The Horsemaster's Daughter (86 page)

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scaping to the ladies’ powder room, Abigail wondered why she wasn’t enjoying herself more. The pressure of the crowd still clung to her like strong perfume even though she had the room to herself. Her status was still brand new, and she was so giddy with excitement she couldn’t enjoy anything. Giddiness and excitement, she realized, were not necessarily pleasant sensations.

She wondered if sitting down on the upholstered banquette would wrinkle her dress. It was tempting; she felt as though she’d been standing for hours, and her bad foot ached.

With a furtive glance at the door, she decided to risk the wrinkles and sank with a grateful sigh to the low bench. Shutting her eyes, she relived the evening, from her grand entrance with Lieutenant Butler, his parents and her father, to the gruesome demonstration in the shark tank.

It had not gone perfectly. She shouldn’t have expected it to. She should have watched her step on those marble stairs. As it was, she had needed Jamie Calhoun yet again to avert a fall. But she couldn’t go back out there, not yet. Not when she could still hear the whispers echoing in her ears. She wasn’t supposed to hear the remarks, but she knew perfectly well that she would be the object of speculation and criticism. She’d overheard someone say Lieutenant Butler was marrying her only for her fortune and her father.

But she refused to let the petty remarks dim her happiness. She was a different person from the awkward wallflower who had bumbled her way through Nancy Wilkes’s wedding reception. Since that humiliating event, she’d been transformed from a sneezing, undistinguished blot on her father’s reputation to the fiancée of America’s most eligible bachelor.

The trouble was, she hadn’t realized being gracious and charming took so much time and energy.

One of the most irritating aspects of the evening had to be Jamie Calhoun. He watched her every move with vigilant intensity, but not because he cared about her. She was simply the subject of a cynical social experiment conducted by a man who derived amusement from observing the hypocrisy of high society. But like a celestial body drawn by the gravitational influence of a greater force, she was helpless to resist. She reminded herself that the attraction shimmering in the air when she and Jamie were together was merely an illusion.

She glanced in the mirror. Just as her guise of a pretty, charming young lady was an illusion, his regard for her was as false as the special shoe she wore on her bad foot.

To her dismay, the door to the powder room opened and a silk-clad whirlwind burst into the room. To her relief, the whirlwind was Helena.

“You should have seen it, Abigail,” her sister said, skidding to a halt in front of the gilt-framed mirror that covered one wall of the powder room.

“Seen what?”

“The look on his face was too delicious.”

“Whose face?”

“Jamie Calhoun’s. At last, we get a hint about his mysterious past and the notorious secret he’s kept for so long,” Helena declared, patting a coppery curl in place.

Abigail frowned at her sister’s reflection in the mirror. “What past? What secret?”

“Ah, you didn’t hear, then. You were too busy with all that pomp and ceremony. I shall miss you, Abigail,” she added with a wistful sigh. “I’m happy for you, but we’ve always been so comfortable as sisters until Lieutenant But—”

“What are you talking about?” She was losing patience with Helena’s mercurial conversation.

“Jamie Calhoun.”

A terrible panic seized her. Getting up from the bench, she grasped her sister’s arm. “What’s wrong? Did something happen to Jamie?”

Helena blinked at Abigail’s white-knuckled grip on her arm. “I didn’t realize you cared so passionately about him.”

Abigail let go. “I certainly do not, but what happened? Did he hurt himself?” Although he’d seemed fine a moment ago, her mind conjured up a host of terrors—a riding accident or tavern brawl.

“It appears our Mr. Calhoun has a secret past. It came to light this evening.”

“Really?” She considered the night she’d discovered Caroline moaning with pleasure in Jamie’s arms. Had someone else discovered them? Dear heaven, perhaps Horace Riordan had challenged him to a duel.

“It was too dramatic,” Helena recounted, turning this way and that to study herself from all angles. “In walked this foreign princess, ferociously gorgeous, and her husband the prince looking like something straight out of the
Arabian Nights,
lacking only a scimitar. She nearly fainted dead away when she saw Jamie.”

“Who nearly fainted?”

“The princess. I tell you, I could hear her gasp as though she were drowning, and she whispered something in a foreign tongue. And then she said the most curious thing. In perfect boarding-school English, she said, ‘I thought you were dead.’ Right then, everyone realized your Mr. Calhoun must have had quite a notorious past. Even from a distance, I could tell theirs had been no casual friendship. The passion was positively boiling in the air. Mr. Doyle says he was to be executed, and he barely escaped with his life. Think of it, Abigail, they must have had the wildest of romances.”

Of course he had a past, Abigail told herself. He didn’t suddenly appear out of the mist, fully formed. Things had happened to him. A good many things. But never had she imagined it would be a love affair with a foreign princess.

“Well,” she said, trying not to limp as she went toward the door, “I certainly have no business worrying about Mr. Calhoun’s romantic background. Lieutenant Butler is waiting.”

