Almost Heaven (7 page)

“Really?”
he mocked, watching her in speculative silence. It hit her then, what the girls had said about his questionable parentage, and she felt faint with shame for thoughtlessly speaking of titles to someone who might have been cheated of his own. The palms of her hands grew damp; she rubbed them against her knees, realized what she was doing and hastily stopped. Then she cleared her throat fanning herself vigorously. “We are all here for the Season,” she finished lamely.

The cool amber eyes warmed suddenly with a mixture of amusement and sympathy, and there was a smile in his deep voice as he asked, “And are you enjoying yourselves?”

“Yes, very much,” Elizabeth said with a sigh of relief that he was finally participating a little in the conversation. “Miss Granger, though you couldn’t see her at all well from here, is excessively pretty, with the sweetest manners imaginable. She has dozens of beaux.”

“All titled, I imagine?”

Still thinking he might be longing for a ducal title he’d missed having, Elizabeth bit her lip and nodded in sublime discomfort. “I’m afraid so,” she admitted abjectly, and to her astonishment,
that
made him grin – a slow, dazzling smile swept across his bronzed features, and its effect on his face was almost as dramatic as its effect on Elizabeth’s nervous system. Her heart gave a hard bump, and she suddenly stood up, feeling unaccountably jumpy. “Miss Jamison is lovely also,” she said, reverting to the discussion of her friends and smiling uncertainly at him.

“How many contenders have there been for
her
hand?” Elizabeth finally realized he was teasing and his irreverent view of what everyone else regarded as a matter of the utmost gravity startled an irrepressible, relieved chuckle from her.

“I have it on the best authority,” she replied, trying to match his grave, teasing tone, “that her beaux have paraded to her papa in record numbers.”

His eyes warmed with laughter, and as she stood there, smiling back at him, her tension and nervousness evaporated. Suddenly and inexplicably she felt quite as if they were old friends sharing the same secret irreverence – only he was bold enough to admit his feelings, while she still tried to repress her own,

“And what about you?”

“What about me?”

“How many offers have you had?”

A bubble of startled laughter escaped her, and she shook her head. To have told him proudly about her friends’ achievements was acceptable, but to boast about her own was beyond all bounds, and she had no doubt he knew it. “Now
that.”
she admonished with laughing severity, “was really too bad of you.”

“I apologize,” he said, inclining his head in a mocking little bow; the smile still lurking at his mouth.

Darkness had fallen over the garden, and Elizabeth realized she ought to go inside, yet she lingered, somehow reluctant to leave the enveloping intimacy of the garden. Clasping her hands lightly behind her back, she gazed up at the stars beginning to twinkle in the night sky. “This is my favorite time of day,” she admitted softly. She glanced sideways at him to see if he was bored with the topic, but he’d turned slightly and was looking up at the sky as if he, too, found something of interest there.

She searched for the Big Dipper and located it. “Look,” she said, nodding toward a particularly bright light in the sky. “There’s Venus. Or is it Jupiter? I’m never completely certain.”

“It’s Jupiter. Over there is Ursa Major.”

Elizabeth chuckled and shook her head, pulling her gaze from the sky and sending him a wry, sideways glance. “It may look like the Great Bear to you and everyone else, but to me all the constellations just look like a big bunch of scattered stars. In the spring I can find Cassiopeia, but not because it looks like a lion to me, and in the autumn I can pick out Arcturus, but how they ever saw an archer in all that clutter is quite beyond my comprehension. Do you suppose there are people up there anywhere?”

He turned his head, regarding her with fascinated amusement. “What do
you
think?”

“I think there are. In fact, I think it’s rather arrogant to assume that out of all those thousands of stars and planets up there,
we
are the only ones who exist. It seems as arrogant as the old belief that the earth is the center of the entire universe and everything revolves around us. Although people didn’t exactly
thank
Galileo for disproving it, did they? Imagine being hauled before the Inquisition and forced to renounce what you absolutely knew – and could prove was right!”

“When did debutantes start studying astronomy?” he asked as Elizabeth stepped over to the bench to retrieve her wineglass.

