Mad About the Earl (36 page)

“I’m not going to listen to this.”

“You will listen or I’ll scream the house down,” she hissed. “Do you want that? Do you want me to ruin Rosamund’s first ball? Believe me, Lord Tregarth, I have very little to lose at this juncture!”

Griffin’s hand clenched in a reflexive movement. He’d never wanted to hit a woman in his life. Until now.

Yet, something deep within him cringed away from this woman like a whipped cur. So slight in stature but so powerful in the weapons she could use to devastate those around her. The small boy inside him recognized that brand of cruelty, knew it all too well.

Jaw as hard as granite, he stayed where he was. As soon as she released him, he’d have her escorted from the house, no matter what his wife said.

Why couldn’t Rosamund understand that there was no controlling or appeasing this woman? She was pure, unadulterated poison. Rosamund needed to purge the marchioness from her system, once and for all.

He tried to block out Lady Steyne’s vitriol, just as he had tried to shut out blow after blow from his grandfather. Oh, not the physical blows. Those brutal whippings were child’s play compared to the harsh bludgeon of his verbal abuse.

“Look at her!” The marchioness swept a hand toward where Rosamund stood, resplendent as an angel in gold spangled silk. “My daughter has
everything
a young woman could wish for. Any man in the kingdom would have blessed himself to marry her, but Montford chose
you
.”

She narrowed her eyes to slits. “Do you think that dressing like a gentleman makes you any less the oaf you were when you first darkened my door? My daughter ought to have had a handsome, refined gentleman in her bed, not some uncouth, overgrown ape!”

Her voice rose to a pitch that was clearly audible to the guests nearby. A few heads turned. Snickers scattered through the crowd. Whispers and titters rippled around them both like eddies in a pond.

Suddenly, his entire body turned hot, then cold. The years spun away. He was back at another ball, a callow, lumbering seventeen-year-old with his grandfather ridiculing him to the world.

Griffin felt his face redden on a tide of humiliated fury. It took every ounce of the strength he possessed not to whip around and snarl at those who would mock him. He burned to call every last one of them to account.

Regardless of his contempt for her, Lady Steyne’s cutting words slashed open a wound that had only recently begun to heal. Rosamund had done her utmost to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. She’d even persuaded him to dance at a ball, for God’s sake!

But his mother-in-law saw through all that. So did everyone else, it seemed. He had been fooling himself to suppose he would ever be part of this rarefied existence. And Rosamund … She had been fooling him, too.

Lady Steyne’s face twisted with malice. “My God, my daughter must lie there at night with you sweating over her like some—some
beast
—and pray for you to be quick—”

Griffin cut her off. “You have said quite enough, ma’am, to show that your mind is as filthy as the gutter. I will not listen to any more. Make a fuss if you wish. Scream the house down, for all I care. Beast as I am, the racket of harpies will not injure me.” He bent until their gazes were level. “On the other hand, they
would
hurt my wife. If you hurt
my wife,
I might take your neck between my beastly hands and snap it in two. Your choice,
Mother
.”

He wrenched from her grasp and strode away. The onlookers fell back as he cut a path through their midst.

He did not hear any screams behind him. But the first strains of the waltz made his guts roil and his steps falter.

Then he bowed his head and kept walking until he’d left the ballroom far behind.

*   *   *

Rosamund finally found Griffin in their bedchamber. Of all places to be in the middle of their ball!

Then she stopped as she took in the scene. Dearlove moved between the dressing room and an open trunk beside the bed, his arms laden with shirts. They were packing.

The valet put down the shirts. Without a word or a glance in her direction, he left the room and closed the door behind him.

“Griffin?” Her gown hushed on the Aubusson carpet as she moved toward him. “What is the matter? Is something wrong? Is it the estate?”

He turned to face her, and the look in his eyes was so bleak, so devoid of any spark of warmth or hope that she could not suppress a cry of alarm.

Hoarsely, he said, “Nothing is wrong. At least, not with Pendon Place. I’m going back. Rosamund, I don’t belong here.”

“But you … But we…” She passed a hand over her eyes, struck by the bizarreness of his leaving in the middle of the ball he was supposed to be hosting. “But you seemed happy tonight,” she said. “You were talking and laughing with your friends. Miss Porter even tried to flirt with you. I saw her!”

Grim-faced, he bowed his head.

“Griffin, it is Jacqueline’s special night,” she said softly.

“And you have launched her in magnificent style.” The words themselves were complimentary, but the voice in which he said them seemed stripped of any feeling. “I believe she can take her pick of suitors now, and I … I thank you for that.”

Not the suitor she wants,
thought Rosamund.

She did not say it. Nor did she inform Griffin that Maddox had beguiled Jacqueline into dancing the waltz with him tonight.

The waltz that she and Griffin should have danced together.

How she’d dreamed of whirling down the floor in his arms at their very first ball. She’d chosen the music so carefully, too. “The Angels’ Waltz,” a little joke between them. In her fantasies, that piece of music would be their very own. Even if Griffin never derived the same level of enjoyment from a ball as she did, when
their
waltz played, he would not refuse to dance it with her.

But she would never have pushed him to dance at this ball if she’d suspected he might leave her because of it.

He was leaving her.

Rosamund’s knees wobbled. She had to grip the post of the bed to steady herself. She felt weak; as weak and powerless as the day she’d realized that her father had sent her and her brother and their mother away and was not ever going to fetch them back.

She made a sound that was half incredulous laugh, half sob. “This can’t be about our waltz, can it?”

