His Christmas Pleasure (4 page)

Or was it that my path was meant to cross yours? I think so. I think there is a strong bond between us. Something we have in common.”

“And what is that?” she demanded, surprised he felt the connection between them as well.

“Loneliness,” he answered, the truth of the word exposing her.

He saw. He knew. His knowledge made her feel vulnerable, naked. Flawed.

And it equally stripped him bare as well. She met his gaze, stunned by his honesty. He was like no other gentleman in this room—

“I have been looking for you everywhere,” a woman’s strident voice interrupted them, even as a gloved hand, rings on almost every finger, grabbed the barón’s arm and jerked him around, which was no small feat.

The barón was tall, muscular. His attacker was petite and one of the most lovely women Abby had ever seen.

She was also Carla, Lady Dobbins—a renowned poet, socially important hostess, and London’s reigning beauty.

Rubies hung from her ladyship’s ears and around her throat. Small stars fashioned out of diamonds pinned her dark tresses into artfully arranged curls, a style she’d set and was all the rage.

Her dress was made of a muslin so fine one could see straight through it to an undersheath, which had been dampened to hug her every curve. And she didn’t seem the least embarrassed that her nipples were boldly protruding against the thin material for everyone to ogle. Then again, her neckline was so low that the whole bounty of her chest appeared ready to overflow at any moment.

Abby caught herself tugging at her own modest decollete in discomfort.

“I have been here, my lady,” the barón said without enthusiasm. As he spoke, he took Abby’s arm as if to walk away.

Her ladyship blocked their path. “You knew I wanted to dance with you,”

she stated, her voice low but attracting attention all the same, judging from how quickly conversation stopped around them. People made no pretense about wanting to overhear what was being said.

That’s when Abby remembered what else she’d read in the papers about

“Baron V.” This was obviously the one they referred to as “the lovely Lady D,” the woman claimed to be his lover.

Abby took a step away from the barón. Now might be a good time to return to her parents, with or without his escort. There was a wildness in her ladyship’s eyes and a tension in her body Abby didn’t trust.

But her movement caught Lady Dobbins’s attention. Vivid blue eyes, the ones countless men had celebrated in poetry to her beauty, honed in on Abby with the intensity of a hawk seeking prey.

“This is what you think to replace me with?” Lady Dobbins murmured. Her lip curled.

“Not here, my lady,” the barón warned, steel in his low voice. “We have an audience. Let me escort Miss Montross back to her family, and then we will talk.”

But Lady Dobbins either didn’t hear him or didn’t care. “Montross?” she repeated. “The banker’s daughter? The one who was jilted? Oh, I see now why she was tossed aside. Good heavens, Andres, have you no eyes? I thought you Spaniards were lovers of beauty. Or have you lost your good taste?”

Abby wasn’t the only one stunned by the woman’s meanness. A collective gasp went up all around them, sending a burst of heat to Abby’s face—which only made her look more pathetic. The crowd’s sympathy aside, she could feel their eyes dissecting her every feature. Even the musicians had not lifted their instruments to play the next set.

The barón pulled Abby behind him. “Do you think you are the only beautiful woman here, my lady? You are wrong. Miss Montross has a beauty you could never hope to attain.”

“Beauty?” Her ladyship snorted her opinion. “You find beauty in ruddy cheeks and a button nose?”

The barón answered. “Also her youth—”

“She is not that young,” the countess lashed out. “She’s much younger than yourself, but I’m talking about her spirit. It is young. She’s a believer, Carla, something both you and I gave up long ago.”

“Because we are realists,” Lady Dobbins said in her own defense.

“Sophisticated.”

“And value nothing,” he agreed.

“I valued you.”

“And see where you are now?” His mark hit home.

Her ladyship drew back. She glanced at those around them as if just realizing she was creating a scene. A wiser woman would have retreated.

Lady Dobbins wasn’t wise. “All a woman has, all that is important about her, all that matters are her looks. You’ve made that very clear, Barón, with so many of us. Now it appears you have developed a taste for, well, something other than the sublime. For example, her hair reminds one of a curly, overripe carrot.”

“Her hair reflects her joy in life.”

