Chapter 4
Competition
Ren was surprised by two things when he arrived at their meeting point.
Well. Three.
First, the gardens were overflowing with the house party’s inhabitants. He’d forgotten Anthony’s bloody archery tournament.
Second, Georgiana Harrington, a reputed hellion-turned-matchmaker, was not above flirting with the scores of gentlemen circling her like famished hawks.
It was the gown, Ren decided with a brooding stare.
The silk was a luscious shade of green hovering somewhere between emerald and peridot, depending upon the play of light washing over it.
When the sun was behind the clouds, the silk showed deep as moss; when it blazed from a clear sky, she seemed lit from within.
In any case, he couldn’t keep his eyes off her, lest he miss the next shift.
And her figure—ah, there was no comparison, simply none in England.
And her smile, doing dangerous things to his composure.
And her laugh, low and delighted, catching him across the distance as surely as if her fingers skimmed along the tense muscles of his abdomen.
Preoccupied, Ren grunted at a question from one of the mothers in pursuit. They either desired a duke for their daughters, or they simply desired a duke. He’d been slipped two notes that morning with directions to bedchambers and discreet times to arrive to avoid scandal.
When he’d brought his son, currently occupied in the playroom with the only other child in attendance, and when he had a female friend, though not so far as to be a mistress, and all society knew it.
He preferred it known, and so did the lady in question, as it saved them both a great deal of unwelcome attention.
He and Julia had a relaxed association without rules or limitations, and except for the enchanting young creature across the lawn, Ren almost wished she’d chosen to attend.
She was enjoyable, entertaining, and lighthearted.
She wasn’t interested in having more children, as hers were grown; in fact, she’d never met Henry and didn’t care to.
She needed a companion, and occasionally, more.
Often, they dined as acquaintances of a similar age, and he returned home with nothing more than clever conversation to show for it.
Nevertheless—and this was a new, exceedingly unfamiliar problem—he didn’t want Julia and Georgiana in the same parlor, leaving him to juggle a growing attachment to one against a contented connection with the other.
It was a quandary he’d never had to navigate.
And, making for surprise number three: instead of retreating from the threat of being besotted for the first time since his Oxford days, he was starting to like the feeling.
Maybe it was the charming village of Twickenham and Anthony’s riverside villa, the brisk breeze off the water, the sense of summer idling through the willows, but Ren felt younger here, less burdened by the duchy, and he suspected Georgiana had something to do with it.
Beyond a polite nod when she’d arrived to find the tournament starting, she hadn’t tried to approach him, nor had he approached her.
Still, he’d briefly chatted with the Earl of Hopeforth, the man who needed the matrimonial nudge, while making sure to catch her eye.
In immediate understanding, Georgiana smiled and glanced around the assemblage until her gaze settled on the woman continually in Hopeforth’s field of vision: Lady Amelia Neville.
For one brief, charged instant across the lawn, he and Georgiana shared more than a matchmaking plan.
Warmer than the sunlight striking his face, more potent than any temptation flung his way by the hordes pursuing him, the invisible current between them stirred something deep and restless, a yearning he scarcely recognized yet wanted all the same.
Truthfully, this playful but harmless arrangement had a good deal to recommend it.
He and Lady Georgiana were adults. Newfound friends.
Set to depart on their next adventure in life in, oh, five days or so.
What was the harm in a little flirtation to accompany their plotting?
Not much different from what she’d been doing over there with that milquetoast Lord Butler-Josephson and Baron Collingswood’s mooning son.
Though Ren suspected this was nothing more than a bored woman passing the time—the same as every conversation he’d endured this past week had been a bored man doing likewise.
As the tournament began, Ren turned his attention to it.
Anthony’s lawns filled quickly, targets set at measured distances, ribbons denoting the lanes while gentlemen who fancied themselves marksmen tested bowstrings and stances with varying degrees of success.
One poor fool loosed too soon and took a graze to the arm—enough blood to draw attention and halt the sport for a moment.
Anthony glanced at Ren with a challenging smile.
Ren could’ve demurred, should have. Claimed his shoulder was giving him trouble, as usual.
