?” St. James demanded.

“I refuse to accept such a wager,” Alex answered.

“Coward.” The word echoed in the silent room.

“Hugh!” Penworthy whispered urgently, putting his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Desist!”

St. James shook him off angrily. “Who else but a coward would refuse to allow his victim a chance to settle the score?”

“You are and never were my victim, Hugh,” Alex said tightly.

“I beg to disagree. It was
my
sister whom you publicly insulted and thus, by extension, myself.”

“It was not well done of me. I concede that now,” Alex ground out, amazing Penworthy. In the two years since it had happened, Alex had never referred to that night.

“No, it was not well done,” Hugh agreed, his face darkening.

“But she danced three times with Desmond Fitzgerald. Three times when it was understood by everyone that . . . that she was my . . .”
His betrothed,
Penworthy silently finished when Alex’s lips pressed together, refusing to allow another betraying syllable to escape.

Yet . . . Lucy St. James had not been his betrothed. Nor had she ever been. Not officially. Whatever understanding existed between Alex and Lucy had been of a private nature.
If
it had existed at all. Except that everyone, apparently including Alex, had thought it did. And certainly for several years and through several Seasons before the “incident” Lucy had acted as if it was understood, as well.

During their years of . . . courtship? dalliance? association? she had danced many more than three times with Thorpe in a single evening. She had gone driving in the park with him. She had visited his townhouse. On several occasions, she’d been seen dining with him at London’s finest restaurants. And she had done all these things without a chaperone, without apology, flaunting Society’s rules, tweaking their collective noses.

Lucy St. James was as spirited and independent as her brother was hot-tempered and bold. It had seemed to all of them that Alex had admired those qualities. But then, it would appear that they had all been wrong about
that,
too. He certainly had not been appreciative of her independence two years ago.

“And that wasn’t the worst of it. Not in the least. My God, what she put me through!” Alex’s voice was raised, his eyes flashing. The rare display of emotion from so famously a self-controlled man caused Davidson, who did not know either gentleman as well as Penworthy did, to grow slack-jawed with wonder.

“You were jealous,” Hugh sneered.

Alex made a dismissive and impatient sound. “You don’t understand.”

“Not jealous?” Hugh asked bitterly. “Then your pride was offended. An excellent reason to insult a lady.”

Alex ground his teeth together, an involuntary muscle lifting his upper lip in a snarl.

“She had spent the entire Season flirting and dancing and playing the coquette,” Alex said in a cold, terse voice. “She was making a fool of me. You yourself noted it. You even commented on it. You said, ’Best beware, Alex, she intends to lead you a merry dance’!”

Hugh bolted to his feet and leaned over the table, his knuckles braced against the surface. “And you
drawled
back, ‘Yes. A telling flaw, that. Lucy must
always
lead, and I find that I no longer have a taste for following.’ ”

“You could not have found a more public venue for your statement—nor more avid ears to hear it than in the crowd gathered that evening. I can still hear their titters! And then, not to leave any doubt as to your opinion of the lady everyone assumed you would make your wife, you left her to find her own way home.”

“So I did!” Alex shouted back. His hands clenched into fists on the tabletop, as though recalling how they’d wanted to clench about Fitzhugh’s neck. Or had it been Lucy’s neck he had imagined wringing? Penworthy wasn’t certain he could guess.

“She told me you left her there without so much as bidding her a good evening,” St. James thundered.

“I am surprised she mentioned it to you. How kind of her to have noted my leaving,” Alex bit out. “I recall hearing later that she stayed until four in the morning and danced twice more with Fitzhugh.”

For a long moment the two men’s gazes locked, their jaws tight. Then, as though realizing how close he stood to violence, Alex took a deep breath, exhaling through his nose. He spread his palms flat on the table, staring at them as he pushed himself back in his seat.

“You are not the only one with a surplus of pride, Thorpe.” St. James, too, seemed to realize how close they’d come to blows. He sank back down in his chair, his mouth twisting. “What else could she do to save face?”

