She would make a lovely wife for someone, just not for him. He was too . . . too ferocious. Strains of music sounded, and a flash of hope crossed her eyes.
“May I have the honor of this dance?” he asked.
Miss Randall-Barclay beamed and curtsied, and then he placed her among a long line of women standing opposite their dance partners, freeing him to go back to thinking about his American.
Merry would never come up with a spiteful term like “pineapple pariah.” If she were insulted, she would get excited, and wave her hands about, and turn pink. She might utter a snappy retort. He’d bet she could be kissed out of a bad humor.
He was finally thinking clearly. Yes, there had been a chance that Merry would coax his brother into sobriety if she loved him. He’d bet his right arm that Merry did not love Cedric.
She might have thought she loved him, but she didn’t.
As the music drew to a close, he was reunited with Miss Randall-Barclay. Her yellow curls were bouncing on her shoulders and she was glowing with happiness.
She was pretty.
Merry wasn’t.
Merry was too intelligent, and too voluptuous, and too funny to be merely pretty.
Hell, he kept coming around to the same realization he’d first had on the balcony at Lady Portmeadow’s ball.
He didn’t want another woman to look at him the way Lady Caroline had. Or touch his arm.
He wanted Merry on his arm.
He wanted Merry in his bed.
Mrs. Randall-Barclay accepted her daughter back with the controlled triumph of a woman certain that her daughter would have a brilliant season, if only because the most elusive bachelor in London had shown every sign of interest.
Trent kissed both ladies’ hands and, determined not to be waylaid again, went in search of Merry. He made it to the bottom of the ballroom just in time to find the main actors in the previous night’s melodrama, Mrs. Bennett and Merry, coming face-to-face.
Last evening, Mrs. Bennett had had the self-confident attitude of a woman enjoying a social triumph. Tonight, she looked like a mouse who had been befriended by a playful cat.
Obviously, she was well aware of her new status as a pariah.
For her part, Merry cast him a harried look and sank into a curtsy in front of Mrs. Bennett before he could greet her.
“Mrs. Bennett,” she said, as she straightened, “Please allow me to apologize again for my gauche behavior in eating your centerpiece.”
“I don’t regard it,” Mrs. Bennett squeaked.
Trent groaned inwardly. The lady should either make a joke of the whole affair or defend herself; if she didn’t show spirit, she would indeed become an outcast.
“I promise you that you need not fear that I’ll consume your table decoration, if you are gracious enough to invite me to your house,” Merry said, trying again.
Mrs. Bennett murmured something without looking up. If she didn’t show some backbone, her invitations would dry up like a puddle in August.
“I imagine Lady Vereker is worried that I shall abscond with a lemon from these lovely trees,” Merry insisted, sticking it out, although her eyes had a desperate look. “She informed me that they were rented from the Chelsea Physic Garden.”
Mrs. Bennett’s mouth wavered into a smile, but at that moment Cedric stepped forward, brushing invisible lint from his brilliantly embroidered cuff.
Trent’s jaw clenched when he saw that his brother’s eyes were glassy. Cedric was drunk. Not entirely soused, but well on the way.
“Are we to begin renting apparel now?” Cedric drawled. “Perhaps there are those in this very room whose attire comes from another’s dressing room.”
Merry narrowed her eyes at her fiancé. “Your lordship, that is not an appropriate subject of conversation.”
“We already have a pineapple pariah.” Cedric paused just long enough to allow an appreciative titter of laughter to subside. “And now I, for one, begin to suspect that we may well discover there is a similarly invidious practice of leasing evening gowns. Bogus ball gowns, in short.”
“Lord Cedric!” Merry cried, as high color suffused Mrs. Bennett’s cheeks.
Cedric pulled out his quizzing glass and directed a hideously enlarged eye at the costumes around them, pausing for a moment on Mrs. Bennett’s ruffled hem.
To Trent’s mind, Merry looked like Venus in a rage. Her head was high, her eyes stormy, and every magnificent inch of her quivered with rage.
