Always Proper, Suddenly Scandalous (13 page)

Abigail’s body froze, like a deer caught in a snare, her eyes wide, unblinking.

Beatrice touched Abigail’s hand and the winsome American jumped. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Abigail said hurriedly, so that Geoffrey wondered as to her reaction.

Suddenly uncomfortable with the discussion on the sentiments of love, Geoffrey returned his attention to Beatrice. “What other
lessons
have you learned from Miss Stone?” From the corner of his eye he detected the slight tightening around the corners of Abigail’s lips.

Beatrice smiled. “Abigail has also begun teaching me about the stars.”

Geoffrey looped one ankle over the other, and looked to Abigail. “The stars?” he asked Beatrice, all the while directing his attention to Abigail Stone.

“She knows a good deal about Greek constellations.” Beatrice furrowed her brow. “Which did you say was your favorite myth, Abby?”

Abigail gave her head a slight shake.

Beatrice’s eyes lit, and she jabbed her finger in the air. “Ah, yes. The story of Dionysus.

Geoffrey stiffened.
Dionysus
.

“Do you know it, my lord?” Beatrice went on.

Abigail touched her hand to Beatrice’s. “I’m sure His Lordship doesn’t want to hear about silly Greek myths.”

Geoffrey shook his head. “No, no. You’re quite wrong, Miss Stone. I’m intrigued.” He returned his attention to Beatrice. “You must remind me, my lady, about the story of
Dionysus
. I must admit it has been quite a while since I’ve studied the Greek classics.”

Abigail surged to her feet. “Er, if you’ll excuse me, I should leave you and Lord Redbrooke to your visit.”

Lady Beatrice sat forward in her chair. She reached for Abigail’s hand. “No you mustn’t!” Her blue eyes glittered with a faintly pleading expression. Then, with an unladylike show of force, Beatrice yanked Abigail back down into the seat she’d just vacated.

Geoffrey supposed he should be insulted. And he suspected he would have…if he wasn’t having such fun teasing Miss Stone.

Beatrice went on. “Placed in a labyrinth as food for a monster, Theseus convinced the King of Minos’ daughter, er…”

“Ariadne,” Abigail supplied weakly. Her fingers plucked at the fabric of her skirts.

“To take her with him if she helped him escape. Ariadne helped free him but he journeyed with her to an island.”

“The isle of Naxos,” Abigail added quietly.

Beatrice nodded. “But the fiend took her and left her alone.” A frown formed on her lips. “Everyone deserted her. Until Dionysus came to rescue Ariadne.”

Geoffrey sat frozen.

Lady Beatrice seemed to note that she had a captivated audience and continued. “Dionysus rescued her from abject loneliness and despair, and as a sign of his love, gave her a crown of seven diamonds.”

“Did he?” Geoffrey drawled. He glanced over at Abigail, who now trained her stare upon the mural painted at the central part of the ceiling. He wondered whether Abigail identified with Ariadne’s sense of loneliness and sadness. His amusement died a swift death.

A knock sounded at the door.

The butler entered with a calling card upon his silver tray. “The Earl of Sinclair to see Miss Stone.”

Geoffrey narrowed his eyes on the smiling, too damned affable Lord Sinclair, who filled the entrance.

Sinclair bowed low at the waist. “Miss Stone, my lady, how do you do?” He looked at Geoffrey. “Redbrooke.”

Geoffrey’s gut clenched as that unwanted emotion that felt remarkably like jealousy coursed through his veins with a life-like force.

Bloody hell.

Abigail and Beatrice rose simultaneously and curtsied.

Sinclair focused his attention on Abigail.

Geoffrey’s jaw tightened at the roguish gleam in the other man’s far too appreciative gaze. A gentleman didn’t ogle a young lady in such a manner. He…well, hell…he just didn’t.

Abigail and Beatrice sat.

Sinclair slid into the small, mahogany shell-back chair closest to Abigail. With its thin spindle legs, the seat was entirely too small for one of Sinclair’s size…and what’s more, too close.

Why when Sinclair sat in the blasted seat, Abigail’s leg all but brushed his thigh in a most inappropriate manner. God how he hated the other man for that subtle touch of her body.

Geoffrey was filled with an unholy desire to see that fragile piece of furniture shatter under the weight of Sinclair’s imposing frame.

Except, Abigail’s placid expression, indicated she was a good deal less impressed with Sinclair’s effortless charm than most other young ladies.

