A Reckless Arrangement (Courting Ruin #4)

Chapter 1

Hyde Park, London

The fashionable hour was waning.

Sunlight spilled low across the Serpentine in molten bands, gilding carriage wheels, polished harnesses, and the fluttering ribbons of bonnets tilted toward one another in elegant conspiracy.

Laughter drifted across the gravel walks in bright little bursts.

Gentlemen lounged with studied ease, as if every one of them had been born with a gloved hand on a cane and not a single troubling thought in his head.

Edward Hallworth walked among them with his normal indolent, faintly amused, and entirely unbothered expression.

It was an expression that had served him admirably.

A man who looked lazy was rarely asked to account for how closely he watched. A man rumored to be reckless was seldom suspected of discipline. A man who cultivated the appearance of charming uselessness could move through drawing rooms and gaming hells alike without inviting scrutiny.

Edward had learned that lesson years ago.

He had also learned that a mask, worn long enough, had a way of adhering to the skin.

“Do stop looking as though you are being led to execution,” Crispin murmured beside him.

Edward spared his brother a glance. “That would imply certainty of conclusion. I still hope for reprieve.”

Crispin’s mouth twitched. “You have spent three quarters of an hour in the park and have not once attempted escape. I call that progress.”

“Progress toward what?” Edward asked. “A deeper understanding of curricles?”

“Toward remembering that you do in fact belong to the world of living men.”

Edward let out a quiet breath. “An accusation I continue to dispute.”

Ahead of them, Eden, Marchioness Blackstone, was speaking to Alice, Viscountess Crewe, with the calm satisfaction of a happily married woman who had come to regard romantic entanglements as both mysterious and entirely manageable.

Gabriel, Eden’s husband, listened with long-suffering fondness.

Samuel, Alice’s husband, bent his head to say something in a lower tone that drew a quick laugh from his wife and a touch of her hand.

The gesture was slight. Intimate only if one knew how to look.

Edward knew how to look.

He had spent enough years observing others to recognize settled affection in the smallest exchange.

A hand that lingered half a second too long, a glance returned without thought, the unconscious shift of a body turning always toward one particular person.

Marriage, when it was happy, altered people in subtle ways, drawing something unguarded to the surface.

He had not expected to notice that sort of thing so often, still less to mind it.

Of late a restlessness had settled beneath his skin that no diversion had managed to ease. Cards bored him. Clubs wearied him. The flirtations that once passed the time now felt like lines from a play. Even vice, when sampled too often, lost its flavor.

It was an intolerable realization, and one that irritated him enough that he nearly excused himself on the spot.

He was considering which route from the park would attract the least comment when a movement at the edge of the crowd caught his attention.

A young woman in pale blue came through the throng as if the world behind her were on fire.

Her bonnet hung askew, its ribbons streaming loose against her shoulders. Her chest rose and fell too quickly, her breath visibly catching, and her expression was so naked with fear, so stripped of all polite disguise, that the air around Edward seemed to sharpen.

She made directly for him.

The conversations nearest them faltered. A circle of attention opened as though society itself, so often blind by choice, had been startled into sight.

The young woman reached him and seized his arm with both hands.

“Please,” she gasped. “Please, you must help me.”

Edward turned fully toward her, instinct arriving before thought.

He caught her by the shoulders to steady her.

She was trembling from head to foot. Up close he could see that she was not as young as panic had first suggested; perhaps three-and-twenty.

Her eyes were blue-gray, wide with terror, and there was a small ink stain near the side of one gloved finger.

“Help you from whom?” he asked.

A shout answered for her.

“Lydia!”

Edward looked up, his gaze finding a broad-shouldered man shoving through the crowd toward them with the heedless force of someone accustomed to clearing his own path.

His hat sat crooked. His face was red with exertion and temper, and his expression held none of the embarrassment a decent man might have felt at drawing such public notice.

The woman made a sound—not quite a cry, not quite a breath—and her hands tightened convulsively on his sleeve.

Edward stepped forward, placing himself squarely between her and the advancing man.

“Sir,” he said, his tone still mild, “you are alarming the lady.”

The man stopped short, though whether from surprise or calculation Edward could not yet tell.

“This is no affair of yours,” he snapped. “She is with me.”

