Like No Other Lover (4 page)

“Leave your concerns in my hands, Father.” It was a list of people he knew well.

“Thank you, Miles,” Isaiah said calmly. “I know everything will be well with you in charge. With luck, we’ll return inside a fortnight and enjoy the final evening of the party.”

And Miles almost felt the transfer of responsibility physically.

There was a silence.

“How goes the scientific studies?”

A surprising question from his father, and not an earnest one. He was about to take a sip of the brandy.

“Very well. There is talk of putting me forward as president of the Royal Society when Sir Joseph Banks retires.”

His father’s brandy glass froze halfway up to his mouth.

Isaiah Redmond spoke the language of status. He knew Sir Joseph Banks.
Everyone
did. Friend of the king. Famed naturalist and adventurer. A learned, respected, influential man.

It was precisely a measure of the respect in which Miles was now held that the notion of his stepping into Sir Banks’s shoes had even been discussed among his colleagues.

Miles learned long ago not to care what his father thought of him, as there was little he could do about it. But the reaction was nevertheless gratifying.

“Very good,” Isaiah said finally, calmly.

Miles simply nodded shortly.

“Good luck with the house party, Miles, and with Georgina.”

It was his dismissal.

“Thank you, Father. Have a safe and prosperous journey.”

Isaiah acknowledged this wryness with a smile. He, for one, had no doubt it
would
be prosperous.

A footman liveried in bold blue slipped quietly into the room to refill the brandy decanter, and moved to the window to pull closed the sable velvet curtains with gloved hands.

And Miles suddenly saw heart-stopping blue eyes, and the footman’s hands in the velvet became his own hands, lifting a mass of shining sable hair. He was riveted.

Christ
. It was like a return of the fever.

He frowned darkly at the footman, whose back was turned.

Then he bowed and left the room quickly, to savor the fact that his dreams had just been handed to him on a shining Redmond platter.

Next to her sat a woman of perhaps about thirty years of age, Lady Middlebough, who was “regrettably” (her word; interestingly, she didn’t sound regretful) without her husband at present; he was to meet her here in a day or so, and they would travel on to Kelham Cross east of Sussex to visit relatives there. She was very pretty in a round, lush, blunt way, with shining dark hair she wore piled and pinned. She was wealthy, if her clothes were any indication: spotless, multiply flounced, crisp, and current in deep green. Her sleeves were long, her neckline deep, her bosom impressive. She seemed restless, too, but without Lady Windermere’s eye glint. Her eyes were bright but her overall demeanor was distracted, and she pushed and stirred her food about as if she hoped she would uncover something else of interest on her plate. At intervals she sent glances toward the door.

Cynthia wondered where Miles Redmond was. She wanted to observe him for a time to decide whether he was truly as humorless and lurching as she suspected. One needed to tailor one’s approach, after all, to one’s quarry. It helped to observe the quarry in his native surroundings first, to see him perhaps interact with others of his class and genus.

This comparison amused her; it was one that she thought Miles Redmond would appreciate, given that he was a lover of insects.

She’d worn white muslin that capped her lovely shoulders sweetly but
not
demurely and was ribboned beneath her breasts with a band of blue that matched her eyes. She’d done up her own hair, then drawn down a few calculatedly wayward spirals to play about her chin. She was devastating when she looked innocent but a trifle mussed.

At least, one of the poems written to her had said as much. She could not recall the name of the poet now. Lord…something.

“Where did Miles get to, d’you know?” Jonathan stifled a yawn.

“Oh, Miles was up with the birds and went out riding for some reason known only to him,” Violet said vaguely. “I don’t know how he manages to rise so early. He was at the pub last night, too. He doesn’t drink as much as he ought for a man his age.”

“Violet!” Jonathan admonished, as she had so clearly said it so someone would admonish her. Everyone looked very interested in this remark.

“It was the South Seas, you see,” Violet explained. “He was there for a year, and he fell terribly ill with a fever, and now he seldom takes drink at all. He’s become staid.”

