Like No Other Lover

The third person was responsible for Mile’s russet color.

Miles watched Cynthia Brightly—of all people,
Cynthia Brightly
—pull at the fingers of her gloves until her hands were free of them, hang up her cloak on a peg near the door, and say something to Violet that caused his sister to tip back her head and laugh merry peals calculated to draw looks.

Every head in the pub drifted helplessly toward the sound the way flowers turn to the sun.

Normally Miles would have rolled his eyes.

Instead he watched, riveted, as Miss Brightly took a general look about the pub: at the table full of laughing Everseas, at Miss Marietta Endicott of Miss Marietta Endicott’s Academy for Young Ladies having supper with what appeared to be two concerned parents and one sullen young lady. At him. Her remarkable blue eyes neither brightened nor darkened in recognition when they brushed his—why would they?—and her faint smile, the aftermath of laughter, remained unaltered. He might well have been the pillar or a hat rack for how
seen
he’d been.

Whereas the brush of her gaze left Miles buzzing like a struck tuning fork.

What in God’s name was she doing in
Sussex
? In Pennyroyal Green? With
Violet
?

“I would have said he’s gone more of a
claret,
” Culpepper said to Cooke. He threw the words down like a gauntlet. He was irritable this evening, as Cooke had won three chess games in a row, and Culpepper hungered for a controversy, any controversy. If none other was forthcoming, Miles’s complexion would have to do.

The two scholarly gentlemen had known Miles since he’d been born, and they’d been particularly proprietary about him since he returned from his now renowned South Seas expedition two years ago. He’d in fact thrilled them into silence when he confided he was in the midst of planning a much grander return expedition and offered them an opportunity to invest in it.

Which was when the door opened and Miles had apparently changed color.

His bloody sister had a gift for controversy, but he never would have anticipated this.

He found his voice. “I’ve gone claret? Perhaps it’s just that we’re too close to the fire.”

Across from him, two pairs of furry brows dove in skeptical unison. At the Pig & Thistle, Culpepper and Cooke and, by association, Miles, were
always
close to the fire, as this was where the chessboard lived.

Miles gave what was meant to be an illustrative good-heavens-isn’t-it-warm-in-here tug at his cravat. He was surprised to encounter the hard thump of his pulse in his throat.

This, too, was Cynthia Brightly’s fault.

He dropped his hand flat to the table and stared hard at it, as though he could read in its veins and tendons the reasons for his response. The scientist in him wanted to know
precisely
what it was he felt about the woman. Strong emotions visited him so seldom—he could hardly blame them, as he was hardly a hospitable host—it was difficult to know whether it was anger or something else.

Certainly anger was a part of it.

He recalled that help was literally at hand. He closed his fingers around his tankard and poured the rest of Ned Hawthorne’s famous dark brew down his throat with long inelegant gulps. It was both cure and courage.

He swiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“What color am I now?” He asked defiantly.

It happened at a ball. The guest list for the enormous annual Malverney affair ranged in pedigree from Prinny to far less discriminate choices. Miles, as second son of the staggeringly wealthy and influential Isaiah Redmond, wasn’t certain where he fell in the ranking, and didn’t care.

Miles’s ship had docked in England again so recently his complexion was still fading in degrees from tropical brown to a proper English shade of parchment, and had reached the sallow stage. He was still too thin for his large frame; fevers, bad food, and a long ocean voyage did tend to strip flesh from a man. Roasts of beef and Yorkshire puddings were replenishing his.

He’d taken a ragtag crew on a barely seaworthy ship to a swollen, pulsing, fever dream of a land: brilliant flowers the size of parasols tangling with vines thicker around than a man’s arms; snakes as supple and long as the vines themselves; beetles the size of St. Giles rats; ants the length of thumbs. Noisy rainbow-feathered birds and iridescent butterflies the size of Chinese fans spangled the air; dusky-skinned women as entangling as the flora shared his bed at night.
Everything
was abandoned, moist, outsized and excessive. He learned to move slowly, languidly; he learned he would never be dry or cool, regardless.

Death was as surprising and thickly everywhere as the life, hidden and overt: scuttling through the undergrowth as tiny scorpions, emerging from the trees as a tribe of cannibals with whom he successfully negotiated for his life, as a tenacious fever that nearly killed him anyway.

Miles wasn’t immune to awe, but the strangeness and dangers of Lacao never frightened him. Fear was usually rooted in ignorance, and he’d long ago learned to vanquish ignorance with preternatural patience, and acute observation and tempered-steel determination. And he recognized beauty, but he never exalted it. He understood the purpose of beauty in nature was to attract mates or prey—which, he’d decided dryly after more than two decades of observing his parents, his family, and the
ton
, was, in fact, its purpose in every society.