“Ah, I see. And that accounts for the next day, too, when she was at Carleton House until dawn, and the day after that, when she danced so long at the Monforts’ that she needed to be carried from the room by two ‘strapping footmen’?” His laughter held no amusement. “I fear you took our separation a good deal harder than your sister did, Hugh.”

“How would you know?” St. James asked, upending the rest of his wine into his mouth. “You left for the Crimea within a fortnight. Without even calling on her.”

“I didn’t want to interfere with her social activities.”

“Ever the gentleman. And it was that same gentlemanly restraint that kept you from coming to call when you returned home?”

“Yes.”

No, Penworthy thought. Whether or not Alex wanted the world to think his relationship with Lucy St. James had faded to indifference, Penworthy knew better. He had been there the first time Alex had seen Lucy St. James after his return from Russia. He had heard him catch his breath when she appeared on the other side of the coffee shop where they’d been drinking. He had seen the expression in Alex’s eyes, lost and dazed, when he’d murmured, without taking his eyes from her, “Penworthy, please. No one has written me such, but I find I . . . I really must know. Before I . . . before I speak to her. Did she marry Fitzhugh?”

“No, Alex,” he’d said gently. “Miss St. James is unwed.”

He hadn’t needed to see the relief flood Alex’s eyes. He’d seen it in the way Alex’s entire body had relaxed. Alex had risen and made his way through the crowded little inn to her table. There, he had bowed over her hand and greeted her with some mild triviality. She had responded in kind. And just as easily as that, they’d agreed to act as if nothing had ever been between them. For the sake of their pride.

Since then Alex had never asked another question regarding Lucy St. James, nor, indeed, had he ever mentioned her name.

Now, if only Hugh had been as civil as his sister. Unfortunately Hugh made it clear to all and sundry that he laid the blame for his sister’s ongoing spinsterhood firmly at Alex’s door. Because “who would wed a woman whose onetime fiancé found her so unfeminine and forward that he must make a public declaration of such?”

Such a mess,
Penworthy thought unhappily.

“There was no reason to bother her,” Alex was saying in reply to St. James’s last accusation.

St. James’s lip curled. “So you were a coward then, too. Lucy is well shut of you.”

“Damn you, Hugh,” Alex said, his palm slamming into the tabletop, sending the piles of coins skittering and jumping across the felt.

“Really, Alex. Shouldn’t you be saving your insults for my sister? Or is there some other unfortunate girl dangling along after you waiting for
her
public dismissal?”

“That is hardly fair, Hugh!” Penworthy protested.

“Now you’ve gone too far, Hugh,” Alex said coldly. “Since you insist on your own ruin, far be it from me to dissuade you. I’ll take your wager and revel in your loss. Don’t think I won’t.”

“As will I! Deal the last card, Penworthy!”

“But—”

“Do it!” Alex barked.

Reluctantly, Penworthy reached into the box, slid the top card out onto the green table, and flipped it over.

Hugh St. James smiled.

“D
id you
see
the way he looked at her?” Elizabeth Roberts breathed from behind the safety of her ostrich feather fan.

Mary Penworthy’s round head of blond ringlets bobbed eagerly. “If a man looked at me like that, I should
swoon
.”

“I should swoon, too,” the third of their little coterie, Theresa Vane, agreed, “but I would wait until I was close enough to him so that when I sank gracefully to the floor he would have to catch me.”

“Shame on you, Terry,” Lady Mary scolded.

“Oh, don’t be a mud lark, Mary. You know you find him just as delicious as any other young lady of the
ton
does.”

“I don’t,” Elizabeth announced somberly. “He frightens me.”

“Of course he does,” Theresa said with a little puff of exasperation. “He frightens all the young ladies and a good many young men, too, I should warrant. That’s part of his fascination, don’t you see? All those dark, grim good looks and that powerful physique and that nasty, nasty scar. He received it during the Russian War. It gives me shivers just to think on it.”

“When he looks at you, you have no idea what is going on behind that cold expression,” Elizabeth avowed. “He looks as ready to carve you up as to say a civil word.”

“Oh, he’s always civil,” said Lady Mary, whose brother was one of Thorpe’s confidants and thus had personal knowledge that the others—much to their dismay—lacked. “None more so. Frightfully correct.”