“Natural or not, eh?” her ladyship said. “And, yes, I am older, but she is wrinkled. She’s almost as withered as a prune.”

“Those aren’t wrinkles,” he said with a sigh as if bored with the discussion.

“They are the lines left from laughter. And who wants a blank canvas? A man needs to know his woman can think and feel. A rose opens as it ages, becoming more fragrant, more full in blossom, more lovely with time. I see in Miss Montross’s face her strength of character. She meets life on her terms and doesn’t need to humiliate another to make herself important.”

Several heads around them nodded agreement. Most of those nodding were men.

Lady Dobbins’s chin shot up. “Character?” she quizzed. “What would you, of all men, know about character? You are a pretty boy, Barón. A charm. You haven’t done one meaningful thing in your life, and now you are holding up this silly, gap-toothed, flat-chested chit as a paragon for all of us to admire.

Look to yourself, my lord, before you chastise me.”

Abby did have a small gap between her two front teeth. It was a family trait.

Her mother and her cousin Corinne had gaps as well.

She wished the floor would open up and swallow her whole. She didn’t care what people thought of her chest, but that small separation between her two front teeth made her terribly self-conscious.

“Her smile is charming,” the barón said. “As for endowments, not all men like overripe melons, my lady. Especially amply displayed ones.”

“You did.”

Her words sucked the air out of the room for Abby. She’d tried not to think of the two of them together. She wanted to like the barón, and she didn’t like the countess … but he had.

Without breaking stride, he coolly answered, “My tastes have changed.”

He was defending her, but his words struck Abby as cruel. As male.

And everyone listening would infer that now she was his next conquest. It would be her name linked to his in the papers on the morrow. She could see it now. She would be referred to as “mysterious Miss Gap Tooth"—and she was ruined. She wasn’t a married woman whose husband obviously looked the other way. She already had enough rumors swirling around her.

Worse, Freddie’s father, the earl, could be smug in the knowledge that he’d saved his son from such infamy. Corinne would never find herself caught in such a scene as this. Corinne was perfect, sensible, dutiful.

Nor was Abby the only one hit by his words.

Lady Dobbins jerked, as if jolted with a shot of electricity. Had she truly thought she could stomp her satin-clad feet and a man like the barón would be contrite? Abby hadn’t known him long, but he didn’t strike her as a lapdog.

Her ladyship’s venom came out in physical violence. She slapped the barón, the action short, to the point, insulting. Then, ignoring the gasps of shock around her, Lady Dobbins sailed away, head high, the crowd shuffling back to let her pass.

There was a beat of assessing silence during which Abby assumed that most people were like herself—shocked beyond belief. And then came the low, agitated hum of conversation as word of the scene was passed from one pair of lips to another.

The barón turned to her, his silver eyes somber, as if he knew the cost of this scene to Abby. But she wasn’t in the mood for apologies. Her reputation—

indeed, her life—was now completely in a shambles with no hope for recovery. Freddie would never marry her and her father would be hard-pressed to find any husband for her.

“I am sorry,” the barón said, and Abby lost all sense.

Her hand flew through the air, powered by her frustration, her shame, and her fear.

Her slap was not as neat, concise, and ladylike as Lady Dobbins’s. It carried the full force of her turbulent emotions. Not only that, but she was a rather strong woman. The sound reverberated through the ballroom.

For a heartbeat, the world stopped.

Shocked by what she’d just done, Abby couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

Her angry finger marks reddened on his skin. He raised a hand to his jaw, frowning, angry, confused. He’d want answers—and she didn’t want to give them. Not here.

She took the only action open to her; she ran.

The crowd didn’t part for her. She had to shove her way through, heading for her father, the only refuge she had in the room. He met her halfway. He must have seen all, but once he put his arm around her and started escorting her toward the door, Abby didn’t care. Having him by her side gave her the bit more courage she needed to leave the ballroom.

Her mother was already standing by the door. “I’ve asked for our cloaks,” she informed them. She took Abby’s hand, and together her parents led her to the front door. Her father gave a vail to the footman, who left speedily to hail their coachman.

