The Perks of Being a Beauty (4 page)

“Mendacity does not become you,” Quentin responded, indicating to Amelia that she should take a seat on the plush sofa near the windows. “You might very well think I would have been happier with someone else, but you are not sorry in the least to be partnering me. It might be a bit uncomfortable. I know full well that you would rather eat my hat than be stuck for a week with one of those puppies.”

“Yes,” she said, trying and managing to maintain her composure no matter how his words might set her heart to fluttering. “But you must know that the situation is untenable, Quentin. We are no longer in the same social positions as we once were. I am, for better or worse, a lady’s companion. It is not right for us to spend time together.”

She didn’t add that it was also uncomfortable for them to spend time together given their past history. But she would never admit as much to him.

“It is but a week, Amelia,” he said, lowering himself disconcertingly close to her on the settee. “You will keep me amused over the course of the week and then we will go our separate ways. Nothing to get worked up about. Just a collaboration between friends. We can still be friends, I hope?”

Amelia bit her lip to hide her chagrin. She had told plenty of gentlemen over the course of her London career that they might still be friends. Usually she said it after rejecting their proposal in the hopes that something better would come along. How alarming to find herself on the receiving end of her own tactic. If she had known how painful it was to hear the words she would never have uttered them once.

Which was not strictly true. But she would have uttered them with more awareness of just how much they stung.

Stiffly, she inclined her head. “I suppose we can manage that,” she told Quentin with more enthusiasm than she felt. It would be difficult to spend the next week in his company, but not impossible. And thinking back to her actions over the past few years, she thought perhaps that fate was paying her back with interest. If she wasn’t the one being repaid she’d find the whole thing deliciously funny. As it was, she was resigned. “Now, should we not take a look at our riddle?”

And, trying desperately to ignore the clean, fresh scent of man mixed with sandalwood that clung to him and his clothes, she leaned in and looked down at the slip of paper he held between them.

Trying to ignore what being so close to her was doing to him, Quentin read their clue aloud,
“Plays my fortune might have made, but these fine words my heart displayed.”

“Good lord, it rhymes,” Amelia said under her breath. “I had no idea Lady Smithson had it in her.”

Quentin’s lips quirked. “It might be that she had help from someone else. It is true that she doesn’t strike me as the literary type.”

“No,” Amelia said with a moue of distaste. “She is barely literate, though I know her father sent her to the very best lady’s academy in Bath. Ah well, I suppose it does not matter who wrote the clues. We should be grateful that we’re spared her own rhyming wit. That would be punishment, indeed.”

“Right,” he said, looking down at the words again. “
Plays my fortune might have made.
Obviously it’s a playwright we’re looking for.”

“But one whose heart was in another sort of work?” Amelia asked, frowning over the clue. Supposed to be paying attention to the clue, Quentin was instead distracted by the small line formed between her finely arched brows. They were darker than her blond hair, and the effect was that her blue eyes, framed in thick dark lashes, caught his own every time he saw her. “Aha!” she said, grinning. “It’s Shakespeare. Or more precisely his sonnets.”

“Ah, good work, madame detective!” he said with a grin. “I think you might be right. I suppose we will find a copy of his sonnets in the library?”

“That’s where we should look first,” she said, rising from her seat and hurrying toward the doorway, leaving Quentin no choice but to follow.

The other couples, he noticed, had all dispersed to search out the answer to their first clue as well. Mrs. Smithson had explained earlier that she’d ordered the clues differently for each couple so that they wouldn’t all be searching for the same token at the same time. So, while Harriet and Carstairs had gotten the ribbon clue first, he and Amelia had gotten the Shakespeare one first.

He thought it rather against type for the Smithsons to let ladies and gentlemen roam about freely on their own together, though he supposed they thought there were enough of them to police each other. Still, the middle classes tended to be much more rigid about propriety than the
ton
, so he would not be surprised if the Smithsons had spies stationed throughout the house and grounds just to ensure no one got overly familiar with one another.

