Forever My Love (Berkeley-Faulkner #2)(61)

“How are you going to manage seeing him without Lord Berkeley’s knowledge?”

“The same as the previous times—I’ll tell Rand I’m visiting my mother, who lives in a terrace house in Lon-don. But this time, I’d rather not go alone. Would you consider—?”

“I would like to accompany you,” Mira said.

Rosalie visibly glowed with pleasure. “I’m so glad! Thank you. You will enjoy meeting Brummell, I assure you.” She closed her eyes briefly, as if trying to suppress an overwhelming tide of excitement. “I’m going to see my father soon,” she whispered, as if trying to convince herself that it was true. “I could die of happiness. It’s been so very, very long since I’ve seen him. You must think it’s terribly odd of me to love someone I barely know,” she said huskily.

“Not at all,” Mira replied, looking away and biting her lip. “Not at all.”

After a pleasant but unmemorable supper at Bedford House, the guests retired to the ballroom, which was flanked on either side by small orchestras. Now unencumbered by Lady Georgiana Bradbourne, Alec was officially considered to be the most eligible bachelor in London, and the inconvenience of such a position was forcibly brought home to him as the evening progressed. He could not look around without meeting the inviting glances of scores of women. He had not engaged in a single conversation that failed to include probing questions about his romantic life, his intentions toward this woman or that, his future plans for marriage. Fielding the barrage as best he could, Alec began to wonder if he would be hunted in this way for the rest of the winter.

“It will get even worse when the Season begins,” a voice intruded on his thoughts, and Alec turned to meet the clear, intelligent eyes of Lord Melbourne.

“Explain, if you please,” Alec said, allowing a faint smile to cross his mouth. He liked Melbourne for his frankness and easy laughter. Melbourne was a statesman who thought whatever he liked and said whatever he thought, but he was so engaging that even when hisopinions were displeasing, he was still respected and regarded with affection. Tact and honesty were rarely so comfortably combined in one person.

“You’re done for,” Melbourne remarked laconically, waving his white hand gracefully. “Come spring, you won’t last a week. They’ll be after you like seamen around a harpooned whale. I would bet my fortune that you’ll be married within a year.”

“Risk your fortune on a worthier cause,” Alec said, his eyes sparkling with laughter. “I have no intention of marrying anyone.”

“Dear fellow, you’ll have no choice. No man ever intends to marry, yet sooner or later most of us end up that way. Curse it. I didn’t intend to marry anyone either, and yet one morning when I awakened I discovered that the woman sleeping next to me was my wife.”

“And so ended the pleasant dream of bachelorhood with the rude awakening of matrimony?”

“Exactly,” Melbourne said, about to continue when his eyes fastened onto a sight beyond Alec’s back. His face froze. “Good God,” he said softly, a small indentation of confusion appearing between his sandy eyebrows. “Who is that? I thought it was…”

Alec turned and cast a quick glance at the man who had just walked in. His fingers tightened around the glass of port he held, and then he returned his attention to Melbourne, who was rapidly recovering himself.

“That is Carr Falkner. Late as usual,” Alec said lazily, his attitude relaxed although his eyes were hard. “Just returned from a long trip abroad. Holt’s younger brother, about twenty-two or so.”

Melbourne nodded, his handsome face flushed slightly. The likeness between Carr and Holt must have startled Melbourne to no small degree, since he was usually one to maintain his composure at all times. “I was acquainted with your late cousin,” Melbourne said quietly, “but lamentably not with his immediate family. I had no idea that he had a younger brother who resembled him so closely.”

“Carr has never cared for the London scene. He has always preferred to stay in the country and engage in scholarly pursuits,” Alec said, frowning darkly. “Until now.”

“Don’t hold that against him,” Melbourne advised mildly. “He has come to the age when all young men want to experience the temptations of life: women, gaming—”

“I think his reasons for moving to London are more complicated than that,” Alec said, thinking of Carr’s cold, shattered young face as Holt’s body had been lowered into the grave, the trip aboard that paralleled the trip that Holt himself had taken at twenty-two, the gradual change in Carr’s behavior from his natural quietness to an irrepressible recklessness. Holt’s recklessness. “I’m afraid that Carr is trying to fill his brother’s shoes.”

“Consciously?”

“I don’t know.” Alec admitted, his shoulders tensing at the sound of Carr’s laughter. Carr sounded too damned much like Holt. And when he cavorted and played pranks with that lopsided grin, he reminded Alec so much of a younger Holt that it caused a suffocating mixture of pain and anger to surge inside him.

As a boy, Carr had always been a sly creature, the darling of the family with his big green eyes and enchanting smile, a stealthy little prankster with the face of an angel. Many a time Holt and Alec had found their plans ruined and their secrets revealed because of Carr’s habit of eavesdropping and telling tales. As they had all grown up, Carr had turned into something of a scholar—little surprise in that, considering his remarkable memory and his ability to repeat everything he overheard. Now they were boys no longer, but Alec remembered how devious, how untrustworthy Holt’s younger brother had been, and he doubted that Carr had changed much. And if there was one kind of man Alec hated, it was an untrustworthy one.