Chapter 3
I just met the most marvelous gentleman!
His name is Harrison Brudenall, and he is a marquis from London!
He has come to Edinburgh to meet with Richard and a group of investors about something or another.
And Richard tells me that it has taken him years to learn tolerance for the marquis because the gentleman once courted Abby!
I cannot countenance it, of course. The marquis is surely not so old to have wooed Abby when she had her Season so long ago.
Nor can I understand why Richard would harbor any intolerance for the marquis.
He’s so magnificently dashing and handsome, with vivid blue eyes that simply dance with laughter.
He teased and flirted outrageously throughout dinner until I giggled like a schoolgirl. Yes, I know at seventeen that I technically am such a girl, but I have never been the object of such practiced flirtation from such a posh London lord as the marquis!
––––––––
A hundred eligible men in the room, Eve claimed, but only the one gentleman Fiona was most reluctant to greet dared seek her out.
And it could not possibly be another behind her.
She knew as much without turning to look that visual confirmation was utterly unnecessary.
Only all too well did she recognize the deep, delicious baritone that reverberated with a little quiver through her.
“Lord Aylesbury!” Eve turned with a smile, holding out her hand in warm welcome. “Fiona,” Eve caught her by the elbow as if she sensed Fiona was on the verge of bolting like a startled deer. “You remember Lord Aylesbury, don’t you?”
Oh, Lord Aylesbury, she longed to drawl with dripping scorn. Why yes, I might remember you. Aren’t you the reason I’m still unmarried at the ripe old age of twenty?
Or perhaps a lovely lie? I’m sorry, I don’t think I recall a Lord Aylesbury.
Either would have been acceptable.
Either was better than being tongue-tied.
“Fiona?”
As difficult as it had been to summon the willpower to come to London with this moment as a mere possibility, it was even more difficult than she might have imagined, turning and facing him in reality.
Her heart pounded a nauseating rhythm against the tight confines of her corset.
The gooseflesh raising the fine hairs on her arms was at odds with the heat rising with the flush that was surely reddening her cheeks.
Damn her brothers for forcing this upon her!
“Lady Fiona,” Aylesbury said, holding out his hand.
She stared blankly at his gloved hand, lifting her eyes to briefly skim his face, and then her gaze fell again.
She should have opted for the year instead.
The misery of three hundred sixty-five days would have been nothing compared to the agony realized in that fleeting glance.
Hair as black as night, vividly bright blue eyes under thick black brows.
A face so ruggedly beautiful it made her heart pinch painfully.
The Marquis of Aylesbury possessed a smile that would steal a woman’s soul.
A smile...
With a frown, Fiona glanced up at him again, noting his taut expression, the faint brackets etched around his mouth and the slight downturn of his lips. Where was the smile? The light of humor in his eyes?
No, she berated herself. She might have to be here, but she wouldn’t care—not again.
“Fiona? Won’t you say something?” Eve prompted.
Mutely shaking her head, she looked pointedly away.
Really, what did a woman say to the man who had broken her heart?
* * *
“Eden, my love,” Glenrothes called the loving sobriquet to his wife as he approached. “Look who I found among the crowd.”
They all turned, and a relieved but honest smile creased Fiona’s dimples as she recognized the handsome, sandy-haired gentleman her brother was bearing along with him.
“Lord Temple,” she said with an affectionate welcome, extending her hand in greeting. He took it, properly kissing the back of her hand before squeezing it between both of his hands warmly but solemnly.
Anthony Temple served with Richard and Vin during their years in the Scots Guard, fighting in Egypt and Burma.
Though he had briefly incarcerated with Richard before they escaped from rebel forces in Egypt seven years before, the family’s genuine affection for him had been born from his rescue of Vin from those same rebels just two years before.
Temple’s visits to Edinburgh had been rare, but his company had been pleasurable despite his typically somber demeanor.
He turned to greet Eve as well. “What a surprise to see you here,” she gushed, narrowing her eyes on Fiona.
A shadow of a smile crossed Temple’s lips, though it did settle in his eyes, lighting their amber depths warmly as he, too, looked back at Fiona. “A pleasurable one, I hope?”
“Very,” she rushed to assure him. A fool couldn’t have missed the incongruity between how she had greeted the two men, and Eve frowned even more fiercely. But Fiona pointedly ignored her and everyone else, focusing entirely on Lord Temple as if he were her savior.