“If only one could win an occasional smile from him,” Theresa sighed.

Marcus says that he smiles sometimes.”

“Blue moons happen with greater frequency,” Elizabeth said significantly.

Mary ignored her. “Indeed. Marcus says that he once smiled a good deal before . . . the war.”

“Before Lucy St. James, you mean,” Theresa said. All three young ladies turned from where they stood clustered at the end of the ballroom and looked across the dance floor at the object of their speculation.

Lucy St. James was speaking to her host and great-uncle by marriage, the Marquis of Carroll. The elderly gentleman’s spine had become so twisted with age that he was obliged to angle his head sideways to peer up at his companion. His affliction had made him more and more self-conscious, yet whatever Lucy had said had caused his face to light with a smile and his faded eyes to sparkle.

“She must be telling him off-color jokes,” Theresa murmured.

“Don’t be absurd,” Lady Mary said. “She’s being . . . Lucy.”

Lucy St. James was no longer a girl, not even by the kindest estimation. Yet here she was, the belle of the Season. As she had been the belle of last Season and the belle of the Season before that and for the four preceding those.

And, tiresome as it was, it looked like her ascendancy was far from over. With skin as pale as cream, eyes so dark blue they looked indigo, and hair of a deep, rich auburn hue, she looked like something one ought to find dancing amongst the standing stones on a moonlit night, a slender and delicate and ethereal creature. Even her features were fine wrought. But this waiflike frailty was belied by a vibrant, even willful, personality.

The three young ladies regarded her wistfully.

“She’s even wearing a crinoline,” Mary murmured appreciatively. Not one of them had yet convinced doting parents to let them purchase the new contraption.

As always, Lucy St. James stood in the vanguard of fashion. Her low-cut white organdy bodice was attached to a billowing tulle skirt at the cinched waist. The gossamer overskirt was patterned with faint golden stars and draped in swags over a petticoat comprising no fewer than fourteen layers of fragile lace flounces edged in gold. When she moved, the crinoline swung out gracefully, allowing just the smallest glimpse of white kid slippers with gold heels.

With little sighs of admiration, the three girls turned back and regarded one another morosely. Lucy St. James was as lovely at twenty-five as she’d been at twenty-two. And, as none of the young ladies collected in the trio had been “out” before that, they could only depend on myriad assurances from others that she’d been just as lovely when she’d come out at seventeen, too. And even then the object of Alexander, Lord Thorpe’s affections.

Not that any of them were at all certain that “affections” was the appropriate term for the emotion she currently called up from the cold corridors of Thorpe’s heart. But there could be no doubt that whatever feeling she evoked from him, it was strong. Rumor had it that Thorpe was even now getting monstrously drunk in some anteroom. But then, rumor had also had it that he had vowed never again to accept an invitation to a party that included Lucy St. James.

“I wonder why he came, knowing that she would be here?” Liz asked.

“Don’t be a widgeon, Liz,” Theresa said. “The marchioness is Thorpe’s godmother as well as Lucy St. James’s great-aunt, and this
is
her eightieth birthday. He couldn’t possibly refuse.”

“Why . . .” Liz’s eyes widened. “It was at the marchioness’s
seventy-eighth
birthday that he . . . that Lucy St. James . . . that . . . Oh my! How awful. I
thought
she blanched when he looked upon her so terribly. I
thought
her lips quivered. I
thought
—”

“And you thought you’d seen a fairy in the end of your garden last year, too,” Mary broke in dryly. “Lucy St. James looks as pampered and lighthearted as ever. Not a whit of color left her cheeks, and her lips were trembling on the cusp of a smile, nothing more.” Lucy St. James was rather a heroine of the young lady’s.

“Doubtless you are right, Mary. It is only that . . . Whatever is the matter with you?” Theresa asked abruptly as she noted that both Mary and Liz were no longer attending her but instead were staring behind her with eyes as round as saucers.

“What do you see, Liz?” Theresa whispered urgently, loath to do anything so uncouth as to turn around. “Never say that old Lord Menglerott has brought his doxy? Mother said he swore he would, but I—Mary? What
is
going on?”