“I’ve had years and years to read,” she admitted ingenuously. Unaware of the searching intensity of his gaze, she picked up her wineglass and turned back to him. “I really must go inside now and change for the evening.”

He nodded in silence, and Elizabeth started to walk forward and step past him. Then she changed her mind and hesitated, remembering her friends’ wagers and how much they were counting on her. “I have a rather odd request a favor to ask of you,” she said slowly, praying that he felt, as she did, that they’d enjoyed a very brief and very pleasant sort of friendship out there. Smiling uncertainly into his inscrutable eyes, she said, “Could you possibly for reasons I can’t explain . . .” she trailed off, suddenly and acutely embarrassed.

“What is the favor?”

Elizabeth expelled her breath in a rush. “Could you possibly ask me to dance this evening?” He looked neither shocked nor tattered by her bold request and she watched his firmly molded lips form his answer.

“No.”

Elizabeth was mortified and shocked by his refusal, but she was even more stunned by the unmistakable regret she’d heard in his voice and glimpsed on his face. For a long moment she searched his shuttered features, and then the sound of laughing voices from somewhere nearby broke the spell. Trying to retreat from a predicament into which she should never have put herself in the first place, Elizabeth picked up her skirts, intending to leave. Making a conscious effort to keep all emotion from her voice, she said with calm dignity, “Good evening, Mr. Thornton.”

He flipped the cheroot away and nodded. “Good evening, Miss Cameron.” And then he left.

The rest of her friends had gone upstairs to change their gowns for the evening’s dancing, but the moment Elizabeth entered the rooms set aside for them the conversation and laughter stopped abruptly leaving Elizabeth with a fleeting, uneasy feeling that they had been laughing and talking about
her.

“Well?” Penelope asked with an expectant laugh. “Don’t keep us in suspense. Did you make an impression?”

The uneasy sensation of being the brunt of some secret joke left Elizabeth as she looked about at their smiling, open faces. Only Valerie looked a little cool and aloof.

“I made an impression, to be sure,” Elizabeth said with an embarrassed smile, “but ‘twas not a particularly favorable one.”

“He remained by your side for ever so long,” another girl prodded her. “We were watching from the far end of the garden. What did you talk about?”

Elizabeth felt a warmth creep through her veins and steal up her cheeks as she remembered his handsome, tanned face and the way his smile had glinted and softened his features as he looked at her. “I don’t actually remember what we spoke of.” That much was true. All she could remember was the odd way her knees had shaken and her heart had beaten when he looked at her.

“Well, what was he like?”

“Handsome,” Elizabeth said a little dreamily before she could catch herself. “Charming. He has a beautiful voice.”

“And, no doubt,” Valerie said with a thread of sarcasm, “he’s even now trying to discover your brother’s whereabouts so that he can dash over there and apply for your hand.”

That notion was so absurd that Elizabeth would have burst out laughing if she weren’t so embarrassed and oddly let down by the way he’d left her in the garden. “My brother’s evening is safe from any interruption in that quarter, I can promise you. In fact,” she added with a rueful smile, “I fear you’ve all lost your quarterly allowances as well, for there isn’t the slightest chance he’ll ask me to dance.” With an apologetic wave she left to change her gown for the ball that was already underway on the third floor.

Once Elizabeth had gained the privacy of her bedchamber, however, the breezy smile she’d worn in front of the other girls faded to an expression of thoughtful bewilderment. Wandering over to the bed, she sat down, idly tracing the golden threads of the rose brocade coverlet with the tip of her finger, trying to understand the feelings she’d experienced in the presence of Ian Thornton.

Standing with him in the garden, she’d felt frightened and exhilarated at the same time – drawn to him against her very will by a compelling magnetism that he seemed to radiate. Out there, she’d felt almost driven to win his approval, alarmed when she’d failed, joyous when she’d succeeded. Even now, just the memory of the way he smiled, of the intimacy of his heavy-lidded gaze, made her feel hot and cold all over.

Music drifted from the ballroom on another floor, and Elizabeth finally shook herself from her reverie and rang for Berta to help her dress.