“Lord Cedric!” she snapped again.
No, shouted was more accurate.
Every head in the vicinity, including Trent’s, turned to see how Cedric would respond.
“Miss Pelford,” he acknowledged with a world-weary sigh, allowing his quizzing glass to fall. He looked for all the world as if he were a bishop whose homily she had interrupted.
“Wouldn’t you agree that it is more invidious to depend upon a woman to pay for your clothing than it would be to rent it?” she demanded.
The awful silence that followed was like the pause that follows a crack of thunder.
“After all, if you had rented that magnificent coat you are wearing, at least you would have paid some of your own money for it, rather than having to rely on my uncle to ensure your tailor was compensated.”
Dents appeared beside Cedric’s mouth.
“As a newcomer to London society,” Merry went on, seemingly without pausing for breath, “I did not understand that an unpaid-for pineapple could decorate a table. But I also had no idea that an entire wardrobe of unpaid-for clothing might be worn without disgrace. We do not have a high opinion of that sort of behavior in Boston, though I suppose it seemed good to you at the time.”
Cedric’s eyes shone with an arctic light but his mouth remained tightly closed. He gave Merry a furious, high-nosed stare, turned on his heel without a word, and left.
Trent glanced back at Merry to find a bleak look in her eyes. She had either just recognized that she was in need of a husband, or she had realized that her spirited exchange with Cedric would do nothing to resurrect Mrs. Bennett’s reputation.
He had every intention of solving her first problem and he could take a stab at the second. He stepped forward and bowed. “My dear Mrs. Bennett, good evening.” He consciously embellished his words with the rich, plummy tone of a duke of the realm.
“Your Grace,” Mrs. Bennett whispered.
“I must apologize again for leaving your dinner so abruptly.” He hesitated, as if wondering whether to speak intimately, then lowered his voice just enough so that everyone in the vicinity could hear him. “A rather extraordinary realization drove me from your table.”
Merry nodded madly. “Oh, do tell us, Your Grace,” she trilled. “What was it?”
“I made up my mind to ask a lady for her hand in marriage,” Trent announced.
“Oh!” Mrs. Bennett yelped. “You did? That is, you are? A lady at my table?”
“When I realized the depth of my passion,” Trent said, “I could not remain at the dining table. I had to . . . to muse about my passion.”
A chorus of gasps was heard. Trent glanced at Merry, whose face had gone utterly blank. Surely she realized he was fabricating all this for her sake.
“I am honored!” Mrs. Bennett exclaimed.
“Please do tell us more about your musings, Your Grace!” a woman standing beside her asked.
“I cannot share my thoughts, as I have not been able to make my address,” Trent said gravely. “To this moment, I have no idea whether the lady in question will agree to become my duchess or no. But it was at your dinner, Mrs. Bennett, that I became conscious of the truth of my heart.”
More twittering.
A glance at Merry showed that she was now struggling to hold back a giggle. At least one person realized he wasn’t the sort to muse about passion.
“I feel certain that you will be able to persuade the lady,” Mrs. Bennett said eagerly. “Perhaps I—”
He interrupted her.
“Had I remained at your table, my dear Mrs. Bennett, I trust that I could have steered your guests away from devouring the centerpiece. I know that my housekeeper would be quite dismayed, Miss Pelford, if you grazed on her elaborate displays.”
“Graze?” Merry repeated, picking up his cue like an experienced actress. “I beg your pardon, Your Grace! Cows graze; ladies such as myself do not.”
“I hope the bovine association did not insult you.”
“I am not cross,” she said piously. “Only hurt.” She heaved a dramatic sigh.
“My butler has rented many a pineapple,” Trent said, untruthfully. “I shall warn him about your penchant for the fruit before you dine in Cavendish Square.”
His butler would sink with mortification at the suggestion that the ducal household had ever rented an item of food—or anything else—but, alas, the household reputation had to be sacrificed at the altar of Mrs. Bennett’s redemption.
