Chapter Two
Who was she…exactly?
That was Major Gabriel Vance’s question as he watched Miss Janelle Caddick open the dance with her new fiancé, Lord Benedict. They’d announced their engagement not ten minutes ago, much to Gabe’s frustration. And now they were opening the ball together.
Gabe glared at the couple, trying to ferret out the problem.
Something about Miss Caddick felt wrong, and it was his job as Lord Benedict’s aide-de-camp at the Foreign Office, to be sure that everything around his lordship was right.
He was Benedict’s attack dog. He smoothed his superior’s way, he stopped problems before they arose, and he aided the man in every other way as he and Lord Castlereigh protected England from foreign threats, including the Corsican monster.
But what was the problem? Everything he saw now suggested Miss Caddick could not possibly be the woman he’d seen leaving the Rose Garden two hours ago.
Her face was sweet, her expression warm, and her posture proper.
She seemed too fresh to be a common whore, even a pretty one.
And the more he watched her, the more convinced he was that she was not a courtesan either.
Thanks to his mother, he knew a great many of them, and every one had an innate sensuality that brought a man’s mind down to its most primal place.
Even when the women tried to hide it, there was always a shift to the hips, a way of smiling, or even a hand gesture that fogged a man’s most elevated thoughts.
Miss Caddick had none of that. If anything, her gestures were efficient, not refined. Forthright, not subtle. Which made her appear like an excellent choice for Lord Benedict.
Except she had been at the Rose Garden. He was sure of it.
“Stop scowling. You’re frightening the young ladies.”
Gabe groaned internally. The last thing he wanted to do was banter vague things with Lord Nathaniel.
The man was a ne’er-do-well who somehow, someway was perpetually underfoot.
At least that was his public persona. Gabe knew him as a talented spy, recently married and blissfully happy, if his cheeky grin were to be believed.
“Ladies are too easily frightened,” he said, refusing to look at Lord Nate.
“You underestimate your fierceness.”
Gabe turned to the irritatingly perceptive Lord Nathaniel.
Perhaps the secret to his survival in the ton was that the man was handsome and wickedly smart.
Plus, he was the third son of an earl, which gave him a place at a society party.
Gabe, on the other hand, was a bastard with no place whatsoever.
“What do you know of Miss Caddick?”
“That she’s perfect for Lord Benedict.”
That was interesting. “Really? How so?”
“In the perfect-for-him way.” Then as Gabe deepened his scowl, Lord Nate elaborated. “Didn’t you hear? They’re madly in love.”
“He hasn’t met her before tonight.”
“Love at first sight.”
“From Lord Benedict? Never.” Lord Benedict was a brilliant diplomat, an extraordinary tactician, and a noble man in all the ways the peerage was supposed to be but usually wasn’t.
Truth be told, Gabe saw him as King Arthur reborn without the weight of Guinivere, because the man not a romantic.
He would never fall head over heels in love with anyone.
Indeed, Gabe had expected a political marriage from his superior, but there was nothing politically advantageous about Miss Caddick.
She was the daughter of a nobody baron. She didn’t even have a huge dowry.
Meanwhile Nate was laughing at him. “You don’t know what he does when he’s away from the Foreign Office. They could have been carrying on a secret affair.”
“He never leaves the Foreign Office, so that’s not possible.”
His companion blew out a frustrated breath. “Come with me,” he said.
Gabe didn’t move. “Where?”
“To meet a young lady who is perfect for you.”
“Not possible.” Gabe had come far from his bastard beginning, earning his rank and his position with Lord Benedict through hard work and a keen analytical mind.
Finding the appropriate wife would help raise his status a notch higher.
Unfortunately, all the appropriate women turned up their nose at his illegitimate birth.
“You haven’t looked hard enough.”
He’d barely looked at all. At least, not in the last couple years.
His last relationship—all six nights of his last leave—had been with Spanish courtesan who was trying to get military information.
He’d had fondness for her while they wandered the city eating until they nearly burst. Then he found her trying to go through Benedict’s correspondence.
It hadn’t even broken his heart because he’d barely been surprised.
