Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A WEEK LATER
“You have to face them with not a flicker of self-doubt in your eyes.”
Gemma pressed her back to the study door, clicking it shut behind her. The gravity of her words were only underscored by the gravity within gold-flecked green eyes that were an exact match to Liam’s.
By them, Gemma meant the haut ton, every last member of which were presently gathered beneath the roof of the Duke of Rakesley’s London residence.
Or that was how it appeared to Liam.
Of course, he understood why they’d all accepted an invitation to this ball. They were ravenous for their first look at him. Well, not him, as such. After all, they’d seen him about these last five years—at the races and the occasional society event.
But that was Liam Cassidy they’d seen.
Tonight, it was a new man they were gathered to glimpse.
“Sister,” he said, summoning his most disarming smile, “I’ve attended many a society ball.”
Gemma crossed her arms over her chest, not disarmed in the least. “Not as Bolton.”
Liam’s jaw clenched—a recently acquired reflex. Until a month ago, his jaw had only ever tensed during the final stretch of a tightly contested horse race. Now, it happened every time he was addressed as Bolton.
Which was often.
So often, in fact, he might have to accept the moniker as his name.
He snorted with dismissal, hoping to lighten the mood. “A ballroom is hardly a field of battle.”
But Gemma wasn’t having it. “Oh, that’s exactly what it is.”
Liam snorted.
“I wasn’t the duchess society wanted for Rake,” she continued, “so I know what I’m talking about. If you don’t wish to think of a ball as a field of battle, then think of it as swimming in a sea of sharks.”
His brow lifted. “And that’s better?”
She nodded. “If you keep a cool head, you’ll come out the other side with all your limbs intact.”
Before now, Liam hadn’t known Gemma’s feelings regarding the society she’d begun swimming in since her marriage to Rake. She’d never addressed it with him. But he now intuited she viewed it as a necessary and unavoidable condition of being with the man she loved.
And he understood something else, too—she was only trying to look out for her brother.
He shook his head in both wonderment and bewilderment, something he’d taken to doing several times a day. “Gemma, I’m Bolton.”
Silence expanded into the air between their locked twin gazes. Out of everyone in the wide world, only she could understand the weight of those words…the weight of this new reality.
“I don’t want it.”
She nodded.
The countess hadn’t believed him, but Gemma did. She’d been brought up in Bolton’s household right alongside him.
She reached out and took his hand. “Liam, you’ll be a different Bolton. And do you know how I know? Because you’re you.”
Gemma believed her words, wholeheartedly, and that faith meant more to Liam than he could express.
But he understood something else, too, something that prevented him from following wholly into her belief.
The might of an earldom was near total power—and near total power was a corrupting force.
One only had to look at how it had twisted the Bolton before him, the man who had been their father.
The control he’d not only exercised over all within his domain, which had included Liam and Gemma, but the need to exert it.
A fearsome thing, that much power in one man’s hands.
The door cracked open, and Rake’s head poked into the room. “The ballroom is bursting at the seams. It’s time.”
Liam gave Rake a nod, then returned his attention to his sister, commanding more certainty into his easy smile than he strictly felt. “Gemma, we’ve made it through everything life has thrown at us thus far, and we’ll make it through this, too.”
Fervency shone in her eyes. “Me at your back.”
“Aye,” he said, “and me at yours.”
Then Liam was on the move, striding into his new reality as he navigated the many corridors and staircases and more corridors that comprised a duke’s London mansion, the crowd growing denser with every step he took toward the ballroom.
It was a big moment. But then, he’d occupied the center of plenty of big moments these last five years, as the winningest jockey in England season after season.
So, it wasn’t that he was unaccustomed to the attention.
Rather, the attention that came with winning was attention he’d sought, in a way.
It was the attention that came with being at the top of the ton’s favorite sport.
The attention now centered on him was a different beast.
Before, he’d simply been handsome, likeable Liam Cassidy, quick with a charming smile that got him into all the places he wanted to go. The ton’s entertainment. Goodwill and jocularity directed at him at every turn.
Now, as he stepped onto the gleaming mahogany ballroom floor, crystal chandeliers sparkling overhead, a path clearing before him as he walked alongside Rake and Gemma, the slaps on the back that accompanied his progress were no less jocular, but he sensed an edge.
