17
When he woke, the dim gray light of morning was peeking around the edges of the window draperies, and Delia was gone. He might have thought what had happened only a few hours ago was a dream, but the fragrance of her hair was on the pillow beside him, along with a note written on Savoy stationery.
My darling Simon, I would have loved to watch you awaken, but since we both work for the Savoy and I came to you last night in nothing but my nightgown, I thought it best to return to my own room while there would be no staff or hotel guests to see me. I may not care much what people think, but even I am not so scandalous as to go parading about the hotel in a state of undress! Perhaps we can have luncheon together?
–Delia
PS—have I told you I love you madly?
He smiled a little, his happiness at her reiteration of love dimmed only by her words about the hotel, for those words were a reminder of what would be happening today and the pain it would surely cause her. Folding the note, he kissed it, inhaling the scent of her perfume one more time, then he got out of bed.
He tucked her note into his card case, then picked up his dressing robe from the floor and put it on. He stretched out one hand toward the bell, but before he could press it to summon Morgan, the valet walked in with a cart containing early tea.
“Ah,” the valet said, “I was coming to wake you, my lord, as you instructed, but I see you’re already awake.”
“It must be eight o’clock, then?”
Morgan nodded as he poured tea for him. “Would you care for breakfast?”
He shook his head at once. “No, I’ve no time. I have a meeting at nine. I’ll eat afterward, if I can.”
As his valet shaved his face and helped him dress, Simon considered how the timing of today’s events might play out.
The board was meeting at the Adelphi Terrace residence of the Cartes for the formal vote, but given the evidence, it was a foregone conclusion that Ritz, Escoffier, Echenard, Agostini, DuPont, and Mrs. Henderson would be fired. Delia’s fate was much less certain.
Like DuPont, Agostini, and Mrs. Henderson, Delia was not officially part of management, and therefore had no legal employment contract with the hotel. Unlike the other three, however, there was no evidence against her. If the board voted to keep her in her present position, all well and good. But if the worst happened, if despite all his efforts of the past two days the board voted to terminate her job, he would resign in protest.
After the vote, Ritz, Escoffier, and Echenard, who did have employment contracts, would be summoned immediately to Adelphi Terrace to be given their official termination—a process that would take probably no more than fifteen minutes—then they would walk the few short blocks back to the Savoy to clean out their desks before exiting the premises for good, which gave Simon perhaps twenty minutes to break the news to Delia before all hell broke loose.
He could only hope those twenty minutes gave him enough time to explain the situation to her properly before Ritz arrived to give her lies and excuses.
Simon was shaved and dressed by half past eight. Stopping by his office, he called for Delia’s maid. While waiting for the girl, he dashed off a note to Delia requesting breakfast rather than lunch, stressing that he had something vitally important to discuss with her as soon as possible, and suggesting a time of ten o’clock in the restaurant. When Molly arrived, he instructed her to awaken Lady Stratham at half past nine and give her the note, stressing that it was urgent; then he departed the hotel.
He arrived at the Carte residence fifteen minutes early, but being a familiar acquaintance at Adelphi Terrace, he knew neither Richard nor Helen would be offended. When he entered their drawing room, however, he saw that he was not the only one to arrive early. In fact, as he glanced around, he realized he was the last board member to arrive. And when he looked at Helen, he realized that she’d planned things just that way.
The vote, therefore, when it came, was no surprise. What did come as a shock to him was the sadness that mingled with his anger as he looked from Helen to Richard and back again. His vote came last, and he was glad of it, for it gave him the blessed opportunity not only to be the one dissenting voice, but also to have the last word.
“I cannot associate myself with those who would punish the innocent along with the guilty,” he said. “I resign my position and relinquish my stock in the Savoy. My attorneys will provide written confirmation of it by the end of the week. As for all of you…”
He paused, glancing around the room, registering only a few expressions in the sea of faces—Richard, staring listlessly back at him… the smirking Lord Astonby… the disapproving Lord Melville… stoic Sir Charles… and Helen, her dark eyes unhappy rather than triumphant. “As for all of you,” he said, staring straight back at her, “every single one of you can rot in hell.”
He turned and walked out, but to his surprise, he was halfway down to the foyer when he heard Helen call his name from the top of the stairs.
“Simon, wait.”
He turned on the landing and kept going, but she caught up with him as the footman was handing him his coat and hat.
“Simon, please,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. “Wait one moment. There’s something I need to tell you before you go.”