But perhaps London was different. Perhaps it was time to try again.
“Who is it?” he asked, falling into step beside Nate.
“Miss Elsie Hunter.”
Gabe stopped moving. Now there was a woman he could believe frequented the Rose Garden. She likely preferred to watch rather than participate, but that did not make her the woman for him. “She’s scandalous.”
“Nothing of the sort!” Lord Nate protested. Then he winked. “But she is saucy and exactly the kind of woman to be intrigued by a bastard like you.”
“I’m an elevated bastard,” he corrected with a growl.
The nature of his birth was well known. He was the illegitimate son of the Duke of Torbay who partially acknowledged his presence.
His father had educated him, bought his commission, and occasionally shared a drink with him at his club.
But that was the extent of their familial relationship.
Still, that was enough to entice some women, and apparently Miss Hunter was one of them.
“Do be polite to her,” Nate said. “I’ve been talking you up.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because Lord Benedict asked me to. If he is to take a wife, then he thinks you should, too.”
Their situations were vastly different, but the pressures to wed were the same.
Lord Benedict needed an heir and Gabe needed the appearance of legitimacy in any form he could find.
That included matrimony. On the battlefield, no one cared about his parentage.
As aide-de-camp to Lord Benedict, he needed to be competent, not legitimate.
But now Lord Benedict was a rising star in the Foreign Office.
Those people cared. Those people wanted both Gabe to be deferential, charming, and have every appearance of a stable, moral life. If he didn’t appear as such, then he couldn’t advance alongside Lord Benedict. Indeed, he might hold the man back, and that was something he would not do.
He owed Benedict his career. On his own, he could not have advanced nearly so far.
But Benedict had recognized his strengths and had not hesitated to utilize him in such a way that everyone understood his skills.
Gabriel might have taught Benedict how to survive in a war zone, but Benedict had made sure that life had meaning.
He’d made sure they’d risen together to an influential place in the military.
And then Benedict’s brother, Anthony, had died, Benedict had become the sole heir to an earldom, and they’d both ended up in the diplomatic corps. A happy shift for Benedict. A difficult one for Gabe. But he could adjust, he reminded himself. He could at least try for a wife.
So with a curt nod, he allowed Lord Nate to introduce him to the saucy Miss Hunter.
It did not go well.
Miss Hunter was intrigued by his disreputable status. She also liked his medals and his muscles. And when he escorted her to the dance floor for the waltz she demanded they dance, she enjoyed herself too much. She laughed too loudly and cast several defiant gazes at her mother.
Women set on rebellion bored him.
He escorted her back to her mother, bowed over her hand, and left, making sure to glare at Nate along the way. Unfortunately, that simply prompted the man to make new introductions to every single female there, or at least those who would deign to dance with a bastard.
Those dances did not go much better. In fact, tonight reminded him why he had given up the social whirl. The eligible women of the ton fell into two camps: vapid or rebellious. And the ineligible women were a great deal worse.
There was only one woman who’d caught his attention this night, one woman he’d kept track of throughout the evening, one woman who’d danced perpetually at the edge of his awareness—Miss Janelle Caddick, his superior’s fiancée.
Throughout the evening, he’d watched as she’d interacted with every well-wisher or sycophant.
Miss Caddick danced every dance, smiled with poise, and acted exactly as Lord Benedict’s fiancée ought.
It was maddening.
He did not trust it. He was absolutely certain she’d been the woman rushing out of the Rose Garden this afternoon. He remembered the curve of her cheek, the flash of her eyes. He knew faces, and he’d caught sight of hers exiting London’s most notorious bawdy house.
He wanted to know why.
So, rather than give Lord Nathaniel one more second of his time, he followed the urging of his gut and went in search of his superior’s fiancée.
He found her in the room with the supper buffet eating what one could only call a generous amount of food.
He didn’t approach her at first but hung back to observe.
The first thing to catch his attention was the healthy flush to her cheek and the impudent upturn of her nose.
Her gestures might be restrained, but her exuberance was clear to anyone with eyes.
The woman clearly loved her food.