Lord of Ice (28 page)

“Hmm, may I?”

She handed it to him. He held it up and examined it closely, then shook his head.

“I’m afraid I do not recognize it.” He gave it back to her.

She nodded. “Thank you.”

He bowed and went to fetch the duchess. Miranda hurried to the mirror and smoothed her hair. Her eyes were still a bit red, but they were no longer swollen. She thought of changing into a fancier gown, then dismissed the idea. She would have to do as she was. She was not about to trouble herself trying to impress the very people who had left her to rot up at Yardley while Uncle Jason had been away at the war.

A few minutes later, she walked into the drawing room with the duchess of Hawkscliffe by her side. Miranda’s posture was stiff, her palms sweating with the jitters, but her patroness looked as serene as always, as their guests rose from their chairs and greeted them. Her first impression was one of deep surprise—the mother and both daughters were dressed all in black, in mourning, she realized, for Uncle Jason. The young man wore a black armband.

She was instantly ashamed of herself for choosing pretty colors for her wardrobe, eschewing the three-month mourning rule. On the other hand, she thought, her heart pounding, in light of her illegitimate status, perhaps her relatives had appreciated her distancing herself from the family by not presuming to wear mourning for poor Uncle Jason. As his legitimate kin, they might deem that their prerogative. As for Lady Hubert, Miranda was half prepared to be afraid of the aunt who had rejected her along with Uncle Cold Fish, but Lady Hubert looked even more nervous than she was. The fiftyish viscountess was a small, birdlike woman with papery skin and an air of frailty. She smiled wanly at Miranda, but even her smile did not remove her constant expression of vague, startled dismay. Curtsying to her, Miranda instinctively felt sorry for the woman.

Lady Hubert then presented her daughters, the Honorable Misses Daisy and Parthenia Sherbrooke, a pair of proud, pale, thin-lipped girls who rolled their eyes at their hapless, fluttering mother. Miranda nodded to them, uneasy with the way their dissecting glances flicked, scalpellike, over her.

Lastly, she was introduced to their rakish-looking elder brother, the Honorable Mr. Crispin Sherbrooke, a splendid young dandy in a bottle-green morning coat and sparkling black riding boots. He had guinea-gold curls and a roguish twinkle in his blue eyes, and the perfection of his snowy cravat made her suspect that his valet worked on it for an hour and a half.

Rather amused, she offered him a curtsy, but Crispin took her hand and bowed over it, pressing a gallant kiss to her knuckles. “Hullo, coz,” he murmured, flashing her a grin as though he had known her all her life.

She smiled gratefully at him, feeling as though she had just found a much-needed friend.

The next evening, Damien escorted Miranda to a private chamber music concert in the home of some old friends, Lord and Lady Carteret. Folding his arms across his chest, he eased back into his chair and tried to take solace from the rich, sonorous strains of the Mozart wind serenade that poured through the candlelit drawing room. Try as he may, however, it was impossible to relax when his protective instincts were in a state of high alert. He was still waiting for that scoundrelly lad, Billy Blade, to report back with information about the men he had killed outside of Birmingham.

Following the twins’ visit to the East End on Monday night, Damien had stopped at the Guards’ Club, the gentlemen’s club for military men. There, he had convened with a few of his most trusted officers from the regiment, gaining all the help he needed to ensure Miranda’s security whenever he elected to take her outside the gates of Knight House. They had resolutely pledged their assistance, for she was Sherbrooke’s niece and the major had been one of their own. Even now, they sat in strategic locations around the drawing room, smartly dressed in their scarlet uniforms, ready to spring into action if there was any sign of another mysterious “accident” befalling Miranda.

She was utterly innocent of the pains being taken to protect her, indeed, she had no idea that he suspected she might be in danger. That was exactly how Damien wanted it, at least until they knew anything for certain. It was bad enough that he had hurt her. He did not wish to frighten her unnecessarily with the possibility that she might be a murderer’s next target.

Last night, he had made excuses to keep her at home rather than attending a large subscription ball at the Argyle Rooms, which she had been anticipating for days. The building was quite large, public, and difficult to secure, even with his men’s help. It was too easy for any sort of person to buy a subscription and gain entry to the ball. A private concert in the home of a good friend was a much safer affair, with its smaller gathering of carefully selected guests, which was why he had relented tonight.

After all, he thought in self-directed bitterness, he had ordered her to find a husband. She could hardly carry out his command if he continued to keep her locked within the gates of Knight House. His gaze was drawn back to her irresistibly, and his stare turned sour.

Griff seemed to be making fine progress. Seated on the other side of her, the widowed marquis leaned over and whispered again in Miranda’s ear. She nodded in apparent agreement with his murmured comment on the performance.

Damien hid his faint scowl and returned his attention to the musicians. Where the devil was Alice, anyway? he thought with a bit of a sulk. She wasn’t doing a very good job as chaperon, or she would have noticed their old chum getting a bit too close. He glanced over his shoulder at Lucien and his wife, who were seated right behind them. Perhaps he was overreacting, for Alice was a woman of exacting moral standards, and she seemed to have no concern about Lord Griffith’s attentions to the girl.

He heaved a grumbling sigh and, with folded arms, flicked his white-gloved fingers in brooding patience on his opposite biceps. Better Griff, anyway, than the likes of Ollie Quinn, but it really was starting to grate on him—the male adoration that followed his luscious ward everywhere she went.

