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Authors: Theresa Romain

BOOK: Season for Surrender
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The polite world would never terrify her again. That was some consolation for all she had lost.
Xavier remained in his study for the next few hours. There was no reason to leave until it was time to dress for dinner.
Smothering himself in work, he realized that the account books were beginning to make sense to him. The columns of neat figures, totting up his holdings—this was proof that there was something of substance to his title. Lord Xavier was more than a scandal sheet, if only he could convince the
ton
.
While he worked, he could almost forget that he'd betrayed Louisa in order to chase her away. He'd meant well, so there was no earthly reason for him to feel so low and dismal.
All right, maybe he wasn't forgetting anything.
A knock sounded at the door, and Xavier set down his quizzing glass. He rubbed a hand over his eyes and tried to smooth his mussed hair. “Who's there?”
“Wheeling, my lord. I have a letter of particular interest for you.”
Xavier bade his butler enter and received a folded and sealed note. “This didn't come through the post,” he observed.
“No, my lord.” The butler hesitated, though his expression, as ever, betrayed no emotion. “It was left for you by one of your guests.”
Xavier knew, then; Louisa had left him with some parting words. Would they be bitter or sweet? “Thank you, Wheeling, that will be all.”
He could hardly wait for the butler to bow himself out before he cracked the seal.
The paper contained only one sentence, written in a copperplate-clear hand.
 
We made a lovely novel.
 