Abby’s father was a gruff man with shaggy red eyebrows under a thatch of curly, graying black hair. He claimed he was Scot although Abby and her brothers secretly thought his ancestry was from Ireland. It was difficult to tell, since he took great pains to speak the King’s proper English and expected as much from his children.

Banker Montross woke early in the morning, worked a full day, came home to a light supper and a reasonable bedtime. This ball was not his usual routine, and Abby had been both surprised and delighted he’d agreed to attend. In the past, he’d left escorting duties to her mother or one of her brothers if in town.

Her mother was an inch shorter than herself. The former Lady Catherine had been the most petite of the old duke of Banfield’s daughters, and the prettiest—another reason the gossips and her suitors had been so quick to savage her reputation when she’d defied her father and married a mere banker. Her thick, honey gold hair was turning silver, and her figure was still trim in spite of her having borne four children.

Abby didn’t draw a full breath until they were safely tucked in their coach and on their way home.

Her father broke the silence. “Damn them all to hell.”

“Heath,” her mother protested.

“I’m sorry, Cate, but this shouldn’t have happened, and it has made a sorry mess for our Abby. By the way, what did happen?” he demanded of his daughter. “I saw you dancing, looking for all the world like a happy poppet, and then the next thing I know, you slapped a man.” He didn’t wait for Abby’s explanation before announcing, “Once I have the two of you home, I’m returning to that ball. I’ll call that blackguard out. I’ll make him pay for his arrogance. Foreigners! They are overrunning London. Makes a good Englishman sick to his belly.”

“No, please don’t call him out,” Abby said.

Her mother echoed the sentiment. “You are too old for such nonsense, Heath.”

“And if anything happened to you, I will never forgive myself,” Abby claimed. “Please, Father, I want to forget this whole evening. It was a terrible night. I should never have gone out.”

“You can’t forget what has happened,” her father said, punctuating the air with his gloved finger. “I’ve endured slights from the aristocrats all my life, even as they ask me to manage their money and turn a profit for them. But I’ll be damned if some foreign nobby is going to insult my daughter. Now, what did he say to offend you so?”

“He said I was beautiful,” Abby answered. “In front of everyone.”

“See, Cate? I should boil him in oil—” Her father’s voice broke off as he digested what Abby had said. “He said what?”

“That I was more lovely than Lady Dobbins and that he likes the gap between my front teeth.” It hurt to even think about the scene. She didn’t know how she was going to appear in public again.

“And you slapped him for it?” her father asked, his confusion showing in a hint of brogue coming through his words.

“He didn’t say it because it is true.” Abby tried to explain the words tumbling out of her as she finally released her bottled tension. “He said it to put down Lady Dobbins, who was furious we were dancing because I think she’d wanted to dance with him but then she was rude and he was rude right back to her but it was me they were discussing and everyone was staring at me and thinking which one of them was right about me and Freddie was there and probably heard everything but it doesn’t matter because he is going to marry Corinne—” She abruptly changed the direction of her thoughts.

“Did you know this? Before we went to the ball this evening, did you know that Freddie was going to offer for Corinne?”

Her father stared at her, his brows raised, as if he’d been overcome by her rush of emotion.

But her mother understood. She’d followed every word and demonstrated her knowledge by gathering Abby into her arms. “You poor dear. You poor, poor dear. Don’t worry. Please, don’t worry.”

“Worry about what?” her father repeated as if nothing made sense. “There was dancing, some people talking about Abby, and then nonsense about Sherwin and Corinne?”

“Lord Sherwin is going to offer for Corinne,” her mother explained patiently.

“Did you know the purpose of this evening before we left the house this evening?” Abby demanded of her mother.

“No, I didn’t,” her mother said. “And if I didn’t, you know your father wasn’t aware. My brother took me aside to tell me about a half an hour ago, and that was the first I’d heard of the match. I tried to warn you, but when I went searching for you, you were nowhere to be found.”

“That is right,” her father verified. “Your mother thought we should make our excuses and leave, didn’t tell me why, but what do I care? I can’t stand feeling like a dressed duck. I was ready to leave the moment we took a step under Banfield’s roof. And I have news for him. He’s welcome to Sherwin and that father of his. The both of them are high-and-mighty stinkers.”