Days of Rakes and Roses (5 page)

He longed for that fire to warm him for the rest of his life; at last he was prepared to fight to make that longing reality.

As he stared at his childhood friend, his voice emerged steady and sure. “I will.”

Cam raised his brandy toward Simon in a toast. “In that case, may the best man win.”

*  *  *

Even as she told Simon Metcalf to stay away, Lydia knew that she wouldn’t be able to avoid him before her wedding. What she hadn’t expected was meeting the miscreant on a daily basis over the next week. Cam and his childhood friend attended most of the same social events she did, curse them. She loved her brother dearly, but after constantly seeing him with the knave who had once seduced her into stupidity, she wanted to hurl a brick at his head. And a second, bigger brick at Simon.

“Those two are demmed inseparable,” Sir Richard Harmsworth drawled from where he lounged picturesquely beside her at the Plaistead ball.

Richard had engaged Lydia for the contredanse, but she’d asked if he minded sitting out and they’d found two chairs in an alcove. It was a relief to relax her guard in an old friend’s company. With Richard, she needn’t smile and pretend to a gaiety she didn’t feel. She hadn’t been sleeping well. Waiting for Simon to do something outrageous left her jumpier than a cat on a hot stove.

Nor did it improve her mood that so far he’d behaved well within polite limits. Not that Simon Metcalf’s interest in the Duke of Sedgemoor’s sister had gone unnoticed. All week she’d deflected questions about his pursuit with pointed reminders that she was no longer on the marriage market.

At social gatherings, Grenville usually left her to her own devices. Not that she minded. She’d never wanted a man who hovered over her. Tonight, blast him, Grenville had hovered.

A few minutes ago, she’d sent him to fetch her a lemonade. She hoped navigating through the throng would delay his return. His behavior lately offered worrying hints that a jealous man might lurk inside Grenville’s phlegmatic shell. One reason she’d accepted Grenville’s proposal after rejecting earlier offers was her reluctance to commit herself to a possessive husband. Perhaps she’d been mistaken in assuming Grenville felt no need to exert his authority over the woman he married.

She didn’t like second guessing herself. Confound Grenville. And confound that pest Simon Metcalf for making her doubt her decision.

At her side, Richard was still expounding his grievances. “I can’t take two steps without tripping over that dashed Metcalf fellow. By Jove, he’s ubiquitous.”

“Are you jealous of my brother’s new bosom bow?”

Lydia’s tart question made Sir Richard stare at her in aristocratic surprise. The deceptively lazy blue eyes sharpened on her face. “Perhaps you’d prefer the decorative Mr. Metcalf to devote his attention to you instead of to Cam.”

“Don’t be absurd,” she retorted, closing her fan with an audible snap.

“Yes, I see that I’m absurd,” her brother’s closest friend—at least until the advent of that wretch Simon—responded with a twitch of his lips. He reached across and gently untangled her fingers from where they tortured her fan’s silk cord. “Always devilish appealing to the ladies, Metcalf was.”

Lydia flushed. “I’d forgotten you knew Simon before he left for the Continent.”

“We were at Oxford together. He was good company then. He’s good company now. In small doses.”

Richard, whose birth was as shrouded in scandal as Cam’s, played a good game of convincing the world that he had no thought beyond the cut of his coat. But Lydia knew better. He was kind, he was cleverer than he revealed, and he was gifted with surprising perception.

Long acquaintance and genuine liking made her speak honestly. “You must know that Cam doesn’t approve of my engagement. Simon’s arrival is part of a plot to make me jilt Grenville.”

Richard glanced across to where Grenville badgered some political cronies, Lydia’s lemonade clasped forgotten in one hand. “You’re capable of making your own decisions.”

She smiled gratefully at the elegant blond man. “Thank you. Now will you tell my brother that? He might listen to you. I’ve scolded him until I’m blue in the face, but he just shrugs as if I’m talking nonsense.”

“I don’t think it’s your brother with whom you’re really angry,” Richard said quietly, standing to snag two glasses of champagne from a passing footman.