Xavier subsided into his seraglio chair. Their time together had been lovely, yes, but had it been no more than a fiction?
Then he noticed another paper on his desk. It had apparently been folded within the first, and in his eagerness, he hadn't seen it flutter out.
It took him a long moment to assimilate what his eyes told him: it was a ten-pound note, written on a London bank.
Ten pounds. The wager. She'd
known
.
She'd known? For how long? And she left him with this note—this brief and poignant reminder of their time together.
In a novel
, they'd told each other in the firelight, then explored the limits of their own control.
What had been real? How did she see him?
He would never know, because he'd sent her away.
For a man so fond of poetry as Lord Xavier, there were suddenly no words.
Chapter 23
Containing Advice from a Variety of Italians
True to her word, Lady Irving had removed Louisa from Clifton Hall by the time Xavier emerged from his study.
He handed the ten-pound note to Lockwood before dinner, trusting that the presence of the party in the drawing room would confine Lockwood's triumph to a non-deafening level.
This was a vain hope.
“What's this?” Lockwood asked in a tone of shock. “Dear me. Lord Xavier has handed me
ten pounds
. Do look, Pellington. Channing. Weatherwax. Gather round!”
Xavier adopted Expression Number Three, Amused Tolerance. In truth, he felt neither amused nor tolerant as Lockwood stepped onto a striped Chippendale chair and waved Louisa's banknote in the air like a flag.
“Lord Xavier has lost a bet, and to me. Has day turned to night? Does the earth spin around the sun?”
“Of course it does, you bacon-brain,” Xavier muttered.
Lockwood's tomfoolery was drawing interest, as a grown man standing atop furniture inevitably does.
“What has happened? Something entertaining?” Mrs. Protheroe had stepped closer to her precious Lockwood, her fair hair a cloud around an avid face.
“It's simple,” Jane said. “Lockwood has won a bet, and he has felt the urge to climb onto a chair.”
Lockwood shot her a poisonous look. “There's nothing simple about this,
Jane
, because Xavier lost. To me. After all the times we've bet, this is surely worth celebrating. How the mighty have fallen!”
Xavier deserved some sort of award for not rolling his eyes. “If you mean to gratify yourself, Lockwood, you ought not to stress the rarity of your triumph.”
“Don't be a poor sport, Coz.” A sly smile crossed the marquess's face, and he jumped down from the chair. “Shall I tell them what this wager was for?”
There was no hope for Amused Tolerance; not as Xavier went cold within all the layers of his clothing. He affixed Expression Number One, Veiled Disdain. “When men of honor make a wager made in confidence, it ought to remain so.”
He gripped a sliver of hope that this would quash Lockwood's boasting. If the marquess started bandying Louisa's name around as the subject of a frivolous wager, she'd become a laughingstock. A
scorned
laughingstock.
Lockwood's blue eyes narrowed; Xavier saw his own tension reflected in his cousin's face. He'd hung the wager on the question of honor—and there was only one possible response for men who wanted the respect of their peers.
“You are right,” Lockwood said at last. “It was a confidential bet.” His flashing smile returned, and he cut his eyes sideways at Xavier as he added loudly, “Confidential because it was a bet upon a woman! I cannot say who. But Xavier was to keep her here for two weeks, by means fair or foul, and he has not.”
The guests looked around. They realized at once who was missing and began to mutter.
“Estella never kept a firm enough hand on her niece,” Lady Alleyneham was saying in a voice clearly intended to be overheard. “This is the natural consequence. The subject of a wager—can you imagine? Why, I should be horrified if my girls . . .”
Xavier turned away, wishing he could stop hearing the terrible words.
He
had made the bet—he and Lockwood. Yet Louisa's reputation was the one that would suffer. He'd sent her away for nothing. Hurt her with his good intentions the first time he'd really tried to act on them. The realization was repugnant.
His fingers felt like frozen sticks, but he caught his cousin's sleeve. “Damn you, Lockwood,” he said below the tumult of speculation that now filled the room. “You're a cheat.”
“Only if you are, my dear Coz.” Lockwood smiled, and Xavier felt a strong urge to disarrange those rows of teeth. “Who was the one who accepted the bet? Who arranged matters to secure his own victory, or so he thought?”
Lockwood turned to a laughing Mrs. Protheroe. “Shocking, is it not? To learn that our host is only human?”
“We all have feet of clay, my lord.” She grasped the lapels of Lockwood's coat and murmured something in his ear, then cast a smile over her shoulder. “Don't worry yourself about it, my dear Xavier. Other women will come along. They always do.”
“Not exactly good
ton
, though.” Dandified Freddie Pellington looked worried under his cherub-cloud of curly hair. “Betting on a lady and whatnot. Seems dashed . . . well. You know. Not the thing.”
He trailed off when his eyes met Xavier's, then turned away to speak loudly to Mrs. Tindall about snipping a sprig of mistletoe for his buttonhole.
And Xavier realized, with the clarity of a slap, that he'd been given the cut direct. For the first time in his life, his behavior had been judged publicly unacceptable.
And it
had
been unacceptable. Lockwood had not even had to lie.
If Xavier had declined the bet in the first place, the blow to his precious reputation would have been far less, and Louisa would never have been implicated at all.
If he hadn't manipulated the house party to appeal to the respectable along with the disreputable, then she would never have come.
If he hadn't spent time with her—gotten to know her so well—he would never have been linked to her.
In so many ways, he could have put a stop to this. But rumor was a runaway carriage, and one way or another, he was overdue for a crash. Unless he acted with the swiftest of reflexes, as though he wasn't aware of the shifting danger until his feet were steady again.
He began at once; managed bits of conversation, offered liquors and sherries as his guests waited to be summoned into the dining room. The Smile served him well; he could summon it by rote.
First: Expression Number Five, Mocking Drollery. He broke off some mistletoe (not from the bush he'd collected with Louisa;
not from that one
) and handed it to Pellington with a flourish, which coaxed a smile from that fellow. With a bit more spoon-fed attention, he'd have Pellington back in his pocket.
Next: Expression Number Two, Haughty Certainty. He told Lord Weatherwax that they would enjoy the finest
cru
in his cellar that night. That was enough to recapture the goodwill of the old inebriate.
And for Lockwood—nothing. He ignored Lockwood's crowing as unutterably vulgar. He could only hope the others would follow his example, as they'd been used, by habit, to do.
When Wheeling announced dinner, Xavier trudged along with the floating chatter of his houseguests, wishing it would drown out his thoughts.
Because he'd made the most dishonorable discovery of all: though he ought to wish Louisa hadn't been pushed into the river of gossip, there was a deep and sullen part of him that was glad these people knew he'd been tied to her, just for a while.
 