Except—
Georgiana stood just beyond the archers’ line, sunlight setting her fair hair aglow as she turned toward her companions. Butler-Josephson had placed himself at her side, leaning in with all the confidence of a man who’d never been denied anything of consequence. Too close.
Then closer still.
The knave’s hand found her waist in a gesture meant to appear guiding, instructive—something to do with stance, no doubt—but it lingered a fraction too long to be anything but familiar.
That was when Ren decided to join the game.
Anthony grinned as Ren crossed to the archers’ line, while those who knew his ability groaned, the Earl of Nesbit going so far as to slap his bow against his leg in disgust.
“That’s not fair play, Vale,” Nesbit said, casting a heated look in his host’s direction. “Dunmere was near unbeatable at university.”
“I know nothing about those pillared institutions,” Anthony murmured, his smoke-gray eyes cooling. “I was born in Limehouse, mate. East End lads don’t typically make it to Oxford.”
Ren smothered a laugh and stepped neatly between Georgiana and Butler-Josephson, taking care to keep his gaze off the swell of her bosom above the scalloped neckline of her gown, though it took effort.
She was built like a dream. “It’s been ages since those trifling contests.
I hardly recall how to play.” He rolled his shoulders, then picked up a bow and tested its bend before placing it aside and choosing another.
He preferred a stiffer stave. “You know my arm gives me fits.”
“I know it gives you fits when it suits,” Nesbit murmured, loud enough for all to hear.
“Let him loose an arrow or two,” Butler-Josephson said, his singsong tone suggesting he’d had too much to drink and it was barely noon.
He sidled closer to Georgiana, and Ren’s blood surged, hot and immediate.
His fingertips tingled with the need to prove himself.
“He’s forty if he’s a day. How good can such an old chap be anyway? ”
Bloody fucking good, that’s what. (And he was not forty.)
In the end, it was the most fun Ren had had in years.
He stepped easily, almost startlingly, into the role he’d played before his father’s untimely death, before the titles of duke, husband, and father had begun to define him.
He was cheerful, gregarious, and a tad arrogant.
He laughed, flirted—only with Georgiana, and subtly at that, so rumors didn’t run rampant—and with practiced precision, wiped the field with his opponents.
He was not without compassion. He let his aim roam outside the straw target’s perimeter twice to allow the match to continue.
He refrained from his old tricks of testing the gust in the air or licking his thumb, then dusting the arrow tip before sending it soaring to further unhinge his rivals.
Proof, perhaps, that the years had endowed him with a solemn degree of maturity. He even managed to exchange places with the Earl of Hopeforth when Lady Amelia Neville entered the crowd, introducing them as if they’d never met. He left them to discuss the weather—banal, but a start nonetheless.
The afternoon only shifted into darker waters when someone brought up the past.
Nesbit fit the nock to the bowstring and let an arrow go that was poorly positioned from the launch.
“Still quite the marksman, Dunmere, for a man who once fancied himself an artist,” the earl said, his lips tilting up in sly malice.
“I recall your father shooting that down like an ailing pigeon not long before he passed.”
The bow he’d settled against his shoulder vibrated with Ren’s shudder.
“Stay the course, mate,” Anthony murmured at his side.
Ren’s arrow sliced through the tense silence and struck the gold center ring, ending the match though he’d considered drawing it out for another round.
“Shall we discuss your activities during that time, chum? I recall a discreet establishment in Covent Garden. Or was it the squalid one off Drury Lane?” He placed the bow on the gear table, bracing himself.
“Sketching seems quite frivolous in comparison.”
Before Anthony could further a brawl he’d doubtless enjoy—and, seconds later, join—Georgiana stepped between the men, her hand going to Ren’s chest, sending his temper pooling into the lime-green grass at his feet.
She smelled like peonies and sunlight, and he desired this more than Nesbit’s bones snapping beneath his knuckles.
“You promised to tell me about the exhibition at Somerset House, Your Grace, and I only have a few minutes before I have to prepare for dinner,” Georgiana said, causing Butler-Josephson to sigh and Nesbit to curse.
Ren gave them both a grin of victory as she led him away, tugging lightly on his coat sleeve as she guided him through the crowd assembled to watch a duke and earl fight it out.