He wanted, badly, to ask the confusing female walking so fluidly—so confidently and easily—by his side what she’d thought about the kiss they’d shared. Whether she’d felt anything at all—anything like the cataclysmic and ineradicable shift in focus that that kiss had imposed on him—and whether, just possibly, she might consider marrying him herself.
He wanted to ask her all those things—wanted to look into her soft blue eyes and say the words, direct and without any obfuscation—but he couldn’t.
Not while she was strolling beside him singing Miss Fotherby’s praises and all but specifically encouraging him to look at Miss Fotherby as his prospective bride.
Confusion wasn’t the half of what he felt. Frustration roiled, mixing with a wholly unfamiliar panicky fear—a fear of not acting and through that losing her, which itself was solidly counteracted and blocked, stymied, by the weight on his shoulders and the horrible prospect raised by the question, What if she said no?
If he asked, and Henrietta refused him . . .
“I’ll inquire further at the teas this afternoon, but I suspect Miss Fotherby really will prove to be the most outstanding candidate.”
His temper snapped and flicked him on the raw. Goaded, he said, his tone terse and harsh, “All right. Enough of Miss Fotherby.” He looked at Henrietta. “Who else should I look at?”
Me. Say, Me.
She’d been looking down while she’d been speaking; now she drew in a deep breath as if girding her loins—and his heart leapt in hope.
“Well, we still have Miss Chisolm and Miss Downtree on the list, so I’ll ask after them, too.”
Hope crashed and died on the rocks of futility. The deflation that hit him left him feeling hollowed out inside.
“And you really should look further afield—we have Lady Hamilton’s ball tonight, and that’ll be another crush, so we may well find more suitable candidates there.” Raising her gaze from the grass, Henrietta was about to glance up at James—unsure of what might show in her own eyes, she hadn’t allowed herself to do so while speaking of Miss Fotherby—but as her gaze rose, she saw the lady in question standing a little deeper into the park and speaking with a very recognizable gentleman: Rafe Cunningham, gazetted rake, profligate gambler, and all-around hedonist.
The pair weren’t conversing; they were facing each other, several feet apart, and Rafe was clearly arguing. Hotly. Miss Fotherby had her back to Henrietta and James, but from the angle of her head, and her gestures, she was arguing just as hotly back.
A swift glance at James’s face confirmed that he, too, had spotted the pair.
Then Rafe spread his arms to his sides, hands open as he made some dramatic appeal.
Miss Fotherby threw her hands in the air, swept violently around, and strode swiftly toward the Avenue; all angrily swishing skirts, her face pale but with flags of color flying in her cheeks, her lips set in a trenchant line, her gaze fixed unswervingly ahead, she marched toward the carriages, where, no doubt, her aunt was waiting. She didn’t glance back once, and she didn’t notice Henrietta and James where they’d halted a little way away.
“Ah.” Henrietta glanced at Rafe, then looked at Miss Fotherby’s retreating back. “I suspect we can guess which gentleman has made Miss Fotherby an offer she doesn’t trust.” Rafe Cunningham was well-born and wealthy, the twin characteristics that, in a gentleman, made him eligible no matter his character.
Wondering how the information that it was Rafe who had approached Miss Fotherby might affect James’s view of that lady, Henrietta refocused her attention on him—and registered the tension investing his long frame. Glancing at his face, she saw that he was studying Rafe.
Was James already feeling possessive over Miss Fotherby?
To Henrietta’s dismay, her stupid heart lurched downward—which only proved that it hadn’t yet come to its senses over James. Inwardly sighing, she looked back at the carriages.
James watched Rafe Cunningham—standing stock-still in the park, his hands on his hips, visibly exasperated and openly frustrated as he stared after Miss Fotherby, his dark features set in an expression of utter incomprehension—and experienced a deep and undeniable surge of fellow-feeling.
Jaw setting, he steered Henrietta away from Rafe and the revealing look on his fellow wolf’s face. “Come on. We’d better get back or your mother will start getting impatient.”