And for this reason, he had never, for God’s sake, challenged anyone to a duel, written terrible poetry, climbed balconies (as Colin Eversea had once been rumored to do), or otherwise
embarrassed
himself over a beautiful woman. Miles quite sensibly and discreetly satisfied his formidable sensual appetites in the arms of the ton’s aristocratic widows, who considered him their best-kept secret.

He would return to England to write the first of what would become a series of books about his adventures. This book would eventually earn him great notoriety, first among scientific circles, which rippled concentrically outward to encompass fashionable circles, until he was avidly sought for lectures and salons and envied by men possessed of less fortitude or who were leg-shackled by wives and broods of children.

This bemused Miles.

He simply couldn’t see his voyage as courageous or mythical when his nature gave him no choice in the matter: he was driven by a simple but quietly ferocious need to
know
things. Negotiating with cannibals for his life simply seemed a quite logical conclusion to the trajectory he’d been on since he was soundly thrashed for taking apart his father’s gold watch when he was seven years old. He’d had all the tiny glittering pieces laid out before him, analyzed and understood their relationship to one another, and was
just
about to reassemble it when he’d been caught.

The thrashing did nothing at all to detract from the giddy triumph of finally understanding at last how the bloody thing
worked
. It was, however, a very important lesson: the quest for discovery was often a dangerous one.

But all of this notoriety was a year away.

For now, he was simply happy to be home again among family, roasts of beef, low uncluttered green landscapes, and discreet, randy aristocratic widows clothed in layers and layers of fabric that could be peeled or coaxed off. He was even happy to attend a ball, and he loathed balls. It just seemed a decidedly, blessedly English thing to do.

But Lacao seemed to be relinquishing him only gradually, the way a dream dissolves into wakefulness. And suddenly, as Lord Albemarle stood at his elbow and pressed him for stories of warm-blooded women of easy virtue, it happened: the heat of the ballroom crush became tropical; the fluttering of silk fans in the hands of women became fronds and butterflies; the rustle of silk and muslin and coats became jungle foliage. His two worlds kaleidoscoped into one.

Which was why he reflexively turned when a flash of iridescence caught his eye. His first thought was:
Morpho rhetenor Helena
. The extraordinary tropical butterfly with wings of shifting colors: blues, lavenders, greens.

It proved to be a woman’s skirt.

The color
was
blue, but by the light of the legion of overhead candles, he saw purples and even greens shivering in its weave. A bracelet of pale stones winked around one wrist, a circlet banded her dark head. The chandelier struck little beams from that, too.

She’s altogether too shiny for a woman, he decided, and began to turn away.

Which was when she tipped her face up into the light.

Everything stopped. The beat of his heart, the pump of his lungs, the march of time.

Seconds later, thankfully, it all resumed. Much more violently than previously.

And then absurd notions roman-candled in his mind.

His palms ached to cradle her face—it was a kitten’s face, broad and fair at the brow, stubborn at the chin. She had kitten’s eyes, too: large and a bit tilted and surely they weren’t
actually
the azure of calm southern seas? Surely he, Miles Redmond, hadn’t entertained such a florid thought? Her eyebrows were wicked: fine, slanted, very dark. Her hair was probably brown, but it was as though he’d never learned the word “brown.”

Burnished. Silk. Copper. Azure. Delicate. Angel. Hallelujah
. Suddenly these were the only words he knew.

He stared. She didn’t notice. Nor did anyone else, such was the crowded ballroom and Mile’s lifelong ability, despite his considerable height, to be more scenery than seen when he chose.

Moments later this grave female disturbance to his peace of mind was swept by the gentle tide of her friends into the ballroom proper and lost to his gaze.

So it wasn’t just a mere poetically excessive expression after all: a woman
could
literally take one’s breath away. Apart from the four intimate, athletic rounds he’d gone two nights earlier with Lady Dovecote—who was at this moment signaling a subtle but unmistakable suggestion to him with her fan on his peripheral vision—no woman had ever before left him breathless.

Miles ignored Lady Dovecote. He remained pointed toward where the woman had last been, like a compass needle quivering toward north.

“Who is the girl in blue?” He took pains to sound a mere quarter turn past bored. He directed this question to Lord Albermarle.

