“I trust I can count on your vote, Penhurst.”
The words themselves were almost as familiar as the rough voice. Another deal, no doubt accompanied by another threat. Another young nobleman at someone’s mercy. The man seemed confident he would get his way.
She kept walking, did not turn to look at the speaker until she was back at her aunt’s side. Under cover of tepid applause, she leaned toward Lady Merrick and asked, “Who is that gentleman conversing with Lord Penhurst?”
Making no effort to disguise her intentions, Lady Merrick twisted in her chair. “Where? I don’t—oh, at the back. Hmm…one doesn’t often seem him out and about, especially at functions like this. Come, come,” she said, nudging Felicity to her feet. “We ought to make our curtsies.”
With her thoughts still on Gabriel, Cami followed in their wake, not having been instructed to stay put.
“Ah, Lord Sebastian. I hope your attendance here this evening is a sign you are in good health.”
“Lady Merrick,” he gasped out, the words followed by the slightest dip of his head. He did not seem inclined to waste his precious breath on a response to her remark, and indeed, it was perfectly unnecessary. He obviously was not a healthy man. He was thin, too thin, and his skin had both the color and texture of chalk.
“May I introduce my daughter, Lady Felicity Trenton? And Merrick’s niece, Miss Burke.”
One shallow bow sufficed for both of them, and his surprisingly sharp-eyed gaze was reserved entirely for Felicity. “Sebastian Finch.”
“Uncle to Lord Ash,” Aunt Merrick explained, low, to her daughter.
Whatever his other ailments, Lord Sebastian’s hearing seemed to be perfectly acute, and the shortened form of his family title did not sit well with the man. Though he did not scold with words, the scowl he shot in her aunt’s direction was sufficient to send a chill through Cami too.
Gabriel’s uncle was the man she had twice overheard plotting to ruin some unknown gentleman. And he did not strike her as the kind of man who would scruple to make even his own nephew miserable.
Or worse.
“Then you and I may soon be—” Felicity began, speaking more to herself than to him. Now that cold, ruthless look turned to her, and her words squeaked to a halt. Rather than acknowledge the rumors of his nephew’s pending engagement to the young woman standing before him, Lord Sebastian cut her instead. With a sharp jerk of his chin he gave silent orders to a goggling Lord Penhurst to show him to a chair.
Felicity paled, then flushed red. Tears glittered along her eyelashes. Instead of returning to their seats, Aunt Merrick huffed and marched them toward the door. The footman was just returning to his post.
“The Trenton carriage. Immediately.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Though the footman moved with alacrity, the carriage’s arrival was not immediate. They had to wait several long, awkward minutes for their coach to be sorted from the others and brought around to the front of the house. Ample time for Felicity’s embarrassment to advance from crimson-cheeked embarrassment to pale, trembling mortification. Meanwhile, Lady Merrick’s indignity seethed and boiled and began to spill from her lips like a foaming pot the cook had forgotten to remove from the fire.
“I don’t—how dare—who would think—wait until Merrick hears of this!”
When they arrived at Trenton House, Wafford bowed them in, and Lady Merrick marched past, still muttering a half-voiced tirade against the bad behavior of both Lord Sebastian Finch and his nephew. “Tell King to make up one of her special tisanes for my headache,” she barked, then pressed the fingertips of her free hand to her temple with a moan.
Both Tom and Wafford were only too willing to believe that the order had been directed at them, if it provided an excuse to escape her ladyship’s black mood. With quick steps, they tried to hurry past one another to deliver the message. Linking elbows with her daughter, she began slowly to ascend the stairs, leaning heavily on Felicity’s arm, though Felicity’s wan face and stumbling steps suggested she might really be the one in need of assistance.
Cami waited until the creak on the stairs rose high enough that she did not think she would be called upon to follow, then strode to the back of the house to take the servants’ stairs to her attic room. When she opened the door, warm air, heavy with the scent of camellias, greeted her. Without even pausing to light a candle, she crossed the room, thrust open the small, high window, and tossed the bouquet out, chipped tumbler and all. The satisfying crash of glass against cobblestones never reached her ears, however. The street was too far below.
And the flowers’ distinctive aroma lingered in her small, stuffy chamber.
Pacing back to her desk, she caught a shadowy glimpse of herself in the looking glass above the washstand. The ribbon. That damned ribbon. Scratching at her throat, spearing her fingers into her hair, she struggled to free herself from it. But it only wound itself tighter, tangling, snarling. Oh, what had she done? To Felicity? To herself?
After dragging a deep breath into her lungs, she lit a candle, then began again, methodically unwinding and unthreading until the silk coiled on her palm like a living thing. Her eyes darted to the open window, but this time her fingers gripped convulsively and would not obey her rash command to be rid of it. With a sigh, she let the ribbon spill into a drawer. It would be a reminder of his touch, of his tempting kiss. A reminder of her foolishness.
Desperate for something to distract her, she opened her writing desk and looked at her book. She had heeded Mr. Dawkins’s directive to make the villain more realistic, more believable. He was real