He escorted her back to her mother’s carriage, handed her up, and made his good-byes.
With a brisk salute, and a last look at Henrietta, he forced himself to turn and stride away.
He’d hoped to regain some of the ground he’d lost last night, but instead . . . as far as he could see, he was further than ever from getting Henrietta to look at him as a potential husband. She seemed to have seized on the advent of Miss Fotherby as a solution to his problem, as a way of accomplishing her task of assisting him to find his necessary bride . . . but he didn’t want Miss Fotherby; indeed, he wished Rafe the best of luck with her.
He wanted Henrietta.
As he crossed the lawns, he consulted his inner self, but the answer was unequivocal. He wasn’t about to retreat, to back away and let Henrietta go—not now he’d found her, not now he’d finally recognized her as his.
So he was going to have to come up with some more definite way of reshaping her view of him.
Something powerful enough to change a Cynster female’s mind.
From her seat in the carriage, Henrietta watched James go, watched him stride off without once looking back. As the carriage rumbled into motion, avoiding Mary’s questioning gaze, Henrietta looked away across the lawns . . . and wished with all her unrepentant heart that Miss Millicent Fotherby had never crossed their paths.
Fate, Henrietta decided, was smiling on Miss Fotherby and her bid to become James’s bride. Most helpfully, that afternoon saw Henrietta, along with her mother and Mary, attending an at-home at Lady Osbaldestone’s house; her ladyship’s drawing room was crammed with every last grande dame Henrietta might wish to question.
Reminding herself she was honor-bound to do her duty by James, she duly set about inquiring as to what the assembled ladies could tell her of Millicent Fotherby.
Of course, in the way of ton ladies, gaining information required offering information in return. In that distinctly august company, her request for information on Miss Fotherby necessitated explaining what had caused what was, for her, a distinctly novel tack; as The Matchbreaker, she more customarily inquired after the bona fides of gentlemen, not young ladies. By and large, as she worked her way steadily around the room, going from group to group, she managed to excuse her query by simply stating that she’d agreed to help James, a friend of Simon’s, with his quest to find a suitable bride, and, if necessary, deflecting attention by asking about Rafe Cunningham, who, as she’d suspected, was, indeed, no better than she’d supposed. Most ladies swallowed her half-truths whole and happily related what they knew of Miss Fotherby, her family, her antecedents, her expectations, and her present situation.
Sadly, what Henrietta learned wasn’t quite definitive and definite enough for her to deem her job done and recommend that James make an offer for Miss Fotherby without further ado. Even more unfortunately, again and again she was directed to seek further clarification from the very two ladies she’d hoped to avoid.
There was no help for it; if she wanted the last word on Millicent Fotherby’s eligibility for the position of James Glossup’s wife, she was going to have to approach Lady Osbaldestone, who, as well as being a distant cousin of Viscount Netherfield, James’s grandfather, was apparently also distantly connected to the Fotherby family.
Henrietta wasn’t overly surprised by that; Lady Osbaldestone seemed to be connected to fully half the ton.
Having to inquire of Lady Osbaldestone was bad enough, but seated beside her ladyship was Henrietta’s aunt Helena—which meant the chaise on which the pair of grandes dames sat held one too many sharp-eyed older ladies than Henrietta w
as at all comfortable with.
Her aunt Helena, the Dowager Duchess of St. Ives, had the most lovely pale green eyes—and a gaze that seemed to see straight through any assumed façade. She was widely acknowledged as perspicacious to an almost mythical degree. Her son, Devil, Duke of St. Ives and head of the Cynster family, had similarly pale green eyes, but he had yet to develop the same perspicacity, much to the relief of the rest of the family.
Steeling herself, Henrietta presented herself before her hostess and her aunt. Both smiled with transparent delight and recommended she sit on a nearby chair and tell them what she wanted to know.
Henrietta obeyed and, despite her trepidation, felt she acquitted herself reasonably well in framing her questions and leading Lady Osbaldestone and her aunt to tell her what she needed to know.
