“On second thought, Remy,” he murmured, “I believe I’ll have tea.”
Chapter 7
Cami reached under her spectacles to press her fingertips to her eyelids, hoping for relief. Instead the grit of exhaustion pricked her eyes and made them water. The third cup of coffee had done little more than make her irritable. The mere thought of a fourth made her stomach churn.
“Lady Montlake’s ball would seem to have done you in,” Felicity said, looking up from her perusal of her papa’s newspaper.
It was not the ball that had exhausted her, though they had arrived home only shortly before the hour at which Cami generally rose. No, her muse had been demanding. Or restless, at least. Pages and pages of corrections, additions, investing Lord Granville with a tragic past—father killed in a suspicious accident, a cruel uncle for a guardian—that made his present villainy believable, if not excusable. After breakfast, she would reread those scribbled words and pray that the energy with which they had spilled from her pen was matched by their quality.
“A headache, merely,” Cami lied, covering her ink-stained fingers—the ones he had kissed—with her napkin. No matter how she scrubbed, they never came clean. Fortunately, Aunt Merrick’s cold had made her so fretful that only King’s presence could be tolerated this morning, else she would already have been chided for her slovenliness.
Felicity’s eyes flicked anxiously across the page. “Oh, my. How dreadful.”
“What is it?” Cami demanded as she twitched the paper away. Her pulse leaped along with her imagination. A riot? Another assassination attempt? Some news from Dublin?
No. Merely a gossip column. Clearly, it would have been wiser to have stopped at two cups of coffee.
Your eyes did not deceive you last night, dear readers. It seems a certain sooty peer roams among us once more. Rumor has it, the Beast has even chosen a bride! One wonders if the lady in question has any notion of the Frogs he is said to have kissed….
“Oh, Felicity. Why do you read this nonsense? You can only expect to hear the worst.”
An inelegant shrug. “There seems to be nothing but the worst to be heard. I ought to know what I’m getting myself into, oughtn’t I? Why, last night I was reduced to begging Mr. Fox to tell me some good of him. As Lord Ash’s oldest friend, he must know something, even if it’s hidden from everyone else.”
Impatience itched at Cami. “And what did he say?”
“After a bit of hemming and hawing, he managed to recollect that Lord Ash had been something of a scholar when they were at university.” Felicity was clearly nonplussed by the revelation. “Apparently, he took top honors in mathematics at Cambridge.”
Of course. A successful gambler would have to have some facility for numbers. “At least you may take some comfort in the knowledge that he is not entirely—or at least, not only—a scoundrel,” Cami said, smoothing her napkin across her lap, then picking up her fork. “Though I confess I am somewhat surprised to hear that he bothered with university at all.” His description of learning the classics as torture suggested the sort of man who wasted little time on such activities. But then, from what she had heard and what Cousin Stephen’s experience had confirmed, a gentleman’s university experience had very little to do with books.
“Mrs. Kendal said his guardian—his uncle, that is—insisted upon it.”
His uncle? Cami’s fork slipped from her suddenly nerveless fingers and clattered onto her plate.
Some of the details of Lord Granville’s story had been drawn unabashedly from Lord Ashborough’s life. But the idea that she had accidentally hit on such a striking similarity gave her qualms. What would he do if he ever suspected she had used him as the model for her villain?
A moment’s reflection made her see the ridiculousness of her worry. After all, how likely was it that the Marquess of Ashborough would read The Wild Irish Rose and see himself in its pages?
“I really do not think you should be listening to Mrs. Kendal’s, or anyone else’s, ridiculous gossip,” Cami said firmly, retrieving her fork, forcing a bite of cold, rubbery egg past her lips, then immediately regretting the decision.
“Well, I would not need to put so much store in her titbits if you would only tell me what you and he discussed. You spent more than an hour in his company last night.” As she spoke, Felicity curled the corner of the newspaper around her fingertip, then frowned at the black smudge it left behind. “Surely, in all that time, he must have said something worth repeating.”
Had he? Their talk had been commonplace, yet a strange sort of intimacy had surrounded their exchange, a cocoon of calm amid the noise and bustle of the ballroom and the supper room. Talk of childhood and family. The sound of her name on his lips. Those lips pressed impertinently, improperly to her hand…
A wave of heat swept up her chest to her cheeks, chasing some sensation, some emotion for which she had no words.
“Lord Ashborough is courting you, Cousin Felicity. He had no particular call to make himself agreeable to me.”
“He is not courting me, Cousin Camellia,” Felicity corrected, an uncharacteristic sharpness in her voice. “I’m a bought bride, and we both know it. Though I doubt he feels much obligation to make himself agreeable to anyone, come to that.”
“Was he disagreeable?”
“No.” Felicity sounded nonplussed. “Merely…distracted.”
At that moment, Tom the second footman entered, bearing an enormous bouquet in one hand and a salver on the other and extending them both to Felicity.
“How lovely! Why, they look just as if they had been gathered from a meadow.” Felicity’s expression of surprised delight was nearly obscured by a profusion of what looked like wildflowers, although it was really too early in the year for them to be any such thing. The splendid riot of pink and yellow and lavender