Abigail did her best to pretend she had no interest in Jamie’s sordid past, but the moment she entered the gilded hall, she sought out the princess. It was impossible to miss her and the prince, the two of them fiercely exotic yet curiously old-fashioned and stiff as they made the rounds of introductions. The princess wore a gorgeous garment of blue silk that wrapped her in mystery. Pantaloons of the same fabric showed beneath the hem of the dress, and golden gauze cloth wrapped her shoulders. She had a pierced nose, eyes outlined in sleek black and scarlet lacquer paint on her fingernails.

Abigail found her uniquely terrifying, yet as mesmerizing as a cobra. She hoped her fear didn’t show when Boyd introduced her to the dignitaries, and she sank into a studied curtsy. The princess murmured nothing more than a polite-sounding greeting, and the prince offered a regal nod, holding himself ramrod straight with the military bearing of a much younger man.

Jamie was nowhere to be seen. How typical of him to disappear the moment she discovered something of this magnitude.

The royal couple moved on to greet more people. Boyd and her father both kept pace with them as though they were part of the foreigners’ entourage, leaving Abigail standing by herself.

She wasn’t alone for long. Her pretty face wreathed in smiles, Nancy Wilkes embraced her lightly. “Abigail, dear. I haven’t seen you since my wedding. Who would have thought catching the bride’s bouquet was more than a party game? Yet in your case, it worked. The moment you caught the bouquet, you turned around and met the man of your dreams. I declare, magic was at work that night.”

As she recalled, Abigail had rushed from the room and encountered Jamie Calhoun, seducing the sister of the president. She only wished she could believe magic had been at work. Instead, she knew it was all calculated manipulation. Perhaps she should thank Jamie for taking the veil of self-deception from her eyes. Why believe in true love? Skill and cunning proved more reliable in her pursuit of Lieutenant Butler.

“How grand to see you, Nancy. I’ve missed our conversations.”

Nancy had been a brilliant scholar at Miss Blanding’s, and she and Abigail had often studied together. Nancy’s keen interest in astronomy had made her a skilled computer of star charts.

“How are your observations going?” asked Abigail, linking arms with Nancy to make a promenade around the aquarium.

“What observations?”

“The stars, of course. You were always so keen on astronomy.”

“I suppose I was, but honestly, I haven’t had a moment to record a single thing. I haven’t even looked at the celestial atlas you gave us as a wedding gift. Honestly, I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had a thought of the night sky in ages.”

Abigail was stunned. She couldn’t imagine that. What on earth could keep a person so preoccupied that she forgot to look up at the stars? “Why not?”

A touch of mystery darkened her smile. “Marriage changes a woman’s priorities. You’ll find that out very soon. A married lady cannot trouble herself with astral projections and meteor showers.”

“Why not?” she asked again.

“Who has time?” Nancy dropped her voice to a whisper. “Believe me, I’ve found other uses for my time at night. During the day, I have to manage my husband’s social schedule and his agenda of duties. And of course, the children will be along before we know it…”

Abigail could not fathom lacking the time to devote to her studies. Excusing herself, she hurried over to Boyd, who had gone to study a display of piranhas of the Amazon.

At the other end of the room, Jamie Calhoun had reappeared and become the center of attention; Doyle and Joseph Pulitzer of the
Post
crowded close as he conversed with the group of foreigners.

Her pulse fluttered as Boyd turned to smile at her, and she put aside her curiosity about Jamie. “Nancy Wilkes was just saying the most curious thing to me. She no longer pursues astronomy because her marriage keeps her too busy. Once we’re wed, will I be that busy?”

“I hope so,” he said. “I know I intend to be.”

A sigh slipped from her before she could contain it. In a small voice, she asked, “Do you think I’ll be able to continue my work in astronomy?”

He patted her hand. “If you insist, you shall have all the time you want. But it seems a shame that you’d want to spend your time gazing at stars when everything you could ever want or need is right here on earth.”

Jamie didn’t know or care who was watching as he faced Layla and her husband. Years and distance peeled away in painful layers, and he remembered the last time he’d seen her, standing frozen with shock while her father’s palace guards had dragged him away. He remembered screaming her name until they beat him unconscious.

Layla’s shock upon seeing him burgeoned into dewy-eyed joy. With a smile, he carried on as though nothing were amiss. “Will wonders never cease? Never thought I’d see Your Highnesses again.”

The prince’s translator repeated the phrase in murmured Arabic. Unlike Layla, he’d never mastered English.

“You always used to say you wanted to visit America,” Jamie said to her. “And here you are at last.” Leaning close enough to make her burly attendant nervous, he whispered, “How many men did you have to kill to get here, hmm?”

She gasped softly, and he remembered that sound in his ear as he made love to her. “What the hell are you doing here, Layla?” he demanded.

She motioned with her hand to keep her servant away. “I am part of a foreign legation. But your country is so strange. I have no place in your world.”

“Then you should go back to your own.”

He could feel her gaze trying to probe past his anger. He could hear her whisper as though they were alone in the bedchamber.

“Jamie,” she said, “I still dream of you.”

At that, he threw back his head and laughed loudly. “And I of you, Your Highness, but I was never fond of nightmares.”