“I know you Americans think that lemonade is an insipid beverage,” Trent concluded. “Yet I must entreat you not to strip our hostess’s trees. The Chelsea Physic Garden will surely wish them returned with their fruit intact.”
He cleared his throat and glanced about. “It must be time for the supper dance.” The crowd watching them obligingly melted away.
Two ladies pounced on Mrs. Bennett and drew her away, chatting animatedly. He assumed they would spend the rest of the night going over the marriageable damsels on her invitation list. In his estimation, the lady’s reputation would not die, but blossom.
He turned to Merry.
Chapter Seventeen
The duke had saved her—or rather, he had saved Mrs. Bennett.
For a moment Merry felt nothing but happy relief. But a second later, her spirits crashed as she remembered Cedric’s petty, cruel behavior. She would never have believed him capable of such abhorrent conduct.
Mrs. Bennett had done no more than put on a dinner party in Cedric’s own honor, and he had mocked her. How could she possibly have misjudged yet another man so badly? She was an idiot, a perfect idiot.
Language that no lady should even know, much less utter, ran through her head.
“The performance is over,” said a deep voice at her side.
She looked up at the duke. Her head felt hot and sick, as if a fever was coming on. “I should apologize for being so rude to your brother, but I will not,” she said fiercely. “I know my reputation is ruined, and I’ve effectively broken off a third engagement, but I don’t care.”
“I don’t believe your reputation is entirely ruined,” he replied, looking unconcerned. “But another public scene might prove the coup de grâce.” He took her arm and guided her through the lemon grove to a secluded bit of space between the trees and the wall. On the other side, the ball carried on without them.
“It’s not as if I have to give him his ring,” Merry burst out. “I can just give it to you, since it is yours!” She began to tug off her long glove, but the duke put his hand on hers.
“Tomorrow.”
“I must find my aunt,” Merry said, giving up the battle of the ring. “Maybe I can persuade her to arrange passage for us on a ship leaving immediately.”
“No, you won’t,” the duke replied.
Merry scarcely heard him. “I shall never come back. The way everyone laughed at poor Mrs. Bennett was despicable.”
Although they were isolated from the ballroom by a screen of trees, she imagined the dancers colliding as they tried to get a look at the two of them, when they should have been minding their steps.
She had no illusions about her status as a spectacle; Miss Merry Pelford and her American ways would be the subject of conversation for years. She’d let down herself and her nation.
“I must go,” Merry said. She was shattered. “My aunt will hear the gossip in a moment, if she hasn’t already.”
“My brother was drunk,” the duke said.
Merry turned to face him. His Grace was leaning against the wall next to her, with that careless look he had sometimes, as if he were indifferent to how those around him felt. And yet he had been the only person other than herself to come to Mrs. Bennett’s defense.
“Drunk?” she repeated, frowning at him.
“Three sheets to the wind. Possibly four sheets. Typically, Cedric waits until he arrives home before he permits himself to become quite so inebriated.”
“If you are making an excuse for him, it won’t wash,” Merry said bluntly.
The duke shrugged. “All I am saying, Miss Pelford, is that when my brother is that deep in drink, he’ll say anything for a laugh.”
“I noticed no signs of intoxication.” Weren’t drunken men supposed to stagger and slur their words? All the same, the certainty she’d felt about Cedric’s temperance was no longer unshakable.
“Did he bring you canary wine tonight? I assure you that Cedric was not holding a glass of lemonade.”
“You’re saying that he drinks to excess, even here, but displays no obvious sign of it?”
“I tried to warn you.”
That was true, and she’d dismissed his attempt as the lies of a jealous brother. Lady Portmeadow’s ball might as well have been a century ago, so much had happened since.
Merry stared at the glossy leaves of the lemon tree in front of her, trying to think it through. There had been an odd agitation about Cedric, a raw eagerness that she hadn’t liked.
“But we danced, and he didn’t stagger,” she said, offering the one indication of drunkenness that she knew of.
