Chapter 2
Chapter 2
Determined not to look, Graham could still see the young woman out of the corner of his eye. The shell of her ear, the velvet curve of her cheek, the tilt of her nose . . . she was a shadow in his peripheral vision, a distraction, a constant reminder that he was not spending the evening as he had intended: alone.
It had not been the act of a gentleman to catch the young woman by the wrist and restrain her, as if she were some mere pickpocket. But the appearance of that slender hand beyond the curtain of his box had startled him, and he’d reacted instinctively to guard his solitude.
Rather than succeeding at warding off an impertinent thief of his privacy, he now found himself in the intolerable situation of sharing his box with perfect strangers. If he had not been certain the old lady would cause an unpleasant scene—and more important, if the play had not been about to start—he would have insisted upon their removal. Churlish of him? Yes, of course.
No one who knew him would have expected anything less.
Well, at least he could not be expected to socialize with them. Watching the performance was a silent activity. And they had not even been introduced.
The lack of an introduction proved something of an inconvenience as the play went on, however. Beside him, the young lady began to lean forward, evidently enraptured by what he would have called a mediocre performance. He shifted slightly in his own chair and sighed.
But his sigh fell on deaf ears. Or its meaning was misunderstood.
Rather than disappearing, her profile inserted itself more insistently into his line of sight. She had a long neck he supposed some fool would describe as swan-like. And a pert chin to go with her pert nose, entirely inappropriate for a meek lady’s companion. And a thoroughly unfashionable abundance of dark brown hair that would surely fall to her waist when unbound . . .
“Ahem.” He cleared his throat once, softly, hoping as much to disrupt his own reverie as hers. He had no business thinking about a young lady’s unbound hair, how it would caress her shoulders and cling provocatively to the curve of her full breasts. Most ungentlemanly of him. He was churlish, yes, but not a cad.
“Ahem.” More loudly the second time, when his first effort did not have the desired effect—either on her posture or his thoughts.
When she had intruded so thoroughly into his line of vision that he could focus on little else, could hardly even see the stage, he was driven to lean forward himself, lay a hand on the front railing of the box, and say, “I beg your pardon, miss—”
“Addison,” she supplied without ceremony. Without fully turning her head. And then added for good measure, “Shhh.”
Unaccountably, her reprimand made a laugh rise in his chest. Surely a reaction to the absurdity of his predicament.
She had shushed him! This . . . this girl, really—she couldn’t be more than twenty—whose lot in life no doubt meant her experience with the theater was that of an occasional sweetmeat, a luxury doled out in dribs and drabs by her crotchety aunt. That would explain her despair when it had seemed the outing would be denied. Her single-minded focus on the stage. Her . . . enthusiasm.
The word sent a shiver of distaste through him. He could not remember the last time he had been so enthusiastic about anything.
And perhaps that was part of the problem. Perhaps that was why he was finding it all too difficult to ignore Miss Addison’s intrusion into his box, his view, his thoughts. If he let himself, he could still recall the softness of her skin, the scant half inch between the top of her kid glove and the hem of her sleeve, where he had touched her.
Good God. He shook off the tingle of memory with a flick of his fingers and tucked that hand against his ribs as he folded his arms across his chest. Evidently, he needed to work off a bit of, er, enthusiasm himself.
The remote situation of Castle Dunstane, combined with the sparse population of the Highlands generally, meant that female companionship could be difficult to come by.
And what an outrageous euphemism that was. As if he required companionship from anyone, especially a woman.
But he was still a man, with a man’s needs.
Fortunately, London was an excellent place to slake them. He’d simply waited too long to visit the metropolis and then let himself be diverted by the first tolerably pretty young woman to fall beneath his gaze.
Now, however, he was well-positioned to find a more suitable object of attention. If he sat up a bit straighter and leaned away from Miss Addison, rather than toward her, he could see the stage well enough.
Well enough, for example, to recognize the charms of the actress playing Emilia. When the performance was over, he would go to the green room and introduce himself. She would know why he had sought her out, and when he offered to take her to supper, she would not refuse—unless she had a protector already. But perhaps not even then. Infrequent though his forays into Town might be, Graham still had a certain reputation as a . . . well, call it a patron of the arts.
In a few hours, he would have forgotten all about the thin, silky skin of Miss Addison’s wrist, against which her pulse had thrummed so insistently, making him all too aware that he was the cause of its precipitate rhythm. He would forget about the length of her hair, or the turn of her throat. About the saucy tilt to her nose.
She would be—was—nothing to him, the merest nobody, her presence a minor inconvenience of the sort one ought to expect when one was foolhardy enough to venture amongst people again.
