Fascination -and- Charmed (49 page)

“Nowhere,” Pippa said in a small voice, thoroughly miserable now. As soon as she’d first looked at Calum Innes, she’d found it impossible to think exclusively of anything or anyone else. “He simply asked me to dance and I agreed.”

“Hmph. I can’t imagine
what
you were thinking of, I must say.”

“Not wise, I know, but I just didn’t think. And it was a perfectly decorous dance, after…” Her voice trailed off. The waltz had definitely
not
been particularly decorous.
Thank goodness!
she wanted to shout. Thank goodness for a man so confident that he made her feel confident. Thank goodness for a man who’d made her forget she was clumsy. Thank goodness for a man who
looked
strong and
felt
strong and who had about him an air of purpose that had nothing to do with self-importance.

“Etienne must be made accountable for his behavior,” the dowager remarked. “For all our sakes, he simply
must
stop keeping company with that—” She stopped abruptly.

Pippa didn’t dare say what she thought, which was that the Duke of Franchot and Lady Hoarville seemed well matched and that she’d be happy to give them her blessing. Oh, if only Papa would simply
give
the wretched Franchots a path across Chauncey land to the port, and a right to use it
without
making marriage to Pippa the asking price, for goodness’ sake. She worried the strings of her reticule. She had never seen the dowager duchess so upset. Why, in the four weeks since Papa had deposited Pippa at the Franchots’ Town home, the dowager duchess had never spoken a harsh word about her grandson—until tonight.

“Such a bother,” Pippa muttered, and was grateful when the old lady showed no sign of having heard.

The coach ground to a halt before Franchot House, and the footmen leaped nimbly from their posts to place the steps, open the door and hand down the dowager and Pippa.

The butler admitted them to the building, saying in hushed tones, “Good evening, Your Grace. My lady. So early? I trust there has been no difficulty?”

“No difficulty at all,” the dowager declared.

Their evening slippers rustled on black-and-white tiles in a marble vestibule lined with Franchot family busts, each one ensconced in a blue-enameled alcove.

“Very well, then,” the dowager said, snapping the fingers of her gloves free, one by one. “It is a lady’s place to make the best of it, don’t y’know.”

“Yes,” Pippa agreed softly, knowing without being told that the second “it” referred to her future husband. “Papa alluded to that being the case. Such a bother.”

The dowager duchess gave Pippa one of her bemused stares before saying, “Yes. Well, then, you’d best go to your bed. One hopes that impossible maid your father supplied will have had the sense to await you.”

“Nelly is very satisfactory,” Pippa said, not caring that she sounded as defensive as she felt. “Papa always gives deep thought to matters involving my welfare.”

“As you say. I shall appeal to Etienne’s finer nature. Things will progress tolerably well then, I’m sure.”

Pippa was not sure. Pippa was suddenly deeply anxious. “Does this mean the wedding may occur sooner than expected?” She held her breath.

“Not a bit of it!” The woman’s exasperated breath sounded explosive in the quiet house. “That would be the end. All the tongues in London would wag.”

“They would?”

“They would think you—” The dowager cleared her throat. “There are still many matters upon which I must instruct you. Yes, well, then…Yes, many things. It is unfortunate that you grew up without close female relations, but I shall not shirk the unpleasant duties that befall me. I shall certainly not shirk them, since the future of the Franchots is at stake.”

Before Pippa could ask if so ominous a statement referred to anything other than the importance of her dowry, the dowager touched her cheek lightly and turned to climb the stairs. Pippa waited a discreet time to allow her future in-law to ascend to her apartments—on the floor above Pippa’s—then ran lightly upstairs and along the corridor to the bedroom that was too cold and too elegant for her taste.

Nelly Bumstead all but capered in her excitement at Pippa’s return. Smaller than her mistress and fair, with brilliant gray eyes, she shot up from a window vantage point of the street and plucked Pippa’s satin reticule from her wrist.

“You need not have waited up for me, Nelly,” Pippa said.

“Oh, go on with you, my lady.” Nelly’s broad, North Country vowels were warm and comfortably familiar to Pippa’s ear. “I’d as soon cut off me own head as not be waitin’ when you got back from that ball. Exciting, was it?”

Pippa sighed and allowed herself to be divested of her velvet cape. “All a lot of bother,” she said.

