Elisabeth Fairchild (5 page)

Her host murmured something comforting and took himself off to encourage the musicians to fill the too-silent room with music again. The guests’ attention must be returned to entertainments other than her clumsiness.

The stranger who had offered her his hand, remarked--oh so smoothly--in a low, cultured voice, “I thought you might be feeling a trifle faint,” as if she had gone down in a swoon rather than out of sheer galloping clumsiness!

She darted a piercing look into the stranger’s eyes, weighing his intent in remaining by her side and engaging her in conversation. The thought ran through her head that the blue of these eyes was exactly the color of Runaway Jack, or Hay-maidens as the Gill flower was sometimes called. It was a color she associated with damp, shady places where one might go to be peaceful, a color that pleased her. She did not want to be readily pleased with any man but Marsh while her hip throbbed and her carefully laid plans were laid waste in a moment of clumsiness.

“Do you require smelling salts?” His voice was slick as satinwood and as deep as the shady pools of those eyes. It irritated her. One could not read much through such a polished veneer. Was he ribbing her? Did he dare to make fun of her humiliating predicament? She would pluck the pretty blue eyes out if that was this dandy’s game.

The endangered orbs, so long and sooty-lashed as to make any female alive positively green with envy, sparkled in a very knowing manner. He was trying valiantly to stop from laughing, no misreading the twitch of his lips. How very like a man, she thought. Any one of her brothers would have been slapping his thigh and shouting with laughter by now. This gentleman might be more restrained, but his thoughts ran along the same lines. He found her ridiculous.

And yet, are you not, in thisoment, exactly that?
part of herself insisted. Her predicament was certainly ridiculous. For a moment, her own mouth was in danger of smiling, but she would not openly acknowledge the humor of her situation. Pride stood in her way. She would not be intimidated by this peacock! She challenged his faint smile with a fiercely proud glare and the firm jut of her jaw, searching the depths of gill flower blue.

Something inexplicable she saw there unarmed her. For reasons incomprehensible, the peacock liked her. There was no other explanation for the warmth directed her way, unless perhaps he liked all females and was in the habit of smiling at them deep within his eyes.

Aurora lowered her chin, more uneasy with admiration than she might have been with contempt. How baffling, that this polished prig should find something to admire in a female who danced so poorly she landed in a heap on the floor at his glossy feet. What a picture of fun she must have been, sprawled on her back in the middle of a very formal room, beneath the very gentleman she hoped most to impress. Perhaps she was no more than an object of amusement to this fellow. She bit down on her lower lip to stop its defection. She must not smile. Falling on her fanny in public was not funny! It was horribly humiliating. But, her mouth disagreed as much as the gentleman before her.

His eyes dared her to laugh. He was most definitely amused.

She lifted her chin, determined to take as much amusement in the peacock as he did in her. “I am quite all right. Really!” Unable to suppress a sudden chuckle, she ducked her head. “How very absurd this is. I do apologize for the disruption.”

“Not at all.” The stranger’s voice was musical in its gliding tones, as if his words waltzed. “Would you care to dance, Miss Ramsay?” He gave a courtly bow and held out his immaculately gloved hand.

She was smoothing her gown when he asked, rearranging the damnable tucker that had come rather dramatically untucked. Her head came up with a snap. “Would I care to dance?” Her eyes narrowed. Had she read him wrong? Was there malice in this prancing peacock after all? “Have you not just seen me crash to the floor in that very pursuit? Whatever gave you the notion I might
care
to dance?”

“Were you dancing?” he asked in so smoothly satirical a manner that she longed first to laugh, and then to slap him. How dare he stand waiting for an answer to such an insulting question, a faint smile touching both lips and eyes? Lord Walsh did not so humiliate her. He was returned to the dance floor with his partner. Her own former partner, Mr. Potter, had vanished. Her gaze raked over the assembled company. She was no longer an object of interest to anyone other than this stranger.

She addressed the smiling cockscomb with haughty condescension that had more to do with her own bruised pride than any real contempt she felt. “I never dance, sir, with a gentleman to whom I have not received proper introduction.”

One of the stranger’s narrow black brows rose theatrically. “I see.” He made no effort whatsoever to suppress the grin that swept his mouth upward and dug an engaging dimple in his clean-shaven cheek. “We can remedy that. Will you wait here a moment?”

He asked her even as he began to slide sideways through the crowd that revolved around them. He was smiling a contained but confident smile, as though convinced she must agree.

“I shall be no more than a minute.”

She did not agree, did not so much as nod, for she had not truly made her mind up as to whether she was at all inclined to wait. No more than a heartbeat was passed, and him swallowed up in the crowd, when Aurora decided sad no real desire to wait for any man after the embarrassment she had just suffered, unless it be Lord Walsh, and he had not lingered to offer her such an option. She turned and began to press her way toward the door, only to come face to face with the very fellow she evaded, on the arm of their host. For an instant the gill flower eyes lit up, as if this smooth, dark-haired dandy had unfathomable reason to be glad he saw her again.

“Ah, here she is,” Tom Coke patted her shoulder, murmured something appropriate about her unfortunate fall and graciously gave them formal introduction. She listened with only half an ear. The dandy, whose name it seemed, was Miles Fletcher, regarded her with fading joy throughout the exchange of names. His lively blue eyes, as he briefly took her hand, seemed overshadowed by disappointment.

Their host quit them once his introductory task was fulfilled, other guests demanding his attention. Aurora watched him go. She could not look Fletcher in the eye.

“Running away from me, were you?”  The young man’s voice was not so smooth as usual. He cleared his throat. “What a pity. I hoped. . .” He fell silent.

She looked up at him. The charm of his smile was paled almost to a whisper. He was strangely endearing, even when he did not smile.