It helped that, being connected with the Glossups, Lady Osbaldestone already knew the full tale behind James’s need to wed. Which meant that Helena knew it, too; the pair rarely kept secrets from each other. Consequently, once they’d drawn from Henrietta the unadulterated story of how she came to be involved in James’s quest, both older ladies fully concurred that James approaching Melinda Wentworth was entirely inappropriate for his situation, and confirmed that Millicent Fotherby was an excellent candidate for James to consider, but . . . it was at that point that Henrietta felt as if the conversation stepped sideways, into what arena she wasn’t quite sure.
“Of course,” Lady Osbaldestone said, “one needs to pay due attention to the reason James’s hunt for a wife came to be.”
“Indeed.” Helena nodded sagely, her gaze growing distant. “It was . . . peste, what was her name? His sister-in-law, the one who was murdered?”
“Katherine—Kitty as she was called,” Lady Osbaldestone supplied. “Precisely.” Lady Osbaldestone caught Henrietta’s gaze and continued, as if tutoring her, “Kitty is the reason James . . . how should I describe it? Pulled back from the general social round. In essence, pulled back from marrying or even socially consorting with suitable ladies of his class with whom he might form an attachment. Kitty, you see, was a much-indulged beauty, and she married James’s older brother Henry for wealth and position, but once she had Henry’s ring on her finger, Kitty set her sights on other gentlemen and, ultimately, her eye fell on James.
“The poor boy paid no attention, of course—Glossups are loyal to the bone. Kitty, sadly, understood nothing about such decencies and set herself to seduce James by whatever means possible—but then a previous lover murdered her. I was staying at Glossup Hall at the time, and it was all quite tawdry. We’ll never know if Kitty’s pursuit of James was in order to abrogate her pregnancy by that previous lover, but I strongly suspect that, when the whole sorry story came out, that notion did occur to James. It would have been a dreadful situation and would have torn the family apart—but that was Kitty. She was entirely self-absorbed.”
“That was when Simon and Portia got engaged,” Helena put in. “So all this took place nearly two years ago, just before they married, and since then James has . . . stood outside society, and only, at least as far as marriage and young ladies are concerned, looked in.”
“Which,” Lady Osbaldestone said, “is precisely why Emily, James’s grandaunt, wrote her will as she did. She was disappointed not to have been able to dance at James’s wedding, but she did what she could to ensure that that wedding took place.”
“Emily was, indeed, a loss.” Helena smiled mistily, but then her gaze fixed on Henrietta, trapped before the chaise, and Helena’s lovely smile took on a different shading. “And so now you are here, helping James to find his bride, and that is entirely as it should be.”
Henrietta saw both older ladies glance at her throat, at the necklace that rested there; she waited for some comment, but none came. Instead, the pair exchanged a glance, then as one they sat back and regarded her.
“It occurs to me,” Lady Osbaldestone stated, “that in your quest to assist James, and, indeed, Millicent, too, you would do well to dwell on the inescapable truth that in our circles, young ladies, these days especially, must be very clear in their own minds as to what they truly want.”
“Yes, indeed.” Helena nodded, her expression serious. “It is often the case that young ladies fail to question their own wants and desires—and even more specifically, their hearts—and so do not realize when fate steps in and hands them the chance to seize all they might wish of life.”
Lady Osbaldestone snorted. “A common failing, that—to not stop and think enough to be sure of what one actually wants. How on earth any young lady can expect to gain the life she wishes without exerting herself even to define it, the heavens only know.”
“Oh, the gentlemen are equally bad.” Helena waved dismissively. “But in their case it is often willful blindness, which is rarely the case with young ladies. No, their problem is generally a lack of forethought—indeed, a lack of understanding that thought is required—combined with an assumption that life will somehow miraculously evolve in the way they wish it to without them having a clear idea in their minds what sort of life it is they wish, and then being prepared to actively go out and push and shove whatever needs to be pushed and shoved into place for that ideal life to take shape.”
