A Family Affair (12 page)

“I’m so sorry, Fanny,” she sniffled. “He caught me off guard. It was my worst nightmare coming to life. You know how I suffered last year, when I knew Charmaine was in London where he was too. Everyone always falls in love with her, and I expected him to. But when a full season went by and he hadn’t even been courting her, I relaxed, and this really took me by surprise. Oh, God, what will he think of me now?”

Fanny hugged her friend closely, silently cursing Rake for being such a blind fool, and especially for being so stubborn about remaining a bachelor.

This was so typical of the men of her family! None of them could see what was in front of them. They kept their eyes on the horizon, always searching for what they thought they needed, instead of actually enjoying what they had.

“Don’t you get upset about this now,” she told Penelope. “Rake is one of the most intelligent persons I ever met, and he does wonders with our family fortune, constantly enlarging the already vast funds, according to my father. However, when it comes to feelings, he is beyond naïve.”

She gave Penelope her own dry handkerchief, and her friend accepted it with a thankful, if damp, smile.

“What was it you two wanted to talk to me about?” Penelope asked when she had composed herself again. “What about Charmaine?”

“Oh, please don’t be angry with me for saying this, but there is no way I can choose not to tell you.”

“Fanny, now you worry me. What is it? Please do tell.”

Now it was Fanny’s turn to stand and walk to and fro before the bench, unconsciously mimicking her uncle. “I think Charmaine has told her friends something I know is untrue, and it is about to backfire on her.”

“What?”

“Last night, at the Easton Ball, I went to the restroom to sit down for a while, but I heard Charmaine and her friends coming.” Fanny hesitated but decided to tell the truth. “As I didn’t want to spend time with her, I hid on the balcony while they were refreshing themselves.”

Penelope frowned. “Fanny, you shouldn’t go out on the balcony all alone. Someone might see you and get the wrong impression. Think of your reputation, your future. Think about your family.”

“I know. You don’t have to tell me. It was a stupid move, but I
cannot
stand your sister.”

Penelope sighed. She knew this was the truth, so she forced herself not to jump to her sister’s defense. Instead she encouraged Fanny to continue.

“They were talking about a lot of things, and one thing was how Charmaine secretly is being courted by Devlin Ross.”

“What?” Now Penelope stood, too, her confusion obvious. “I can’t believe it. I mean, she’s hardly met the man. She once told me he didn’t even look at her with the admiration she was used to, and it vexed her a bit. She is a bit spoiled, you know.”

“A bit?”

Penelope glared at Fanny, who let the subject drop and continued on with her confession instead.

“As I happen to know Devlin has no intentions toward Charmaine, her lie will soon be revealed. It will be devastating for her if her friends choose to make it public.”

Penelope paled as she realized the truth of what Fanny said. She grabbed Fanny’s hand and stopped her from pacing.

“Are you sure?”

“Have I ever lied to you?”

When Penelope shook her head, Fanny couldn’t stop herself, and she hugged her friend close.

“It’s not too late, as the truth is not out there yet. We still have time to stop it. You have to talk to Charmaine.”

“No.”

“You have to.”

“Please don’t force me to tell Charmaine.”

“You have to, or else I will. You know as well as I do that she won’t believe a word of what I tell her. But she believes everything you say. So, yes, you have to. She’s
your
bloody sister.”

They stared at each other for a while, both trying to subdue the other with bare willpower. But, as always, it ended with the two of them giggling.

“Oh, Fanny, you’re such a treat.” Penelope sighed. “Okay, I’ll talk to her, but I won’t look forward to it. You said he has no intentions of courting her. I have to know—are you certain?”

Fanny’s face warmed, and she knew she didn’t have to tell her friend anything. The beet-red color would say it all.

Penelope cried out with delight. “Oh, Fanny, really?”

“I don’t know what it will lead to, but there is a mutual attraction, and Devlin has acknowledged it to Rake. I don’t think he would do such a thing if he were already engaged, or on the verge of proposing.”

