In the Arms of a Marquess(39)

“Well, you’ve got a sensible head on your shoulders, after all, don’t you, young lady?”

“I have my moments.”

“Moments in which your beauty eclipses the sun, moon, and stars combined, dearest Lady Constance?” Lord Styles drawled as he entered the chamber. “Innumerable, I daresay.”

A flicker of displeasure passed across Constance’s eyes so swiftly Tavy nearly missed it.

“Afternoon, ladies.” Lord Gosworth entered, Ben and Marcus behind.

Marcus moved to Tavy and lifted her hand to his lips. “What a relief from the wilds of nature.” He offered a charming smile for all. “Feminine beauty and grace to please a man’s weary eye.”

“Young flatterer,” the dowager scowled.

Tavy tugged her hand away.

“Good heavens.” Constance frowned. “What are you doing, tromping in here in all of your dirt and smelling of gunpowder?”

Lord Styles gestured toward the sideboard. “Nasty day out. Need a belly warmer before a hot bath, don’t you know.” He splashed amber liquid into glasses and passed them to the earl and Marcus. Ben went to the dowager.

“Lady Fitzwarren, it is a pleasure to welcome you to Fellsbourne.” He bowed, as elegant as ever in mud-spattered boots and long coat, his broad shoulders emphasized by the capes and his handsome face flushed from the cold. Tavy dragged her gaze away.

“Don’t ask what brings me here, Doreé, for I won’t tell.” The dowager tsked her tongue. “But I knew you wouldn’t mind if I showed up uninvited. Your pater and I were fond friends, and I spent plenty a day at his whist table—that is, when he wasn’t off proposing bills. It’s more than a shame he didn’t live to force that East Indies reform through to success. Fell apart without him leading the charge.”

“It would have put things back the way they were before.” Lord Gosworth nodded his head regretfully. “With Parliament’s hands in every nook of the Company’s business, a man can’t sell a teaspoonful of tea without a pack of idiot lords telling him what to do, not to mention our august monarch.”

Lady Fitzwarren harumphed. “It was too bad you were abroad when that bill fell through, Abel. After Doreé, you might just have had the support to see it passed.”

“Perhaps, Mellicent,” Lord Gosworth replied. “But I will speak plainly. What my fellow lords—present company excepted, of course—what my fellow lords know about trade in Hindustan they could fit inside their stays. Don’t know why we don’t all just hang the Company and go out on our own. What, what, Crispin? You were independent before Prinny pushed you into joining up with the Company. The rest of us were all in it years ago before that damn bill. But why did you take this fool’s plunge, lad?”

“I always say it is best to be in the company of successful men.” Marcus grinned and lifted his glass in salute.

Lord Styles grunted. “You’ve got it wrong, Gosworth. The Company’s better off with Parliament’s oversight. Keeps eastern wealth in the hands of those of us born to control it. It is in Britain’s interests.” He swung his glass to his lips and gulped the contents. Tavy had the distinct impression that he was already foxed, although he masked it well. But gentlemen often drank a great deal when they hunted. Lord Gosworth and Marcus looked less than clear-eyed.

But not Ben. He set his glass on the sideboard without tasting it.

“Gentlemen,” he said as a footman entered with a tray, “I suggest we leave the ladies to their tea.”

“M’wife’s probably looking for me anyway,” Lord Gosworth said pleasantly and departed.

“Until dinner then, mesdames.” Marcus made a pretty leg and went out with the earl.

“I won’t be chased away from the whiskey so soon.” Lord Styles cast Constance a pointed look, a sliver edge to his laughing tone. “Can’t see why you are allowing it in your own house, Doreé. You’ve never been the sort to flee in the face of a woman’s scorn.”

Tavy’s stomach tightened.

“No,” Ben said. Tavy knew she should turn her gaze away, but she did not and he met it, as she hoped and feared. “I never have.”

Then—because she was for all intents and purposes betrothed to another man, who was right to trust in her public loyalty to him even if it chafed beyond endurance, and also because apparently she had lost her talent at dissembling lately—she dropped her gaze until the Marquess of Doreé and his companion left.

Later in her bedchamber, for the first time in years, she wept. She wept for what she never had, yet still lost years earlier. She wept for her friends—Alethea, Lady Fitzwarren, even perhaps Constance—who seemed to hope more for her than she did. And she wept for the girl that once had the courage to defy convention for the sake of dreams, who now feared being hurt again more than settling for mediocrity.

Chapter 10

To PRIME A FIRE-SHIP. To lay the train and get her in readiness for being set on fire.—Falconer’s Dictionary of the Marine

After nearly three decades of denying most of his desires, Ben’s resistance to temptation was crumbling. Each time she lifted her liquid gaze to him across a room full of people, he was twenty-two again, fantasizing about peeling the clothing from her lovely curves and making her body come alive to him, as he had done so briefly in that moonlit garden.