Following Amelia down the hall and into the library, he paused in the doorway to watch her quickly skim the shelves, unsurprised to see she knew exactly where the volume was to be found. “Here it is,” she said with satisfaction. “Right where I saw it last.”

He stepped up beside her and leaned over her shoulder to watch as she flipped through the tome, searching for the next clue. But though she fanned the pages and turned it upside down, no paper fluttered out.

Bending his knees slightly, he peered into the hole where the volume had been shelved and reached in to pluck out a slip of folded foolscap.

“If at first you don’t succeed…” Quentin said, extracting a quizzing glass from his pocket to peer down at her. He rarely used the thing but it did help one depress pretension when necessary. He’d had a hunch he might need it this week.

Amelia rolled her eyes. “… Try a little harder?”

He bit back a laugh. “You never did take me seriously with this thing.”

“It is rather difficult when it makes you look like a prig,” she said, plucking the clue from between his fingers. “Now, since I was the one who solved the first clue, I think I should have first crack at this one.”

Quentin waved a dismissive hand. “Be my guest, my dear. Though I hope you won’t mind if I read over your shoulder.”

“I do not see what difference it will make if I do,” she said primly, “for you’ll do it whether I like it or not.”

“True,” he said, looking over her shoulder as she held the paper almost up to her nose and read aloud.

“Excellent work! You must await your next clue in the drawing room at ten o’clock sharp tomorrow morning. In the meantime, to prove you’ve found this clue, you must each pencil your initials on the flyleaf of this volume.”

Amelia groaned. “That is too cruel of her,” she said. “What are we to do with ourselves until luncheon? Penciling in our initials will take all of a few moments.”

“Oh come now,” Quentin said. “We’ve only an hour or so before luncheon. Surely your charge can manage without you for as long as that.”

“I suppose so,” Amelia said with a frown.

Once they’d both penciled their initials into the volume of sonnets, Quentin gestured Amelia to a cozy pair of chairs before the fire. She looked suspicious, but then with a slight shrug, lowered herself gracefully into the chintz-covered seat.

Always on the lookout for trouble, that one,
Quentin thought. “Now, I would like for you to tell me a truth, if you please.”

“Why on earth would I do that?” she asked, her earlier diffidence finally relaxing a bit so that she spoke to him in their old familiar way. “Unless, of course, you were willing to pay me back with truth for truth.”

He didn’t even have to think about it. “Very well.”

With quiet deliberation, he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and took Amelia’s gloved hand in his. Through the fine kid, he could feel the warmth of her fingers. And as he watched, a small shiver ran through her.

Not so indifferent to me as you’d hoped, eh, Amelia?

Clasping her fingers between his, he said, “I would like to know why a beautiful, intelligent woman like the one seated before me would be so foolish as to refuse to wear her spectacles?”

She sucked in a breath and tried to pull her hand away, but Quentin held on tight. “It is the height of foolishness,” he said. “Especially when they do not take away from your looks one whit.”

“How do you know I even own spectacles?” she demanded, her lips pursed in disapproval.

He grinned. “I didn’t, but you just told me. And knowing you and your impatience with being behind on news of any kind, I have a very good notion that you keep some in your rooms. And perhaps even carry them with you in that pretty little bag at your wrist.”

He watched with some amusement as she glanced down at the reticule guiltily.

Finally, she shook her head ruefully and pulled the drawstring down over her wrist and opened the bag to remove a pretty little pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. Wordlessly she unfolded the earpieces and set them on the end of her nose, reaching first behind the left and then the right stem and fastening them over her ears.

“Happy now?” she asked defiantly. Her blue eyes were flashing with annoyance, though Quentin could not help but feel somewhat triumphant over having so thoroughly guessed at her secret.