That odd glint of the eye that communicated envy or competition or both.
He’d beheld that same light in many a jockey’s eye out on the turf.
He was no longer merely likeable Liam Cassidy.
He was Bolton.
Rake stopped before the massive marble hearth that dominated one end of the ballroom with its intricate Italianate carvings depicting all manner of frolicking deities.
As this was the natural focal point of the room, it was only natural that Rake would use this place to lift his glass.
The ballroom’s collective breath fell into an instant hush.
Dukes tended to inspire that effect on a room, particularly a duke like Rake.
Except those two hundred pairs of eyes weren’t fixed upon Rake.
They were watching Liam, silently observing him as if he were a newly discovered species of animal.
He’d had a bit of Latin from one of the tutors Bolton had brought in to teach him and Gemma, so he reckoned he’d be called something like Equorum agitator, which roughly came out to horse driver.
In truth, though he’d been offered something of an education and, undoubtedly, some of that learning had sunk in, if it hadn’t involved horses, Liam hadn’t been much interested.
So it was that Rake raised his glass and introduced the new Earl of Bolton to society, but all of those right and proper words fell on deaf ears.
Liam was busy scanning the crowd.
Not in the general sense.
Specifically for a pair of bright silvery-blue eyes behind round brass spectacles.
Was she here?
She would’ve been invited.
He’d made sure.
Of a sudden, he realized what he was doing wrong.
He was looking in the wrong place.
Saskia wouldn’t be in the swell of the crowd. She would be at its periphery, tucked into a discreet corner from which she could observe without being observed.
His gaze wandered farther afield…there…staring directly back at him was the pair of eyes he sought.
Her gaze neither flinched nor wavered at the contact.
Instead, it searched his with an openness and inquisitiveness he hadn’t known he’d missed down to the quick of his soul until this very moment.
For the first time in weeks—five, to be exact—the wobble that had been his constant companion stilled and he felt… steadied.
A smile—his first unburdened one in weeks—pulled at his mouth and he felt like himself…Liam.
The Liam he’d been.
The Liam she knew.
Himself.
The instant Rake’s toast ended and the assembled burst into polite applause, a large blustery man stepped into the empty space before Liam. “So, now you’re one of us, let me introduce you to my daughters.”
It would’ve been unmannerly to the ask the man to introduce himself first—he was a lord of one variety or another, anyway—so Liam kept the smile affixed to his mouth and endured the ritual of introductions to all five of the man’s daughters, each younger than the last, and giggly, too.
By the time they’d moved on, Saskia no longer occupied her patch of discreet corner.
Blast.
He said to no one in particular, “If you’ll pardon me…” his feet already on the move.
Saskia was here.
That was all the information he needed.
He would find her.
But the progress of navigating this crowd was slower going than he liked.
It had become a usual part of his life to be the recipient of multiple claps on the back on a given day, not just race day.
Such was the life of a winning jockey. If a win, or even a loss, brought a fellow a paltry shilling, he was their favorite person in England—until the next race.
But what had begun irritating him about all the slaps on the back this last month was they had naught to do with his prowess on the turf.
These slaps of congratulations weren’t for Liam Cassidy.
They were for the newly minted Lord Liam Sutton, 4th Earl of Bolton.
The man Liam, improbably, found himself to be.
These claps on the back were for naught more than the accident of his birth.
A lord…him.
He gave his head a clearing shake.
“If it isn’t the Earl of Bolton,” came a plummy aristocratic voice at his side. And there came the jocular clap on the back that would, of course, accompany such a greeting.
He turned to find the hard, reptilian gaze of the Earl of Bridgewater upon him.
Through horse racing, he’d had a few dealings with Bridgewater over the years, and those had been enough to last a lifetime.
The reputation Bridgewater had earned—of treating those he deemed below him worse than the dirt beneath his feet—had been entirely true.
Those below the earl included his trainers and jockeys…
and his horses. A situation Liam found intolerable.
As he nodded and said, “Bridgewater.” A mean pleasure that he might take from being an earl occurred to him. He didn’t have to smile at a man he didn’t like.
He was no longer entertainment.
He was an earl.
In the eyes of society, he was Bridgewater’s equal.