Chapter 2
“We must find out to which places he has been invited, my dear. Or, more usefully, which invitations he has accepted. The man is always drowning in requests for his company and he is very good about not spreading himself too thin,” Lady Balfour said authoritatively, as she and Louisa drove in the park.
Louisa fidgeted. It had been three days, but the subject of Lord Wrenworth would not go away.
It did not help her resolution to put him behind her, once and for all.
Nor did it help matters on the practical front—a proposal from him was a far-fetched notion that didn’t merit any in-depth discussion, let alone motivated efforts.
It would be so much more productive if she could convince Lady Balfour to invite Mr. Pitt to one of her dinners.
“Wouldn’t Lord Wrenworth prefer to marry a lady with a loftier pedigree or a greater fortune?” Louisa tried one more time.
Lady Balfour snorted. “So he would. But that’s what a magnificent catch is all about: gaining the hand of a man who should make a more ruthless choice.”
Had her moonier sentiments concerning The Ideal Gentleman continued unabated, Louisa probably still would have protested, hoping someone would bring her back to her senses, but at the same time, she’d have been secretly thrilled that she had her sponsor’s backing to go boldly after the man of her dreams.
But she no longer wanted to be anywhere near him, a man who made her feel transparently greedy and social-climbing.
“Speak of the devil!” Lady Balfour whispered urgently.
Lord Wrenworth emerged from a bend in Rotten Row, the very image of a dashing gentleman charioteer in his nimble calèche. And in spite of Louisa’s wariness, her heart skipped a beat. There was no arguing with beauty of such magnitude.
“I thought bachelors didn’t come for these afternoon drives,” she muttered, annoyed with herself.
“So they don’t.” Lady Balfour spoke out of the corner of her mouth, busy nodding at Wrenworth. After all, he couldn’t approach a phaeton driven by ladies unless his presence had first been acknowledged.
To Louisa’s surprise, he didn’t merely nod and move on, but pulled up against their vehicle.
“Good afternoon, Lady Balfour. Good afternoon, Miss Cantwell. Enjoying a drive out before the rain comes again?”
Try as Louisa did, she could not detect any special inflection in the pronunciation of her name. But as soon as his gaze landed on her, she felt as if she were being peeled like an onion, layer by layer—an experience not the least erotic, but clinical, something done with gloves and forceps.
“But of course. And you, young man, what brought you here?” Lady Balfour inquired.
“A wild whim.” He smiled.
A man who could smile charmingly at toads, Louisa thought unhappily.
He drove abreast of them for no more than a minute.
Perfectly appropriate, not a hint of impingement on their time.
As soon as he left, Lady Balfour began to berate herself for not asking after his itinerary while she had him at her disposal.
But even she did not suggest that the meeting was anything other than coincidental.
Louisa, however, felt a certain prickling at the base of her spine.
* * *
Lady Balfour would not have agonized over her missed opportunity had she known that Felix had already bestirred himself to seek them out.
He had a good view of Miss Cantwell across a crowded drawing room at Mrs. Conrad’s house.
Miss Cantwell pointedly—or so it felt—did not look at all in his direction.
He saw her again toward the end of the week, in the midst of a rowing sortie on the river.
He wasn’t part of their merrymaking party, of course.
Rather, he glided by on a yacht with a company of his own.
She frolicked and laughed until she became aware of him.
The mirth on her face slipped away, replaced by wariness.
So it was no fluke.
She truly saw something the matter with him.
He was oddly pleased—and stumped. What was one to do in such a situation? Certainly he could not walk up to her and say, Brava, old girl, for having the sense to be wary of me.
He put down the book on Asiatic travels he had been browsing.
It was nearly four o’clock. He’d be expected at his club, his opinions eagerly anticipated on the day’s occurrences.
As he exited the bookshop located a little way from Piccadilly Circus, however, he almost bumped into the subject of his preoccupation.
Miss Cantwell.
He ceased flicking book dust from his otherwise immaculate gloves.
She had just alighted from a Balfour victoria, clad in a green velvet walking gown. “I’ll be but a second picking up her ladyship’s order,” she said sweetly to the footman and the driver.
She turned around, and stilled in shock as she saw him, as if she had the misfortune of finding herself directly in the path of a sharp-fanged wolf.
Half a second passed before she recovered her composure. She smiled at him, a smile that radiated no warmth. “My lord Wrenworth, how do you do?”
