Sherry Thomas - His At Night

Lady Kingsley had to personally come and escort him to Edmund Douglas’s study for him to perform a preliminary search. He went through the motions and discovered two hidden compartments in the desk: One of them held a revolver, the other hundreds of pounds in wrinkled, stained banknotes, both of which a man was perfectly at liberty to possess.

Documents crowded the study’s copious cabinets. One cabinet contained ledgers relating to the running of the estate. All the other cabinets were devoted to the filing of letters, telegrams, and reports from the managers of the diamond mine, a quarter century of records of the origin and continuance of Douglas’s wealth.

Lady Kingsley was waiting for him outside the study—she’d been standing guard. “Anything?”

“Excellent record keeping and completely above-board,” he said. “And have I mentioned that it is a pleasure to work with you, madam?”

She frowned. “Are you quite all right?”

“I’ve never been better,” he said, and sailed on past.

“Is it true that diamonds come from mines rather than oysters?” Vere asked his reflection above the washstand.

Bloody hell.

“Or is it that if you split open a pearl, you find a diamond inside?”

Bugger.

Everything was backward. This was the woman with whom he’d roved the coast of the West Country for more than a decade, the woman who understood his every mood and desire—his haven, his refuge. He didn’t care that her uncle was most likely a criminal. He didn’t mind that he must now conform his conduct to the limits Society found acceptable. But why, for God’s sake, must he meet her on a case, when he could not compromise his role?

As the highest ranking man present, he would be seated next to her at dinner. So they must converse. Possibly at length. And he must play the part of the idiot, no matter how he wished otherwise.

He pushed his fingers through his hair, the jubilation of the past hour now a jumble of frayed nerves. There was no helping it: He was bound to disappoint her at first. He could only hope that it would be a mild disappointment, and that in her kindness she would overlook it and choose to appreciate his sweetness instead—he portrayed sweetness beautifully, copying it, as he did, from Freddie’s character.

When he’d finished dressing, he sat down and tried to compose a better line of inquiry: subtle stupidity, if such a thing were possible. But his mind kept drifting away, back to the cliffs, back to the moors, back to the stunning coasts of the West Country.

The sun was setting, the sky ablaze. The wind whipped her coat and the ribbons on her hat. As he placed his arm about her shoulder, she turned toward him. And how lovely she was, eyes the color of delicately brewed tea, a long, straight nose, lips as soft as a whisper.

Meeting her in person was, he realized with a renewed pang of anxiety, perhaps not quite the unmitigated good fortune he had first believed. She had a face now, a name, a history and identity of her own.

They’d been one for so long. Now they were separate entities, so separate she barely knew him. And it was up to him to return them to that seamless unity he’d loved so well.

In his idiot guise, no less.

“You look well, Penny,” Freddie said, as they crossed the entry hall toward the drawing room.

Vere had never liked the way he looked—he bore an uncanny resemblance to his late, unlamented father. But tonight he hoped his looks would do him some good. Tonight he needed every arrow in his quiver.

Lady Kingsley pulled him aside almost as soon as he entered the drawing room. She spoke to him in a low voice and he heard not a single word she said as the crowd parted and revealed Miss Edgerton.

She stood with her back to him, in a dinner gown of pale blue beaded tulle. The skirt was narrowly fitted through her hips and thighs, then flared out in ruffles studded with seed pearls, as if she were Venus, freshly born of the waves, with a froth of sea foam still clinging to her calves.

And then, as if she felt the force of his gaze, she turned around, her gown sparkling with her motion. The bodice of the gown was cut modestly. But even the almost prim décolletage could not disguise the magnificence of her bosom, or the deep cleavage that came as a complete surprise to him, since he’d never before looked below her chin.

His heart thumped. Of course he’d made love to her before, but always gently, and more as a prelude to sleeping in her arms than for its own sake. He’d never imagined she’d inspire an animal lust in him.

Well, on that account he did not mind being wrong.

She smiled. And it was a wonder he did not knock his head on the ribbed vault ceiling—surely he levitated high above the floor.

