It Happened One Midnight (PG8) (21 page)

“I’m thinking deep thoughts about our business at night, Liebman.”

Which was, as he predicted, thriving. Their first hastily printed and distributed decks of court cards sold out rapidly, despite their cost (two pounds!), and several shops in the Burlington Arcade had ordered more of them, and Almack’s had ordered one hundred decks of them, White’s twenty-five, at least five different gaming establishment a good hundred more, and Klaus had begun daydreaming about building a second printer while Jonathan began daydreaming about doubling profits.

They’d earn back the entirety of Tommy’s investment within just weeks at this rate.

“And I am reaping the benefits of it during the day,” Klaus said dreamily.

As a steady stream of beautiful women had come to sit in his window to be sketched.

It was a veritable cascade of competition and vanity, a parade of cold looks and cold shoulders, as the cream of London young womanhood filed in and out of Klaus Liebman & Co. to sit for Wyndham in the window, which was rapidly becoming just a bit famous. Passersby slowed to admire them.

Unsurprisingly, Argosy had begun to show an interest in commerce. For surely that was the reason he stopped in at the Bond Street shop.

The orders for them were piling up. Hundreds of them so far. Two hundred alone, the day after Klaus Liebman & Co. had advertised in the broadsheets.

“How shall we choose the final faces for the suits?”

“Oh, I suppose we could draw names from a hat,” he said absently.

He was trying to imagine what sort of deck Tommy would fit into. The Most Problematic Women of London, perhaps. Men would arrive in droves to purchase the deck, grateful for the warning. They could print a fresh deck yearly, with new faces, just like a calendar.

Jonathan smiled to himself. Ideas
were
capital.

“Are you really going to choose a bride from this deck, Redmond?” Liebman was wistful. He would love a similar opportunity.

Jonathan thought of the ball he was due to attend this evening, and all the lovely women he would be obliged to dance with.

“But of course, my dear Klaus. Can you think of a better way to choose a bride?”

Klaus, a German, and generally optimistic, didn’t quite catch the whiff of irony surrounding those words.

O
NE, TWO, THREE
. . . one, two, three. . .

He could do it in his sleep, the Sussex Waltz. He very nearly was at the moment, although the beautiful blond woman whose hand he was holding and whose waist he touched didn’t seem to know it.

“Papa says the shooting is excellent. Grouse all but fly right into your hands.”

“Oh, that’s a shame. What makes it a sport is that animals you are trying to shoot are generally trying not to be shot.”

Lady Grace Worthington missed the irony.

“Well, there’s always riding, too. We live near some of the loveliest woodland left in England. You know how it was all cut for shipbuilding for the war. Papa made a
fortune
.”

Jonathan was all too aware of her fortune. His father craved an association with her father.

“And do you enjoy riding, Lady Grace?”

“Oh, yes! And walking is very pleasant, too.”

“Oh, I concur. When I’m trying to get from one place to another, walking or riding are usually my choices.”

That whirring noise, he thought, was the sound of irony sailing right over her admittedly very handsome golden head.

Jonathan was enjoying himself, but not for the right reasons.

“There are ruins, too,” she enthused. “Quite pretty ones.”

“I’m sure there are.” There are ruins bloody
everywhere
in England.

He wondered if babies felt this way when rocked. He’d never dreamed a waltz could actually put him to sleep. Not too long ago it was considered utterly scandalous, the waltz. Men and women touching each other for the duration of an entire dance. Like sex standing up. How very carnal.

How wrong they were.

Although, like everything else in life, it likely depended upon one’s partner.

“And a folly, where we can picnic.” She was still talking.

“Follies are jolly.” By golly!

“Yes, aren’t they!” She smiled. Teeth arrayed like pearls. Her short top lip sat atop a slightly plumper lower one. Her mouth
is
like a bud, he thought, somewhat bemused. Poets aren’t
completely
mad when they write that sort of nonsense.

Tommy’s mouth had the generosity of . . . a just-opened rose.

Somehow it didn’t feel at all like nonsense when he thought it.

“I often take my embroidery out to it on fine days.”

He frowned very faintly. She took her embroidery out to where . . . ?

Oh! the folly!

“What sorts of things do you embroider? Do say butterflies.”

“I do!” she smiled. “And flowers and bees. Handkerchiefs and the like.”

He really had nothing more to say to that. Unless it was:
Yes, but what in bloody hell do you
do
all day?

He didn’t say it. Because it wasn’t just patently unfair, it was mad. If an English gentleman did his job correctly, the women in his life wouldn’t really need to
do
anything. Embroider. Knit. Raise the children, with assistance from a battalion of servants. Manage the household. Beam adoringly at her husband from across a breakfast table.

A woman shouldn’t need to steal abused orphan children to be considered interesting.

He should be very unhappy, indeed, if Tommy de Ballesteros had robbed him of his pleasure in meaningless conversations. They were practically evidence of gentility. They were as comfortable as featherbeds. They were as English as the Union Jack. Meaningless conversations were as much a part of his life as the Sussex Downs, and always had been.

Then again, veterans of war often returned to England, bored and lost and purposeless after the noise and trauma and variety of the battlefield. Perhaps Tommy was his metaphorical battlefield.

But his thoughts seemed tethered to her, and the lead was short, and he was forever being yanked back to her side.

He imagined how his hand would feel against her waist now—it would be like dancing with a hummingbird, all quick lithe warmth—and how her hand would feel folded safely in his, and his mouth so close, so close to her mouth . . .

Tommy would likely want to lead.

He wouldn’t let her.

He smiled to himself.

The bands of muscle in his stomach tightened. He inadvertently squeezed Lady Worthington’s hand.