So Miles Redmond was a staid, nondrinking near-invalid, to judge from the way Violet described him. Cynthia felt her cheery mood waver.

Lady Windermere paused in her shoveling. “Plenty of debauchery to be had in the South Seas,” she said sagely. “Native girls and whatnot. He’s probably just grown bored with that debauchery nonsense.”

Jonathan laughed, and Violet looked fascinated, and Lady Middlebough murmured something that sounded like, “…not what I heard about Redmond.” She sank small teeth into a piece of fried bread, slowly tore a strip away, and chewed it as if chewing would be her only scheduled activity for the day and she needed to make it last.

Cynthia looked at her sharply.
Could
one grow bored of debauchery? she wondered.

Was Miles Redmond
capable
of debauchery?

“Oh, never fear, sister mine. I drink enough for both of us,” Jonathan proclaimed cheerily. He hefted and bolted his cup of coffee, then waved for a footman to refill it.

Cynthia liked Jonathan, but he was not an heir, was too young yet to consider marriage—though he was probably her age—and was clearly thoroughly
enjoying
being young too much to be leg-shackled. A bit of a pup all the way round, she had decided. Though, in his dark way, he promised to be every bit as handsome as the wayward brother, Lyon Redmond.

Just then a young woman appeared in the doorway and paused diffidently.

Lady Middlebough glanced up quickly then glanced away and tapped long fingers against her teacup, like a flautist playing a jaunty tune. Lady Middlebough seemed to be expecting someone and was continually disappointed. Her husband?

“Georgina!” Violet sprang up out of politeness. “Goodness, when did you arrive? Everyone, allow me to introduce Georgina Mossgate, Lady Rutland. Please do have some breakfast, before Jonathan eats two pigs worth of bacon.”

Everyone, uncertain what to do, began to stand in order to deliver curtsies and bows.

“Oh, goodness. Please don’t get up,” Lady Georgina said, sounding flustered to have made something of an entrance. “I arrived very late last night, and everyone bar the footmen seemed asleep. It’s a lovely day, isn’t it? My room is quite beautiful. I’ve a view of the lake. Quite blue, the lake. As is the sky today, isn’t it?”

She was nervous. She was babbling. As well she ought. Several females were studying her with curiosity, not all of it benign.

Lady Georgina was a woman, not a girl—her figure swelling out of her pale striped muslin walking dress made this very clear—but she had the open, innocent face of someone who had never wanted for much or been deliberately hurt, and so found the world altogether peaceful and pleasant and could not imagine it otherwise. There was a serenity about her—that smooth brow, clear gray eyes, eyelashes and eyebrows only a shade darker than her complexion—that Cynthia wanted to rumple. She recognized the impulse as uncharitable, and forgave herself, as it was also probably natural. Unbroken surfaces must invariably be broken: the spoon eventually dipped into the pudding, the sheet of new-fallen snow trod upon eventually, and satisfaction could be had in all of that.

Lady Georgina probably
was
a lovely person and not remotely interesting.

“Our families have been close for lo on a decade now.” Violet provided this explanation for Lady Georgina, after everyone else at the table had been introduced and explained
to
Lady Georgina (“dear friend of my mother’s” for both Lady Windermere and Lady Middlebough; “dear friend from London,” for Cynthia). Jonathan apparently required no explanation; he rose and bowed anyhow.

Cynthia waited, a trifle tensely, for recognition to light Lady Georgina’s eyes when the new arrival heard her name. Perhaps her eyelashes and eyebrows and forehead were so very pale that subtleties of expression could not be seen from the distance of a few yards and the width of the kitchen table. Emotions that typically writ themselves large on features via a dropped jaw, perhaps, or bulging eyes, ought to be visible, however, and Cynthia comforted herself with the possibility that Lady Georgina hadn’t yet had a London season, or a well-connected gossiping relative or neighbor, to inform her all about Cynthia Brightly.

A chair was slid out for Georgina by a footman and she joined the table.

