She was a queen from sparkling diamonds to delicate slippers.
“I will still help you with Lizzie’s debut when the time comes,” she added.
He opened his mouth but she held up her hand. “You are here because you learned of my rank, Ward. Why would I want someone who finds me acceptable only because of my birth? I won’t accept that any more than you would accept someone who disdained you for yours.”
It wasn’t like that. But he—a man who had always taken his eloquence for granted—couldn’t find a way to explain.
“I gave my heart away too easily,” Eugenia continued, “but it will be my own again just as quickly. Next time, I shall choose someone who knows my worth—and I do not mean my rank.”
Words of explanation, of justification, pounded his brain. Lizzie and Otis were so young and so damaged. He would sacrifice the world for them, anything to make up for their childhood.
But he had stupidly sacrificed the one thing that would make them happy.
There was no point in protesting. She was right. When he’d said he needed someone to the manner born, he had implied she wasn’t good enough.
For him. For Lizzie and Otis.
“You ought to take this back,” she said, holding out the veil as if it meant nothing.
“Please keep it,” he said, his voice rasping. “Lizzie sent it as a gift.”
She shook her head. “Children often change their minds after being separated from beloved objects. Lizzie will be happy to see it, if only to remind her of her father.”
“You knew she wore it for her father?”
He was confounded. Otis had known Eugenia was the daughter of a marquis; Eugenia had known that Lizzie was mourning her father, not her mother.
How had he ever believed he could care for his siblings, considering all the mistakes he’d already made?
“Just ask her questions,” she said, guessing his thought because of all the people in the world, she most often knew what he was thinking. “She will tell you everything.”
Ward nodded.
Then he turned and took himself from the ballroom and into the dark.
Chapter Forty-two
Eugenia forced a smile. “This is the sort of drama I remember from growing up.”
Three unsmiling people looked back at her. The Duke of Villiers seemed disappointed, her stepmother anxious, her father furious.
“You had an affaire with Edward Reeve?” he barked.
Anger went straight up her spine and she flashed, “Considering the house I grew up in, how can you be shocked that I took a lover?”
Her father’s stricken eyes, her own seething grief and rage . . . it was too much.
She burst into tears. “I didn’t mean that,” she sobbed against her stepmother’s shoulder. Harriet’s arms closed around her, warm and comforting.
“I know,” she said in her ear. “We all understand, sweetheart.”
“I don’t,” her father said stubbornly, but he closed his mouth after a glare from his wife.
“We’ve all played the idiot in our time,” Villiers said. “You have to admit, Jem, that you and I have no high ground to stand on.”
“I’ll go to my chamber,” Eugenia said, before her father could turn his anger on his oldest friend. “Please give everyone my apologies for disrupting the evening.”
“We will see Eugenia in the morning,” Harriet announced, “and she can tell us about her adventures. If she chooses to do so, and only as much as she chooses.”
Back in her room, she managed to stand still while Clothilde attended to her, removing the diamonds and the silk gown, the shoes, and the rest of it. All the time she felt as if her own breath was searing the inside of her lungs. Why did it hurt to breathe?
When Clothilde left, Eugenia sank onto the edge of her bed. Tears streamed down her face.
Sometimes life didn’t give you what you wanted. She knew that better than anyone. Not everyone found true love, or was taken care of, or adored, or pleasured.
Her love affair with Ward was over, truly over.
Over, not because Ward protected Lizzie and Otis—but because she had to protect them. She and Ward could never be happy, because he hadn’t thought her good enough for him until he’d learned of her family. He didn’t love the true Eugenia—the Eugenia who had started the registry, who was planning to open a tearoom, who had ideas about a cookery book.
The last thing the children needed was to find themselves in yet another unhappy home; she suspected that their parents’ marriage had been strained, if not worse.
No matter how much love she might lavish on Ward, in the end, he would break her heart. She had bent herself to Andrew’s ideas of what she should be, but she had been young. This wasn’t a matter of brightly colored gowns: Eugenia couldn’t change the fact she had started Snowe’s—and in any case she didn’t want to.
A piercing sense of loneliness sank into her bones, which was ridiculous. Ward had entered her life only a month or two ago.
No one fell in love that quickly.
Except she had.
First with Andrew, and then with Ward.
There was a gentle knock and her father’s voice said, “May I come in, Eugenia?”
“Of course.” She stood up and pulled on her robe, then went to the door and let him in.
Her father just opened his arms and she walked into them. For eight years, it had been just the two of them, and though she loved Harriet with all her heart, her father was her mainstay.
After Andrew’s funeral, her father had brought her home and stayed with her for weeks, not leaving the house, coaxing her out of bed, making her eat toast, if nothing else. Harriet and her half-siblings came and went, but her father stayed.
“The man is rubbish,” he said gruffly.
“Don’t you remember that you thought Harriet wasn’t a lady?” Eugenia asked.
“Harriet was disguised as a young man and doing a damn good job of it. No duchess I’ve ever known wore breeches as well as she did.”
“No duchess wears breeches,” Eugenia pointed out.
“Harriet still does, on occasion,” her father said with satisfaction. He tightened his arms and rocked her back and forth. “I suppose I’ll see his father at the session for that private act at the end of the month. I mean to say something about the idiot he raised.”