He was unable to stop himself from glancing furtively at her again and felt a curious constriction in his chest at the sight of her that was part distress, part longing. She looked so beautiful tonight. He would not have thought that such a quiet, pink-pearl color would have flattered her so well, but her silken gown shimmered in the candlelight, its pale hue making the green of her eyes look all the more brilliant and deep. The soft, tender curve of her upper arms enticed him beyond bearing; he wanted to skim his lips along that small stretch of her bare skin between the short, puffed sleeves of her gown and her high, white gloves. That innocent region seemed so much more permissible than the splendor of her chest above the delicate neckline of her gown. He dragged his gaze away in misery. He knew he had brought this on himself, but he had not foreseen what a very cold place the world could be when someone as sunny and warm as Miranda FitzHubert treated one with cool reserve.

When the performance was over, he got up and went to check in with his fellow officers. Each discreetly reported that he had seen nothing out of the ordinary. Satisfied, he took a glass of wine from a passing waiter’s tray just as Griff ambled over to him with a smile. Damien was unprepared for the jolt of jealous hostility he felt as his old friend joined him, clinking his glass with his own.

“Cheers.”

Damien forced a taut smile and looked away, shaking off the strange impulse. Steeling himself, he looked at Griff in question. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

Damien crooked a brow at him.

“Ah. Possibly,” he murmured with a sly half smile. “Very possibly, indeed. She is delightful.”

“What’s holding you back?” he asked with his usual soldier’s bluntness.

“Are you so eager to get rid of her?”

He clamped his jaw judiciously for a moment, then lifted his chin. “I want to see her settled in life. That is all.”

“I see. Well, it is too soon—for me, and, I suspect, for her.”

“Don’t wait too long. Look,” Damien growled, nodding toward Miranda and Crispin, who were standing side by side, admiring a dramatic Turner landscape on the wall. “The cousins have got their heads together again.”

Griff chuckled.

“Jason always said that lad is a fool,” Damien muttered. “What the devil can he be talking to her about so intensely, do you think?”

The marquess shrugged idly, swirling his wine in his glass. “Who knows?”

“Aren’t you going to do anything? That lad might be angling for her.”

“Let him angle. She can handle herself. Better, I daresay, than most of the young ladies in this room. She is an original,” Griff declared. “I find her quite refreshing.”

“Well, if she’s so damned refreshing, maybe you had better go over there and interrupt?”

Griff looked askance at him.

“What?” Damien asked, a bit put off by his friend’s penetrating stare.

“Crispin Sherbrooke may be in love with her, but he’s not the one who worries me.” Griff gave him a hard look, then sauntered away to mingle politely with the guests.

“You mean you don’t know?” Crispin asked, his blue eyes twinkling with wicked glee. “Oh, Lord, child, the tale is too delicious.”

“Tell!” Miranda giggled.

“Perhaps I should make you wait until after you come to dinner at our house tomorrow night.”

“You would be an infamous cad to do so. Tell me the gossip!”

“You will be scandalized,” he warned playfully.

“No, I won’t.”

“Your guardian will lop my head off if he finds out I told you.”

“I won’t breathe a word. Crispin, you are torturing me. Tell.”

“All right, but only because you are so pretty. Not the eldest brother, Hawkscliffe, nor that lovely morsel, Lady Jacinda—they are of the true blood. But the rest of them—that devil, Lord Jack; the twins; and my own
bon ami
, Alec—are, every one of them, cuckoos in the nest, the results of their mother’s peccadilloes. And everybody knows it.”

“No!” she exclaimed in a whisper, smacking him with her fan.

“I swear on my luck it’s true.” His eyes danced merrily as he took a sip of his wine. “Their mother, Georgiana, had so many lovers that she used to be known as the Hawkscliffe Harlot.”

Miranda gasped, torn between fascination and guilt at listening to gossip about the people who had been so kind to her.

“Who is the twins’ real father?” she whispered.

“
Ma petite,
so innocent! Don’t you know anything, little chuckle-head? Their father was Georgiana’s longtime devotee, the marquess of Carnarthen.”

“Is he here?”

“He’s dead. He was Welsh and a high-ranking navy man. He was so devoted to Georgiana—another man’s wife—that he never married and died without legal issue.”

“Oh, that is so sad!”

“That is why Parliament created your guardian Lord Winterley,” Crispin went on in a conspiratorial whisper. “Carnarthen was very powerful and very well liked. As the elder of the twins, Damien is in actuality Lord Carnarthen’s firstborn son. Since Carnarthen’s title went defunct after his death, some of his friends in Parliament banded together to have a new title created and given to Damien so that the bloodlines would survive.”

“I thought he was made an earl for his war victories!”

“Heavens, not an earl, no. Even Wellington’s top men were only raised to viscounts.”

“ 'Only' viscounts,” she scoffed merrily. “That’s easy for you to say. You’ll be one someday.”

They laughed, but anger and shock began simmering in Miranda’s veins. Of all the nerve!

That blackguard had sliced her heart open, casting her aside on the grounds of her illegitimacy, and all the while, he, too, was a bastard! Her eyes flashing, she scanned the room until she picked him out in his smart, scarlet uniform.

He was standing alone, staring at her.

She felt the familiar, soul-deep shock of the impact as their gazes collided and locked. With a withering look, she turned away and drew on her acting skills to summon a gay laugh. She took her cousin’s arm and went to look at the next fine painting.

The next evening, Algernon looked down his long dining table with a shadowed smile to himself of complacency. Not only could he boast some of the brightest luminaries of the ton at his table this night, such as the great Lord Winterley and his elder brother, the powerful duke of Hawkscliffe and his radiant duchess—which made the night a social coup for a generally unpopular man like him—but, more importantly, his son was carrying out his task to perfection. The boy might just make him proud, after all. By virtue of their kinship, Crispin had already slipped under the defenses that Winterley had mounted around his ward to keep the rest of her suitors at bay.