A Masquerade in the Moonlight(47)
Marguerite had seen the wrapping around his right hand, but had refused to care. “Not unless it might prove fatal. If that were the case, I should be prepared to have a fireworks launching by way of celebration. Is it a life-threatening injury?” she asked him with a blighting smile. “And, please, Donovan, I must beg you don’t tease me with false hopes.”
“I’ll not be dying anytime soon, darlin’,” he answered, helping her to thread her way through the crush of people surrounding a table where refreshments were being served, Lord Mappleton and Georgianna following behind, his lordship asking some rather pointed questions about the size of her uncle’s fortune. “It’s only a bruise, I think, although painful enough. Would you wish to kiss the hurt away for me, the way my sainted mother did whenever I scraped myself?”
“Thank you, no. I’d much rather throw myself off the roof of this building,” Marguerite answered quietly, still smiling at acquaintances who were moving about in all their jewels and finery, eager to see and be seen by the rest of the ton. “But, just out of curiosity, what did you do to hurt yourself—put your hand somewhere else it didn’t belong and have someone swat it with a mallet?”
“Nothing so exciting. I merely punched a man.”
Marguerite stopped in her tracks, to look up at him inquiringly. Georgianna and Lord Mappleton were still talking nineteen to the dozen behind her, but she had ceased to listen. “Punched a man? Hit a man?” she asked, suddenly feeling chilled in the overheated room. The blockhead shouldn’t be let loose without a keeper! How could he come to their country as an emissary from his government and then go around bashing people? “Who? Why?”
“The Earl of Laleham,” Thomas told her, his tone maddeningly calm and unconcerned, “and I did it because he asked me to. Very agreeable fellow, the earl, and although I haven’t talked to him since leaving Gentleman Jackson’s this afternoon—where I was the guest of Sir Ralph Harewood—I did have some flowers and a container of gruel sent round to his residence. But he may not appreciate my gifts for, now that I’ve had time to think on the thing, he may have asked me to spar with him because he overheard what I said about my deep affection for you.”
Marguerite was no longer chilled. She was icy cold. Thomas had hit the Earl of Laleham? He had milled down William Renfrew? William knew that Donovan was courting her—if anyone could call his outlandish assault on her emotions courting? First Arthur, then Perry, and now Ralph and William. Did he know about Stinky as well? How could he have stumbled into such a viper’s nest? Dear God! Was the American a total lunatic? She looked up at him warily as the remainder of what he had said penetrated her brain. “Gruel? Donovan—don’t just stand there. Explain yourself, you grinning jackanapes.”
Thomas grimaced as he scratched a spot just below his right ear with his bandaged hand. “Why, I rather suppose I broke the man’s jaw,” he said, then grinned, so that she longed to punch him herself. “I at least cracked it. Paddy said I gave him a ‘wisty castor,’ whatever that is. But it was all in sport.”
“So is bear baiting, or so I’m told,” Marguerite spat out, not caring that anyone close by might hear her. “Of all the stupid, paper-skulled, idiotic, dangerous—Donovan, no matter how important you think your mission in England is to your government, I suggest you leave here at once. Pack up your belongings and stow yourself away on the next ship heading to Philadelphia. It served you once, it may save you now.”
“Run away? And leave you, my darlin’? Impossible.” He began to steer her toward a narrow, twisting corridor, away from the crush of bodies.
“Wait!” she protested, realizing what he was about. “We can’t leave Lord Mappleton and Georgianna.”
He continued along as if her words had meant nothing, taking her farther from the light of the chandeliers and the safety of numbers. “Why shouldn’t we leave the two lovebirds alone? That is what you’re doing tonight, isn’t it? Setting his lecherous, money-mad lordship up with your little blond beauty—not that I can say I’m overly enamored of her eyebrows. You see, I already know you invited him here this evening. Quite the matchmaker, aren’t you?”
Marguerite planted her feet firmly, refusing to move another inch. She was human enough to acknowledge she was thrilled Donovan was handsome, intelligent, and exciting—but did he have to be so bloody smart to have immediately seen what Lord Mappleton could not? “You are one for imagining things, aren’t you, Donovan? Why ever would you think that I would have any interest at all in throwing Arthur and Georgianna—a young woman who foisted herself on me for the first time only this evening, by the way, and whom I am not quite sure I like—at each other’s heads?”