Ever the hostess, Lady Beatrice, engaged Sinclair in discourse. “We were just discussing the ancient classics before you’d arrived, my lord.”

“Specifically matters of astrology and astronomy, it would seem,” Geoffrey drawled, enjoying the heightened color that ran from the top of Abigail’s head, down her neck, and he wondered just how much lower...

“My cousin is rather well-versed in the topic,” Beatrice said.

Abigail dropped her gaze to her lap. “Beatrice is merely being polite.”

Beatrice shook her head emphatically. “Oh, no. Not at all. Er, that isn’t to say I’m not being polite. I am. But I’m also being truthful. Abigail knows nearly everything on the topic.”

Sinclair’s eyes lit with interest. He raised a brow. “Is that so?” He directed his question to Lady Beatrice. At his attention, color filled her cheeks and she dropped her gaze to the floor, clearly not immune to Sinclair’s charm the way Abigail had been.

Geoffrey frowned. He suspected he should feel a hard resentment, even a stony annoyance at Sinclair’s effect on Lady Beatrice, and yet…

His eyes went to Abigail.

She smiled at Geoffrey, clearly having noted her cousin’s reaction to the roguish Sinclair.

“We were just discussing the tale of Dionysus and Ariadne,” Beatrice said.

“Ahh, yes. The tale of Theseus’ desperate attempt at survival.”

Geoffrey gritted his teeth. Of course, the bloody perfect Sinclair would be so versed in the classics to remember the details of the myth.

“Is it really a tale of desperation?” Abigail asked. “I consider it a story of Dionysus’ great love for Ariadne.”

“You are a romantic, Miss Stone,” Geoffrey bit out.

Three pairs of eyes swiveled his way. He stiffened under their intense scrutiny.

“Are you a cynic, then, my lord?” Abigail quietly asked. A sound, very nearly a groan, escaped Lady Beatrice, who dropped her head and shook it back and forth.

Geoffrey ignored her. His jaw tightened. “I am a man of logic. I’d not be so desperate as to pledge my love to a woman merely to escape Minos’ labyrinth.”

Abigail moved to the edge of her seat, her back stiffly held in a way that Lord Wellington himself would have applauded. “Then you, my lord, must have never known desperation.”

Geoffrey moved to the edge of the seat. “Then you, Miss Stone, would be wrong.”

Silence met his pronouncement. The steady tick-tock, tick-tock of the ormolu clock, blended with the rapid breathing of Miss Stones’ heaving chest, filled the quiet.

Geoffrey balled his hands into tight fists, shamed by his unwitting revelation. He’d lived the past five years of his life guarded, protecting himself from outside notice and censure. In the span of a moment this woman had made him reveal a hint about the dark past he kept buried. He stood hastily. “Lady Beatrice, I shall leave you and Miss Stone to your visit with Lord Sinclair. Good day.” Geoffrey sketched a quick bow.

As he took his hurried leave, he felt Abigail’s eyes boring into the fabric of his garment.

With her romantic views and bluestocking tendencies, Abigail posed a threat to his well-ordered world.

Yet, for the first time in nearly five years, he craved the opportunity to live and laugh with the same reckless abandon the lady herself seemed to exhibit.

Geoffrey ran hands that shook through his hair.

God help him. It would appear he’d not changed at all.

A gentleman must keep a private box at the theatre. He is not, however, to take part in the public display of gossip that occurs at that particular venue.

4
^th
Viscount Redbrooke

~11~

Scandalously loud whispers and too-polite laughter filled the auditorium of the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane. The candles from the chandeliers set the theatre aglow in a flickering light, throwing shadows upon the theatre boxes. In the dim light, Abigail scanned the crush of satin clad bodies.

“It hardly seems like people come for the sake of the show,” Abigail said under her breath at the conclusion of Act I of Shakespeare’s Othello.

Beatrice grinned. “Don’t you know? The only reason Society attends the theatre is to gossip and gawk at one another.”

Abigail’s lips pulled in a frown. “That is a shame. Perhaps they’ll be quieter for the second half.”

Her cousin Robert snorted. He tipped back on the legs of his chair. “Hardly. Just the opposite.”

“Hmph.” Abigail’s gaze moved with methodical precision through the crowd, taking the opportunity to study the people in attendance.

Beatrice cocked her head. “Are you looking for anyone in particular?”

Abigail started, and gave thanks for the darkness that concealed the rush of heat that flooded her cheeks. “No.” She prided herself on the nonchalant delivery of that single word utterance.

