Chapter 5
CHAPTER 5
Cue Ball
T he atmosphere in the gentlemen’s club James had frequented all his adult life had that familiarity that wrapped around him cozily. Especially while he and Richard indulged in a game of billiards. It was the only time James saw his uptight and proper friend loosen up.
“No wager this evening, Crawford?” Richard teased.
James scowled. Familiar or not, there was something different in the way he just was. It irked him that he couldn’t place it. Something was eating at him, and it drove him crazy that he couldn’t locate it and pluck it out because it was taking roots like a weed in his perfectly curated garden. It was disrupting the patterns he carefully planned.
But he was unwilling to let the mask slip. The mask of that effortless charm that took almost all his energy to maintain. The reputation of the charismatic rake who had no care in the world, who simply had it all.
“If we hit the tables, Seymour, I will gladly make a wager. But with you and that damn stick? I am never winning, and we both know it.”
“I know. You prefer the whim of Lady Luck. I prefer the certainty of skill. I can control exactly what the balls will do, and thus I control the outcome.”
“Where is the fun in that?” James chuckled. “Having control all the time?”
Richard sniggered as if to himself, and the look in his eyes softened. A rare sight on him. One he reserved for his wife.
James still couldn’t believe that Richard of all people was in love.
“Your turn.” Richard pointed at him with his stick.
James scanned the table, trying to decide his next move, but he just couldn’t concentrate. He was not as good as Richard at this, but tonight he was losing the basic functions of his body. Still, he finally found an easy shot and bent to take it.
“Have you called on Diana?” Richard asked.
The stick slipped from James’s hand, and the balls ricocheted aimlessly around the table. When he straightened up, Richard was observing him.
James clenched his jaw. There it was, the wrinkle is his perfectly ironed life.
“No.” He coughed. “Not yet.”
Richard frowned.
It had been days since the auction. Propriety demanded that James would have visited her by now. But James was never about propriety. One does not build his reputation by being respectful.
“You do intend to honor the offer, Crawford, right?”
James smiled that disarming smile of his, but if there was one person on earth who was immune to his charm, it was Richard. It was the main reason he was his best friend. His only true friend.
“I will, of course. You know me.”
“It is exactly because I know you that I am drawing your attention to this matter. This is not some barmaid we are talking about. Not some wanton widow. This is my sister-in-law.”
“I am aware, Seymour. I have paid a ridiculous amount to promenade with her. I mean, the barmaids I could have?—”
His words were cut short when the stick in Richard’s hand came too close to his nose.
James threw his hands up in the air and smiled.
Where James was fire, Richard was ice. And right now, he envied his friend for possessing that particular attribute.
Something was boiling inside him since that damned night. Since the moment he saw her , so petite and sweet and innocent. Her sharp, unforgiving tongue had challenged him. There was none of the fluttering of lashes or fake sighs. She never saw him as anything other than a friend of her brother-in-law—and a rake, at that.
That is a lie , a voice in his head hastened to correct him.
She did see more. When he pushed her against that table, her cheeks reddened, and her breathing quickened. Oh, what he wouldn’t give to throw her on the table and silence her smart mouth.
“James! Your turn. You know what? This is hopeless.” Richard tossed his stick on the table. “Brandy?”
Yes, lots of it .
James swallowed, his throat suddenly dry.
This can’t be happening.
Where did that thought come from? The image stirred him so deeply that he had to sit uncomfortably across from his friend. For all the practice he had in feigning nonchalance, he was almost losing it.
The moment the brandy was served, he emptied his glass.
Richard studied him. He knew that something was off. He was off.
“James, you will call on Diana.”
“I said, I will!” James snapped.
Richard was shocked but said nothing.
James clenched his jaw. Yet, seeing his friend avoid his gaze for fear that he might explode again was not a sentiment he liked.
“Come on, Seymour,” he joked with that practiced ease. “A little anticipation stirs the blood.”
Richard chuckled. Then, he kept laughing.
James felt irritated. This was not lighthearted. His friend was laughing at him.