“Oh, go on with you, my lady. Surely there was a crush of the quality.” Nelly bobbed in front of Pippa to look directly into her face. “And lots of lovely gentlemen? Were there lovely red uniforms and gold braid and such? I thought when I came to you as there’d be all sorts of fancy affairs t’see, but—”

“My father has always been quiet,” Pippa said, and thought “preoccupied” would be more factual. “Since my mother died, that is. When she was alive, Dowanhill was filled with laughter much of the time. Papa has told me so.”

“Aye, I know,” Nelly said, sounding anything but mollified. “Me own mam told how Dowanhill used to be the liveliest estate in all Yorkshire. D’you suppose there’ll be more goin’ on at that high-and-mighty”— Nelly covered her mouth and ducked her head—”I mean, at the duke’s castle? I only wondered because he’s hardly at home here in London.”

“I have no idea what the duke’s habits are at Franchot Castle,” Pippa said. She did know that she wished she never had to find out. “His lands are beautiful—as beautiful as our Cornish property, and much larger, of course. We are neighbors there, I suppose. When Mama was alive we went to Cloudsmoor every summer. After…Well, since then, we’ve rarely visited Cornwall and we have never kept social company with the Franchots.” How odd that statement sounded, when the two families had connections reaching back for centuries.

“So you do know the countryside there, my lady,” Nelly said.

“Quite well,” Pippa agreed. “I always enjoyed exploring the wild hills around Cloudsmoor. But I do wish we could return to Dowanhill,” she added, without having intended to say such a thing.

“Oh, my lady,” Nelly said, and her eyes clouded with worry. “Come and sit by the fire. I’ll take off those slippers and rub your feet. You always like that.”

The room was done in rose tones, which Pippa liked well enough. She did not like the soaring crown canopy on the bed that made her feel as if she were lying at the bottom of a tower, or the stiffly upholstered chairs and gilt tables that did not encourage one to relax at all. Nevertheless, she did as Nelly suggested and sat in a wing chair near the fire.

“Lady Justine brought you a present,” Nelly said. She nodded at a table to one side of the chair. “Said to tell you she hopes you won’t think her forward in giving you something she made herself.”

“Oh.” Pippa picked up a miniature fashion doll with a rosy china face and black hair gathered into ringlets above each ear.

“Not the doll, of course,” Nelly said. “She didn’t make that, but she dressed it for you. Lady Justine said to explain as she saw the gown in Ackermann’s Repository and she thinks you’d look lovely in one just like it.”

Nelly paused for breath, and Pippa exclaimed over the wonderful detail of the perfectly fashioned clothing. “This is the new poppy color,” she said of the India muslin gown. “The gold lace trim is exquisite. I should
love
such a gown.” And the dowager duchess would go into the vapors at the idea of Pippa’s wearing anything so daringly modish.

“You’d look a treat in it, too,” Nelly said with the rush of loyalty Pippa had already come to love. “With your black hair and white skin, you’d be as pretty as a picture.”

Pippa smiled shyly and touched the doll’s gold-and-poppy-colored crepe turban and examined the tiny pearls Justine’s nimble fingers had placed as earrings. “Lady Justine is clever,” she said and sighed. “And kind. I hope I can be a friend to her.”

“You’ve a heart of gold, my lady,” Nelly said. “There’s not a body alive as wouldn’t be proud to have you as a friend.”

Would Calum Innes be proud to have her as a friend? Pippa shook her head and cradled the doll in the crook of her arm.

Nelly lifted her mistress’s feet and set them on a small stool. “I expect you’ve fair danced your feet off at that ball,” she said, removing the beige satin slippers the dowager had chosen to match the gown Pippa so disliked. “You’ll have been glad Her Grace arranged for that barley-brain of a dancing instructor to come and teach you the steps and such.”

“Yes,” Pippa said distractedly. “Not that he’s made me less clumsy.”

“Go on with you, my lady,” Nelly said. “If you occasionally knock a thing or two over, it’s because you’re nervous, naught else. I just know you enjoyed the ball.”

Pippa could not begin to explain to practical, if romantic, Nelly that she was lonely and homesick and that her heart ached, not for London balls, but for the gardens of Dowanhill, where she’d learned to fill the solitary years of her young life and where she had created her own world.

“Were the dresses ever so lovely, my lady?”

“Ever so,” Pippa said.