“That’s nearly all of us, then, but for the gents. Argosy ought to be here by noon. Sent word from the inn in Monkton. Milthorpe is even now stabling his horse. He’ll be disappointed to find Father gone, that’s for sure,” Jonathan said with perverse relish.

“We’ve planned a salon for everyone to greet each other this afternoon,” Violet said sweetly. “Everyone should be recovered from their journeys by then.”

And when he had his replies, he relished being able to tell them he could make it happen easily and soon, on a scale and scope none of them had dared dream of before.

Once he married Lady Georgina, of course.

He returned Ramsay to the stables and walked back to the house, arriving happily dirty and perspiring and resolved. He gamely swabbed his torso with hot water and soap to ensure he smelled as little like horse as possible, submitted to a ruthlessly clean shave at the hands of his valet, dressed in a spotless, flawlessly cut coat and crisp cravat and shining boots, replaced his spectacles on his face, and prepared to step further into his future.

The room exhaled Redmond wealth and history and comfort; the way a church always seems to exhale peace and prayers.

But it was also the room, Miles recalled, where he and Lyon had played at soldiers by ducking behind the settees and aiming fireplace poker muskets at each other, and where they had pretended that the vast spreading carpet—scrolled in interlocking roads of cream and brown and oxblood—was instead a great sea of boiling lava (this was Miles’s idea; he had read of volcanoes and lava), which meant they couldn’t walk on it. They were instead compelled to traverse the room by leaping from chair to settee to table to settee to chair again, which is what they’d been doing before they were caught. Naturally, as a result of all their leaping, a marble bust—some somber blank-eyed, anonymous, quarter of a man—Miles never could understand the purpose of busts—crashed to the ground and had not, sadly, bounced. It shattered.

They hadn’t been thrashed, interestingly. His father instead decided to make it their first lesson in commerce: he’d explained the cost and provenance and fragility of every single thing in that room, what those things meant to the family, and what it meant to be a Redmond. And even then Miles had felt the weight of his own history and the duty to the name encase him like armor.

Now strangers and old friends clustered toward one end of this familiar room. A late arrival was Lord Milthorpe, a Sussex neighbor, member of the Mercury Club and friend of his father’s who had come to stay for a few days to discuss investments with Isaiah. As his father had predicted, he looked decidedly uneasy, almost as if all that carpet really were lava and would ultimately lap up over his ankles. The poor man had expected manly company and manly conversation with Isaiah Redmond; instead, he’d been dropped into a party filled with chattering women and handed a teacup half the size of his hand.

An earlier arrival was Anthony Cordell, Lord Argosy, heir to a viscount and another longtime friend of the family, and a particular friend of Jonathan’s. Indolent from centuries-old money, he’d virtually been born bored. To his credit, he hadn’t yet done anything
untoward
to rectify this—just the usual gambling, women, pugilism, and shooting. Argosy was not unintelligent, and it was entirely possible he might develop character if given any reason at all to do so. He could not yet be described as dissolute, but only required a nudge or so, really, in that direction. He needed an occupation, Miles thought. But Argosy was none of his concern, unless he intended to lead Jonathan into mischief, or Violet, for that matter.

And then there were the four women: Violet, whom he needed to watch; Lady Middlebough, whom he very much wanted to speak to privately; Lady Georgina, who looked impossibly fresh and round and who was politely pretending not to be scandalized by whatever Violet happened to be saying. He ought to begin charming her. It wouldn’t be difficult, he decided, looking at her now. And then the one whom…

He went still. One simply…wanted to warm one’s hands over her.

Her dress was a deep shining green, cut simply: a rectangle neckline and short untrimmed sleeves. It would have in fact been surprisingly severe but for the overlay of mist-fine net in which little sparks seemed to be caught. Miles was not a modiste. He couldn’t have said precisely what caused the little sparks. He could, however, say quite definitively that the effect was like watching the mist pull back from the Sussex downs in the morning in response to the first rays of the sun, and oh dear
God
he was thinking again in poetry.

He frowned darkly to scare away his own thoughts.