“Very well, thank you. And you, Miss Cantwell?”
He took off his glove and offered his hand. She shook it uncertainly.
Then it happened. Her face colored. “Very well, too. I’m running some errands for Lady Balfour. Please do not let me keep you.”
It dawned on him as she disappeared into the dim interior of the bookshop that she wasn’t wholly unaffected by him, as he had assumed.
Quite to the contrary. Somewhere deep inside her, the infatuation that he’d thought short-lived still simmered.
And at this close range, she had been flustered by his presence.
It was an entirely new experience for him, to be physically appealing to a woman who otherwise did not care for him.
Until this moment, Miss Cantwell had been an intellectual, almost impersonal riddle. Now for the first time he became sexually aware of her.
And a rather ferocious awareness at that.
* * *
“My dear Louisa,” cried Lady Balfour, “you will not believe what good fortune has just befallen us.”
Louisa, who had a curling iron in her hair, wielded by Lady Balfour’s maid, did not dare move. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Tenwhestle was at his club this afternoon. And guess who should come to him full of regret and apologies? Mr. Pitt. He must leave London immediately.”
“Oh, no. Is everything all right?”
Louisa had been looking forward to sitting next to Mr. Pitt for hours on end.
Lady Balfour still thought him too homely, but Lady Tenwhestle was sympathetic to Louisa’s cause and had gone ahead and invited him to dinner, so that Louisa could deepen their acquaintance and, she hoped, hasten the arrival of his proposal.
“Nothing serious—something to do with the family estate,” said Lady Balfour. “That put Tenwhestle in a quandary—with Mr. Pitt’s absence, we’d be thirteen at the table. So Tenwhestle turned to the gentleman next to him and asked whether he happened to be free this evening.”
Such delight Lady Balfour’s reflection in the mirror radiated—an unhappy suspicion began to coalesce in Louisa’s head. “Which gentleman?”
Lady Balfour ignored her question. “The gentleman answered in the affirmative. And he was so amiable as to tell Tenwhestle that there was no need for the lady wife, at this late hour, to rearrange seating to suit his superior rank. He would, literally, take Mr. Pitt’s place at the table.”
“I see.”
“Do you, my dear?” Lady Balfour all but twirled. “You are going to sit down to dinner with Lord Wrenworth. I can’t tell you how many mamas have tried to arrange the same for their daughters—to think this should just fall into your lap. You must be the luckiest lady in all of London.”
More unnerving words Louisa had seldom heard.
Lady Balfour went to fetch her fan, leaving Louisa to stare at her reflection in dismay.
Her entire toilette had been oriented toward making herself look as fetching as possible, with an ingenious bust improver that cantilevered her small breasts to the point of spilling over the cusp of her décolletage.
And it was too late to change into a different dress. Or a less excessive bust improver.
The moment Lord Wrenworth’s gaze met hers across Lady Tenwhestle’s drawing room, before the ladies and the gentlemen had even been paired for their procession to the dining table, Louisa already felt the heat of her utter mortification.
He knew.
He knew that she’d dressed and coiffed herself for Mr. Pitt—the blinding white silk of the dinner gown, the flirty curls in her hair, and the blasted décolletage that made her chest look like the twin cheeks of a baby’s upturned bottom.
He knew that she’d meant to appear girlish and pure, while leading Mr. Pitt toward resolutely impure thoughts.
And he even knew how exasperated she was for all that detailed effort to have gone to waste.
All this—and a hundred more vexed thoughts—washed through her before he’d even said, “Good evening, Miss Cantwell.”
What was it about this man that made her lose her mind?
And then lose her mind a little more when she had to walk beside him, her hand on his arm.
Because he smelled delicious—like that first lungful of fresh air after a good summer shower.
Because though her fingers barely touched his sleeve, she could still feel the shape and strength of his forearm.
Because when he leaned toward her and murmured, “You look lovely tonight, Miss Cantwell,” she sprouted goose bumps everywhere.
“Do you come to London often, Miss Cantwell?” he asked halfway through the first course.
She watched as he broke a piece of the bread passed around by the servant, his fingers strong and elegant. “No, sir. I visit quite infrequently.”
“And where is home, if I may ask?” He spoke without glancing in her direction, busying himself with his butter knife.
“I live in the Cotswold, not far from Cirencester.”
“The Earl of Wyden’s seat is somewhere in the vicinity, is it not?”
“Yes, the estate is about ten miles away.”