Kasey Michaels (20 page)

She lowered the glass. “Yes, I am, actually,” she admitted, then spoke quickly, so that he couldn’t interrupt. “Your mother has been a dear, truly, but I can’t imagine myself dutifully taking lessons from her in how to capture a man’s attention. And this is important, isn’t it? It isn’t enough to look the part of the debutante, not if we wish to entice Noel Kinsey—who couldn’t possibly be overly interested in milk-and-water pusses in their first Season. I have to be unique, different. Perhaps a bit forward? Do you understand what I mean, Simon? How do I trick him into thinking I am interested in him and still behave like a lady? And you want me to more than interest him—you want me to
stagger
him, yes?”

“Your supposed dowry will stagger him sufficiently,” Simon told her, once more placing the cheroot in the corner of his mouth, his guard relaxed—which is precisely how Callie wanted it to be. Poor man, for all he thought he understood her, he just didn’t know her all that well, did he? Why, she almost pitied him, Callie decided silently. And he did look so very handsome with a cheroot. Very handsome, indeed. She could quite easily bring herself to flirt with him—just for practice, of course.

So thinking, and striking while the proverbial iron was still hot from the stove, she waved off his answer. “Yes, yes, the supposed fortune I’ve inherited from my great-aunt, who passed away only a year ago, so that I am just out of mourning and come to London to be popped off by that same aunt’s bosom chum, the Viscountess Brockton. Imogene told me all about that silliness. But heiresses must be knee-deep all over London during the Season. It will take more than deep pockets to make me unique, bring me to Noel Kinsey’s particular attention.”

“You could always tackle him in the gardens, I suppose,” Simon suggested, his mouth smiling even as his sherry eyes became somehow shuttered, as if he had just thought of something distasteful.

Callie shook her head, dismissing his words even as she rejected the recurring and increasingly unsettling thought that Simon might be rethinking his plans for her, and rushing on, “You’re deliberately not understanding me, aren’t you, Simon? I suppose I shall just have to say this baldly, without wrapping it up in fine linen, as I suppose I should. I want you to teach me how to flirt, my lord Brockton. I want you to teach me how to attract a man. How to, if needs must, even
kiss
him. I’ve never done that, you see. Kissed anyone.”

Simon, who had been drawing on his cheroot at the precise moment Callie made her final request, seemed to have swallowed a mouthful of smoke. He began choking, throwing the cheroot out onto the grass as his eyes began to tear and he coughed into his hand.

“Oh, poor, dear, Simon!” Callie chirped, testing her proficiency in the realm of demonstrating convincing feminine inanity. “Are you all right?”

Simon rewarded her with a killing glare. “You,” he said accusingly, slowly recovering his breath, and his voice, “you want me to
what
?”

Callie, bored with tiptoeing around the thing, finally lost all patience with subterfuge. “Oh, stop acting as if I’d just asked you to burn down Parliament! I thought you said we were friends.”

“Friends?” Simon repeated, glaring at her again. Really, the man had refined glaring to an art! “I see I’ll have to rush home to my study and find old Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, to refresh myself with the nuances of his definition.”

“Don’t be so deliberately thick, for goodness sake, for you can’t fool me!” Callie rolled her eyes in disgust. Really, Lester had never given her one-tenth the problem his lordship was presenting when faced with one of her very simple, reasonable requests. “I only said that I want you to teach me to flirt, how to capture a man like Noel Kinsey. Is that so difficult to understand? Or do you want your mother to instruct me? And concentrate your mind for a moment on the notion of Lester giving me lessons. Imagine it, Simon, if you will. Your mother?” she pulled a face. “
Lester
?”

Simon held up his hands in front of him, signaling surrender. “All right, all right. I’ll do it. Dear God, help me. I’ll do it.”

“Good!” Callie exclaimed,, feeling supremely satisfied. “When shall we begin?”

Simon sighed, looking at her as she rather childishly wriggled where she sat, smiling triumphantly, wonderfully, alluringly unaware of her exceedingly formidable beauty. “I think we already have, brat,” he said dully, so that she frowned in confusion. “For my sins, I think we already have.”

And then, believing a light had dawned somewhere inside of her, taking her closer to womanhood than she had thought herself to be, Callie blushed to the roots of her hair. “Was I flirting, Simon?” she asked quietly, nervously lowering her eyes to the blanket.

