Taming an Impossible Rogue (25 page)

“You don’t seem bitter about all that.”

She shrugged, light green eyes glancing up at him and then away again. “I was at the time, but I’ve been in London for nearly three years now and, believe me, I’ve seen girls who’ve lived much less pleasant lives than I have.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Now Camille was actually chuckling at something, and he clenched his jaw. “So you’ve only known each other for a year or so.”

“Yes. We’ve all talked about that. How we’ve become … comrades in arms, I suppose it is.”

“A mutual fight against the idiocy of the
ton
. I understand. Except that you invite the enemy into your midst every night.”

Sophia grinned. “And we take their money.”

Keating laughed. “I feel utterly despoiled. And yet, I shall continue to come calling. I’m evidently a weak, weak man.”

“Yes, well, I could regale you with my theories on men and weakness, but then you might leave me here to hire a hack.”

“You’re a friend, Sophia. I wouldn’t abandon any friend, disagreement or not.”

She looked up at him. “You know that’s why Camille decided she liked you. Because you’re one of us, and you understand.”

Now this was abruptly becoming more interesting. “One of ‘us’?” he repeated.

“Ruined. Scandalous. Minxes, blackguards, and rogues.”

He grinned. “I have the feeling that we are much more fascinating in conversation than the proper, the closed-minded, and the meek.”

With a snort, Sophia nodded. “Most definitely.”

Camille glanced back at them over her shoulder. “What’s so amusing?”

“We’ve decided we enjoy being rogues,” Keating offered.

“That doesn’t surprise me at all,” Fenton commented, his shoulders lifting. “Propriety takes more effort. It’s not for the weak-willed or weak-minded.”

Silence.

“Evidently it
is
for the men who speak without thinking first, however.” Keating wanted to smirk, and he pushed against the urge. Yes, Fenton had just shown his stiff-backed side, but that was who he was. And Camille knew that about him. Perhaps it was better if she became used to it in small doses. Like arsenic.

“Simply because you have an inability to follow the rules doesn’t make misbehaving acceptable. I would imagine that Lady Camille would agree with that, whatever her reasons for turning away from her peers.”

“I prefer not to discuss it at all, since I cannot help but relate every aspect of the conversation to myself.”

The four of them stopped beneath a stand of elm trees. “True enough,” Fenton agreed. “We have larger considerations than our differing opinions of your past actions.”

Ah, and he still manages to sound like a complete nidget.
“Shall we have a late luncheon?” Keating said, wondering once again whether it was God or the devil laughing at him for landing himself in the position of diplomat. He motioned to the tiger down at their carriage. The lad unstrapped the blanket and large picnic basket from the vehicle’s rear and carried it forward. “Or at least some Madeira and biscuits.”

“Biscuits, definitely,” Sophia agreed, taking the other end of the blanket and, with the rather surprised tiger, spreading the plaid thing onto the grass.

Keating folded his legs and sat with Camille on his left and Sophia on his right, and his cousin seated rather more stiffly opposite him. Fleetingly he wondered when Stephen had last partaken of a picnic. Well, Camille loved the out-of-doors, so the marquis would simply have to become accustomed to it.

“This was thoughtful of you,” Camille noted, sending him a smile.

“With our mouths full I thought we’d have fewer insults flinging across the park,” he returned, handing her a pair of glasses.

“Very wise.”

“I don’t see the point of pretending to be polite and eating sweets. If this is what you claim I neglected to do earlier, it seems a poor reason to avoid a marriage.”

“Stephen, shut up,” Keating said, and handed him a plate of biscuits. “Eat.”

“In itself,” Camille took up, her expression more thoughtful and less apprehensive than he would have expected, “yes, a single picnic—or lack thereof—would be a poor reason to avoid a marriage. I’d like to think I wasn’t quite that idiotic.”

“I’m not romantic. We’re still promised to each other. Did you ever think that perhaps I would have preferred to marry someone else?”

“I can’t imagine who.” Keating looked at his full glass of Madeira and set it onto the blanket beside him, untasted. “Statues don’t generally marry. Not even with marquises who might admire their stoicism.”

Fenton looked at him for a moment before he returned his attention to Camille. “You’re deliberately mistaking my meaning. I merely meant that you weren’t the only one promised in marriage to someone you’d never met.”