“Crawford, go visit Diana and do your duty. Your silly, little games won’t work on her.”
“She is a woman, is she not? Allow me to disagree, then.”
Richard shook his head. “That would be one great wager, but I would never bet on my sister-in-law falling into your trap.”
“Your rules spoil all the fun.”
“And your fun disrupts my rules.”
James poured more brandy into the small, curved glass, and for some reason, his mind brought forth her full curves, the way she felt against him when he pushed the boundaries just as much. She had gasped. He remembered that sound well.
What would it take to make her breathless?
His eyes widened when debauched images rushed to his mind. Images of Diana breathless and flushed, her lips parted. He shifted uneasily on the armchair as if it was on fire.
“You seem to hold her in high regard, that sister-in-law of yours.” He was desperate for a distraction.
“I do. She is a proper lady. Well-bred and with exquisite manners.”
James thought of their banter and how daring it was, borderline improper, but he wasn’t going to disillusion his friend.
“It is a pity she doesn’t wish to marry,” Richard added.
James’s ears perked up. She didn’t want to marry? Interesting. That was what almost all the ladies of the ton were after.
Someone like her, with that fire, destined to be a spinster? No way.
“Ah yes. You called her the jilted wallflower.”
“She is that. You see, there was a man who courted her for a while. A good-looking fellow with good standing. It was common knowledge that he was to propose soon. But at a ball, the man fell on his knees and professed his love for someone else. Before Diana’s eyes.”
“What? He did what?”
“Exactly, my friend. You can only imagine how poor Diana must have felt.”
“And who is that fellow?” James asked, suddenly irritated by the affairs of a lady who was a stranger.
“Who cares? They left London, of course. Since then, Diana renounced marriage, much to her siblings’ dismay. But… after Selina’s stunt—which I still do not approve of—she has started receiving visitors once more. I wouldn’t be surprised if she were to be wed soon.”
That was not the plan. James had made that bid to vex her. To see her flustered. And all the money in the world was worth it just to see her as furious and shocked as she was when he went to claim his prize. To render her speechless as he kissed her hand.
It was a game. A game he won.
And it seemed that his little stunt affected her a little bit more. If she was half the woman she had shown him, she was probably pulling her hair out, having all these annoying callers.
If there was any time to make her patience snap, it was now. Surely, she must be thinking she was rid of him. Oh, he could almost see the look on her face. Priceless.
“Do not worry, my friend.” James stood up. “I will call on her tomorrow.”
“Where are you…?” Richard trailed off as James rushed out.
James climbed into his carriage and went straight back to his estate, still unable to put his emotions in order.
He entered the place he was forced to call home, feeling exhausted. He just wanted to go to sleep and pray that all these weird feelings and thoughts allowed him to do so.
“You are late.”
He froze in the dimly lit hallway. If there was ever a voice he hated to hear, it was the one that came from the small, ground-level study. His father’s voice.
He turned slowly and raised his chin in defiance, his eyes hardening. His father was sitting at his desk, going through years and years’ worth of ledgers. Reports and bills and crop sums, incomes, and expenses.
Those were James’s ledgers. The work he had put in while his father wallowed in depression. And now his father was back, going through his estate and dictating his curfew.
“You are late. Again,” his father repeated.
“Quite observant of you,” James uttered. “I could say the same for you.”
The weight of his words filled the space between them, that space filled with unvoiced anger and unresolved issues.
Solomon Bolton, the Duke of Pemberton, shrank a bit under his son’s harsh words. Because they were true. He was late. Late to check the ledgers and late to check him.
James felt a hollow satisfaction at seeing the older man take the sting of his words. The words had hit their mark—he saw it in the slight tightening of his father’s mouth and the stiffening of his shoulders.
Still, when his father got up to stand at the threshold of the study, his back was straight, and his face was cold. James was irked that he looked so much like his father.
“Being late and getting drunk? Is that what will restore your reputation? Your rakish ways may win you some favor with the ladies behind fans, but no respectable family will ever let you near their daughters.”