Nelly sighed hugely and ran a hand over thick blond hair that never seemed to want to remain where it was pinned. “And the gentlemen were lovely, too?”

“You are altogether too concerned with gentlemen,” Pippa observed, but kindly.

“I know.” Nelly smiled and her pretty face glowed. “I’m glad I’ve my dreams for company. As long as you’ve your dreams, you’re never lonely or disappointed, I always say. Of course, you don’t need dreams, because your life’s going to be a fairy tale, my lady.”

How could a large, angry-looking man who clearly preferred the company of another female provide Pippa with a fairy-tale life, or even with a moderately pleasant one? “I think dreams are the best,” she said. “Dreams are your own, and if you dream when you’re awake, you’ve got some control over them.”

Nelly, kneeling before Pippa, paused in her firm massage of her mistress’s feet. “D’you dream, too, then? You sound for all the world like you know how.”

“I dream,” Pippa agreed, and remembered how Calum Innes’s big, firm hand had felt at her waist.

“Did you dance every dance, then? Of course you did.”

“I danced once,” Pippa replied before she could stop herself.

“Only once?”
Nelly dropped Pippa’s foot unceremoniously onto the stool.
“Once?
Whatever did you do the rest of the time? I’d have thought the duke would keep you floating around the floor all night, just so he could show you off.”

Pippa smiled and impulsively leaned over to kiss Nelly’s cheek. The maid looked so taken aback, Pippa was embarrassed.

“Perhaps the duke wasn’t feeling himself,” Nelly suggested, resuming her massage of Pippa’s feet. “Is he lovely to dance with?”

“I don’t know.”

Again Pippa’s foot was dropped. “Y’don’t know?”

“I’ve never danced with him.”

“But you said you danced with him
once.”

Heat began building in Pippa’s cheeks. “I said I danced once. I didn’t say it was with the duke.”

Nelly sat back on her heels and regarded Pippa with open fascination. “You danced with someone else?” she whispered. “Another
man?
”

Pippa flipped a hand. “It was nothing.”

“Did you know him before?”

“No.”

“No?
You danced with a man you didn’t know? Who was he?”

The warmth in Pippa’s face spread steadily over her entire body. “I told you, I don’t know. And it isn’t important. We won’t meet again.” She felt a slow, cheerless turning about her heart.

“You must have found out his name.” Nelly drew up her shoulders. “Not that it’s any of my business. Not that I ought to ask at all, even.”

“Calum Innes.” Pippa stared into the fire. “Of Scotland, I think.”

“Of Scotland? Scottish gentlemen have such lovely voices, don’t they?”

“Lovely,” Pippa agreed. “It suits him. It’s warm and low and serious. But he laughs so beautifully.” Her father had been the only man in her life, and he’d never been given to laughter.

“What kind of dance did you dance?”

“A waltz.”

Nelly gasped and her hands flew to her cheeks. “Go on with you. You danced a
waltz
with a man you don’t know?
My lady!
”

Pippa frowned. Was that so very shocking? “Yes,” she said. “He is a gentleman and the dance was delightful.” That explained
that.

“And you’d do it again,” Nelly said with awe. “I can see it in your eyes. Is it as fast and free as they say—the waltz?”

“Very fast and completely free.”

“But you’ll not be seeing the gentleman again.”

“Never.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I’m sure,” Pippa said, remembering the thunderous expression on the Duke of Franchot’s face. “Quite sure.”

“Calum’s a lovely name.”

“Lovely.”

“I expect he was tall, my lady.”

“Very tall.”

“And dark?”

“His hair is dark red. Or perhaps exceedingly dark brown, but a little red when the light touches it.”

Nelly sighed. “You’re going to dream about him.”

“Yes…
No.
Absolutely not!”

“Of course not,” Nelly agreed quickly. “Why would you dream of a strange Scotsman when you’ve a dashing English duke about to make you his duchess?”

Why indeed?

“I fancy gentlemen with shoulders that don’t need any padding myself,” Nelly announced.

Calum’s shoulders were broad and muscular. “Mmm. He wore a black evening coat. Very plain, but of perfect cut and fit. His shoulders are so…” She drifted for an instant. “Yes, his chest is also very nice.”

“Lovely,” Nelly said. “I can almost see him. Does his hair curl?”

“A little. Just enough. When he laughs, dimples show beneath his cheekbones. His face is lean and full of wit.”