I Adored a Lord (4 page)

“After seven years, I should hope you would be.”

But it had not been seven years since Vitor had last heard his brother's voice, only four. Wesley, the arrogant fool, did not know he knew that.

“Ah well, I could not possibly resist the invitation.” Wesley glanced about the woods so far from his fashionable world of London society. “Town is a dull bore these days, and Mother pesters.” His eyes glimmered. “Why you couldn't have been born first instead of me . . .”

“Fate is a comfortable mistress, Wes, if you accept her demands.” Fate, the mistress that four years ago had put him the hands of mercenaries who turned him over to the British to be tortured.

“Listen to the monk teaching me about mistresses.” Wesley chuckled. “Speaking of . . . The prince seems unreconciled to his matrimonial prospects. Was this party forced upon him?”

“Ask him yourself.” Never had Wesley acknowledged aloud Vitor's relationship to Portuguese royalty. But he knew that their mother had slept in another man's bed and bore a son from it. The Marquess of Airedale, an indulgent father to both his sons, had not balked when Vitor had left England at the age of fifteen to live in the house of the man who had cuckolded him. On the single occasion that Vitor had returned to England as a man, the marquess had welcomed him.

Vitor understood his elder brother. However much Wesley cared for him, he resented him because of their father's love. But he hated him too, for a seven-­year-­old grievance that he could not apparently forget or forgive. Vitor knew this because, during the war when he had been a prisoner of his own country, accused of treason, he had heard it in his elder brother's wintry voice when Wesley tortured him.

R
AVENNA TRAILED HER
toes along the rug as she neared the drawing room door, digging furrows in the pattern. With the world outside the castle a swirling mass of snow and wind, she could not avoid the humans within unless she wished to remain trapped in her bedchamber. And Petti and Sir Beverley would scold. But she delayed as well as she reasonably could.

She smiled at the footman stationed at the drawing room door and peeked around his shoulder.

“To our host!” Sir Henry, the Thoroughbred breeder, exclaimed. “May he prosper!”

“Hear hear!”

Guests raised their glasses toward the prince. He stood resplendent in the center of the room, wearing collars to his chin and enormous lapels. Eyes red and wandering, and grin sloppy, he bowed with drunken excess.

The Earl of Whitebarrow, a tall, golden-­haired man of arrogant eye and patrician nose, cast Ravenna a swift, assessing glance. Young Mr. Martin Anders stared intensely at her from beneath an unkempt forelock. The skin around his right eye was red and shadowed, as though he'd been struck with a fist. His father, the Baron of Prunesly and a renowned biologist, peered at her above his spectacles, then frowned.

Ravenna looked for the delicately dark Mademoiselle Dijon and found her beside her father, the general. Her tiny white dog huddled in her lap, decorated with ribbons that matched her mistress's gown. At least one person in the party kept good company.

Luncheon had been a purgatory of idle conversations, sly, silent assessments from the women, and peculiar perusals by the men. Dinner would surely be the same. And still dozens more of both must be endured before Sir Beverley released her from this prison. She must find some other activity swiftly.

Activity away from the stables, preferably.

Sir Beverley had spoken with the prince's head groom. No stable hand, coachman, or other servant accompanying any of the guests resembled the man that had pinned Ravenna to the ground the night before. A tiny village flanked the fortress, but the groom said that the villagers were few and he knew them all well. Chevriot had been the property of Prince Sebastiao's family for a century through marriage to a French heiress. The villagers here were loyal to their absentee overlords and wary of strangers.

Nevertheless, when the sun rose Ravenna had waded through falling snow to the village and into every craftsman's shop, searching. If she confronted her attacker in the daylight, publicly, the prince would be obliged to take some action against him. There were some advantages to being considered a lady, after all.

But she found no man with broad shoulders, indigo eyes, and a laughing crease in his left cheek that made her stomach tingle. With snow clinging to her stockings and her hems encased in ice, she returned to the chateau out of sorts.

This party did not aid matters any.

Across the drawing room, the blond Whitebarrow twins were moving toward mousy Ann Feathers as though casually strolling. But ill intent lurked in their pale blue eyes. The hair on the back of Ravenna's neck stood up.