She squeezed him back. And smiled so sultrily he realized he must have been smiling sultrily at her.

“What do you think of child labor?” he said suddenly.

She blinked as if he’d flicked something into her eyes.

And then her eyes went wide and a faint pink washed her cheeks. She could not have looked more nonplussed if he’d suddenly noisily broken wind.

He could undo it if he wanted to. He could change the subject. He could steer the conversation as surely as he led this dance.

He waited.

She cleared her throat. “We’ve a number of young servants. There’s a good deal of work to do in a house that size, and servants are so expensive to feed and house, and the children, why, you can just get them very cheaply from the workhouses. ”

Very cheaply. As if they were cheese, or eggs.

“Can you?” he said softly.

“Well, of course. Surely your father employs children.”

“No,” Jonathan said. “He doesn’t. At least not the youngest ones. I think our scullery maid may be all of twelve years old. Do you think children ought to be working when they’re very little?”

He watched her valiantly consider this, likely in order to please him. It wasn’t the sort of thing she’d ever needed to think about. Servants just
were
. They kept the house functioning, and maintained the lifestyle to which she was accustomed. She didn’t think much more about them from moment to moment than she did about her own, for instance, liver, or pancreas.

“Well, it’s not as though they’re like us, are they? They’re servant children.”

“No, I suppose they aren’t like us. Apart from the two eyes, four limbs, same species, that sort of thing.”

She nodded, looking relieved at what she interpreted as their accord.

He stifled a sigh.

It was official. He’d been ruined for purposeless conversations.

He abandoned continued efforts to sustain it. And his thoughts snapped back to Tommy de Ballesteros once again.

Lady Grace looked worried about his silence. He did nothing to ease her worry.

“Mr. Wyndham said the light loves my skin,” she blurted. Then she blushed fetchingly. “He painted me for the Diamonds of the First Water deck, you know.”

Jonathan was instantly alert. Artists
would
say things like that.

“And who
wouldn’t
love your skin?” he said, and offered up a genuinely sultry smile.

The ballroom grew restless when he did that, and fans fluttered agitatedly, and feminine brows fought the urge to frown, because frowning brought premature lines.

He realized too late it was just the sort of thing that resulted in his face ultimately being slapped by Lady Philippa Winslow.

It wasn’t his
fault
.

Her skin
was
flawlessly lovely. The rest of her likely was, too. A tasteful portion of her bosom was presented by that fashionable dress of hers, and it looked ample and white and soft. And yet he couldn’t seem to muster interest in peeking beneath her dress, when just a week or so ago he’d had one distinctive daydream about it. She was a perfectly pleasant person, apart from a great, and understandable, streak of vanity, which he had exploited for the purposes of his deck.

Truly. He should be kind to her. Surely that shouldn’t take any great effort. Surely he was so well bred that he could be nothing
but
kind.

“Do you really intend to choose a bride from that deck, Mr. Redmond?”

A bold question, that. He liked it. He wasn’t bored by it, anyway.

“Where on earth would you have heard a thing like that?” he said idly.

“From . . . everywhere.”

He smiled. “It does seem rather arbitrary, doesn’t it? And rather presumptuous? If I chose a bride from the deck, why should I presume that she’d have me?”

He was interested in what she’d have to say to that.

“Surely you’re aware you’re the catch of the season, Mr. Redmond.”

Said the woman who was entirely confident that
she
was the catch of the season.

Was he? He supposed every season needed one. And weren’t there more titles on offer? Then again, the Redmond fortune rather trumped a number of titles.

“I’ve heard I’ve a certain amount to recommend me,” he said humbly.

He would need to tread carefully. The last thing he wanted was for Lady Grace Worthington to go making assumptions about how two catches were like two peas in a pod.

But he also wanted to sell a
lot
of decks of cards.

“Then again, can you imagine anything more romantic than allowing destiny to choose a mate, Lady Grace? And what is destiny if not a metaphorical turn of the card?”

All she’d heard was the word “romantic.” Her big cornflower-blue eyes went starry.

“Do you believe in destiny then?” she breathed.

Did he? The word instantly called to mind that damned Gypsy girl, Martha Heron, and his whole being reared away from it.

He’d opened his mouth to respond with polite scorn when his eye was caught by a flash of movement on the periphery of the ballroom. It was more of an impression, really, of bright hair, of liquid, almost primal grace. Rather like a wild creature, perhaps a fox, escaping into its burrow.

“Yes,” he answered instead.

And he abandoned an open-mouthed Lady Grace Worthington without a word just before the last note of the waltz was played, and bolted cross the ballroom, turning heads, fluttering the plumes on turbans.

But revelers soon filled in the path he created, the way displaced water will.

Chapter 17

T
OMMY HAD BEEN LEANING
against the wall next to a statue (of what appeared to be Diana, the Goddess of the Hunt), her eyes hooded, her fan languidly sweeping beneath her chin, and calmly, quietly hating Lady Grace Worthington.

There was a rich variety of things to hate about her: the coronet affixed to her golden head, as though she thought she were a bloody queen; or the smile that implied everyone in the ballroom was her loyal subject; or that gown—a violet blue, like a certain pair of eyes, silk, achingly stylish. It had likely cost a queen’s ransom.

Primarily she hated her because of the hand resting on her waist.

She in fact couldn’t take her eyes away from the hand resting on Lady Grace’s waist.

And in the rational depths of her mind, which still hadn’t recovered to their full pragmatic strength in the wake of an ill-advised kiss, she knew all of this was absurd, since Tommy would have happily affixed a coronet to her head if she possessed one, and she was generally quite in favor of smiling, and there was no question that one could call the girl “beautiful” and not be accused of hyperbole. If one liked blondes, that was.