He sat down on the bed, his hands hanging loosely between his bent knees. “You say that as if a waltz is such a trivial thing.” He looked up, his eyes like slate. “And it is to you, isn’t it?”

Her voice shook. “No, actually.
That
waltz was far from trivial. In fact, it was very important to me, Griffin. I wanted
so much
to be held in your arms and dance, caught up in the romance of it all. I wanted to show the world that we belong together.”

“No.” His voice was so low, she had to strain to hear it. “You wanted me to be someone I am not and never can become.”

He went on, ignoring her repudiating cry. “You are Lady Rosamund Westruther, top of the trees, a diamond of the first water. You are a creature of this world. You not only belong to it, you are its cynosure.” His lips twisted. “They name
bonnets
after you, for God’s sake! And hair ribbons! And God knows what else.”

“That is scarcely my doing,” she said.

“So effortless for you, isn’t it?” he agreed. “When
you
look at that ballroom, you see only acceptance and adulation and pleasure.”

She did not think he knew very much about her if he believed that. But she knew what he meant. She belonged. He didn’t.

“And what do
you
see?” Rosamund asked quietly.

“Can’t you guess?” He drew a deep breath. “I see the agony of being awkward, seventeen, a lumbering uncultivated giant in a ballroom full of elegant, cruel strangers. All of them tittering and curling their lips, pointing out my clumsiness. And my own grandfather leading them in their ridicule.”

A humorless laugh dragged out of him. “That ball was in
my
honor, just as this one is in Jacqueline’s. What an introduction, eh? Meet Griffin deVere, the laughingstock of the ton.”

Rosamund felt his pain as if it were her own. Oh, she had never been humiliated in public, not even by her mother. But she knew the wounds spiteful mockery and contemptuous taunts could inflict. Particularly from someone close, someone who was meant to put the welfare of their child or grandchild above all else. Those barbed remarks chipped and chipped at one’s confidence until it all but eroded away.

That was what had happened to Griffin. And he had not possessed an elder brother to protect him from the worst. Nor had the Duke of Montford swooped down to pluck him from that vicious environment before it irreparably damaged his soul. Only the earl’s death had released Griffin from that harsh existence. By then, she suspected, it was too late.

“I love you
as you are,
Griffin,” she said. “I do not wish to turn you into someone else. Indeed, you will laugh at this. But when you cut your hair and wore your new clothes for the first time and looked so fine and gentlemanly, I was not pleased at all.”

He looked up at that, and she was encouraged to see a glimmer of interest in his eyes.

“Oh, you looked splendid, of course. Too splendid, I thought! Now all the other ladies would see you as I had seen you from the start. I did
not
like that notion, Griffin. Indeed, I wanted to stick Miss Porter with one of my hairpins for daring to flirt with you tonight.”

The smile he awarded to that sally was but a faint echo of hers.

She was trying too hard. She did not patronize him; every word she said was the truth. But to someone whose confidence had been brought so low, it must seem that she did patronize him, that she lied to make him feel better.

The truth of the matter began to break upon her like a snaking fissure that widened and lengthened beyond hope of containment. Griffin was so utterly demoralized that nothing she said now could make him change his mind.

“Very well,” she managed. “I will go with you to Pendon Place.”

“And leave your guests? No, don’t do that, my dear. Besides, it is Jacks’s ball. She will understand that I must go if you tell her it was an emergency. It would bewilder her and hurt her if you abandoned her, too.”

“Perhaps I could bring her afterwards, just for a short stay.” Desperation made her clutch at straws.

His hands gripped together. His expression turned hard. “I do not want Jacks to come back to Pendon Place.”

“But—”

“Please, Rosamund.” There was a note in his voice that silenced her objection.

Surely his determination to go back was not an insurmountable obstacle? Desperate, she said, “I shall ask another lady to chaperone Jacqueline for the rest of the season. I’ll follow you in a few days. There is no reason we cannot be together in Cornwall if you dislike Town so much.”

He was silent. Then he said, “You were made for this life, Rosamund. I could no more bury you in the country than I could trap a butterfly in a tea caddy.”

A butterfly? That stung. “You think I am ephemeral, a frivolous creature made only for pleasure?”

“I think you are—” He sighed. “—too many delightful, good, honorable things to name. But you should be in London, not Pendon Place, this season.”

“Not without you.”

“You belong here, Rosamund.”

“I belong with
you
! You stupid man! How could you dream that I’d choose all this—this flummery over you? Griffin, I
love
you! And you said that you loved me!”

Suddenly, she realized. She would choose him. But he would not choose her.

She sat down abruptly on the chair behind her. Thank God there
was
a chair or she would crumple to the floor.

“But it’s not my choice at all,” she whispered. “Is it?”

Slowly, he shook his head.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Despair was an emotion Rosamund had not felt for many years, not even when Griffin failed to come for her, year after year. Somehow, she got through the rest of the evening, though she could not have said whether she fooled anyone about the state of her mind and heart.

Control was so ingrained in her that she expected she’d made a good fist of it, however. She held her head up and gave the explanation Griffin had given her for his sudden absence.

Called away to an emergency. Such a pity. Yes, she believed she would remain in Town. She had a duty to chaperone her sister-in-law, and one could not interrupt the dear girl’s pleasure in her first season.

She could have laughed to remember her words to Montford earlier that evening. That she would take her revenge on her mother by showing that lady how happy she was. She
could
have laughed, had she any laughter left in her soul.