A shrill whistle sliced through the air, catching their attention. The picnic was over, and Lord Newbury wanted his daughter to join them for the journey home.

Together, Penelope and Fanny walked back through the fields of flowers, thinking about all that had happened in the few short hours of the picnic.

Penelope hugged Fanny again before she left her and joined her sister and parents in their carriage. The lawn was almost empty by now, and Fanny looked through the few people remaining, but Devlin was nowhere to be seen. She couldn’t help but feel a little prick of disappointment.

She had secretly yearned to meet him again, if only to say goodbye. If she didn’t see him now, there was no way to tell when the next time would be. The invitations she had received so far had been from relatives and friends, nothing to which a bachelor who wasn’t an immediate relative would be invited.

The next grand ball was two weeks away, and suddenly fourteen days seemed like an eternity.

Her father was in an expansive mood and enjoyed ordering his brothers about, collecting chairs and tables. At the same time, he succeeded with annoying his poor servants, who couldn’t do their jobs with their masters constantly in their way.

Fanny joined her mother, who stood silently in the now empty field, ignoring her husband. Caroline was a radiant beauty, with mahogany-colored hair and shiny green eyes. Fanny had many times wished she had inherited her mother’s striking colors, instead of her father’s brown hair and gray eyes.

Sin also had their father’s coloring, but where the men looked strict and handsome with that, she as a woman looked merely mousy. Sebastian stood out in any family gathering, the only child who had their mother’s coloring.

“Have you been enjoying yourself?” Caroline asked her daughter as they strolled toward their carriage.

“I have. It has been most entertaining. So far, I am really enjoying my first season. Everyone is dashing and fashionable, and the clothes are amazing. I can’t believe how some of the women put on so much jewelry at this early time of the day. I could hardly make out if they were dressed at all!”

Caroline laughed at her enthusiasm. “Yes, the women of the
ton
do know how to look their best. But I think you and Penelope won the fight, looking so pretty together. Just like a bouquet of flowers. And I wasn’t the only one admiring you. I noticed a certain duke who couldn’t tear his eyes from you.”

Fanny cursed silently over her inability to stay serene, as she could feel her cheeks get warm and red again. There was no way her mother would let it pass without getting an explanation out of her.

“According to Rake,” Fanny admitted quietly, “he has acknowledged his intentions of courting me.”

Caroline could easily see how much her daughter cared for the man, or rather her own image of him, even though she pretended to be unaffected.

“And how do you feel about it?”

“I must confess I am very much attracted to him, as everything about him is highly appealing to me. And I do want him to court me, because I want to get to know him. I want to see if I’m just as attracted to his personality as I am to his appearance. I was fanatic about him when I was younger, and I seem to fall too easily into the same state of mind as I did then. But I do now understand how falling in love is more complicated than one would think. A person you once knew could today be someone else. A shiny exterior can hide a rotten inside.” She winked to her mother. “Just take Charmaine as an example.”

Caroline laughed. “I have always felt sorry for the poor girl, as she has not had an easy time with you hovering around, hostile and unfriendly.”

“Mother! You are supposed to be on my side, not the fishy ogre’s.”

Caroline didn’t answer the childish remark. Instead she simply looked at her daughter until Fanny made an embarrassed grimace.

“I know. You don’t have to say it,” she finally admitted. “I have not been very accommodating toward Charmaine. She was such an awful child when we were younger I got kind of used to disliking her. Penelope always tells me there is more to Charmaine than meets the eye, and that I am just being childish. But nobody thinks about how she acts toward me. She is not very nice when she addresses me, either, and so I don’t think our poor relationship is only my fault.”

“If you are nicer, maybe she will be, too,” Caroline urged. “You don’t know until you’ve tried, my dear.”

“I suppose you are right, although I think it’s a little late for me and Charmaine to be friends. Especially now.”

“Oh?”

“Promise you won’t tell Papa about it!” When Caroline looked at her with suspicion, Fanny stopped and put her hands on her hips. “Promise!”