As though she’d heard a rumble of thunder, Cynthia Brightly looked up, saw his frown, and smiled. It was a demure smile, but warm. A soft
ray
of a smile, that could send mist receding and then heat the downs so that the scent of warm spring grass rose—

The damned girl was much too certain of her own charm.

With effort, Miles reduced his frown to a socially neutral expression and turned his head ever so slightly to make it appear he’d been looking beyond her, at his sister Violet, who had just said something to make Lady Georgina laugh.

Undeterred and unaffected, Miss Brightly turned her head slowly away from him, taking with it that smile. She said something to Violet, who laughed and touched Cynthia affectionately on the arm.

Miles began to frown again. He caught himself. And did what he always did when he felt uncertain: he observed.

Miss Brightly wasn’t fully involved in that conversation, though he was probably the only one who noticed. She seemed to be casually touching her eyes on things and people in the room, watching them, in fact, in the way that he normally took in a room: Milthorpe, Argosy, Jonathan, the chandeliers, the furniture. He imagined her registering everyone and everything present the way his father’s man of affairs kept books: compiling neat columns of assets and liabilities, performing the math, arriving at conclusions, deciding upon where next to invest her charm.

And then she gracefully stood.

Miles took a step toward Milthorpe. Cynthia had begun a sort of drift toward him.

And Miles seemed unable to move any farther than that. He waited. And then she looked up, lovely face mildly surprised to find him in her path.

Ah, very good acting, indeed.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Redmond. You were missed this morning at breakfast.”

Very direct, very disarming.

If he
could
have been disarmed, that is.

“Good afternoon, Miss Brightly. I hope you are enjoying your visit so far. What makes you think I was missed?” He matched her tone so flawlessly it was very nearly mockery.

If she’d noticed, she did an admirable job of disguising it.

“I
am
enjoying my visit, thank you.” Her face glowed up at him. “Your home is beautiful. And a number of inquiries were made after you at the meal, which is how I drew my conclusions about your presence being missed. Suggestions were made that you had tired of South Sea island debauchery and embarked upon a life of wholesome abstinence.”

It was so very
alive
, her face. Delicious, playful wickedness flickered through her innocence like those sparks caught in the net of her dress.

And granted, hearing a word like “debauchery” emerge from lips like hers generally held a good deal of appeal. If another appealing woman had uttered it—perhaps Lady Middlebough—he might have attempted to steer the conversation down promising byways of innuendo.

Instead he said: “This room must feel rather like Tattersall’s to you, Miss Brightly. What an interesting variety of eligible men are represented. However will you pick one out?”

Miss Brightly went rigid.

A tick of fraught quiet went by between them.

And then she tipped her head slowly up to him, as though balancing a scalding cup of tea atop it. Aware of a grave, grave danger.

And she looked—
really
looked, for probably the first time—into his face.

What she saw there caused wary reassessment and comprehension to cut across the blue field of her eyes as swiftly as a pair of hunting falcons. They were there and gone as though they had never been, leaving her eyes once again blue fields of innocence.

So she was not entirely a fool. This was a bit vexing, as he would have preferred her to become
less
interesting, rather than more.

“I hope you’ll forgive me, Mr. Redmond, but I’m not certain I take your meaning.”

“Oh, come, Miss Brightly,” he jollied on a murmur. “I
am
one of your hosts, after all. I must insist you share with me. You’re here for the eligible men, are you not? Why else
would
you be here in Sussex? Perhaps you even have your eye on one in particular?”

Her features were entirely still. Her eyes, however, seemed even more vivid, as though she’d focused her thoughts entirely on him, and it was a potent look, indeed. He thought he detected a rustle of nervousness. Ah, yes: a glance told him that one of her hands had burrowed surreptitiously into one of the folds of her gown.

“If you’d care to share the name of the fortunate gentleman, perhaps I can provide some insight into his pedigree?” He was as solicitous as a shopkeeper. “As host, I feel it’s my responsi—”

“Mister
Redmond.” It sounded like a warning. Rather as though she wished to protect him from himself. “I would very much like to participate in a conversation with you, but I must confess to feeling excluded by my own confusion. Your conversation has taken a turn I do not understand.”

