Flirting With Fortune

reading her letter was daunting enough; to think of Mr. Godfrey recognizing himself . . .

“Don’t be silly. It’s not as though it was printed in the Times, for heaven’s sake. It likely won’t leave the bedchambers of any of the young ladies for which it was intended.”

Jocelyn leaned against the arm of the sofa, tilting her head thoughtfully. “Oh, I bet it will. I only wish I could go to the Westmoreland ball to witness the reaction for myself.”

A sudden rush of nerves whisked through Beatrice’s veins. By eight o’clock that night, she would know exactly what the ton thought about the letter—and by extension, her.

Chapter Ten

Beatrice was not, by nature, an anxious person. In fact, she was generally actively not anxious, remaining more or less calm in all sorts of situations. But standing at the doorway to the Westmorelands’ surprisingly crowded ball, she had only one thought: whether she could make it to the ladies’ retiring room before she cast up her accounts all over the eggshell-hued marble floors.

She took a deep breath, trying her best to ignore the cloying scent of a hundred perfumes mixed with beeswax and freshly polished wood. For heaven’s sake, she was made of sterner stuff than this. Just because she may or may not have baldly called a gentleman out for being a fortune hunter in a widely distributed magazine with a highly scandalous letter meant to help, not hurt anyone, did not mean that she could fall to pieces over it.

Besides—if she wished to slip through the crowd unnoticed in order to eavesdrop on gossip, she’d best keep her dinner where it was.

The good news was, a problem with the carriage had delayed their departure, so they were more than fashionably late, which meant that no one announced their arrival.

“Are you quite all right, my dear?” Mama’s voice was little more than a whisper in Beatrice’s ear. “You look rather pale.”

“Yes, of course,” she murmured back, keeping a forced smile on her lips. “Although,” she said, inspiration striking, “I think I will visit the retiring room to freshen up after our ordeal with the carriage.”

“Shall I join you?”

Beatrice tried to relax, stretching her lips into a broader smile. “No, no, I’ll be only a moment. And look, Lady Wembley has already spotted you.” She waved at the lady in question, and Mama nodded and went to speak with her friend.

There—she felt slightly better already. Adopting a bland expression, she slipped into the crowd, doing her best to meld with her surroundings. She really was headed to the retiring room—often the best gossip could be had there—but more than anything, she wanted a chance to observe as nonchalantly as possible. It’d be easier if she could have worn a plainer gown, but her mother had insisted Beatrice don the new one that had been delivered the day before. Shimmery metallic threads did tend to make one feel conspicuous, but with any luck no one would—

Seemingly out of nowhere, Mr. Godfrey stepped directly in her path. Drat, drat, drat.

“Lady Beatrice,” he purred, his light brown eyes pinning her with unsettling intensity. “I was beginning to despair of seeing you this evening.”

Her stomach clenched, and she would have taken a step back were the space available. Curse her blasted luck—of course he would be the very first person she ran into. She eyed him warily, guilt marching up her spine while she tried to divine if he knew anything of the letter.

If he did, he gave nothing away. His inflection was exactly the same, his posture ever straight and his gaze entirely too direct. Nothing about him spoke of affront or anger, merely his normal, all too arrogant self.

She swallowed past the lump of self-reproach that clogged her throat and offered him a weak smile. “Good evening, Mr. Godfrey. I’m afraid you have caught me on my way—”

“Yes, yes, I can see that you are quite on a mission. I don’t wish to keep you, my lady—I merely wished to add my name to your dance card before it fills up.”

No polite question this time—instead he held out his hand as if it were a foregone conclusion that a dance would be his tonight. Beatrice looked down to the small card attached to her wrist with a slender green ribbon and sighed. It was as good a penance as anything. And perhaps, if she were very lucky, he would be so busy with his usual tactic of dancing with the wealthiest women, he wouldn’t have time to hear any gossip.

Holding out the card and pencil, she smiled a bit too brightly. “But of course.”

He bent over the card and scribbled his name beside one of the two dozen dances listed out. When he was done, he looked up to her with a triumphant smile. “Thank you, Lady Beatrice. I look forward to our dance with much anticipation.”

That made one of them.

She dipped her head in acknowledgment before turning and escaping into the crowd. Sneaking a look at the card, she groaned. Of course he would claim one of the waltzes. Oh, well—tattlers couldn’t be choosers.

She had gone all of a dozen steps when a hand closed around her arm. Before she had the chance to get annoyed at being waylaid again, Miss Sophie Wembley hooked her arm around Beatrice’s elbow and grinned, her dark eyes positively glittering with excitement. “Finally—I’m so glad I found you. Did you see it? Tell me you saw it. Of course you did—you see everything.”

Beatrice grinned despite herself. Sophie was absolutely irrepressible. “The letter?”

Sophie nodded and started forward, dragging Beatrice in exactly the direction she was headed in the first place. Sophie’s normally riotous curls had been brought to heel tonight, pulled up into a tight bun at the top of her head, but a few black curls had managed to escape and were now floating like silk streamers behind her as she rushed forward.

The moment she pushed through the door to the retiring room, she turned on Beatrice. “Tell me what you know. Assuming you know something, because you probably do. You always do.”

Drat—she hadn’t expected anyone to come right out and ask like that. Beatrice tried to think of a way to respond without lying to her friend. They had been slow to befriend each other initially, but with them both being middle sisters, they had eventually built on that common ground.

They also had their own talents, Bea with her paints and Sophie with her music. She was no savant like Charity, Beatrice’s longtime family friend and near-genius pianoforte player, but Sophie was still quite talented on her oboe. Her mother had chosen the odd instrument under the mistaken notion that the more unusual the instrument, the more memorable the musician, but Sophie had embraced the small, high-pitched woodwind and somehow made the thing sing.

Beatrice opened her mouth, fully prepared to sidestep the question, but a shuffling noise alerted her to the presence of someone else in the room. Cutting a glance to Sophie, she shrugged. “I know what I read, same as you.”

Miss Marianne Harmon, Lord Wexley’s youngest daughter, stepped from around the screen and eyed them both. “You must be speaking of the letter printed in A Proper Young Lady’s Fashion Companion today.” She paused in front of the mirror to pat her hair—as if a single strand would dare disobey her and fall out of place—and smiled at her own reflection. “Pray, don’t let me interrupt your conversation.”

Since Beatrice was technically related to Marianne, she refrained from making the face she wanted to. Third cousin might sound distant, but Mama would likely hear of it by the end of the night, and Lord knew Beatrice already had enough potential trouble on her plate. Instead, she gave a one-shouldered shrug. “No conversation, really. Neither one of us knows anything above what we read in the magazine.”

Family or not, Beatrice had no problem lying to Marianne. The woman possessed a remarkable ability to retain information and mold it to her benefit when the time was right, and Bea wasn’t about to provide her with any fodder.

“Well, it hardly matters. It was just a silly thing, obviously written by someone who hasn’t the sense God gave her. Why else would she—if indeed it is a she—stoop to publishing such a thing?”

“Oh, I thought it was brilliant,” Sophie chimed in, a broad grin lighting her features. “I never thought of such