“Would you care to dance?” Temple asked with a trace of a smile as the next dance was called.
“I would love to,” Fiona accepted with honest enthusiasm, taking his arm as he led the way to the dance floor without even looking over her shoulder. “The lads have done little more than trod upon my toes tonight.”
“I hope I make a better showing.”
“I promise you, you can do no worse,” Fiona assured him with a teasing grin.
“I wager I can,” he jested quietly.
Allowing her a moment to hook her train loop around her wrist, Temple took her hand in his and settled his other hand firmly at the small of her back as the opening bars began to play.
With little reason to, Fiona hadn’t studied her dance card but was pleased to recognize the strains of a lively mazurka by Claude Debussy.
Lord Temple took a step forward, setting them in motion, and Fiona cast one last look at Lord Aylesbury before the spirited Polish folk dance required all her attention.
He was watching her, his expression more grave than she ever imagined it could be.
Good God, Harry Brudenall, is that really you?
If it was, he was nothing like the Harry she remembered.
* * *
“Are you quite all right, Lady Fiona?”
She looked back up at her dance partner with a smile. “My apologies, Lord Temple. I’m not as familiar with the steps of the mazurka as I should be.”
Belying his claims otherwise, Temple led her skillfully and enjoyably through the steps. The mazurka was a couple’s rather than patterned dance, keeping her partnered with him throughout the set. It was also complicated enough to command the dancer’s whole attention.
Regrettably, it did not.
Despite her best efforts to ignore him, Fiona was entirely too conscious of Aylesbury’s serious gaze following her.
Until that gaze was gone.
The awareness faded, and she sighed with relief, putting some effort into enjoying herself. “Despite your warnings, my toes are surviving quite nicely.”
“It is a surprise to us both, I assure you,” he jested in his quiet way. “Much to my mother’s chagrin, I am not one to frequent society balls.”
As contained and solemn as he usually was, that didn’t surprise Fiona at all. “What brings you out tonight, then?”
“Richard wrote that you were all coming to town, so I thought it might be nice to make an exception.”
She groaned as she was twirled around the corner. “Please do not tell me that he recruited you to assist in this mad effort to see me married off! I hardly require yet another pair of censuring eyes frightening off all the eligible gentlemen.”
“No,” Temple shook his head with a low chuckle as he moved her around the floor. “I’m most definitely not here to chaperone you, Lady Fiona, but perhaps instead to join the ranks of said eligible gentlemen.”
“Join the ranks...?” she began to ask, and then it struck her what he had said. A blush blossomed on her cheeks, and she nearly stumbled. Was Lord Temple saying that he intended to court her?
“Lady Fiona? Have I shocked you into silence?” he teased lightly. “Perhaps I should have begun as I had originally intended with an invitation to join me for a ride?”
Another blush heated her cheeks, and Fiona studied Temple through her lashes, noting his strong facial features and sandy hair for the first time.
His light brown eyes are so solemn yet warm.
And he was tall, a pleasing aspect of any gentleman given her unusual height, with a muscular military bearing.
He didn’t have dark hair, but he was very handsome indeed, though she hadn’t once stopped to consider it before. Temple had come into their lives when her thoughts had been far too occupied with thoughts of Aylesbury to notice anything else.
Alas, that hadn’t seemed to change.
Glancing around the ballroom, it took Fiona a moment to locate Aylesbury again, not on the sidelines but amid the dancers with a young, blonde miss in his arms. He was saying something to her, though she couldn’t make it out from the distance.
Whatever it was, it stirred none of the adoration in the young woman that Aylesbury usually inspired in females.
“Lady Fiona?”
She looked up at her partner again. “My apologies, Lord Temple. I’m afraid you’ve taken me quite off guard.
But, to answer your question, yes, I think I would enjoy a ride.
” Now that the worst had happened and she’d managed to come upon him, the last thing she needed was to let Aylesbury think she was pining for him or without options. “Carriage or horse?”
“How about bicycle?”
Fiona laughed at the thought. “I fear I cannot imagine you riding a bicycle, Lord Temple. It doesn’t suit a military man, does it?”
A pink gown swished by the corner of her eye, and she caught sight of Aylesbury close by.
“Is it true, Miss Langston? Have you heard from her?” he was asking his partner. “Do you know where she is?”