“You know, my lord, I find myself more interested in the future than in the past. If we are to reconcile, I would first like to know what I might expect.”

She’d changed. Somewhere in the past weeks, Camille had become more assertive, less timid, and, as far as Keating was concerned, more intriguing. He bit into a biscuit and chewed, unable to take his eyes off her.

“Ah. Well, we’ll be spending the Season here at Pollard House. It’s been in my family for six generations, as has Fenton Hall. The hall burned down a hundred or so years ago, and was redesigned by Christopher Wren himself. In fact, the family has long claimed Wren as a distant relation. When he began the plans for St. Paul’s Cathedral, in fact, he—”

“There’s a pond,” Keating interrupted. “Good for swimming, better for fishing.”

“A pond,” Camille repeated, smiling. “So you mentioned before. Is it at the front or the rear of the house?”

“The front. The carriage drive loops around it, and my uncle had a small dock built so Stephen and I could take out a boat. It’s sunk somewhere out in the middle.”

She snorted, then covered her mouth with one hand. “So you were adventurous boys, were you?”

“Yes, Keating was forever dragging me from one disaster to the next.
I
grew out of it. Keating still enjoys his mayhem.”

“It wards away the dullness,” Keating said lightly, reminding himself that he was behaving not for himself, but for Camille. And for young Michael. “Tell her about the views and the people and the local soirees, Fenton. Not about how the stones were laid.”

“What? Oh, well, I suppose there’s a soiree monthly at the Clackfield assembly. And the Duke of Sommerset lives only five miles away. I’ve been to Sommerset Park on three different occasions, but unfortunately His Grace doesn’t entertain often, and he is frequently abroad. Th—”

“When I resided at Fenton,” Keating interrupted, just barely refraining from rolling his eyes, “there were frequent fairs and races at the village. I once saw a lamb with two heads there. The fellow had two small leashes made for it, one for each head.”

Camille chuckled again, a merry, musical sound that for some reason put him in mind of angels. Naked, wanton angels. “I remember attending a fair. No two-headed lambs, but we used to see the May dance performed nearly every spring.”

A fleeting image of a young, nearly white-haired chit spinning amid ribbons around a Maypole flitted into his mind. She would have been laughing, smiling, completely unaware that the man she’d already been promised to in marriage would never bother to send her a letter or a single rose.

“Blackwood.”

He blinked. “What?”

“I said, Clackfield hasn’t hosted a fair in years, so there’s no need to chat about one. Keep your advice to yourself.”

“I see. Shall I leave, then?”

Camille reached out as if to grab his arm before she clenched her fingers and shifted to reach for the plate of biscuits. “That isn’t necessary. Tell me more about Fenton Hall, why don’t you?”

“We’ll have time to see to that. But as you were speaking about the future, I have a surprise for you.”

Keating caught Camille’s sideways glance, but he hadn’t a clue what constituted a surprise in Fenton’s eyes. A puppy? Flowers? An accounting sheet or a book about mud?

“What might it be, my lord?” she asked after a moment, clearly realizing that Fenton expected to be asked.

“On Tuesday you and I will be dining at Pryce House.”

Her face paled alarmingly, and Keating had to steel himself against the abrupt need to comfort her. Damned ham-fisted Fenton. “Perhaps you should approach things a bit more slowly,” he suggested.

“Nonsense. I’ve spoken with your parents, my lady, and they’ve agreed to dine with you, as long as I am accompanying you. So you see, marriage to me does have its benefits. Your parents will welcome your presence again.”

However much she thought she’d learned since that moment standing in the church doorway, Camille’s first instinct was to stand up and run. Sitting there and being civil and ignoring Stephen Pollard’s self-important prattling with the much more compelling Keating close by had been difficult enough, but then the marquis had done this. He’d gone to her parents, spoken to them, without saying a word to her first. “I don’t wish to go,” she blurted, every instant of the fear and desperation she’d felt on that night flooding back through her.

“Fenton, stop being such an a—”

“Of course you’ll go,” the marquis said, interrupting his cousin. “This is about reconciliation and recovering your reputation. You can’t do that if you’re still disowned. And I remain a laughingstock whose bride fled to a gentlemen’s club and only changed her mind about marriage out of hopelessness.” His voice growled over that last part. “Meeting with your parents is vital.”

