Chapter 12
“Yet he was jealous, though he did not show it, For jealousy dislikes the world to know it.”
Lord Byron
What madness had possessed him to kiss Fleur at Rundell and Bridge’s?
The same question plagued him still three days later in the ballroom of her sister and brother-in-law, Lord and Lady Winfield.
Fleur had kissed him eagerly, hungrily, and without any restraint, then immediately after snuggled herself into his arms. Only to then stomp off in a huff, without ever sharing with Hart her sweetheart’s bloody name.
Hands clasped behind him, Hart did his best not to look at the wild throng directly across from him on the other side of the dance floor. “Well?”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific,” his man-of-affairs, Kilmartin, drawled. “You’ve got me seeing to all manner of business these days.”
Heat climbed his collar. The hell he needed clarification. “You’re paid to know precisely what I’m talking about.”
“Rundell would not break the lady’s confidence,” Kilmartin said, confirming he had known the exact matter being referenced. “Also had some choice things to say about your expecting him to blather about his clients’ business.”
“I bet he did,” he muttered.
“You don’t pay me enough for the work you expect, Hart.”
Hart skimmed his gaze over the same large crush of guests. “As your father’s spare, you love bossing people around for me. I tolerate more from you than I ought.”
“Sod off. You can’t find a better man-of-affairs in the kingdom, and you know it.”
He did. They had met through Hart’s father, the duke, a longtime friend of Kilmartin’s sire, the Marquess of March.
On occasion, March brought his son around.
Hart had puzzled from afar. The best answer for why that he could arrive at—March actually seemed to…
enjoy his son’s company. The wheels in Hart’s head turned, and soon he’d had the idea to put the smiling lad on his staff. Hart had been twelve.
“…Are your friends also on your staff…?”
Hart’s gaze caught upon the blonde-headed, mischief-making minx, now dancing through a lively country reel, who had posed that cheeky question. “As if it bloody matters anyway.”
“What are you on about, Hart?”
Yanking his attention from Fleur, he glared at a much less smugly amused Kilmartin. Irritation welled inside him.
“Only a man who considers me a friend would speak as candidly as you did, without fear of retribution.” Hart’s raised voice earned stares from the guests clustered around them.
“Hart?” Kilmartin’s brow puckered with genuine concern. “Is everything all right?”
“What the hell do you think?”
“I…actually, I’m not altogether sure.”
That bloody embrace. He had made love to her mouth and she had kissed him back with delight. Then they would both act as though nothing had happened?
The very chit responsible for Hart’s descent into madness chose that very moment to dance directly across his line of vision. To be precise, she whirled by, both hands clasped in those of the notorious rogue and committed bachelor, Lord Anthony “Tony” Markham.
The only thing Markham appeared committed to doing this moment was getting a better look at Fleur’s impressive cleavage.
Despite that rash, explosive, and forbidden moment of passion between Hart and Fleur, it was just that—forbidden. Fleur was still a proper, virginal lady.
A detail Fleur’s current partner didn’t appreciate. Hart sharpened his stare on the happy couple—specifically, Markham’s adroit fingers that snuck a stroke along the base of her narrow back, too close to her bottom for a proper lady.
A faint rumble sounded in his throat.
Kilmartin followed his stare. “Ahh, now I see the source of your malcontent.”
If Kilmartin understood, that made bloody one of them.
“You believe the Earl of Whitehaven is positioning his brother for an alliance with the McQuoids.”
The thought hadn’t even occurred to him—it should have. If he hadn’t a justifiable reason to interfere in a potential match, his man-of-affairs just gave him one.
Finally, the reel ended.
When the lady reclaimed her seat, Hart’s shoulders relaxed.
Only for an instant. In every direction, would-be suitors and eager lads clamored around her.
He gritted his teeth, jaw aching. “Kilmartin?”
“Yes?”
“Are we friends?”
His man-of-affairs froze with his glass halfway to his mouth. “Are we…?” Kilmartin’s brows dipped at the corners.
“Friends,” Hart snapped. “As in chums.”
“I…am familiar with the word—both of them. And…of course?”
As he had thought. Hart disregarded the fact that Kilmartin’s affirmation had ended in the uptilt of a question.
He made the mistake of checking on Fleur.
She smiled, but even across the room, he caught the tension at the corners of her mouth.
Fleur’s dance with Markham had left bright enchanting red circles across her delicate cheeks.
But beyond that splash of color, her face was a shade of white he’d never believed her olive-kissed skin could manage.