She? Fiona couldn’t help but wonder and cursed her curiosity.
No! There was nothing—nothing!—about the Marquis of Aylesbury that should interest her any longer.
She had put him behind her. She was ready to move on to a brighter future.
..one where what Aylesbury did and whom he did them with should not interest her.
“Ah, but I am no longer in the military,” Temple was saying.
“Very well,” she said, though her voice was distracted and lacking the enthusiasm it had carried before. “Bicycles it is then, though sadly, I don’t have one.”
“I shall have a pair brought around for us. Shall we say tomorrow, then?”
Suddenly, a burly uniformed man with an impressive silver walrus mustache pushed through the crush of dancers, ignoring protests along the way. He caught Aylesbury’s partner by the arm and pulled them to a halt.
Shoving the girl behind him, the older man puffed up like an outraged rooster. “I thought I told you to leave my daughter be, Aylesbury.”
Aylesbury said something more in a low tone, to which the old man bellowed, “I told you before, my daughter doesn’t know anything about it.”
“Lady Fiona?”
She cast a preoccupied glance at Temple. “I’m sorry. Yes, tomorrow will be fine.”
Aylesbury’s voice rose then. “I just want to know where she is!” He grabbed the woman’s arm again. “I just want to know she is well, Miss Langston,” he said. “Surely you can understand that? I love her.”
Fiona felt the blood drain from her face at his words. He loved her? Who was she?
“I said bugger off, Aylesbury!”
Temple frowned at the disturbance. “That’s hardly language to be used when ladies are present.”
“I don’t know,” Miss Langston cried out.
“You’re lying, Miss Langston.”
Despite herself, Fiona couldn’t help but agree with Aylesbury’s accusation. Whoever Aylesbury was looking for, Miss Langston knew something about it.
“Now, see here!” Miss Langston’s father blustered again at Aylesbury’s accusation, slapping a meaty palm against Aylesbury’s chest and shoving him away.
Having been around physical confrontations between grown men for most of her life, Fiona would have expected any man to fall back or at least stumble under the force of the heavier man, but to her surprise, Aylesbury held steady.
And instead of retreating, he stepped up again until he was face to face with the other man, his fists curling into the older man’s lapels.
“I will have the truth from your daughter, Langston.”
“Fiona.” Temple eased her away, but she couldn’t move. Nor did anyone else on the dance floor as they watched the potential drama unfold, unable to look away from any scandalous moment that could serve to invigorate what might be a stale evening for some.
“Unhand me!” Langston commanded hoarsely and put both hands to Aylesbury’s chest, pushing him again. This time, Aylesbury did stumble a step backwards, giving Langston room enough to charge Aylesbury like an enraged bull.
All around them, ladies gasped and squealed, stepping back in horror. One tripped over another and fell to the floor amidst calls of surprise and puddles of lace and taffeta. “I say,” Temple called out, stepping into the fray to separate the two combatants. “Enough of this!”
He grabbed the older man's arm and held him back, motioning for the other male bystanders to assist him.
“What is going on here?” their hostess, Lady Onslow, cried out as she rushed through the crowd. “Fisticuffs? My lords! How could you?”
“You’ve gone mad, Aylesbury,” the older man spat, struggling against Temple’s hold. “I hope you never see her again.”
Aylesbury leapt forward, rage evident in every movement. However, whatever attack he had in mind was cut short by the intervention of two other bystanders. He fought their hold only briefly before raising his hands in surrender. “This is not over, Langston.”
“The hell it isn’t!”
Lady Onslow ran to his side, tugging on his arm. “My lord, are you quite all right?”
He nodded shortly. “My apologies, Lady Onslow.”
With a stiff bow, he turned and marched off the dance floor, the crowd that had been gathering around the spectacle parting like the Red Sea before him. He glanced at Fiona as he passed, his eyes filled not with the rage she expected but with sorrow and turbulence.
With a nod, he continued on his way, a scandalized murmur rising in his wake.
However, she had dreaded, anticipated, and pictured meeting him again, Fiona had never imagined him like that. “That was Lord Aylesbury, wasn’t it, Lady Fiona? Do you know him well?” Temple asked, returning to her side.
Fiona put a hand to her wildly beating heart and let loose a shaky breath as she shook her head.
No, that violent, brooding man was not the Harry Brudenall she knew at all.