“I wonder why you are so reluctant to wear them?” he asked, answering her question with a question. “They are quite attractive. And if they can help you see what’s right in front of you, then…”

“You are a man and could not possibly understand,” Amelia said with a huff as she rose to straighten a shelf of books that were all listing to one side. “As a woman without means, I have nothing to trade upon but my purity, my gentility, and my looks. If any one of those is compromised, my chances of putting a roof over my head are severely diminished. I have only to look at the example my own mother set to know the truth of this.”

Even now, Quentin could remember how the blowsy widow, Mrs. Snowe, had set their tiny village on its ear with her come-hither glances for the married men of the parish when she had arrived on her brother’s doorstep with her beautiful daughter, Amelia. Though her heritage was as respectable as any gentry family in the area, it was clear from the snubs she’d received from the ladies of the neighborhood that something about the woman was unsavory. Of course Quentin and his older brothers had seen her as exciting and had all done their best to make themselves appear attractive to the woman. But once Quentin met Amelia he had been able to see no one else.

“You are nothing like her,” he said now, and he meant it. He might have been hurt and angry all those years ago when Amelia had followed her mother to London to make an advantageous match, but with the hindsight of age he could see that she’d merely been trying to please her mother, whose interest in her daughter had always seemed to depend upon what the girl could do for her. “Truly, Amelia, you have more compassion in your little finger than your mother had in her entire body.”

Something about this caused Amelia to laugh. “Quentin,” she said, turning her attention from the shelves, “you don’t know me. You don’t know how I’ve lived these past years.” She shook her head. “When I was in London, swanning about the
ton,
making a name for myself as a diamond of the first water, I was making miserable the lives of every girl I perceived to be a threat to my status. I was, in short, a terror.”

That brought him up short. For some reason, Quentin had always imagined Amelia’s time in London as one entertainment-filled party after another.

“Surely it wasn’t as bad as all that,” he said, sure she was exaggerating.

“No,” she agreed. “It was worse. It took a truly awful public outburst on my part to show me that not only was I not doing myself any favors, but that I had caused nearly every person I interacted with to despise me.”

Tears glistened in her eyes as she looked up. “Quentin, I was awful. And the only person I could count as a friend was a girl who was even more despicable than I was.”

He did not speak, sensing that she needed to finish this tale without interruption from him.

“I was finally able to make amends in some small way by apologizing to the three girls whose lives I’d made positively miserable,” she continued. “I can even count them as friends now. But it took a great deal of work on my part to make them trust me. Though they were much more forgiving than I deserved. Especially given that I tried and failed to entice each of their husbands in turn.”

Amelia looked into his eyes again. “Quentin, I am not the same girl you befriended all those years ago, and I must warn you that thinking so will be at your own peril.”

With those words, she stood and hurried from the library into the hallway beyond.

Chapter Three

Amelia walked quickly past the double doors leading from the hallway into the drawing room, where three couples huddled over their scavenger hunt clues. Her chest hurt with the knowledge of what she’d just revealed to Quentin, but it had been necessary—for his own protection as well as her own. She might not particularly enjoy her position with the Smithsons—at least not in the way she would have enjoyed having a home and family of her own—but she did feel that what she’d done for Harriet since her arrival did much in the way of expiating some of her past sins.

She had determined when her mother’s death left her destitute that she would use her beauty for good and on someone else’s behalf for a change, and so far she had managed to do just that. Still, it was difficult to forgive herself for her past sins. Especially when she had been forced to accept help from one of her most sinned-against victims.

Always she’d been aware that her mother’s way of life was a precarious one. When they left Cornwall for London for Amelia’s first season, they’d lived in a rented house in Mayfair where they’d dined on the finest delicacies and worn the most elaborate gowns Amelia had ever seen. But as one season turned into two, then three, and so on, their accommodations had moved farther and farther out of the fashionable district until at last, when her mother had died, they’d been living in a mean little house in Hans Town. Amelia had paid what bills she could afford to from the meager sum she’d found hidden in her mother’s nest egg. And for the rest, she’d been forced to accept help from Cecily, the Duchess of Winterson.