Mischief by Moonlight (6 page)

So why was she so peevish and unsettled?

Oh
where
was Colin? They'd been in London for over two weeks, and still they hadn't seen him. It was almost as though he were avoiding them.

***

When Colin finally appeared at Maria's house at the beginning of the following week to escort the ladies to their first ball, Josie was so happy to see his familiar face that she almost rushed forward to hug him, though she knew that would be excessive.

He wore a black tailcoat and a snowy white shirt, and though she'd certainly seen him in black before, tonight there was something about him that whispered midnight things to her. Black hair, black coat, yes, but it was more to do with something dark and remote in his manner and a shuttered quality in his silver-green eyes.

His greeting, while friendly, was detached—he merely nodded to her with a polite smile, then moved on to greet Edwina. He was preoccupied, or subdued, but whatever it was, he was far more reserved than usual. He might be that way with other people, but he'd never been like that with her. She tried to catch his eyes, but his gaze was always elsewhere.

As the other ladies were adjusting their wraps, she moved closer to him and said, “Colin, I haven't gotten a chance to thank you properly for asking Maria to sponsor Edwina and sending your coach for us. It was so very good of you.”

“Think nothing of it.”

“How can I, when I know it must have been some trouble to you?” She smiled, wanting to encourage him not to be so remote, but he only gave another of those detached smiles.

She reminded herself of how reserved he was and put extra warmth in her voice. “I know very well that the world of debutantes is not your realm. You did something extra for us, and especially for Edwina.”

He inclined his head courteously in reply then looked away and told Maria they had best be on their way. As he escorted them out the door, never once did he show by any word or glance that it made any difference to him that she, Josie, was there.

She felt a little crushed.

On the way to his gleaming black carriage with its golden family crest, he enthused politely over their gowns and said what a fine evening it was for a ball. Josie was wearing one of the new gowns Maria had bought for her, a white silk with a bluebell-colored sash tied under her bosom and a matching bandeau in her hair. Her new blue satin slippers made her feet want to skip across a dance floor. She felt pretty and gay, and she thought Colin might say something particular about how she looked tonight, but he didn't.

He handed them deftly into the carriage and sat next to Edwina and opposite Josie, wearing a pleasant smile that suddenly seemed out of place paired with the bold jutting of his large nose and the black slashes of his brows.

He asked after their family and the news from Upperton. The conversation was polite and general, and it could hardly be otherwise, as they were not alone. Nor would they be; this was London, not the back garden at Jasmine House, she told herself.

But where was the subtle warmth she usually felt from Colin?

She began to wonder if something had changed, if in coming to London they now might not be as they'd been in Upperton. Perhaps he'd left Greenbrier so abruptly because there were important things here she knew nothing about that required his attention.

But she acknowledged how much she was used to being one of the things on which he liked to spend his attention, and she didn't want it to be any other way. Where was the man who'd told her such diverting tales of his historical investigations in small villages? Who'd shown her his childhood journal wherein he'd carefully recorded all the minute doings in his household over the course of an entire month?

This new Colin, with his eyes that sought other views and his air of command, was someone she didn't quite know. She needed his friendship…didn't he need hers?

They arrived at Lord Worthing's manor, where the ball was to be held, and he got out to hand them down. When it was Josie's turn, she gave his hand a friendly little squeeze, but he didn't squeeze hers back. When she realized that she felt a little rejected, she told herself she was being silly and too sensitive. Surely he was just preoccupied. Or was something perhaps amiss?

Or was it her—
was
he in fact being cool to her for some reason?

She examined her conduct on the last occasions they'd been together, but she couldn't see why he would be.

Unless—she thought guiltily of poor Mr. Botsford and his bouquet—he'd seen her put the love potion in his drink. But surely Colin would have said something at the time, demanded to know what she was doing? Unfortunately, she could hardly come right out and ask him.

“I wonder if Mappleton has arrived yet,” Edwina said as they paused a moment before the grand, lit-up manor. Lively music could be heard, and even as they stood there groups of people were going inside. Maria looked on with the impassive air of a general approaching a good position on a battlefield.

Josie wanted a moment with Colin, to ask him if all was well, but when they entered the grand foyer, a footman announced the arrival of the Earl of Ivorwood, and their hostess, Lady Worthing, rushed forward to welcome them.

Colin presented Josie and Edwina to her. “The Cardworthy family are some of my oldest and dearest friends,” he said, sounding quite as usual.

