And Then She Fell(33)
James watched Rafe Cunningham—standing stock-still in the park, his hands on his hips, visibly exasperated and openly frustrated as he stared after Miss Fotherby, his dark features set in an expression of utter incomprehension—and experienced a deep and undeniable surge of fellow-feeling.
Jaw setting, he steered Henrietta away from Rafe and the revealing look on his fellow wolf’s face. “Come on. We’d better get back or your mother will start getting impatient.”
He escorted her back to her mother’s carriage, handed her up, and made his good-byes.
With a brisk salute, and a last look at Henrietta, he forced himself to turn and stride away.
He’d hoped to regain some of the ground he’d lost last night, but instead . . . as far as he could see, he was further than ever from getting Henrietta to look at him as a potential husband. She seemed to have seized on the advent of Miss Fotherby as a solution to his problem, as a way of accomplishing her task of assisting him to find his necessary bride . . . but he didn’t want Miss Fotherby; indeed, he wished Rafe the best of luck with her.
He wanted Henrietta.
As he crossed the lawns, he consulted his inner self, but the answer was unequivocal. He wasn’t about to retreat, to back away and let Henrietta go—not now he’d found her, not now he’d finally recognized her as his.
So he was going to have to come up with some more definite way of reshaping her view of him.
Something powerful enough to change a Cynster female’s mind.
From her seat in the carriage, Henrietta watched James go, watched him stride off without once looking back. As the carriage rumbled into motion, avoiding Mary’s questioning gaze, Henrietta looked away across the lawns . . . and wished with all her unrepentant heart that Miss Millicent Fotherby had never crossed their paths.
Fate, Henrietta decided, was smiling on Miss Fotherby and her bid to become James’s bride. Most helpfully, that afternoon saw Henrietta, along with her mother and Mary, attending an at-home at Lady Osbaldestone’s house; her ladyship’s drawing room was crammed with every last grande dame Henrietta might wish to question.
Reminding herself she was honor-bound to do her duty by James, she duly set about inquiring as to what the assembled ladies could tell her of Millicent Fotherby.
Of course, in the way of ton ladies, gaining information required offering information in return. In that distinctly august company, her request for information on Miss Fotherby necessitated explaining what had caused what was, for her, a distinctly novel tack; as The Matchbreaker, she more customarily inquired after the bona fides of gentlemen, not young ladies. By and large, as she worked her way steadily around the room, going from group to group, she managed to excuse her query by simply stating that she’d agreed to help James, a friend of Simon’s, with his quest to find a suitable bride, and, if necessary, deflecting attention by asking about Rafe Cunningham, who, as she’d suspected, was, indeed, no better than she’d supposed. Most ladies swallowed her half-truths whole and happily related what they knew of Miss Fotherby, her family, her antecedents, her expectations, and her present situation.
Sadly, what Henrietta learned wasn’t quite definitive and definite enough for her to deem her job done and recommend that James make an offer for Miss Fotherby without further ado. Even more unfortunately, again and again she was directed to seek further clarification from the very two ladies she’d hoped to avoid.
There was no help for it; if she wanted the last word on Millicent Fotherby’s eligibility for the position of James Glossup’s wife, she was going to have to approach Lady Osbaldestone, who, as well as being a distant cousin of Viscount Netherfield, James’s grandfather, was apparently also distantly connected to the Fotherby family.
Henrietta wasn’t overly surprised by that; Lady Osbaldestone seemed to be connected to fully half the ton.
Having to inquire of Lady Osbaldestone was bad enough, but seated beside her ladyship was Henrietta’s aunt Helena—which meant the chaise on which the pair of grandes dames sat held one too many sharp-eyed older ladies than Henrietta was at all comfortable with.
Her aunt Helena, the Dowager Duchess of St. Ives, had the most lovely pale green eyes—and a gaze that seemed to see straight through any assumed façade. She was widely acknowledged as perspicacious to an almost mythical degree. Her son, Devil, Duke of St. Ives and head of the Cynster family, had similarly pale green eyes, but he had yet to develop the same perspicacity, much to the relief of the rest of the family.