“All right, I won’t tell your father, as long as it isn’t something dangerous to you or anyone else in our family.”

Fanny rolled her eyes, but she knew she couldn’t ask more of her mother, since she was too caring for her own good. She told her mother what she had learnt about Charmaine’s lie, and what Rake had said about the consequences.

Caroline nodded. “You did the right thing, my dear. Telling Charmaine now makes it possible for her to repair her story with her friends and, by doing so, prevent a terrible scandal before it is too late. For any other young woman, it wouldn’t be such a big thing, but Charmaine is, after all, the most sought-after debutante, and thereby an easy target for every envious other woman out there who would love to put an end to her reign.”

“Thank you, Mama.”

With a gentle smile Caroline climbed into the carriage, now full of Darling men arguing over the best way to stack chairs, and put an end to the conversation.

Chapter 12

“Is this seat taken?”

Devlin looked up from his newspaper and gave Rake a welcoming smile. “I’m sorry you had to wait,” Rake continued, as he sat. “Dinner turned into a rather heated occasion. My brothers and nephews couldn’t stop arguing about some bloody chairs, and the subject prolonged the whole meal.”

It sounded strange to Devlin’s ears, having one’s meal disturbed and prolonged because of chairs. He had eaten his dinner alone. Bear, who usually joined him when he was at home, had been out on one of his unmentionable escapades.

“Quite a crowd here today,” Devlin said, tilting his head toward the other men in the room.

“It’s always like this when the Season starts. Every last gentleman in the
ton
comes here to meet old acquaintances and exchange news and gossip.”

As a servant passed their table, Devlin ordered two glasses of wine, while Rake lit a cigar and leaned farther back in the comfortable armchair. Neither of them spoke until after the servant had returned with their wine and then left them again in their dark corner.

“I think Penelope is in love with me,” Rake said in a voice whose uncharacteristic squeaks and trembles made it clear he hadn’t gotten over the shock yet.

“Is it a problem?” Devlin asked. “I thought the girl was like family to you already.”

Rake sat up. “That’s just it. She’s been around my legs for eighteen years, and not once have I thought of her as anything more than Fanny’s friend, or an annoying little sister. But these last months…”

He leaned back again and puffed on his cigar, obviously more upset about the whole thing than he should have been, if he truly thought of Penelope as merely a little sister.

Devlin hid a smile. Rake was already caught in Penelope’s sweet web and had not a clue about it. He sent a thought of sympathy to the poor girl, who had an impossible mission ahead of her. It wouldn’t be easy to make Rake give up his bachelor ways and instead settle for being a husband and a father.

The thought of becoming a husband brought him back to his own situation.

“Your family left the picnic before I had a chance to say goodbye.”

Rake snorted. “As we were among the last ones leaving, I don’t think your missed chance to drool all over Fanny was because of us. I would rather say it was because you didn’t come forward, although she stood there moping over not seeing you anywhere.”

Devlin lit up. “Did she mope?”

Rake rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, please save me from this. Don’t make me talk about things only women find a pleasure in discussing.”

Devlin didn’t like the reprimand and would have asked more but saw it would be to no use. Rake had no intention of saying more about what his niece did or did not say or do.

“It was that awful Lord Nester who more or less pushed me inside their carriage when he learnt I had arrived in a paid hack,” Devlin admitted with a shudder. “I had to sit beside Charmaine, who ‘happened’ to bump into me at least twenty times during the short ride. There are few bends on the way from Green Park to Grosvenor Square, and yet the poor girl was thrown around the carriage. Your Penelope—”

“She is not
my
Penelope!”

Devlin looked patronizingly at him, and this time it was Rake’s turn to fume.

“Anyway, Penelope tried to converse with me about the weather and other neutral topics, but her old man kept probing about my fortune. He wanted to know how vast it was, and enlightened me on how good it was for me to have so much money as a safety. He even mentioned how he wished his daughters would marry someone with a large fortune, and pointed out that I wasn’t married.”

Rake laughed, as he had no problem imagining Lord Nester ranting on about money and marriage.