If James thought he understood what nasty feelings were, hearing his father judging him like that redefined the term swiftly. Blood rushed to his temples, and his heart pounded madly. His lip curled slowly before he took a step forward. Then another. Not rushed, not reckless. Intentional.
Solomon’s eyes widened.
“That,” James said, his voice a barely controlled growl, “is hardly your concern.”
Something in his tone made his father hesitate.
The Duke opened his mouth to say something, but he was met with the ice in James’s eyes. He stepped back and walked away.
When his father left, James cursed under his breath and then climbed up the stairs, every muscle still tight with restrained fury. He hoped his grandmother didn’t hear their exchange. It would wreck her to see them like this. She was always pushing them to reconcile in that firm, sweet way of hers, the same way she had always been as his guardian.
He tore at his cravat, shrugged off his waistcoat, and yanked his shirt over his head as if shedding his skin could rid him of the anger burning beneath it. He needed to sleep. He had to sleep and forget all of this and the way he allowed his father to get to him again.
He had to sleep. He had to make good on his promise to Richard lest he wanted to find that precious billiard stick inserted into his cavities. He had to call on Diana.
At that thought, an image of her flashed through his mind. Not the sharp-tongued wallflower that challenged him. Another her. Flushed cheeks, heavy-lidded eyes, mouth slightly parted and swollen from something far more indulgent than biting retorts. He smelled her bergamot scent and heard that little gasp she let out.
Tomorrow, little wallflower .
That was his last thought before he drifted off to sleep.
When the curtains were pulled back the next morning, he felt better than ever. Perhaps there was some merit to all that talk about getting a good night’s sleep. He was almost whistling as he went down for breakfast the way he did since he was three-and-ten. In his grandmother’s drawing room, the sunniest room in the estate.
He hesitated like he did every day. Because this wasn’t just his grandmother’s haven. It was his mother’s favorite room too. It had the perfect light for her watercolors. Sometimes, she would secretly paint him, despite Society dictating that women only draw tame little flowers.
His hand trembled before he steadied it, and then he turned the knob.
“Good morning, Grandmother!”
The old lady dropped the cat on her lap and opened her arms to him. James smiled— really smiled.
“My boy,” Euphemia Bolton greeted as he leaned down to warp his arms around her.
He placed a kiss on her cheek and took his spot on the sofa, grabbing the morning paper. The butler came in with his usual breakfast—sweets and coffee.
“Argh!” Euphemia wrinkled her nose at the smell of coffee. “How can you stand that?”
James poured the black liquid into the china cup he had brought from Italy. That was where he got addicted to coffee, after all.
“If we did this in the dining room, you would have put more space between you and that ,” James said as he raised his cup to her.
“Well, I must have you know that I happen to like this distance. I am not going to drink my perfectly blended tea too far from my only grandchild.”
James looked up from the newspaper. Euphemia Bolton was old, but she was not senile. He knew that the mention of the famed ‘only grandchild’ was a prelude to something less pleasant.
“I heard that there was an interesting auction at the Seymour estate a few days ago.”
There it is.
James knew that secluded as she may be in her old age, his grandmother was still the greatest gossip he knew. Little if nothing escaped her.
“It was interesting, indeed. There was a tea set I tried to get for you, but it was snatched by Lady Fairton.”
“I am sure it was. Though, you didn’t leave the auction empty-handed.”
James folded the newspaper he wasn’t reading and smiled at his grandmother. “But I did leave Richard’s house empty-handed.”
“Do not test me, boy! You know what I speak of. Lady Diana.”
The mention of her name somehow turned his smile into something else. Not frozen, but not that perfectly rehearsed mysterious smirk either.
“Ah.” He leaned back.
“ Ah? ” His grandmother put the other cat down—a sign that things were serious. “Care to elaborate?”
“I would love to, Grandmother, but I am expected.”
James downed his coffee in one gulp, got up, and kissed her on the cheek.
“Expected? Where are you expected?” she almost yelled at his retreating back.
He looked over his shoulder and smirked. “At Westall Estate, of course.”