 
After the endless, empty round of gustatory pleasures—dinner and port and tobacco—everyone gathered in the drawing room for games. With the New Year only two days away, the weather had turned gray, with an endless cold drizzle that suited Xavier's glum mood.
But he knew better than to betray that, especially with Lockwood scrutinizing him. So he had the fire built up roaringly high and had mulled wine circulated among the guests as they organized for a game of squeak piggy squeak. This flirtatious amusement involved much lying atop one another's laps and shrieking. All in all, a most pleasant evening.
Well, it should have been. Xavier had thought himself a hedonist, once. But the pursuit of pleasure was neither
pursuit
nor
pleasure
when it was handed to one, pointlessly, on the lap of a near-stranger.
“Lord Xavier!” A hail from the double couple—Lord and Lady Weatherby, and Mr. and Mrs. Simpkins. “Do think of a new game for us.”
Lady Weatherby gave him a feline smile and twined a forefinger through one of her long, dark ringlets. “We have great faith in your . . . talents. Perhaps you could wager on . . . us?”
Could the woman not speak a sentence without pausing for ten minutes? Doubtless it was intended to be seductive, but not even in rumor would Xavier become the fifth member of this couple.
“I beg your pardon, dear lady, but I think I hear our hostess calling my name.” He dutifully dragged his eyes up and down her form and was rewarded with an impish smile. Fair enough. He'd been forgiven for the earlier awkwardness.
His guests might be easily led, but they were equally ready to be convinced.
Show us what to think of you
, they bleated.
We'll follow
.
So he showed them the same thing he always had: a willingness to titillate, to smooth over rough-edged interactions. But this time, there was a purpose to it. He was Lord Xavier, only kinder. Less dismissive, and a little better. Good enough, he hoped, to restore their faith in him.
What he'd do with that faith, he'd no idea. Of all the gifts Louisa had given him, only her belief that he could be
more
lingered still.
He veered in the direction of Mrs. Tindall, gave that good soul a pat on the arm, and then—having fulfilled his duty to the observant Lady Weatherby—he made his way to a divan at the far end of the room and sank onto it with a sigh.
This part of the room was much dimmer. It took him a second to notice Signora Frittarelli at the opposite end of the lengthy seat, almost hidden in shadow. Evidently she'd used a nearby lamp to ignite one of her fragrant little cigarillos, then had extinguished the light.
Belatedly, Xavier asked, “May I join you?”
She shrugged within her claret-colored velvet, then tugged a slim gold case from the valley of her generous bosom. “You want some smoke?” She extended the case to him.
“No. Thank you.”
This was a surer sign than any that Xavier had altered: he hadn't flirted, hadn't taken a cigarillo from the gold case, warm from
la signora
's bosom. As far as he knew, she hadn't come to anyone's bed since the house party began; she was ripe for the plucking, if he wanted her.
But he didn't.
She nodded and blew a ring of clove-infused smoke from her painted lips. “You are
triste
.” She mimed crying, hands waggling before her face.
“Careful, careful.” Xavier snatched the cigarillo before she singed her coiled hair. He handed it back to her as soon as her gestures calmed.
“
Sad
is the word you mean, but I assure you I am not.” He tried to think of something else to say, but his wit seemed to have deserted him along with Louisa.
“
Ciò che un bel bugiardo
,” she muttered.
What a beautiful liar.
“I am not that, either.” He drummed his fingers on his knee. “Well, not beautiful.”
“Ah. You have some good
linguaggio
.” She smiled. In Italian, she added, “You fool these others, but you cannot fool me. I know poor acting when I see it. It is my livelihood.”
She reached across the length of the divan and gave his knee a comforting little pat, then sat back as though nothing had passed.
Xavier was too surprised to be insulted.
So there were two women who'd seen through his act: a scholarly innocent, and a seductive performer.
Maybe his mask wasn't as good as he'd thought it. Or maybe he didn't care so much about keeping it affixed at all times.
To one so steeped in notoriety as
la signora
, his own trespasses would seem as nothing. “May I trust you with a confidence?”
She studied him under heavy lids, her face sleepy and lush under her weight of dark hair. “Yes. You give me
invito
to your house. I give you my ears.”
He nodded his thanks. He'd once wanted much more than that from the prima donna—or if not precisely wanted, felt obligated to pursue. But the offer of listening ears now seemed the better gift.
He studied the giggling guests, sitting on one another's laps, tumbling to the floor, grasping and groping. Bathed in the crystalline light of the great chandelier, they seemed a species entirely apart.
“I've made a mistake,” he began. His fingers fumbled over the cloth-covered buttons on his coat sleeve, twisting them until the threads strained tight. “But there's nothing else I could have done.”
He had hoped that saying the words would help to roll away the weight on his shoulders. But if anything, it seemed heavier.
“Then why you are sad?” She held her cigarillo lightly, letting the smoke trail away to nothing, and studied him.
“Because. It was a mistake.
Errore
,” he added impatiently.

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