Chapter 18 #2
A malignant glint flicked in Bridgewater’s eye. “How does it feel to be the most eligible lord in all England?”
“Am I now?” Liam kept his tone cool and distant. He had experience in dealing with this sort of man. After all, he’d been raised in Bolton’s household.
Bridgewater snorted. “You’ll have your pick.
” Another snort, this one a hair wet. The man was clearly in his cups.
“You already had your pick of half when you were naught more than a jockey. Now, you can have any lady you like.” Yet another wet snort.
“My countess herself would run off with you at the slightest crook of your pinky.”
Liam kept mum on that last point—and all the points preceding it, too.
But nothing was stopping Bridgewater, now that he’d got going.
He pointed at a lady across the dancing floor.
“Take Lady Belinda Cocksey, for instance. She’s a country chit, true, and you’ll have to forgive her surname—but then you’d be giving her a new one, wouldn’t you?
She comes with ten thousand pounds on her wedding day.
” Bridgewater pointed in the opposite direction.
“Or Miss Eveline Sharlto. An heiress from the West Indies.” He nodded meaningfully. “Sugar plantations, you know.”
Liam continued holding his peace.
“Or if you’re a lover of beauty, there’s Miss Jane Cooper-Dunne. A diamond of the first water, that one.” The man practically salivated as he ogled the young miss.
The thing was, Liam hadn’t the least use for country pursuits or sugar plantations and, while he held some regard for female beauty, a diamond of the first water was bound to require constant adoration and that sounded like a dead boring life to lead.
“There’s another one,” continued Bridgewater. “Lady Saskia Calthorp.”
Liam’s ears perked up. “Pardon?”
The earl extended his arm, nearly ramming his forefinger into the eye of a passerby, who exclaimed an annoyed, “Watch how you go, old man.” Bridgewater hardly noticed. “Been on the marriage mart for years, she has.”
She stood not twenty feet away conversing with Mrs. Lancaster. But it might as well have been across the Atlantic Ocean, as far as Liam was concerned, for it would take a three-month voyage to get to her at the rate he was going.
“Sister of a duke, and a right knocker, too,” continued Bridgewater, appraisingly. “Behind those spectacles, of course.”
A right knocker in regard to Lady Saskia Calthorp were the first true words Bridgewater had spoken all night.
Strawberry-blonde hair artfully arranged so it was half up and half down, the half down tendrils trailing down her back and over her shoulder, leading the eye toward curves that were unmistakable, though her coral silk dress wasn’t scandalously revealing.
She simply had that sort of figure—the sort that curved in and out in all the right places.
“You’ll want to stay well clear of that one,” concluded Bridgewater.
Liam experienced an overwhelming desire in his hands to clench into fists. “And why is that?”
“The fearsome sort of woman, I’m afraid.” Another wet snort from the earl. “The uppish reads-intellectual-rot sort.”
Saskia would be regarded thusly by the likes of Bridgewater.
In fact, it spoke well of her that she was.
Sure, she possessed an aptitude that many would perceive as fearsome, but that wasn’t all she was.
She was Harriet LaPlume—and she wasn’t.
She was Arabella—and she wasn’t.
The true Saskia was woven somewhere in between those identities—but she wasn’t located there, either.
The true Saskia was someone only he knew.
Someone he liked.
Someone he’d missed all these weeks.
He still craved her.
Their night together wasn’t enough.
So, she was that, too—an unslaked craving of body and mind and, perhaps, soul.
Bridgewater shook his head. “A shame that, really. What a waste of a female—”
“Bridgewater,” said Liam on a curt bow and pivoted on his heel.
He began walking—striding—before he did something rash, like planting his still-clenched fist in the center of an earl’s face.
Bridgewater shouldn’t even have the right to gaze upon Saskia, much less entertain a single opinion about her.
It was only when Liam reached a buffet table that he realized he’d gone in the wrong direction—away from Saskia. A footman dipped a ladle into the wide cut-crystal punch bowl and filled a cup with arrack before extending it. An idea came to him. “And another, if you will.”
Armed with two cups of arrack, Liam again entered the breach.
This time, he would succeed in catching Saskia.
But when he reached the very patch of mahogany floor where he’d last seen her, she was gone.
Though his height wasn’t a boon as a jockey, he was grateful for it now as he scanned the sea of aristocrats.
Mostly, he found an abundance of top hats and brunette-, blonde-, and red-haired coiffures, but none the specific shade of strawberry-blonde he sought.
A frustrated growl had just escaped him when he spotted a fleeting form with the exact shade of strawberry-blonde and figure beneath coral silk that he knew so well. But it was her back he spied, for she appeared to be…leaving.
No, no, no.
His feet were on the move, arrack sloshing in the cups, as he crossed the ballroom and entered the corridor she’d disappeared down.
He didn’t know all the ins and outs of Rake’s mansion, so he wasn’t sure what rooms specifically lay behind each door.
He opened the first one he came to and immediately found it was the door he would’ve opened, anyway, if he had known which room was hidden behind it.
The library—and Saskia was inside.
From the opposite end of the room, her gaze startled up from the book she’d already slid from the bookcase. He chuckled. “Of course, this was where I would find you.”
A shy smile pulled at her mouth. “I have a confession.”
“Do you now?”
He bumped the door with his shoulder, and it swung shut behind him.
He was the only one who would hear the confessions of Lady Saskia Calthorp.
“Tell me, Lady Saskia,” he said, his voice pitched so low and rumbly it could pass for a growl, “what is your confession?”