Voices were heard at the top of the stairs, indicating that the other members were coming down to depart, and she pulled him into the nearby study. “First,” she said as she shut the door behind them, “I want you to know I bear you no ill will. And—”
His sound of disdain interrupted her. “That’s big of you,” he ground out.
“And,” she continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “I hope that one day you will feel the same.”
“I won’t.”
She sighed, having the gall to look unhappy. “I did what I felt was right.”
“Right?” he echoed, giving a humorless laugh. “There is nothing right about what you did. Condemning an innocent woman, and to some of the people in her very own circle? Firing her when she’s done nothing wrong because of your own jealousy and spite—”
“That’s not why I did it!” she cried. “I did it for the good of the hotel. And besides,” she added, looking away as he made a scoffing sound of utter contempt, “it’s not as if I were alone in my opinion. Everyone but you agreed with me that she has to go.”
“Persuaded by you, no doubt.”
She didn’t deny it. “Lady Stratham may or may not be innocent of any wrongdoing herself,” she said, meeting his gaze again, “but either way, she simply cannot be trusted. Ritz,” she added as he opened his mouth to reply, “will open a London hotel one day, and we cannot risk that she remains at the Savoy, when she could be his spy within the gates. Everyone here today understood that. Everyone except you.”
“Which is why you went behind my back.”
“Given your obvious feelings for her, I felt you could not be trusted, either.”
“Then we have nothing more to say, do we?”
He moved to depart, but her voice stopped him. “There is one other thing.”
“Yes?”
“I am obliged to remind you of the confidentiality agreement you signed upon becoming a member of the Savoy board.”
“Of course.” He gave a humorless laugh, somehow not surprised that she would have the temerity to bring that up now. Helen was first, last, and always a hardheaded woman of business. “So like you to remind me.”
“You are legally pledged to silence regarding all board activities,” she went on doggedly. “Your resignation does not change that.”
“I fully understand the contracts I signed, Helen. There is no need to remind me of them. And since trust has now been broken on both sides, I suggest Richard make me an offer to buy my shares in the Bainbridge, for I see no way that a partnership between us can remain viable. Goodbye, Helen.”
He jerked open the door and left the study, stalking by the other gentlemen putting on their coats and exiting the house without a backward glance.
The spring air was crisp and cold, but as he walked back to the Savoy, it did nothing to cool his blood. And when he heard the voice of the odious Lord Astonby behind him, his temper once again began ratcheting upward.
“Hard lines, Calderon.”
Simon glanced over his shoulder to find the other man behind him, along with Lord Melville. Reminding himself it was pointless to engage in a quarrel now, he merely shrugged and kept walking.
“We would have liked to vote with you, old chap,” Astonby said, raising his voice to be sure his words carried to Simon’s ear over the clatter of London traffic. “Fellow peer and all that. But we just couldn’t see our way clear.”
“No woman,” Melville added, “should work for a living. Particularly a lady. Highly inappropriate.”
Simon could have pointed out that down below the ivory tower these two lived in, plenty of women worked, some because they had to, and some because they found it enjoyable. But the other two were clearly itching for a quarrel, and he had far more important things to do than accommodate them. He set his jaw and kept walking.
“Still,” Astonby continued, “Lady Stratham will appreciate your efforts on her behalf. It seems she has a knight in shining armor. But, really, Calderon, is she worth it?”
“Might be,” Melville put in. “Lady Stratham’s a bit long in the tooth at thirty-three, but still a beautiful woman.”
“Dangerous, though,” Astonby added. “Deadly, in fact, if her poor husbands are anything to go by.”
Goaded beyond bearing, Simon decided he could spare a minute to put this spoiled brat in his place. He stopped and turned around, causing the other two to halt as well. “Is there a point to all this commentary?” he asked.
“Concern,” Astonby replied, belying that answer with a grin. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
Simon smiled back at him. “More than you do, I imagine.”
This little jab was ignored. “You’re a brave man, Calderon,” the earl told him, snickering like a schoolboy. “I’ll give you that.”
“I’m not sure what has inspired this compliment,” Simon replied, though he knew precisely. “But whatever it is, it seems to amuse you. Care to let me in on the joke?”
“Don’t be coy. Plain as day you want to be husband number four. Most of us suspected something like that was in the wind, of course, when we saw you in her box at the opera, but last night when you called on me, suspicion became fact. Personally, I wouldn’t choose to begin my courtship of a woman by trying to salvage her employment, but to each his own. I suppose to a man barely elevated out of the gutter, a wife with a career isn’t so revolutionary.”