Beatrice frowned, and leaned closer. She ran her pretty blue-eyed gaze over Abigail’s face.

Abigail pressed her back against the red velvet cushions of her seat.

Robert winked at her. “Beatrice’s trying to verify whether you are being truthful.” He directed his attention out on the crowd below.

“Oh,” Abigail said, lamely.

Her cousins studied her with such intentness that Abigail squirmed under their scrutiny. Still, she had one determined sister, and two, very obstinate brothers, three if one considered her youngest brother, back at home, and Abigail had long ago learned how to close her lips and aggravate them with her silence.

Knowing Beatrice studied her, Abigail quelled the urge to look for Geoffrey. It was utter madness, this desire to see him. Except…she touched the special pocket sewn into the front of her gown where she carried the frayed and battered scrap of Italian lace Geoffrey had twice rescued for her. She suspected there was more to him than the rigidity he presented to his glittering world: a man unafraid to intervene with the use of force if it meant the protection of a woman’s honor, someone who would set aside propriety to wade into a lake to retrieve a memento to stave off a woman’s sadness. He didn’t mock her interest in the stars as Alexander had, but seemed to appreciate that she cared to speak on topics different than those expected of a lady.

And he belonged to her cousin.

“Ahh, there is, Lord Redbrooke,” Beatrice said, seeming more to herself.

Abigail followed her cousin’s gaze and knew the moment Geoffrey registered Beatrice’s focus.

Geoffrey and Beatrice shared a smile. There, for all of Polite Society, to see. From the stoic lord, it may as well have constituted a formal offer of marriage.

Abigail curled her toes in a desperate bid to halt the urge to flee. All his heroic efforts on Abigail’s behalf had merely been the actions of a gentleman. Here Abigail sat, making more of his rescue when in actuality, Geoffrey would have done the same for Beatrice—any lady, for that matter.

The curtain drew back.

“It is starting,” Beatrice whispered, clapping her hands together with more enthusiasm than Abigail ever had seen demonstrated by her otherwise, reserved cousin.

The actors launched into Act II. Familiar with the tale of a love destroyed and betrayal, Abigail again sought out Geoffrey. Their gazes collided. She offered him a smile.

Unlike the polite smile he’d shared with Beatrice not very long ago, his lips flattened into a hard line, and he returned his focus to the stage below.

Abigail bit the inside of her cheek. Yesterday afternoon, Geoffrey had been stiff, proper, unrelenting…the kind of gentleman she’d never wanted in her life. His harsh revelation yesterday, and then his swift departure, had indicated that Geoffrey, too, carried secrets. She remembered the flash of pain in his eyes, the muscle that had throbbed at the corner of his mouth.

Her cousin, Robert had indicated Geoffrey had not always been the aloof figure who now courted her cousin. And not for the first time since he’d swept onto Lord and Lady Hughes’s terrace and rescued her from Lord Carmichael, she wondered what had happened to Geoffrey, a man who so desperately needed life teased back into him.

She glanced over at Beatrice, thoroughly engrossed in the performance below. Abigail’s heart tightened with unwanted feelings of regret and…envy. Geoffrey had been abundantly clear that he wanted Beatrice to be that young lady.

After all, gentlemen such as Geoffrey Winters, Viscount Redbrooke, did not wed ruined young ladies careless enough as to toss their virtue away. Regret tasted like the bitterest of fruits and it threatened to choke her as she recalled that night she and Alexander had been discovered in one another’s arms, her gown in dishabille…

Abigail swallowed hard. All the humiliation and despair she’d carried crested like a wave at sea and nearly engulfed her, threatening to pull her under.

Abigail stumbled to her feet, nearly upending her chair.

“Abigail?” Robert looked at her questioningly.

“I-ah-I require a moment,” she said. And before he or Beatrice should think to follow, Abigail fled. She registered the moment her maid Sally started after her, and picked up her pace, down the long hall, down a flight of stairs. She wanted to leave.

“Sally,” she said, her voice raspy to her own ears. “Please have the coach summoned, and then return and tell the marquess I have a megrim.”

Concern filled Sally’s kindly eyes. “Are you certain I should leave you alone, Miss Stone? Perhaps I should return for the marquess.”

“No!” Abigail said. “Please, just have the coach summoned.”

Sally hesitated, and then hurried ahead, leaving Abigail at the main stairway of the theater.