“You’re flirting now, Callie, and quite well,” he grumbled back at her, reaching over to take her hand in his. “But let’s get started with the more formal, structured aspects of the preliminaries to the mating ritual as they are played out by Society, shall we? Let’s concentrate for the nonce on the male contributions to the game.”

Her fingers tingled under his touch, sending heat all the way up her arm, into her face. This couldn’t be good. This couldn’t be good at all. But she had begun this course, and she’d finish it! “That—that seems a proper place, yes. Go ahead.”

“Thank you,” Simon said, humor evident in his tone, even as Callie’s second thoughts about this entire conversation served to melt her knees, so that she was immensely glad she was sitting down. “Now, to begin.” He lifted her hand to his mouth, placing a perfunctory kiss on the back of it. “That, Callie, is acceptable. All right?”

Callie fought the shiver that had begun to run up her once-burning arm, the slight queasiness that turned her stomach to jelly. “Acceptable. All right,” she said as calmly as possible, nodding her understanding.

He kissed her hand again, this time her fingertips, then raised his eyebrows as he looked at her. She wondered if he noticed that she was fast dissolving into a puddle of insensibility. He probably did, damn him! “That, you may have noticed, is rather more intimate, and not to be allowed unless the man in question is the prancing French dancing master I will employ for you the moment we return to Portland Place.”

Callie cleared her throat, which had become most alarmingly clogged. She blinked twice, trying to concentrate her mind on the subject at hand. “Too intimate. And what should I do about that?”

“You are to withdraw your hand at once and stare the miscreant into stunned apology, at which point he will beg your forgiveness and probably ask to lead you into the dance. You will then be wonderfully polite and agree, because if you refuse to dance with one gentleman, you are forced either to retire or sit the whole evening long, turning down all offers. If you are disposed to like the gentleman, you have won a slave for life. If, however, you take him in dislike, especially after having been fairly well
forced
into giving up a dance to him, well, then I suggest you make it a point to tread on his toes a time or two, just so that he knows he may be forgiven his forward behavior, but the insult has not been forgotten.”

“You’re teasing me, aren’t you, Simon?” Callie asked, still very much aware that he had not let go of her hand. She’d give him another hour, then insist he release her. “Because I have to tell you, that’s above everything silly!”

“Society is silly, Callie,” Simon pointed out, mentor to pupil, then raised her hand to his lips once more, his eyes on her face. “And now, your final lesson for today, as we must be getting back to Portland Place.”

This time he turned her hand at the last moment and pressed a kiss squarely in her palm, the tip of his tongue tracing a faint, tormenting circle against her skin before he allowed her to withdraw from his grasp. “There. Now, my dear student, my little country miss who wishes to play the role of
une femme fatale
, how do you respond to that?”

“Like this?” Callie answered shakily. And then—feeling as if her entire world had somehow suddenly shifted on its axis—she slapped him flat across his wickedly grinning face.

—Jane Welsh Carlyle

Chapter Nine

“E
xplain it to me again, Armand,” Bartholomew Boothe said as he sat in Simon’s study later that same afternoon, a glass in his hand and a perplexed frown on his face. “You’re saying that my new bay both is
and
isn’t the same one I saw at Tatt’s? Just what is that supposed to mean? Throckmorton promised me he had just bought her. And at Tatt’s—he even showed me his bill of sale! That’s why I took her off his hands, to help him over his gambling debt. He’s dipped badly, Throckmorton is, he told me, and had no choice but to sell her. Which didn’t keep me from getting myself a smacking great bargain, as I only paid half what I would have if I’d picked her up at Tatt’s.”

He looked from Simon to Armand Gauthier as he patted down his elaborate and too-large cravat, his confusion giving him the appearance of a perplexed pigeon—an
underfed
perplexed pigeon with his oversize breast feathers all a-ruffle.

“Are you saying that Throckmorton wasn’t being honest with me? Is that what you’re saying, the both of you?”

“Face the truth, Bones. Throckmorton put one over on you and that’s all there’s to it,” Armand told him, slyly smiling at Simon, who only nodded his agreement.

Bartholomew glared at Armand. “He isn’t dipped? Feeling the bailiff’s pinch?” Then he shifted his increasingly anxious gaze to Simon, obviously fighting against believing either of them. “Not drowning in the River Tick? Pockets to let? Run aground?”