That was, he supposed, meant to be an insult. What Astonby didn’t seem to realize was that he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of him. Delia, however, was a different matter entirely.
Before he could reply, however, Astonby spoke again. “After you left, I immediately went to White’s and placed a bet on it. I daresay we all did.”
Lord Melville nodded in assent, and though Simon found it rather galling to think his efforts on Delia’s behalf had brought about no better result than a flurry of bets about his life expectancy, even that wasn’t what was causing his blood to boil at this moment.
“I gave you a year and a half after the vows.” Astonby clapped him on the arm as if they were old friends. “Do be careful. I’d hate to see anything happen to you.”
“Right now, Astonby,” he said pleasantly, “I’m not the one in danger.”
At this unmistakable warning, the earl’s grin faltered a bit, but unfortunately, he didn’t take heed. “Before you walk down the aisle, old chap, might I suggest life insurance? She is the black widow, after all.”
Before Simon even realized what he was doing, his fist had connected with Astonby’s jaw in a painful but thoroughly satisfying thwack that wiped that loathsome grin from the earl’s face and sent him to the pavement. Simon had no time to savor his victory before Lord Melville retaliated on his friend’s behalf, landing a hard, smashing uppercut to Simon’s jaw.
Stars exploded in his head, and the last thing he remembered was the shrill sound of a constable’s whistle before everything went black.
When he woke up, he was in jail.
Rising early had never been Delia’s strong suit. And having had almost no sleep the past few nights, she was in no frame of mind to be shaken awake by a maid for the second time in three days. “Oh, leave off, Molly, for heaven’s sake,” she mumbled, shrugging away the hand on her shoulder and burying her face in the pillow. “Go away.”
“Begging your pardon, my lady, but I’ve been ordered to wake you at half past nine.”
“Ordered by whom?” she asked, even as she began drifting back into sleep. “Whoever it is needs to die.”
“It was Lord Calderon, my lady. He ordered me to wake you and give you this. It was urgent, he said.”
Delia opened one eye to find the maid holding out a note, and her sleep-fogged senses began to clear. She loved Simon, she really did, but if he was going to expect the same sort of strenuous demonstrations of her affection in the future as he had enjoyed last night, he was going to have to give her time to recover.
She smiled at the thought, gave up on sleep, and pulled the note from Molly’s fingers. Still smiling, she sat up and began to read. Three seconds later, however, her smile vanished, and she gave an exclamation of dismay.
“Breakfast at ten?” she cried. “And it’s—what?” She looked up at the maid. “Half past nine?”
“A few minutes after, my lady. It’s taken me a bit of time to wake you.”
“The man’s mad,” Delia declared, glanced at the penned lines again, noted that the word urgent was underlined three times, and capitulated with a sigh.
“Men!” she muttered, tossing aside the note and the sheets and moving to get out of bed. “Don’t they know a woman can’t be ready to go anywhere in half an hour? Pull the slate-blue wool dress out of the armoire, Molly, and fetch some hot water. Quickly, now. I’ve got to be downstairs by ten o’clock, it seems.”
By some miracle, she arrived in the restaurant breathless, a bit untidy, and only five minutes late.
Lord Calderon, she was told as she was led to a table, had not arrived yet. Euphoric, excited, and also a bit aggrieved that he’d rushed her down here only to be late himself, Delia ordered a pot of hot coffee, but she’d barely taken her first sip before a man appeared beside her table.
It was not Simon, however. Much to her surprise, it was Sir Charles Russell, the Savoy’s solicitor.
“Sir Charles,” she greeted. “What brings you here today?”
“I came to see you, actually.” He put his hand on the chair opposite hers. “May I join you for a few moments?”
“Any other time, I’d happily allow it, but I’m expecting someone, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, I know, but Lord Calderon will not be joining you this morning. He’s been… detained, I understand.”
Delia felt a stab of disappointment. “He said he had something important to discuss with me.”
“Does he?” The solicitor reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “It may have something to do with this.”
As the solicitor slid the folded sheet to her across the white tablecloth, Delia’s disappointment shifted and deepened, transforming into the same odd sense of foreboding that had hung over her all day yesterday. “What’s this?” she asked, taking the sheet.
“Your official letter of termination.”
She froze in the act of unfolding the slip of paper. “What?”
“I regret to inform you, Lady Stratham, that you have been fired.”