Furrowing his brow, he focused all his attention on the stage. Emilia was even more beautiful than he had first realized, with perfectly symmetrical features and gleaming golden hair.
Not, however, a particularly good actress. Her gestures lacked subtlety. And more time ought to have been spent sanding the sharpest edges from her voice before giving her a speaking role. She hailed, quite obviously, from Plymouth—somewhere very near the docks.
Time was when he would have been delighted by the girl’s performance. Lord, how particular he had grown—a consequence he supposed, of having learned to school the contours of his own speech. Just as well that Miss Addison was not privy to his thoughts. She would think worse of him than she already must—not that he cared one jot for her good opinion.
A murmur of annoyance must have passed his lips. Or else the grinding of his teeth had been audible. Miss Addison twisted her head over her shoulder to fix him with a look of mild irritation that slid almost imperceptibly into concern. Or perhaps alarm. He was probably scowling, the expression common enough with him that he was not always aware of doing it. And given their relative positions, it must look for all the world as if he were scowling at her.
Which, in a way, he was.
“Are you well, my lord?” she mouthed. Despite her evident apprehension, the excitement of the evening—or at least, the light of the chandelier—twinkled in her blue eyes.
“Perfectly,” he replied with a brusque nod.
But the word itself was drowned out by the sudden clamor of applause as the curtain fell, and her gaze snapped back to the stage without seeming to notice his dismissive gesture, as if she were startled to discover the performance was at intermission.
The noise made her aunt jerk a little in her seat. He wondered whether she had been dozing—an understandable response to the uninspiring performance, in his opinion. Miss Addison, he noted, did not clap.
Perhaps they were better judges of the theater than he had given them credit for being.
Below, the rustle of the crowd rose to a dull roar as people began to look about themselves and converse with acquaintances across the aisle or a few rows away. Some got to their feet and began to mill about. Others lifted their faces to study the occupants of the boxes, to see which scions of society could be spotted, and with whom.
Graham wished, not for the first time, that he had taken a seat at the back of the box. Though even there, he would hardly have been unobservable. Particularly not to Miss Addison, who had once more turned toward him, her expression now almost expectant.
“Well, my lord? I take it you were displeased by the performance so far.” Again, that mischievous blue sparkle—not merely an effect of the light, then. The chandelier was behind her. “Either that, or our intrusion on your box has soured your enjoyment of the evening.”
May not both things be true?
It was precisely the sort of quelling retort he would ordinarily make—although there was nothing ordinary about the present situation. But for the first time in many, many years, he did not speak the taunting words that rose effortlessly to his lips. He did not have to.
Miss Addison did it for him.
“Both,” she supplied in a slightly deeper voice, a vaguely Northern accent. Mocking him.
“Julia,” scolded her aunt, who was giving the exchange far more attention than she had given the performance.
“I only said aloud what his lordship was clearly thinking,” Miss Addison defended herself.
But Graham’s thoughts had already taken another turn. Or rather, returned to their previous, forbidden track.
Julia. Julia Addison.
“Forgive me,” he said, rising. The rail at the front of the box was too low to give a man of his height much security. He rounded his chair and stepped into the narrow channel between the two rows of seats, closer to the older woman, before making his bow. “Since the worthless Mr. Pope did not think to do the honors, allow me to introduce myself. Dunstane, at your service, ma’am.”
She snapped open a jeweled lorgnette and looked him up and down before answering, with a surprisingly regal nod, “Mrs. Hayes.”
Mrs. Hayes did not apologize for barging into his box. He had not really expected it of her. After all, she had been wronged, just as he had. Graham intended to see that the box manager regretted his double-dealing.
“My niece, Miss Addison,” Mrs. Hayes added with a wave of her hand.
Miss Addison unhurriedly came to her feet. “My lord.” Her curtsy was graceful, despite the confined space. But also grudging. Whatever timidity and deference she had exhibited—or he had fancied her exhibiting—upon entering the box had flown. If she had said as much, it could not have been clearer that she suspected him of arrogance.
Perceptive chit.
“May I fetch you some refreshment, Mrs. Hayes?” he offered, intending not to prove Miss Addison wrong about him—she wasn’t wrong, after all—but to rattle her certainty. To put her off balance, so to speak. Metaphorically, of course. He was not quite awful enough to wish her to take a tumble into the pit and break that lovely neck.
“Thank you, my lord,” Mrs. Hayes said, the gracious dip of her head pairing rather incongruously with a poke of her now-folded lorgnette at her niece. “Go on, then.”
Miss Addison’s—Julia’s—eyes widened, and for just a moment, he thought she meant to refuse to accompany him.