“Well said!” Lady Osbaldestone thumped her cane on the floor and caught Henrietta’s eye. “And if you’ve a mind to be helpful, you might think to repeat that to your younger sister. She’s hiding over there with the other young ladies thinking we haven’t noticed what she’s about, but she’s one who definitely needs to put more thought into what she truly wants before she starts pushing and shoving.”
“Being, as she is,” Helena added, “so very good at pushing and shoving.”
Henrietta found herself smiling and promising to pass on the message to Mary, who had spent the entire visit chatting in a corner with several other young ladies, then she happily accepted a dismissal and escaped from the two grandest grandes dames in the room.
Only later, when she was heading for the door in her mother’s train and turned her mind to summarizing all she’d learned, did it occur to her that she wasn’t at all sure who had been the principal target of Lady Osbaldestone and Helena’s warning: Millicent Fotherby, Mary . . . or herself.
The thought distracted her, but once they’d settled in their carriage and it was rolling over the cobbles, carrying them to their next appointment, she mentally shook herself and refocused on the indisputable facts.
Rafe Cunningham notwithstanding, Millicent Fotherby appeared to be the answer to James’s prayers.
And equally undeniable was her own welling desire to push Millicent aside and take her place.
Pushing and shoving?
Henrietta inwardly snorted, and stared out of the window as they rocked along.
Lady Hamilton’s event that evening was a ball masque. Having realized that fact and recognized it as a godsend, James arrived at Hamilton House in good time to stand idling just inside the ballroom, indistinguishable from countless other gentlemen in domino and mask, waiting to pounce the instant Henrietta arrived.
When she did, shrouded in a hooded domino with a pale blue mask fixed across her face, he nevertheless recognized her instantly and swooped immediately she parted from their host and hostess and turned to survey the ballroom—already a sea of hoods, masks, and black cloaks.
He’d previously thought ball masques boring, their current resurgence in popularity distinctly ho-hum, but tonight . . . tonight, he hoped this ball masque would facilitate his salvation.
Halting beside Henrietta, grasping her elbow through her domino, he dipped his head to murmur, “Good evening.”
She looked at his masked face, looked into his eyes, and smiled; relief tinted the gesture, which seemed almost absentminded. “I’d forgotten it was to be a ball masque until it was time to dress. I wondered how I was going to find you in all this.” She waved at the anonymous crowd.
“Indeed—and speaking of that, I’ve had a revelatio
n.” He drew her aside, out of the press of incoming guests. Steering her toward the wall, he elaborated, “A ball masque is completely useless in terms of further assessing others—even if we think we know who someone is, we won’t be certain, not until the unmasking at midnight. The odds that we might merely waste our time are high. Hence, for tonight, I propose that we set aside all thoughts of broadening my horizons and extending my short list, or even further discussing Miss Fotherby, and instead simply allow ourselves to enjoy the evening and the pleasure of each other’s company.” Halting by the wall, where the crush was less evident, he smoothly faced her and arched a brow, visible above his minimal mask. “What say you?”
She stared up at him, slowly blinked, then her gaze refocused and raced over his face. She hesitated, then glanced out at the crowd, surveying the shifting, anonymous throng before, finally turning back to him, she said, “I think . . . that’s an excellent suggestion.”
Henrietta wasn’t sure what had most prompted that answer—her own inclination or the echoes of Lady Osbaldestone’s and Helena’s voices still ringing in her head—but the instant the words left her lips, she felt certainty and assurance well. She’d felt the lack of both in recent days, so she welcomed and embraced them, and beamed at James. “All right. So tonight it’s just us, and all for fun.” She spread her hands. “Where do we start?”
The answer was an exploration of her ladyship’s rooms and the various entertainments offered therein. Neither felt drawn to the card tables set up in a minor salon, but they filled glasses at a fountain overflowing with champagne, and sampled the strawberries footmen were ferrying through the guests on silver salvers. The dance floor, occupying the half of the large ballroom before the raised dais on which a small orchestra labored, captured them. And held them.
“I’d forgotten that at a masked ball one can dance however many waltzes as one wishes with a single partner.” Henrietta laughed as James responded by whirling her even faster through a turn.