“What do you think?” she asked Berta a half hour later as she pirouetted before the mirror for the inspection of her nursemaid-turned-lady’s maid.

Berta twisted her plump hands as she stood back, nervously surveying her glowing young mistress’s more sophisticated appearance, unable to suppress her affectionate smile. Elizabeth’s hair had been caught up into an elegant chignon at the crown with soft tendrils framing her face, and her mother’s sapphire and diamond eardrops sparkled at her ears.

Unlike Elizabeth’s other gowns, which were nearly all pastel and high-waisted, this one was a sapphire blue, by far the most unusual and alluring of them all. Panels of blue silk drifted from a flattened bow upon her left shoulder and fell straight to the floor, leaving her other shoulder bare. Despite the fact that the gown was little more than a straight tube of silk, it flattered her figure, emphasizing her breasts and hinting at the narrow waist beneath. “I think,” Berta said finally, “it’s a wonder Mrs. Porter ordered such a gown for you. It’s not a bit like your others.”

Elizabeth tossed her a jaunty, conspiratorial smile as she pulled on the sapphire gloves that encased her arms to above the elbows. “It’s the only one Mrs. Porter didn’t choose,” she admitted. “And Lucinda hasn’t seen it either.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

Elizabeth turned back to the mirror, frowning as she surveyed her appearance. “The other girls are barely seventeen, but I’ll be eighteen in a few months. Besides,” she explained, picking up her mother’s sapphire and diamond bracelet and fastening it over the glove on her left wrist, ‘‘as I tried to tell Mrs. Porter, it’s a great waste to spend so much for gowns that won’t be at all suitable for me next year or the year after. I’ll be able to wear this one even when I’m twenty.”

Berta rolled her eyes and shook her head, setting the streamers on her cap bobbing. “I doubt your Viscount Mondevale will want you wearin’ the same gown more’n twice, let alone until you wear it out,” she said as she bent over to straighten the hem on the blue gown.

CHAPTER 5

Berta’s reminder that she was virtually betrothed had a distinctly sobering effect on Elizabeth, and the mood stayed with her as she walked toward the flight of steps leading down to the ballroom. The prospect of confronting Mr. Ian Thornton no longer made her pulse race, and she refused to regret his refusal to dance with her, or even to think of him. With natural grace she started down to the ballroom, where couples were dancing, but most seemed to be clustered about in groups, talking and laughing.

A few steps from the bottom she paused momentarily to scan the guests, wondering where her friends had gathered. She saw them only a few yards away, and when Penelope lifted her hand in a beckoning wave Elizabeth nodded and smiled.

The smile still on her lips, she started to look away, then froze as her gaze locked with a pair of startled amber eyes. Standing with a group of men near the foot of the staircase, Ian Thornton was staring at her, his wineglass arrested halfway to his lips. His bold gaze swept from the top of her shining blond hair, over her breasts and hips, right down to her blue satin slippers, then it lifted abruptly to her face, and there was a smile of frank admiration gleaming in his eyes. As if to confirm it, he cocked an eyebrow very slightly and lifted his glass in the merest subtle gesture of a toast before he drank his wine.

Somehow Elizabeth managed to keep her expression serene as she continued gracefully down the stairs, but her treacherous pulse was racing double-time, and her mind was in complete confusion. Had any other man looked at her or behaved to her the way Ian Thornton just had, she would have been indignant, amused, or both. Instead the smile in his eyes the mocking little toast had made her feel as if they were sharing some private, intimate conversation, and she had returned his smile.

Lord Howard, who was Viscount Mondevale’s cousin, was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. An urbane man with pleasing manners, he had never been one of her beaux, but he had become something of a friend, and he’d always done his utmost to further Viscount Mondevale’s suit with her. Beside him was Lord Everly, one of Elizabeth’s most determined suitors, a rash, handsome young man who, like Elizabeth, had inherited his title and lands as a youth. Unlike Elizabeth, he’d inherited a fortune along with them. “I say!” Lord Everly burst out, offering Elizabeth his arm. “We heard you were here. You’re looking ravishing tonight.”