Not, of course, that he would have minded one whit if she had. He had made the offer as much to garner himself a temporary reprieve from their company as out of any sense of gentlemanly obligation.
But after a momentary hesitation and with an almost imperceptible squaring of her shoulders, as if it required effort to comply with her aunt’s request, she moved to leave the box. He did not offer her his arm.
The long saloon was every bit as crowded as one might expect, and Graham hated crowds. At the edge of the room, he hesitated, anticipating with a shudder the feel of strangers jostling against him. Again, he sighed, the sound lost beneath the rumble of conversation surrounding them.
Undaunted by the throngs, Miss Addison stepped forward, prepared to thread her way through. She would have been lost to him in a moment if he had not reached out to touch her elbow.
She stopped, a stone to trouble the stream of humanity flowing around her, and looked up at him. “Yes, my lord?”
How had she been so certain the fingertips pressed briefly against her arm had belonged to him, and not the hand of some careless passerby?
“Wait here.” He jerked his chin toward the nearest statue and then set about the task of procuring Mrs. Hayes’s refreshments on his own. Despite his reluctance to enter the fray, he made his way with relative ease; his size was an advantage, and he was not above using it.
When he returned a few moments later, two glasses of wine in hand, he scanned the top of the crowd for the familiar statue. A quasi-Greek figure of a woman, half-clothed in her marble—or more likely, plaster—drapery. It put him in mind of one of the caryatids on the cover of that damned ladies’ magazine, which had occupied a larger share of his thoughts over the last few months than the publication had any right to do.
Beneath the statue stood Miss Addison—right where he had left her, much to his surprise. She glanced about her, taking in the spectacle without seeming to be much affected by it. As if she were one of the rare sort who came to the theater to do something other than ogle the other theatergoers.
Her hands were folded primly in front of her, but the plain hem of her muslin gown rippled tellingly where she tapped her toe.
“Impatient to return to the play?” he asked when he had made his way unnoticed to her side.
She started. Evidently, she had not been awaiting his return with bated breath. Her bright eyes looked him up and down. He noted the exaggerated sweep of her gaze, as if she had not before realized how he towered over her. She darted a glance over her shoulder, toward the curtained entrance to his box. “I don’t want Mrs. Hayes to worry.”
He took no step in the direction she so obviously wanted to go. “Are you enjoying the performance?”
She paused before replying. “The role of Iago is creditably done.” He had the distinct impression even that partial answer had required careful weighing. “I suppose on the whole, I find it generally entertaining.”
Damning with faint praise.He hadn’t expected it of her—or rather, he hadn’t expected it of the girl who had sat beside him not half an hour ago, to all appearances riveted by everything that passed before her on the stage.
But perhaps he had misread her enthusiasm. Misread her.
Perhaps she, too, had been determined to ignore the distraction posed by her unexpected companion for the evening.
“Interesting,” he replied with a sage nod. “I would have described it as insipid.”
The flare of her eyes reflected surprise but not, he thought, disagreement with his assessment.
“It happens sometimes,” he went on, leaning slightly toward her so as to be heard when he lowered his voice. “Even the great actors are affected by opening night jitters.”
Miss Addison glanced again toward the boxes. “Then perhaps Mrs. Hayes should have accepted Mr. Pope’s offer to find us tickets for another night.”
He recalled Miss Addison’s quiet noise of displeasure at the prospect. She must have been looking forward to this evening for some time. Now she was disappointed by how things had unfolded. Disconcerted.
Well, tonight had not gone as he had planned, either.
In the distance, a jangle of bells signaled the end of intermission. He held out a glass of cloyingly sweet ratafia. “For your aunt.”
Some indefinable reaction wrinkled across her brow and was gone. “Mrs. Hayes is not my aunt,” she said, though she accepted the glass. He expected some further explanation—he had quite plainly heard the older woman call Miss Addison her niece—but none came. She turned toward the entrance to the box, then glanced back over her shoulder when she realized he had not followed. “You do not intend to watch the rest of the play?”
He contemplated another hour of sitting beside her, her profile inserting itself into his view of the stage, the soft scent of her soap intruding on his senses. He shook his head. “Another night may be better, as you say.”
She seemed to sense his reluctance was not based solely on the mediocre performances. Swallowing back whatever retort she had been about to make, she curtsied rather stiffly instead. “You have that liberty, I suppose. It is your box.”
The crowd divided them as people made their noisy way once more into the theater. He watched Julia’s retreating form until it was lost to him among the throng.
Alone at last, he glanced down at the remaining glass with a grimace. He had intended it for her.
Placing it untasted on the pedestal of the statue, he hurried down the staircase to the exit.