God give her strength. Everyone had an opinion on her marriage. Her brief charity with Sir Richard evaporated into irritation as she accepted the proffered glass. “I think you should mind your own business.”

Richard laughed softly. “And I don’t think you’re angry at me either.” His expression enigmatic, he studied her oblivious betrothed. “I wonder if Sir Grenville guesses how significant the competition is.”

She cast Richard a look of dislike. “There is no competition. In a week, I’m going to marry Grenville, then I’ll have great satisfaction in showing you all how happy I am.”

Richard raised his glass to her. “More power to your right arm, Lady Lydia.”

For all her annoyance with Richard and every other male of her acquaintance, she couldn’t help smiling. “Hear, hear.”

But as the ball proceeded, bravado faded, even though for once Simon seemed content to keep his distance. She should be happy about that, but illogically, his neglect made her edgier than his attentions did. If only she could convince herself not to notice where he was and who he spoke to.

Much as she strove to avoid him, at one stage of the night, the person Simon spoke to was her. Although at least he had the good taste not to ask her to dance. He hadn’t asked her to dance since that acrimonious exchange at the ball to celebrate her engagement.

She stood near the orchestra with Richard and two of the ladies who worked on her charitable committees. Cam and Simon approached and immediately caused a feminine flutter around her. Even Lydia had to admit that when Cam, Simon, and Richard stood together, it was difficult to decide who was the most striking.

The dance before supper was about to begin. Grenville would come and find her any moment. It turned out that Cam and Richard were engaged to dance with her friends. Both were dashing widows of the kind her brother and his cronies pursued with solely sinful intent.

For one moment, Lydia stepped back from her all-encompassing troubles and contemplated the three men, all tall, all dressed in impeccable tailoring, and all handsome enough to have stepped down from Olympus to dazzle mortal women.

Odd that each of them had reached their thirties without marrying.

Of course, Cam would marry as his duty to the dukedom. She suspected he already cast his eye over the ton’s unmarried ladies of suitable rank and bearing. He’d choose a bride as he did everything else, with his head not his heart. Which made his dislike of her engagement to Grenville even more contradictory.

She imagined that Richard, tarred with scandal, would also choose an exemplary bride. One in the first stare of fashion if she meant to compete in any way with her husband’s elegance.

In light of his fortune and remarkable looks, Lydia guessed that most women would overlook Richard’s dubious background. Everyone knew that he was a bastard, for all that he’d inherited the Harmsworth title. He liked to pretend he didn’t care, but she had a suspicion that the pride he hid so well rankled at the gossip. Occasionally she’d wondered if the signs of repressed temper she’d read in him might explode into defiance.

If that happened, life could become very interesting indeed.

And then there was Simon. Simon who she also supposed would marry sometime.

“Just who are you plotting to kill?” Simon whispered under cover of the flirtations entertaining the others.

Lydia started and blushed, and cursed that she did. The color in her cheeks betrayed that much as she wanted to treat Simon as a stranger, it was impossible. How he’d laugh if he knew that she indeed wanted to murder someone. The faceless, nameless, thieving, magnificently lucky woman who would become his wife.

How he’d laugh, when right now all Lydia wanted to do was bawl. Why did he still wield this power over her? What was she doing, even thinking of him like this when she was pledged to a respectable man who had never faced down a whisper of scandal?

“Perhaps you should be feeling a little vulnerable right now,” she hissed back.

Instead of reacting with pique or anger, he flung his head back and laughed as if he found her a source of untold delight. And as Lydia stared in helpless enchantment at the man she’d loved and lost, she felt her heart crack into jagged pieces.

*  *  *

The ball had been a crush so Lydia was drooping with tiredness by the time Cam’s coach arrived to take them both home. If only there was the slightest chance that she’d sleep tonight. At this rate, she’d look an absolute hag for her wedding. Grenville would probably take one peek at her when she came up the aisle and run for cover.