“He’s flush as he ever was, Bones,” Simon concurred, taking a sip of champagne. It was nice, relaxing this way before dinner in his own house, surrounded by his friends, his mind free of thoughts of the infuriating young girl upstairs. Well, as free as it could be, he supposed, absently rubbing at his recently abused cheek. “He’s also probably off somewhere doing a jig, happy to be rid of his mistake and having recouped half of his money.”

Bones shook his head furiously. “No! No, you’re wrong. The horse just must be sickening for something. So bright and lively she was at Tatt’s last week, and again when I first bought her—so bright and lively! And now she just stands there. Stands there! Not a bit of spirit—and I had thought to race her!”

Armand spoke into his brandy snifter. “Drop another live eel down her gullet and she’ll show you spirit again,” he suggested, winking at Simon over the rim.

Simon laughed into his fist, knowing that their gullible friend Bones, Throckmorton, and even the most creditable Tattersall’s had been taken in by the most elementary of ruses. A sluggish horse invariably turned wonderfully brisk and lively with an eel in its belly—until the squiggly thing was digested, that was. Just as a fractious horse made stupid on ale could be sold as a calm, lady’s mount—until he became sober once more and kicked down the rails in his stall.

“Give it up, Bones,” Simon advised as Bartholomew continued to glare at Armand, “and have the poor mare sent to your estate to snore out her declining years. Either that, or make an early-morning visit to Fish Monger Lane tomorrow.”

“The perfidies of man,” Bartholomew grumbled at last, shaking his head as if his disappointment outstripped his anger at being duped—then had expanded itself to include not only the perfidious Throckmorton, but all of mankind, for Bartholomew’s judgments were often as sweeping as they were tardy. “Takes the heart out of a person of conscience such as myself, truly it does.”

“Poor Bones,” Armand commiserated as the obviously crushed man rose as if he had suddenly gone old and jaded and toddled over to the drinks table to refill his glass. “How it pains me to see the bright light of love for your fellow man extinguished. I am devastated for you, completely and unequivocally, and I must tell you how much sympathy I have for your deep pain.” He winked at the viscount. “So, Simon, do you think you could talk your cook into a serving of eel in parsley sauce for our friend this evening?”

Simon bit back a laugh, watching Bartholomew’s spine stiffen as the man filled his glass until it splashed over the rim. “You’re a cruel man, Armand,” Simon said with as much censure as he could muster, which wasn’t much. “I’ve always admired that in you.”

Armand nodded his handsome dark head, acknowledging Simon’s words as a compliment. “As I have always admired your expertise with the clever twisting of the sharp, bloodless knife of nefarious invention, my friend. Speaking of which, how goes our protégé? Is she champing at the bit to assist you in bringing Filton to his knees? That is, if you’ve been at long last allowed to examine the extent of your dear mother’s progress with the chit? Although I shouldn’t complain, I suppose, as my revoked dinner invitation has now been reinstated.”

Simon resisted the impulse to touch his fingers to his cheek. “She’s passable enough, I suppose,” he said, dismissing Callie’s beauty, wit, and intelligence by means of the unrevealing damning of faint praise. “There’s still a prodigious amount of work to be done before Imogene can launch her, that’s for certain. Thank God it’s too late in the Season to have to deal with presenting her at Court, even if that will limit her invitations. But I still refuse to involve her in my plans for Kinsey, not that she knows that. Or
will
,” he ended, glaring at Bartholomew as if to brand that thought to the man’s brain-box.

Bartholomew returned to his seat, his glass already half-empty. “What sort of work, Simon?” he asked, winking at Armand, and clearly out for a bit of revenge on at least one of his friends for having pointed out his gullibility in getting himself stuck with a worthless slug of a horse. “Lessons on horseback? No, didn’t sound as if she needed those. Perhaps in how to best aim a bit of footwear at a peer’s head? Again, it seems the young lady is already proficient. Oh, but have you given her a rendering of your family crest to study, to commit to memory as it were, so that she doesn’t end up riding home from Almack’s in the wrong coach?”

Simon laughed along with his friends, although his heart wasn’t really in the joke. “I’ve half a mind to turn Callie over to you for the remainder of her tutoring, Bones,” he then threatened, “as she tells me she can’t dance.”