Miss Ann Feathers lifted her round gaze from the ground and managed a curtsy for the twins. Then the torture began, like nasty little girls plucking the wings off a butterfly. Ravenna did not need to hear them speak to know the gist of their conversation. Miss Feathers's round cheeks turned red as beets, her eyes rounder yet, and the champagne began to dance in her glass as her hand trembled. She passed a palm self-­consciously over the ruffles at her throat and Lady Penelope's smile hardened.

A little growl rumbled at the back of Ravenna's throat. Pushing away from the wall, she moved toward the trio.

A hand touched her elbow and she turned to meet Lady Iona McCall's regard, as blue as the breast of a damselfly in summer.

“Miss Caulfield,” she said quietly, a musical lilt in her clear voice. “I admire yer courage.” She cast a swift glance at the Whitebarrow sisters torturing Miss Feathers. “But I'd be takin' care no' to cross anybody this early in the game.”

Ravenna laughed. “Well, it's refreshing to know that someone else realizes this is a game.”

“Aye. 'Tis a competition, for certaint.” Lady Iona's flaming upswept hair sparkled with diamonds in the candlelight. Daughter to a widowed duchess, the Highland beauty was an heiress and had a better chance of winning the prince's admiration than any other maiden present. “But there be prizes a clever leddy might consider beside his royal highness,” she added. Ravenna followed her amused gaze across the room in the other direction.

Lord Prunesly and his daughter Cecilia stood by the hearth with two men, the Earl of Case and another with his back to her.

“Lord Case is handsome, it's true,” Ravenna stated the obvious.

“Aye. But his brither's handsomer still,” Iona said upon a purr of delight. “We've only spoken once, yet I think I may be in luve wi' him already.”

“Is that him?” He certainly made a fine figure from the back, with long legs set in a confident stance and a coat that stretched perfectly across his wide shoulders. “Has he only just arrived?”

“No. He arrived yesterday but no one's seen him till nou. Lord Case said he's passed the day at the hermitage up the hill.” She chuckled. “Can ye imagine it, Miss Caulfield? An English laird preferrin' prayer to play?”

He turned his head to Cecilia Anders and an odd little jitter of moths fluttered through Ravenna. His jaw was smooth and strong, his hair almost as dark as hers and falling just short of his collar. Miss Anders laughed at something he said and he smiled. From across the room, Ravenna saw his clean-­shaven cheek crease.

Her entire body went hot. Then cold. Then hot again.

Impossible
.

As though he sensed her alarm, he looked over his shoulder and his attention alighted upon her. With that slight smile still shaping his violently bruised lip, he inclined his head to her.

“Why, Miss Caulfield,” Lady Iona said, “ye've already got an admirer. Well done, lass!”

It could not be
. Yet there he stood, purple lip as evidence.

He was a lord? The son of a marquess? The brother of an earl? Wasn't that just her poor luck? She might have had some success at chastising a stable hand. Now her attacker far outclassed her. No justice would come to her now.

But she could see justice done elsewhere. Nodding to Lady Iona, she continued toward mousy Ann Feathers and the Whitebarrow twins. As she approached, Ladies Penelope and Grace seemed to be studying Miss Feathers's reticule.

“Well, isn't this clever, Grace?” Lady Penelope said.

“Oh, yes, Pen. So many beads,” Lady Grace said with a thin smile.

“Beads on reticules and fans were delightfully au courant . . .” Penelope fluttered her fan before her mouth and added in an audible whisper to her sister, “Last year.”

Miss Feathers fingered the sparkling beads sewn in a clever little swirl pattern on her reticule. “Papa bought this for me on Bond Street in January.”

Lady Penelope offered her a moue of pity. “Well, that explains it. All the best shops in town close up after Christmas.”

“Do they?” Like everything about her, Miss Feathers's eyes were round as carriage wheels.

“I doubt it.” Ravenna stepped into the little circle that crackled with cruelty and misery. “She said that to make you feel poorly, Miss Feathers. Your beads are quite nice. Nicer than anything I've got, certainly.”

“Oh, that is an enviable recommendation, isn't it?” Lady Penelope's half-­lidded eyes gleamed.

“Dear Miss Caulfield,” Lady Grace purred. “Wherever did you find that gown? In the housekeeper's chamber?”