Behind Edward, Lydia’s fingers flinched against his coat.

He felt the recoil as clearly as if it had struck his own body.

“Is with?” Edward repeated.

The fellow’s jaw hardened. “Stand aside.”

“The lady appears to prefer that I do not.”

Around them, attention sharpened. A matron lowered her parasol an inch. Two young gentlemen slowed. One older man turned with frank curiosity.

The stranger saw it too. His gaze flicked over the watching faces. His nostrils flared.

Coward, Edward thought coldly.

Without turning, he lowered his voice, and said, “North gate. There is a line of hackneys just beyond it. Take the first carriage you find and do not stop for anyone.”

There was a pause behind him.

“You are helping me?” she whispered.

The question pierced him more cleanly than the plea had, not because of the words themselves, but because of the disbelief in them. As if help were a thing so uncertain she could not trust its presence even after it had been offered. He did not allow himself to consider why that angered him.

“I am,” he said. “Go.”

She hesitated only a moment longer before gathering her skirts and hurrying away.

The man lunged after her.

Edward moved—no flourish, no wasted gesture—simply shifted into his path with enough precision that the man would have had to lay hands on him to continue.

“Think very carefully,” Edward said softly. “At present you look merely unpleasant. In another second you will look like a man pursuing a terrified woman through Hyde Park before witnesses.”

“Damn you,” the man hissed, his face scarlet.

Edward’s mouth barely curved. “I have endured worse sentiments.”

A laugh sounded somewhere to the left. The fellow’s color deepened. He stood rigid for a heartbeat, rage and prudence visibly at war in his face.

Prudence won.

With a muttered curse, he backed away, shouldered past a gawking youth, and disappeared into the crowd.

Almost at once the park resumed itself. Conversations rose again. Wheels rattled by. Sunlight flashed on glass and lacquer. It was one of society’s oldest talents, to witness ugliness, shudder briefly, and then arrange its features back into indifference.

Edward remained where he was for a moment, watching the space where the man had vanished.

Lydia.

He turned toward the north gate, but the pale blue of her dress had already disappeared into the flow of bodies and equipages.

He should let it end there. He had intervened. The immediate danger had passed. There was no sensible reason to involve himself further in the troubles of a frightened stranger.

Yet he refused to settle. Perhaps it was the man’s determined expression. Perhaps the raw fear in hers. Perhaps only the old, unwelcome recognition of what happened too often when women were left to the mercy of men who counted on silence to complete the work of threat.

“Edward?” Eden said.

He looked back.

All four of his companions were watching him. Gabriel with alert amusement. Alice with visible concern. Samuel with the expression of a man who had already guessed trouble would follow. Crispin, who knew him best, said nothing at all.

“I find,” Edward said, brushing an imaginary speck from his cuff, “that I have developed a sudden and profound dislike of fresh air.”

Gabriel’s brows rose. “How tragic for the park.”

Edward inclined his head. “Offer it my condolences.” Then he turned and walked toward the north gate before anyone could stop him.

The hackney stand was loud with drivers’ calls, stamping horses, and the grind of wheels over packed earth.

A child darted too near a pair of bays and was yanked back by a nursemaid before disaster.

Dust hung in the lowering light. Men shouted destinations over one another with the cheerless enthusiasm of people who had repeated the same demands all day and expected to repeat them until dark.

Edward scanned the line.

He found her at once.

She stood near a weathered bench beneath a plane tree, not inside a carriage as prudence would have dictated, but rooted in place. Her bonnet had been hastily tied, one ribbon trailing longer than the other. She gripped her reticule so tightly her knuckles stretched the kid leather of her glove.

Every few moments she looked back toward the road. Once, a gentleman’s laugh carried too sharply from the stand, and her shoulders jerked before she mastered the reaction.

When she saw Edward, relief flashed over her face so quickly it might have escaped a less attentive man.

Relief.

It altered her entire expression before caution dropped over it again like a veil.

“You should not have followed me,” she said when he reached her.

“And yet I did.” He glanced at the bench. “There is a seat. Use it before you fall over and compel me to become heroic twice in one afternoon.”

“I am perfectly capable of standing.”

Even as she said it, a tremor moved through her knees.