Cam handed her into the carriage before following her inside the vehicle. He shut the door after him and tapped the ceiling with his cane to bid the driver to roll on. With a heavy sigh, Lydia subsided onto the padded bench in the darkened cabin. Then some charge in the air made her sit up straight, every nerve prickling.

“Simon.” Her voice was flat with displeasure.

Whenever he was near, her skin tightened with an awareness that she wanted to deny but couldn’t. Even before she’d detected the patch of shadow on the seat opposite, she’d sensed his presence.

“Don’t lose your temper, sis.” From next to her, Cam grabbed her hand where it curled into a fist in her filmy yellow skirts.

“I have no intention of losing my temper,” she said with icy precision, breaking Cam’s hold. “I assume we’re going straight home. I can endure Mr. Metcalf’s company that long. With my brother as chaperon, even Grenville couldn’t object.”

“How very sporting of you, Lydia.” Simon’s calm amusement made her want to cuff him.

“I thought you might like a chance to catch up with each other.” Her haughty brother never sounded nervous. He sounded nervous right now.

And so the worm should. Simon wasn’t the only person she wanted to slap. How she wished Cam hadn’t got this bee in his bonnet about reuniting her with her childhood sweetheart.

“I believe Mr. Metcalf and I have already said everything that we need to,” she said in the same frigid voice, twining her hands in her lap in an attempt to quash her violent impulses.

A bristling pause descended, filled with the faint creaking of the coach and the cry of a pie vendor a few streets away. As the carriage broke free of the traffic outside the Plaisteads’ house, it gathered speed.

“We need to talk.” Simon’s self-assured baritone fell on her ears like poison.

Her sparking temper incinerated all intentions to maintain a frosty silence. “I don’t think so,” she snapped. “Although I appreciate the chance to demand that both of you end this childish campaign immediately.”

Cam turned toward her in the darkness. “Lydia, Grenville’s not—”

“Cam, old man, it’s not the time,” Simon said quietly. “Leave it.”

To Lydia’s surprise, her lordly brother heeded his friend’s reprimand. “My apologies, Lydia. It’s not my place to interfere.” Before she could come to terms with this blatantly insincere comment, he knocked on the ceiling once more. The carriage lurched to a halt with a suddenness that made her snatch after the leather strap hanging by the window. “I hope you’ll forgive me.”

“Cam, what on earth are you doing?” Lydia asked, seriously worried now.

“Giving you two some privacy.” With a speed that left her gasping, he unlatched the door and leaped from the carriage.
“Bonne chance!”

He waved to the coachman to drive on and slammed the door behind him.

Chapter Four

“Cam is the utter limit,” Lydia growled.

The carriage wasn’t yet traveling fast enough for her to injure herself if she jumped out. While she had no wish to walk home unescorted, she was sure Cam would relent after he saw his sister tumble onto the open street. With an unsteady hand, she reached for the door.

Simon leaned across the well between the seats and caught her wrist before she could release the latch. The tingling warmth of his grip shocked her into stillness.

He wasn’t rough with her. If he had been, she’d have had no hesitation in shaking him off and pursuing her foolhardy plan. But his touch was tender as it slid upward to shape her bare arm beneath her drooping cashmere shawl. He’d removed his gloves, so the contact was skin to skin. She trembled with unwilling physical reaction. Heaven help her, the pleasure that seeped through her veins was forbidden but, oh, so alluring.

Simon’s hold tightened. “Wait.”

Just that. One word. No eloquent pleas for cooperation. No apologies. No excuses. And she, idiot that she was, found herself unable to throw off the restraint of that long-fingered hand. With every moment, the carriage picked up speed, putting escape further out of reach. Over the rattling of the wheels across the cobbles, she could hear the rasp of Simon’s breath. Light from outside flickered erratically over his face, lending him a demonic aspect. But she knew he’d never hurt her. Physically, at least.

She kept her tone firm, even as insidious heat crept from his hand along her arm, down through her chest to a heart that had lain frozen for ten unhappy years. “What do you intend, Simon? I can’t believe you mean to ravish me—not with my brother’s cooperation. Even for you, that’s a step too far.”