“Cedric staggers only when he’s into a second bottle of brandy.”
“Second bottle,” she said faintly. “You didn’t say—I didn’t understand.”
“Few people do.”
His expression was so dispassionate that he could have been discussing the weather. Merry scowled at him. “Why haven’t you done something? You’re his brother. He was cruel to Mrs. Bennett.”
“You raise an interesting question. What can I do for my brother? Hide the brandy? I’ve done that already. Cedric shows no desire to limit his drinking, and believe me, he is well aware of my feelings on the subject.”
She lapsed into silence again. He was right. Cedric was an adult. “Does this occur with regularity?”
“Cedric began drinking more and more after our parents died,” the duke said, as casually as if they were talking about a penchant for something as innocuous as collecting rare books. “After a few embarrassing episodes, he more or less learned how to control his conduct in public—although he didn’t succeed tonight.”
“I have appalling taste in men,” Merry said under her breath.
“It does seem that way,” the duke agreed. He was a deeply annoying man, because one moment his blue eyes were chilly, and the next they were so warm that a person—even one like herself, in the depths of despair—wanted to smile.
“I shall leave this ball in even more disgrace than I left Mrs. Bennett’s house last night,” Merry said gloomily. “I might as well get it over with.”
They emerged from the partial seclusion of the trees and started walking the length of the ballroom.
In the back of her mind, she was thinking about the fact that the duke had apparently decided on a bride—or had he? She was desperate to ask whether he had invented his revelation merely to provoke the crowd’s curiosity . . . but she couldn’t think how to phrase such a question.
Surely he wasn’t speaking of Lady Caroline.
Merry couldn’t delude herself about the streak of pure, blind jealousy she felt in response to that idea. She was the biggest fool in the world. Who goes straight from being besotted by one man to being infatuated by his brother?
The duke may have been Cedric’s twin, but everything about him was darker. They talked differently; they moved differently. Cedric was supple and graceful, his steps in the quadrille a thing of beauty. He twirled and whirled, and other dancers stepped aside to watch him.
She’d never seen the du
ke waltz, but she would guess that he would hold a lady at arm’s length and lead her around the floor briskly, as if he couldn’t wait for the music to end. She couldn’t imagine him giving a final flourish as he bowed, or spinning his partner one last time as the music faded.
They reached the great doors leading from the ballroom without encountering her aunt or uncle. If she had had any doubts about how fast gossip could spread, the fact that every person in the ballroom turned to watch the two of them walk the length of the room would have dispelled that.
“I have to leave,” she hissed. “I can’t walk through the reception rooms looking for my aunt. This is intolerable.”
The duke nodded, drawing her down the corridor until he opened a door and whisked her through it, closing it behind them.
The chamber they found themselves in was quite dark, save for what little light was emitted by a fire burning low in the hearth; Lady Vereker had no doubt left the lamps unlit in an effort to discourage her more adventuresome guests from straying into the private chambers.
Once her eyes adjusted to the dimness, Merry was able to make out book-lined walls, a large table in the center, and a great many comfortably padded armchairs arranged in clusters.
The duke glanced down at her. “I’ll leave you here, and look for your aunt and uncle myself, Merry.”
“I can’t believe that I’ve done it again,” Merry whispered, her voice catching. “There’s my third betrothal gone. I’m such a fool.”
The duke sat down on a large leather chair and then, before she could react, pulled her into his lap.
“Your Grace!”
“Hush,” he replied, and eased her against his chest. It was very large and comforting chest. She laid her cheek against his shoulder, even though it was monstrously improper.
“Do you think something is wrong with me?” she asked. “Never mind, that was an absurd question.”
“You would have been the salvation of Cedric,” His Grace said, running his hand comfortingly down her back.
“I very much doubt that,” Merry said. “He made it quite clear that he had no respect for me.” She tugged off a glove and used it to wipe away a tear. The duke’s hand paused for a moment and then resumed a slow caress.