“In fact, yes,” she said, her neck burning. It wasn't true. But when Petti had tut-­tutted the gowns she'd had made up for the trip, she'd told him that delicate muslins and silks weren't for her, that she would only ruin such finery and she felt much more comfortable in sturdy woolens anyway. More herself.

“Oh, dear,” Lady Penelope said. She was subtler than Grace, and her gaze slipped from Ravenna back to Miss Feathers. “Wasn't your mother a housekeeper once, Miss Feathers?”

“She was cook to an earl when my father and she became acquainted,” Miss Feathers whispered.

“A cook? Ah. That explains it,” Lady Grace said, glancing at Lady Feathers's rotund form. “But dear Miss Caulfield.” She turned back to Ravenna. “You must have spent the entire summer season last year at the sea.”

“I did not.”

“Then however did your skin acquire that delightful . . . glow?”

“Perhaps she is fond of walking, Gracie,” Lady Penelope said. “Do you remember last season when you strolled every day for a week on Viscount Crowley's arm in the park? Even a bonnet and parasol did not entirely protect you from the sun.”

“But surely strolling on a viscount's arm has not been Miss Caulfield's trouble, Pen,” Lady Grace demurred. “Has it, Miss Caulfield?”

“Oh, I suppose you're right, Grace,” her sister said. “But perhaps she is an avid rider. Sometimes that can give a girl a dreadful tan. Do you ride, Miss Caulfield?”

A footman appeared beside Ravenna with a silver tray of glasses filled with sparkling white wine. She didn't usually drink wine.
She must get out of this place
. With all her might she mentally willed the sun to shine and the snow to melt and reached for a glass.

“Allow me.” The voice from the shadows the night before, deep and wonderfully autumnal and decidedly not-­a-­stable-­hand's voice, sounded at her shoulder. With his scarred hand he removed Miss Feathers's half-­empty glass from her fingers and replaced it with a fresh glass, then offered another to Ravenna. She was obliged to accept it, no matter that he had not looked at her, though he must recognize her.

“Good evening, my lord,” Lady Penelope said upon a curtsy. Lady Grace and Miss Feathers followed suit. All three of them stared at him as though he were a god. Ravenna stood immobile. She would curtsy to a man that had attacked her in the dark when Sir Beverley's pet pig flew.

“Miss Feathers, as you are my sole acquaintance among this lovely quartet,” he said with a smile that said he was thoroughly aware he was making every female in the room breathless, “would you be so kind as to make introductions?”

Miss Feathers obliged. The twins curtsied again, deeper this time. Lord Vitor Courtenay, second son of the Marquess of Airedale, bowed.

“What happened to your lip?” Ravenna said to him. “It looks sore.”

Miss Feathers's fingers darted to her mouth.

“Thank you for your kind concern, Miss Caulfield.” His eyes were very dark blue and still rimmed with the longest lashes Ravenna had ever seen on a man. Beauty and virility and confidence and sheer privileged arrogance combined to remarkable effect. No wonder these silly girls stared. “It was bitten,” he said.

“Oh, dear.” Lady Penelope pouted sweetly. “That must have been alarming.”

“Not terribly. I have been bitten by cats before.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “This one,” he said, turning his dark, laughing gaze upon Ravenna, “was otherwise charming.”

“What about the bruise on your brow?” Ravenna said. “Did the cat do that too?”

“I fell off my horse,” he said with a slow smile, his gaze dipping to her mouth. “I injured my leg in the moment too.”

He was entirely unrepentant, and vastly handsome, one of those overindulged noblemen she'd heard plenty about from Petti, the sort who behaved in any irresponsible manner he wished yet was never obligated to answer for it. Just like the prince, she supposed.

“Oh, that is a shame,” she said. “To be abused by both a cat and a horse in succession doesn't say much for your rapport with animals, does it? Perhaps you shouldn't have anything to do with them.”

“Actually, it rather strengthens my resolve to pursue the opposite. What sort of a man is he who shrinks from challenges, after all?”

A shiver of panic mingled with the odd heat slipped through her. Something about his smile . . . How did his mouth look so familiar?

Because when he had been pressing her body into the straw, she had stared at that mouth
.