Her face was innocent. But her eyes burned. She understood
very
well.

He sighed heavily. “Very well, Miss Brightly. Forgive me, but I’m about to bore both of us by telling you things you already know, but do keep in mind that you have forced me to do it. Things such as: you are not without charm, but you
are
at present attending a country house party without a husband or even a fiancé. While you were in one possession of a rather grand fiancé last I heard—the heir to an earl? Courtland? This leads me to believe something rather unfortunate happened in London to end the engagement…” He cast his eyes toward the ceiling rosette. “A duel, perhaps?”

He returned his eyes to her.

Before his eyes, her jaw slowly set; storm clouds gathered across her gaze, and the blue went very, very dark.

Cynthia Brightly was officially angry. Unsurprisingly, anger suited her. Perversely, her anger suited
him
.

“I see I’ve assessed the situation correctly,” he said cheerfully. “Shall I go on?”

“Mr. Redmond—” Her eyes darted left then right, then fixed with a momentary flash of longing on the footman strolling through, bearing a tray of tiny glasses with splashes of sherry glittering in the bowls. He wondered whether the sherry or the fact that the footman was leaving the room appealed to her.

“Now, now, Miss Brightly. You did ask for clarification. As I am a man of science, I dislike cursory explanations. So let me be thorough. I imagine whatever scandal you left behind in London, if it’s the sort of the magnitude that ended an engagement, will follow you here to Sussex soon enough, for foul weather
does
have a way of traveling the land, and I don’t imagine Sussex will be spared it. You are, then, one step ahead of it at the moment. I suspect you wouldn’t be here at
all
if Sussex didn’t represent your last hope for a respectable marriage, as doubtless your reputation is growing, shall we say…rather threadbare.” He added with confiding relish, “Goodness knows you’ve certainly taxed it over the past season or so.”

And now her frown drifted into something like puzzlement. Her fine brows nearly met over the bridge of her nose. Those blue eyes scrutinized him like a jeweler bent over a suspect diamond with a loupe. Searching for provenance, character flaws, authenticity, motive.

Miles allowed her the silence; he allowed her the inspection.

He didn’t know how he’d expected her to respond, though he was thoroughly enjoying confounding
her
expectations.

He’d almost given up hope of her responding when she did.

“You’re opposed to ambition in a woman, Mr. Redmond?”

His head went back a little at the words. Stunned.

And then…peculiarly thrilled.

He’d never dreamed that right here, in the middle of his father’s grand Harvest Room, surrounded by cheerful guests, he would engage in the socially unthinkable:

A genuinely honest conversation with a woman.

He rewarded her with a nod, as though she were a pupil who’d passed an exam. “Oh, on the contrary,” he said softly, conspiratorially. “I applaud ambition, Miss Brightly. It’s all I’ve ever known. And marriage is in essence a business alliance, is it not? And the wisest among us approach it as such. We should
all
aspire to make the very best marriage our born assets and gifts will allow us to make. Wrapping it in the folderol of love and romance is a recipe for disaster. Or disillusionment.
Quite
unnecessary. Wouldn’t you agree? Something tells me that you do.”

A shadow of uncertainty passed over Miss Brightly’s brow, followed by a flicker of cautious optimism. He could see that she was wondering whether agreeing with him wholeheartedly might very well aid her pursuit of him.

He relieved her of suspense.

“It’s just that I’m on a bit of a hunt for a marriage myself, you see, and I thought it might be companionable for the two of us to compare notes while we’re about it. For instance, Lady Georgina is the most suitable partner for me, as she has a staggering fortune, a fine family, and a grand title, and an alliance with her would please my parents and permanently connect two great families. And as Redmond heir, I cannot
possibly
marry anyone other than a woman of the very finest family, fortune, and character without risking my position in my family and dishonoring my father’s wishes. Though certainly, as clever as you undoubtedly are, you already know that. Hence, we are free to compare notes upon our quest for matches this fortnight, as I’m quite out of the question for you.”