Someone said something to her. She turned her face toward the speaker. A sharp pain on his forearm made him hiss—Lady Kingsley had rapped him, hard, with her fan.

“Lord Vere!” she whispered, her voice ominous with disapproval. “Did you not hear a word I said?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Look at me when I talk to you.”

Reluctantly, he wrenched his gaze from Miss Edgerton. “Sorry?”

Lady Kingsley sighed. “She thinks you are intelligent.”

“She does?” A lightninglike thrill zipped through him.

“She is not meant to, remember? We have work to do, sir.”

His imagination was showing itself to be quite second-rate. How many times had he walked arm in arm with her? Over how many sustained miles? And yet he’d never known that she smelled of honey and roses, nor that her skin gleamed like Vermeer’s pearls.

Entering the dining room, however, startled him out of his romantic daze. Above the mantel hung a large and—to say the least—peculiar painting: a fair-haired angel in midflight, black robe flowing, black wings spread, a bloodied sword in her hand. Far below her on the ground, a man lay facedown in the snow, a red rose in full bloom next to him.

Vere was not the only guest who remarked on the unusual and unsettling painting. But the general cheer of the gathering was so pervasive, and Miss Edgerton’s person so agreeable, that the guests, to a one, chose to ignore the obvious theme of death the painting evoked.

Miss Edgerton said grace. Vere prayed that Fortune would look kindly upon him. May he walk the fine line between lovable dimness and outright idiocy and walk it well.

“Miss Edgerton,” he said, as soup was laid down, “would you happen to be related to Mortimer Edgerton of Abingdon?”

“No, indeed, Lord Vere. My late father’s family hails from Cumberland, not Berkshire.”

There was such delight and warmth in her voice. Her eyes sparkled. Her attention was wholly and wholeheartedly centered on him, as if she’d waited her entire life for him. He wanted to propose this minute and take her away. Let someone else worry about Edmund Douglas.

At the farther end of the table Lady Kingsley set down her water glass quite loudly. Vere clenched his hand about his spoon and forced himself to proceed. “What about old Mortimer’s brother, Albemarle Edgerton. Are you related to him?”

This was where her good cheer would first falter. But she would think that he was jesting or had made a silly blunder. She would give him the benefit of the doubt.

Her merriment, however, dimmed not at all. “Not Mr. Albemarle Edgerton either, I’m afraid.”

“Their cousins the Brownlow-Edgertons in the next county? You must be related to them.”

Now there could be no mistake. Now she would see that he was not only below average in intelligence but hadn’t a clue of his below-average intelligence. But she only radiated pleasure, as if he’d inquired whether Helen of Troy had been a direct ancestress of hers.

“Not at all, no. But you seem to know them very well. Are they a very grand family then?”

Had she understood anything he said? How could she not react at all? It was human to respond to clearly recognizable stupidity with at least a pause. Where was her pause?

“Indeed, I do know them very well. And I was sure you must have descended from one of them. Truly wonderful people; a shame neither old Mortimer nor his brother ever married. And their cousins were all spinsters.”

At the beginning of the evening he could not have imagined that he would intentionally tip over into overt asininity. But he had not been able to help himself.

She nodded earnestly. “All the more reason they should have had children.”

No pause. No wavering. Not a single sign that she noted his absurdity.

He took a sip of his soup to buy himself some time to think—and found that he couldn’t. His head was in a state of paralysis. This was not how it was supposed to proceed.

And he could not—nor did he want to—understand what it meant.

He took two more sips of the soup, which seemed to have come directly from the Thames, and glanced surreptitiously her way. Her outward poise and perfection slew him. What was wrong with her on the inside? How could she carry on a conversation with him as if there were nothing at all the matter with him?

His eyes lit on the painting behind her.

“The artwork, is it Raphael’s Deliverance of Saint Peter?” He was going to provoke a reaction if it killed him.

“Do you think so, sir?” she asked evenly, her eyes wide with an admiration he most certainly had not earned.

For a moment he had considered—indeed, nearly hoped—that perhaps she was a dimwit herself. But she’d gone overboard with the flattery of her gaze.