“The earl and countess are on a diplomatic mission to Sweden,” Eugenia said with an inelegant sniff. “But you do have to go to London and vote against the private act, Papa. The Duchess of Gilner is a harridan who only wants to raise Lizzie and Otis because they’re legitimate, whereas she tossed Ward out as a baby.”
“I shall.” He handed her a handkerchief.
“They’ll be shocked to see you, won’t they?”
“Who?”
“All those lords . . . You don’t attend Lords often, do you?”
“Certainly I do,” her father said indignantly. Then he added, with a shrug, “When I haven’t anything better to do.”
Eugenia stepped back. “I love you, Papa.”
He cupped her face in his hands. “You are the most beautiful and brilliant woman of your age in all Britain. If this young ass can’t see it, he’s not worth a single tear.”
“Thank you,” she said with a watery smile.
Chapter Forty-three
Monday, June 29, 1801
Beaumont House
The London home of
the Duke and Duchess of Beaumont
Kensington
Ward had always known that his father was powerful, but he hadn’t realized how many friends the earl had until he looked around the ballroom of Beaumont House. In the absence of his parents, his uncle by marriage, the Duke of Beaumont, was heading a campaign to ensure that the Duchess of Gilner’s private act would be soundly defeated.
There were three dukes in the room—no, four: as he watched, the Duke of Pindar strolled in, with his wife—Ward’s former fiancée—on his arm.
A quartet was playing at the far end, a few couples drifting through a quadrille. The Duke and Duchess of Fletcher were dancing scandalously closely, and if His Grace bent his head a smidgeon, they would be kissing.
One of his father’s closest friends, the Duke of Cosway, on the other hand, was arguing with his duchess, but Ward knew them well enough to understand that their arguments were like kisses. A prelude to intimacy.
For a moment a vision of a future with Eugenia drifted through his head. His longing to be dancing and arguing with her twenty years from now was a ferocious burning in his gut.
But the children were the important thing at this moment.
After the court case . . . Eugenia.
The vow beat in his head, the rhythm of the last week. Desire to be with Eugenia gnawed at him, and only iron control had kept him from returning to Fonthill and kidnapping her again.
Once the children were securely his, he would do just that. He could convince her that he loved her and respected her, after he’d become guardian of the children without her help, removing any question of whether he wanted her only for that.
He kept seeing the bleak, betrayed pain in her eyes, and the familiar sense of being gut-shot hit him again.
The thought of her dancing with Beaumont’s heir, possibly sleeping with him, was a roar of anguish in his skull. Thinking of the devil—or the devil’s father—the Duke of Beaumont appeared at his shoulder. “Mr. Reeve, I would like to introduce you to Lord Bishell, who just came into his title . . .”
Ward bowed as he was introduced to yet another peer who was implicitly being instructed to vote against the private act, or risk Beaumont’s wrath—and the Duke of Beaumont was the most powerful man in the House of Lords.
It was becoming clear to Ward that his grandmother was remarkably foolish to imagine that she could garner enough votes to win the case. She knew perfectly well how society functioned and yet she, an embittered old woman, was challenging the most powerful cabal of noblemen that existed in all England.
Ward actually felt a flicker of sympathy for her. She had lived to see her only daughter reviled by all England. From what he understood, Lady Lisette had died without ever again visiting her mother. And now the duchess’s bastard grandson would raise the only relatives she had left.
The door opened again. Knowing it was a foolish hope, he turned to see if possibly the Marquis and Marchioness of Broadham—and their daughter, Eugenia—would enter.
The Beaumont butler announced, “Her Grace, the Duchess of Villiers; His Grace, the Duke of Villiers.”
Villiers would never pause in the doorway, but he had no need to, because every person in the room turned at the sound of his name. He was famous for his flamboyant dress, but tonight he wore a dark plum coat with no embroidery whatsoever.
“Leo, what on earth has come over you?” their hostess cried, running over to them. “You are practically funereal.”
The duke made a magnificent bow. “It’s my hair,” he said, straightening. “White hair and black eyebrows. I assure you, Jemma, that putting on some of my favorite coats is like putting finery on a crow.”
Her Grace kissed Villiers’s duchess on both cheeks. “Sweetheart, how are you? I heard that Theo fell off his horse and broke an arm.”
“Taggerty’s Traveling Circus came through the village,” the Duchess of Villiers said with a wry smile. “Naturally, having seen it once, Theo thought he could stand on his horse’s back too.”
Ward walked forward. “Your Grace,” he said, kissing the Duchess of Villiers’s hand. He bowed to her husband. “I am truly grateful for your support.”
“You sound like a campaigning sheriff,” Villiers observed, raising a thin eyebrow. “Have you some tin mugs to give away?”
“I’m afraid not,” Ward said evenly.
“They could be engraved with a pertinent saying. I would suggest ‘fools are wise until they speak.’” His tone couldn’t have been more acerbic.
“Stop being such a curmudgeon,” their hostess said, linking arms with Villiers. “Come. I must show you an attacking combination I have just learned that has no fewer than three sacrifices.” With a smile at his wife, she drew Villiers over to a chessboard set out in the corner. Only her ballroom—and perhaps Villiers’s—would include a gaming table.