“Hoped what?” she prodded irritably, angry with herself. It had been rude in her to try to lose this harmless, cheerful cockscomb in the crowd, as rude as any jesting remark he had made in reference to her dancing.

He shrugged and spread his immaculately gloved hands. “I hoped we might be friends, Miss Ramsay.” He executed another formal bow. “I am not so pushing as to insist.”

She was surprised that he would turn his back on her and walk away--surprised and frustrated. A growing desire to give chase troubled her. “
Let him go
,” one part of her urged. “
Explain
”, another voice within her head insisted. She ought to explain. She took two steps toward that end, and stopped. How did one explain behavior one did not understand? She could not explain her rudeness, could not explain that plans had been made to impress Lord Walsh, painstaking plans, plans gone ridiculously awry, and that it was the failure of those plans that she was angry and impatient with--not him.

He might have asked her if she wanted a drink of water as easily as he had asked her to dance. She would have snapped his head off either way. There were those who blamed her short-temperedness on the color of her hair. Aurora had no patience for shirking responsibility. She held herself accountable--the unruly, bad tempered, tantrum-throwing child part of her that she had never learned to wholly silence.

She set out after Miles Fletcher. She need not explain herself, or her plans to win Walsh, but she must apologize.

Too long had she stood debating the issue. Miles Fletcher stopped to talk with none other than Lord Walsh and the delicate, dark-haired, bone china female he had been dancing with when she had toppled him to the floor. Lord help her! He knew Walsh! They greeted one another with casual familiarity. She had missed a golden opportunity in accepting Miles Fletcher’s invitation to dance. He might have eventually introduced her to Walsh. As it was, he took up the willing hand of the pale-complected beauty Walsh had been parading around the floor and coaxed her to dance with little more than a smile. Dash it all! He looked very elegant from across the room in his meticulously correct attire. The young woman showed to advantage on Miles Fletcher’s arm.

Aurora liked to be right. She wanted to be right in her refusal of Mr. Fletcher’s offer of a dance. Perhaps he was clumsy, she reasoned, no more than a prancing, foppish fool no more graceful than the dreadful Mr. Potter.

But, Aurora had been wrong with regard to every other aspect of the evening. It did not surprise her that she had been wrong in this respect as well.

The music was a waltz. Expecting the worst, Aurora was more than a little jealous to watch Mr. Fletcher and his partner glide across the floor like swans upon the still surface of a lake. His sleek, dark head bent to the young woman’s equally dark curls. She smiled in response to his remark. Step, step, glide. The man was a master. There were none who could compare to the fluid, swimming sweep of his movements, none who seemed so much at ease in this new and daring dance step. He looked, in his stark black and white, as elegant and as polished as his words had been.

What a fool she was! Aurora regretted her entire exchange with Miles Fletcher and wondered what it would have been like to count him her admirer. Her future might have been changed had she but said yes instead of no to the offer of a young man’s arm. Frustrated, Aurora turned her back on the room, wondering if she would have a second chance to prove herself with either Fletcher or Walsh.

“Who is she?” Grace wanted to know of Miles as soon as he led her away from Walsh.

“Who?” Miles asked with mock ignorance. He knew exactly who she meant--the young woman he could not drive from mind or memory--the female who drew him even as she drove him away--whose future he meant to affect.
L' Amazon
stood staring at him, as he and his sister joined the set.

Grace was not about to drop the subject. “You know. The sublimely foolish, falling-down-girl with the dreadful dress who blessed your toes by refusing to dance with you.”

Miles smiled. “Do you not recognize my sublime goddess of this afternoon?”

Grace’s eyes widened. “That is never the same creature!”

“Oh, but it is.”

“Gad! Whatever was she thinking to pull all of that glorious hair away from her face?”

Miles smiled a tight little smile. “Perhaps she felt her hair too forward for polite company.”

Grace laughed. “Fling my words back into my face. Go ahead. I deserved that. Now, tell me who she is. I am all curiosity and contrition.”

“Beyond that she is called Aurora Ramsay, I know very little.”

“Not ‘Rakehell’s sister?” she laughed. “And what is it they call the other brother? Rue?”

“Watch your tongue, my dear. And your manners. You have neglected to mention ‘Rash’, ‘Rogering’ and ‘Rip’ Ramsay, also of the same family.”

“Have I? What a bother to be the only girl among five such brothers! It’s no wonder the poor thing hasn’t a clue about her appearance. Tell me, do they all have red hair? It is such a passionate color to carry about on one’s head.”

“I’m told they do. You may see for yourself as to Rupert Ramsay’s passionate head. He is here with his sister.”

“Here? Where? Point him out. I must dance with him.”

“I do not think, my dear, that even your considerable charms can convince Rupert Ramsay to waltz with you.”

“You underestimate me, Miles, unless of course the fellow does not fancy females.”

“On that account I am not fully informed, but I have it on good authority that he is not at all fond of dancing. Thomas Coke says he frequents the library more often than the ballroom.”

“What? A fortnight in the country w a house full of fascinating company and he closets himself away in the library? What a curious family these Ramsays would seem to be. I am intent on meeting both of them. Perhaps a book before bedtime is in order. Lord Walsh would never dream of looking for me in the library.”

“Saucy minx,” Miles clucked his tongue. His sister was an incorrigible flirt. “Ramsay had best beware his heart.”

“His heart?” She tipped her head to look at him through her lashes with feigned innocence. “Whatever do you mean?”

“You know precisely what I mean,” he said. “Men are forever losing their hearts to you Grace, but I have yet to see yours so much as touched by a fellow.”

She tapped her fan reprovingly against his shoulder. “Are you not immensely relieved it is so, my dear? We are involved in a fortnight where women are outnumbered in attendance by men, four to one. You would be forced to pull me out of no end of scrapes if I easily lost my heart.”