Perhaps it was, but for heaven’s sake, he might have been a bit more diplomatic in telling her about it. She could feel the warm dismay of Sophia sitting across from her, and nearer still, the solid warmth of the man who was swiftly becoming her greatest advocate and dearest friend. “I won’t go alone with you. I will be outnumbered.”

“But—”

“You can’t expect Cammy to voluntarily subject herself to that,” Keating put in, his own voice low and tight. “I suggest you invite one or more of her friends to accompany you.”

“Ha. As if Lord and Lady Montshire would allow the likes of you through their front door. The rabble their daughter has attracted over the past months is not to be permitted to cross their threshold.”

“You have a very odd method of courting,” she managed.

“Let me make myself clear. I am not courting you. I am attempting to put right the mess you made a year ago. For both of us. As we will both benefit from the results, I don’t think you have a right to complain.”

That made sense, in a horrid, unsympathetic sort of way. A chasm opened up in front of her, filled with her nightmares and memories of the past year. Everything her parents had said to her. Sleeping in the servants’ quarters of her aunt’s house. The realization that she’d lost … everything because she’d wanted her future husband to be someone she could view as a friend and lover.

Dimly she was aware of Keating standing up and putting a hand beneath her shoulder to half lift her to her feet. She heard him cursing, and Fenton’s defensive-sounding responses, and then Sophia taking her other arm and guiding her to the coach. Finally the blood pounding in her ears quieted a little, and she looked up.

The first thing that met her gaze was Keating’s angry, concerned expression directly across from her. “Did I faint?” she asked, realizing they were in the coach and it was moving.

“Very nearly,” he returned darkly. “Idiotic, ham-fisted, thick-skulled boob.”

“I am not!” she protested.

He grabbed her hand. “Not you. Him.”

His fingers were warm, his grip solid and more possessive than comforting. It helped to steady her more even than Sophia’s arms across her shoulders. “Perhaps,” she said, taking a welcome deep breath. “But he’s correct. I need to go.”

“Then I’ll be joining you,” Keating said immediately. “I dislike bullying.”

And she liked him, very, very much.

Chapter Sixteen

“Oh, he was angry. For a moment I thought he meant to flatten Lord Fenton. His own cousin!” Sophia brought a glass of water into their shared bedchamber and poured it into the vase holding the latest bouquet of roses.

“If I’d been a man,
I
might have flattened Fenton,” Camille conceded, giving up on reading the book on her lap. Nothing seemed to distract her from the thing that loomed before her like a gigantic cloud of doom—tonight she would be dining at Pryce House. A place she’d not set eyes on in over a year.

“But my point is,” her friend continued, bending to sniff the yellow and white profusion of flowers, “he stood up and defended you. Without hesitation.”

Yes, he had. And because she knew how much he had at stake in this, his support meant even more to her than anyone else could ever know. “I should have been prepared for something like that. Of course my parents need to … forgive me if any of my reputation is to be recovered.”

“So you’re going through with all this? With dinner and with … marrying Lord Fenton? He’s not very kindly.” Sophia sat in the deep windowsill next to her. “And if I’m not mistaken, you’ve become acquainted with a man who
is
very kindly.” She grinned. “Despite his reputation to the contrary.”

Camille nudged her shoulder against Sophia’s. Sometimes it seemed so odd that friends she’d known since childhood, with whom she’d shared secrets and infatuations, had turned their backs on her rather than be touched by scandal. She’d known Sophia for just under a year, and there were times she felt closer to Miss White than she ever had even to her own sisters.

“I have to tell you something,” she said, glancing up to make certain their door remained closed. “Fenton has offered Keating a … bounty for retrieving me. It’s a tremendous amount of money, and Keating needs it badly.”

Sophia furrowed her brow. “Just a moment. You’re saying that Keating was paid to bring you back to Fenton? You know this? And you still sympathize with Keating?”

Oh, she more than sympathized with him. “He’s the one who told me. During our second or third conversation, actually.”

“But then why has he … why have you been…” Sophia stood up and paced to her bed and back again. “He likes you.”