As for Markham. Older, more mature, and more experienced, and damned good-looking in the way fellows went, Lord Markham had planted himself at Fleur’s right shoulder, like a damned centurion guard, and effortlessly dispatched would-be rivals with a single glance.
Hart bared his teeth.
Kilmartin offered his flute.
Locking his jaw, Hart snatched it quickly and took an even quicker sip.
While Kilmartin motioned for another, Hart downed the contents of his in a single swallow. Placing the glass on the server’s tray, he grabbed himself another.
This sip he took befitted a man of his reserve. “See, that is something a friend would do,” Hart pointed out.
“Carry a silver tray and serve you drinks?”
He went hot under the collar. “No.”
“Steal a fellow’s spirits?”
“Share a drink,” Hart shot back.
He noticed Kilmartin’s amusement too late.
“Forget it.” He tossed back his second.
Damn the infernal minx who’d crawled her way inside his head and stayed. Fleur had laid rest to the notion of a wallflower’s corner. She sat alongside those lesser beauties and brought a gaggle of gentlemen in for her rowdy party.
At present, Markham leaned behind Fleur’s rope-backed, armless chair and forced her to look up. The lady caught sight of the good-looking rogue over her.
Like a gothic novel villain, Hart fought to keep from rubbing his hands in gleeful anticipation of her fiery outburst—that never came.
The big-curled minx flashed a damned dazzling white smile that brightened the bloody room, at Markham.
And here, he had credited her as being clever.
Kilmartin rescued Hart’s empty flute and slipped him a new one.
Fleur had told Hart he had no friends. If she looked his way even once, she would have seen Kilmartin refilling Hart, right on cue.
This time, a gentleman braved Markham’s wrath—Lord Bradburn. Younger than the other gentleman by at least a decade, but undaunted.
Such was the effect Fleur had on men.
She said something to Bradburn and then offered the cad her fan.
Bradburn accepted Fleur’s pencil. As he wrote onto the silly frippery, the gaggle around her oohed like they’d witnessed the first fire being built.
What the hell was she doing?
Pandemonium broke out around Fleur. Her aspiring suitors made a dash to claim her pencil, and then they were all signing the bloody thing.
“Clearly, I’m your friend,” Kilmartin said.
“Took you long enough to answer.”
Someone stepped between Hart and Fleur.
Hart cursed.
“My, someone is in a foul mood, big brother.” Tremaine greeted him with an infuriating amount of jollity.
Hart cursed a second time.
“Case in point,” Tremaine drawled.
From the edge of his vision, Hart caught Tremaine looking to Kilmartin for an explanation. From the front of his vision, he stared in annoyance at the throng around her.
“Your brother’s maudlin,” Kilmartin said.
“Hart is?”
“I am most certainly not.” Moody. He wanted to punch a pillar and growl like a bear, but he was definitely not one of those pathetic fools who got all gloomy.
God spare him from ever becoming someone to make such a fool of himself as those drooling, leering goons.
A McQuoid as a Diamond. Even the idea of it was bloody laughable, and yet there could be no doubting that those curls he had teased her over fit her as an ethereal queen’s crown.
Her figure that he’d once taken as shapeless had, in a short span, developed a mature fullness in all the places that mattered—her lush bustline. Her gently rounding hips.
Just then, Fleur folded her arms and shook her head.
She had finally shut them down.
It didn’t matter.
From across the ballroom, Hart contemplated separating the heads of Fleur’s suitors from their bodies. Then, because it made him feel better, he put the cads in order of their execution.
It didn’t actually make him feel better.
Each instinct raged to shield the wild, reckless girl from those leches.
His jaw flexed.
She was no girl. She was a full-bodied, breathtakingly beautiful woman.
Hart cursed her useless family. One could combine however many dozens of the McQuoids there were and not assemble a single brain from the lot of them.
The same protective bent he’d had—and still did—for his brother had extended for the little hellion.
Two people he needed to look after were the last thing he needed.
Fleur looked his way. Finally.
When their eyes met, hers lit, and he found himself a lot less cross.
Not that he truly cared if she noticed him. But if she was going to lecture Hart about being a good friend, the very least she could do was recognize his presence—the same way he had been doing for her, for the better part of the evening.
The hoyden gave him a scandalous wave, because what else would she do? Fleur McQuoid couldn’t do anything without creating a scandal in her wake. And he naturally smiled, because her behavior was just that ridiculous.
Hart inclined his head in a discreet and actually appropriate recognition.
Not that the lady noted.