Albemarle was foxed and garrulous and pleased to be able to enlighten Miles. “Oh! That would be Miss Cynthia Brightly. She’s a bit fast, so I’ve heard, and it’s no doubt ungentlemanly of me to say it, but there you have it. The belle of the season, and it would be duller for lack of her, though there’s Violet this year, thank God, and God
save
us, my apologies, Redmond. Please don’t call me out over your sister. Miss Brightly has no fortune and no family, one hears, but she has…everything
else
…as you can see, and it is quite fashionable to be in love with her.”

Ah. So this phenomenon had already been discovered. The scientist in Miles was displeased.

“Care for an introduction?” Albermarle concluded. “My sister can probab—”

But Miles had already vanished.

He remembered that passage through the ballroom now. He’d no doubt been acquainted with most of the people he brushed past, but so focused was he on his objective that he was incapable of recognizing any of them. He smiled very slightly all the way through that silk and muslin jungle as though his smile was a passport, a lantern, an apology for the fact that his elegant English manners were only now returning to him along with his English complexion, in degrees.

All the while some internal blacksmith took great clanging strokes at his heart.

At last he saw again that flash of iridescence—surely that dress was fashioned of fairy wings? He was too enthralled to be appalled at his own metaphor. Perhaps one thought in geysers of clichés when one fell in love.

His pace slowed. Was this extraordinary confluence of reactions
love
?

It wasn’t entirely pleasant, if so, he mused. But it was definitely interesting, and Miles appreciated “interesting” more than nearly anything else in the world.

He was close enough now to see that her profile was designed to do dramatic things to hearts: stop them, steal them, break them. Her bottom lip—a pillowy, pale pink curve—inspired decidedly earthier thoughts, all of which communicated with immediacy to his groin. Her complexion was burnished in chandelier light and flushed from the heat; a few streamers of hair trailed from her coiffure, specifically, it seemed, to draw attention to her long, long neck and the bosom creamily, philanthropically displayed by her daringly low neckline.

And then he heard her voice. He would never forget that first sound of it: lilting, feminine, surprisingly mature and confident. She’d lowered it; the woman she stood near—a Miss Liza Standshaw, Miles thought—had looped a familiar hand through her arm and leaned her head into Cynthia Brightly’s: the better to hear secrets.

Unfortunately, he had remarkably good hearing.

“Lord Finley has thirty thousand pounds a year and golden hair, but his mama is a harridan. Still, such a small price to pay for
thirty thousand pounds
, don’t you think, Liza? He’s a bit dissolute but quite a lively dancer. He’s claimed two of mine already—waltzes! The Earl of Borland has a wen, but it’s something a girl can overlook given the title and the money and the various castles, don’t you think? And Mr. Lyon Redmond is exceptionally handsome and wealthy, isn’t he? The Redmond fortune puts that of Croesus to shame, or so I’ve heard. I’ve heard he’s eyes only for Miss Olivia Eversea, quite moony over her, in fact, but the families are about as cozy as the Montagues and Capulets, and I’m certain their papas will never allow a match, so let’s do put him on the list. I shall want an introduction.”

“Miss Olivia Eversea will be no match for you, Cynthia,” her friend maintained stoutly. “We shall get you that introduction. There’s Mr. Miles Redmond here tonight. The second Redmond son. He’s eligible, too. Will you want an introduction?”

“Mr. Miles Redmond…Miles Redmond…Oh! The towering dark chap with the spectacles?” she sounded aghast. “He does whatnot with insects, does he not? Lud, Liza, are you
mad
?” Cynthia Brightly gave her friend a playful rap on the arm with her fan. “Why should I settle for a dour
second son
when I could have an actual heir? Or an
earl
?”

They giggled. A sound as musical and icy as the spring thaw.

Miles backed away smoothly, unnoticed. One step. Two steps. Three steps.

Until he bumped gently against a short pillar supporting a Grecian-style sculpture: Hercules, he noted. Doing something heroic with or to a lion.

For a moment he unconsciously mimicked the statue’s absolute stillness.

The shock, when it arrived, was unnatural and nasty: as though a butterfly had landed on his wrist only to sink fangs into it.

It gave way moments later to a distant sort of amusement. He’d been a simpleton about women, really. Somehow he’d never dreamed such a coldly mercantile heart could beat inside so delicate a breast. He was impressed and unnerved and fascinated and, in a peculiar way, grateful; from that moment on, he saw every woman anew, sought evidence in their eyes of the tick of their minds, danced with them as if holding little grenades. They all became much more interesting for what he suspected they didn’t say to him than for what they did say.

Only later would he realize that the tectonic plates of his pride had shifted that day. The rumble in his character was low and deep, but he was permanently changed:

Miles Redmond did not like being dismissed.