Ward turned to the Duchess of Villiers, an extraordinarily beautiful woman whose hair was still as gold as a guinea even after raising eight children, if one included her husband’s six bastards—and one did, because she and her husband had gathered them all under their roof.
“That’s the last I’ll see of my husband tonight,” she laughed. “Those two talk only of chess if they’re within each other’s orbit. I’m so sorry not to have seen more of you in the last few years, Ward.”
“I lived abroad for some time before I began teaching at Oxford.”
“You’re being very modest. Your father has endlessly boasted of your paper-rolling fortune.”
Ward ignored that. “I apologize if the Duke of Beaumont prevailed upon your husband to attend the House of Lords tomorrow against his wishes.”
“Villiers is Eugenia’s godfather, so he’s feeling grumpy,” she replied in her direct manner. “But he will fight for you in court. We have six illegitimate children, Ward. The House of Lords cannot be allowed to delude themselves that we would allow illegitimacy to overthrow a will such as the one written by that poor young lord.”
“I am indebted,” Ward said.
The duchess smiled at him. “Villiers believes you will make Eugenia happy.”
“That is not what he indicated to me.”
“He is of the belief that competition can drive a man to recognize his own folly.” She tapped his shoulder with her fan. “If you must know the truth, he’s peevish because he wagered that you would climb to her window after that scene at Fonthill . . . instead, you returned to Oxford.”
“Your husband wagered that I would ruin Eugenia’s reputation by surprising her in her bedchamber? That is reprehensible, Your Grace.” He shouldn’t be so blunt, but he couldn’t stop himself.
“Ward,” the duchess said with a sigh. “Do remember that we’ve known you most of your life, won’t you? You must call me Eleanor. Of course, Leo thought that. He is so certain of his command of human nature; it does him good to be mistaken from time to time.”
“He’s not entirely mistaken,” Ward allowed. After all, he fully planned to climb to her bedchamber window if need be.
“After I banished Villiers years ago,” the duchess said, “my future husband put on a plain black coat—anathema to him to this day, as you can tell by his complaints—and wrote a note under a different name asking me for a drive in Hyde Park. I was in that carriage before I grasped my suitor’s identity.”
“Are you suggesting that I should pretend to be a different man—legitimate, perhaps? Or a member of the nobility?”
The duchess’s eyes softened. “Ward, you are a member of the nobility. As are all of our children. What Villiers wanted to prove in his black coat was that the private man, not the most flamboyant rake in London, was in love with me.”
“I love Eugenia,” Ward said.
“Everyone loves her,” the duchess said, with a clear look from her blue eyes. “You will need to move quickly. Evan has told his mother that he plans to make her his wife.”
A sound dangerously close to a growl rose from Ward’s chest.
“I expect her to attend the hearing tomorrow, sitting in the peeresses’ box.”
It had never occurred to him that Eugenia might be there. Not that he knew anything about the House of Lords and their not-so-private private acts.
His former fiancée, Mia, suddenly appeared. With a smile at the duchess, she nudged Ward with her elbow. “Ask me to dance, won’t you?”
“It’s refreshing to see how friendly the two of you are,” the Duchess of Villiers observed. “When I realized that Roberta had once been betrothed to Villiers, I glowered at h
er every chance I got.”
“We are excellent friends.” Mia twinkled at the duchess. “I intend to use Ward to make my husband jealous.”
A minute later, as they began circling the floor, she asked, “Are you quite well?”
“Not really,” Ward replied.
“You have nothing to worry about,” she said. “Just look around this ballroom. Why, if someone blew it up with gunpowder the way Guy Fawkes tried to do with Parliament, half the country’s peers would be lost.”
“You’re a novelist to the core, Mia,” Ward said, smiling down at her.
He felt a prickling in his shoulders, glanced to the side, and met the glare of Mia’s husband. The look in Pindar’s eyes actually cheered him up. “I think you’re succeeding in making your husband jealous.”
“Excellent,” Mia said, patently unconcerned. “Now, how are you planning to win back Mrs. Snowe?”
“I shall kidnap her.” He had decided to drive the carriage to Fonthill’s front door, push past that butler, and carry her out over his shoulder. But if she attended the House tomorrow, he would steal her straight from there.
Mia frowned. “I’ve written that plot twice, Ward, and it would not be romantic in reality. I always have to finesse the inconvenient fact that my heroine wouldn’t have a toothbrush or a clean chemise.”
“I brought her maid along last time.”
“Last time?” Mia squeaked.
“Vander is on the verge of doing me bodily harm,” Ward said, bringing her to a halt in front of her duke, who promptly tucked his wife under an arm and dropped a kiss on her head for good measure.
“Don’t be a bear,” Mia said, looking up at her husband. “I dragged Ward onto the floor.”
“Why?” Vander growled, in a very bearlike fashion.
Ward gave him a sardonic grin. “It seems there’s a former-fiancée clause that permits her to organize my love life.”
Mia poked Vander around the middle. “Will you please stop glowering at my former fiancé?”