Josie gave herself a sort of internal shake and told herself she ought not to scrutinize him so. But thoughts about Colin's mood were quickly replaced by wonder as they moved into the enormous ballroom.

“Why, it's amazing,” Josie said, gazing at the beautifully dressed people dancing beneath the chandelier glow of hundreds of candles. Flowers decorated every surface, and the introductory notes of a fiddle floated through the room, filling her senses.

“Softly,” Maria whispered wryly, “lest you seem too pleased. The fashionable people will think you a rube.”

“Then I shall be glad to be considered so, for to be in such a glorious place and not be amazed would be wrong. It's pure magic.”

“Josie,” Edwina said with a hint of exasperation, “you are far too inclined to like things. Why, listen to that woman's laugh—she sounds like a donkey.
That's
not magical.”

“Ladies,” Maria said cheerfully, “let us remember our
tone
.”

Lord Mappleton appeared then and invited Edwina to dance. Maria presented Josie to a very handsome blond gentleman who turned out to be Viscount Roxham, one of Colin's good friends. His wife, Lady Roxham, was dancing with someone else, and he smiled kindly at Josie and offered her his arm.

“Nick told me about you,” Roxham said as they began the steps of a quadrille.

She blushed. “I seem always to be hearing of him from other people.” And it struck her that, yet again, she'd forgotten about him. She hadn't thought about him once all that day.

The knowledge made her a little sick.

“It must be odd,” Lord Roxham said with a rueful smile, “to find yourself discussed by people you've yet to meet.”

“A little,” she said weakly. What she
had
been paying attention to was Viscount Roxham's handsomeness. People called him Lord Perfect, and she saw why: he had golden hair and sparkling blue-green eyes and these very fascinating little slashes that formed in his cheeks when he smiled. Truth be told, his smile made her feel a little breathless,
and
what
on
earth
was
wrong
with
her
? Roxham was a married man, and she was engaged!

She moved her eyes away from his male beauty, but they only settled on a man behind him who had curly brown hair and a wonderfully deep laugh that made Josie want to stand in front of him and see if she could make him laugh more. Dear God, maybe she even wanted to kiss him, this handsome stranger.

Almost frantically she swung her eyes about the room as she danced, but everywhere she looked were gentlemen who seemed fascinating. Handsome, dashing, playful—she wanted to know them all, know their stories, hear them laugh, feel what it would be like to be with them.

Heaven help her, she was an emotional hussy.

Somehow she finished the dance with Roxham, only to be invited to dance by the curly-haired gentleman, an Irishman named Mr. Kit Standish, it turned out. She said yes to him, and to all the other men who asked. She loved dancing with them, but all the time her conscience kept demanding to know what she thought she was doing. It accused her of liking their attention too much, and forced her to admit that she had a deep appetite for all of this—for the compliments men gave her, for their charm and their male beauty and the feel of their strong hands on her.

Anxiety mingled with the pleasure of the dancing, so that her head spun.

Colin, the only man with whom she felt she might safely dance and avoid this turmoil, had not come near her all night. She caught a glimpse of him dancing with a lovely woman wearing a feathered turban, and another time with an exquisitely dressed stout woman. But he didn't seem inclined to catch her eye or come to chat with her or ask her to dance. She began to wonder if he was avoiding her.

By the time the dinner break came, she felt quite disgusted with herself, and while the others were leaving to find the dining room, she lingered at the table where cups of ratafia were set out.

She took a glass and sipped it, feeling the now-familiar burn of brandy behind the sweet flavor of the cherries and spices. It went to her head almost immediately, and she began to think it might help take away the mixed-up feelings that had overtaken her as she realized how much she was dazzled by the men of London.

She finished one glass and took another. A few moments later, she saw Colin passing near her, unaware of her presence. She stepped forward and grabbed his arm.

Colin turned in surprise.

“Didn't you see me?” Josie said, an unwanted husky note in her voice betraying that she was upset. But they'd been such good friends, and he was treating her like an acquaintance, and she hated it. She needed him now.

She took another sip of ratafia, willing it to relax the lump of feeling in her throat. She felt odd and out of sorts, as if she didn't know herself anymore, or what she might do.

For a moment his face wore the strangest expression. She might have said it was anguish, but it was gone in a moment.

“Josie,” he said. “I trust you are enjoying yourself?”

“Yes. No. I don't know,” she said, wanting to tell him everything but too ashamed.

His eyebrows went up. “Curious.”

Colin was older and wiser—she could tell him about how muddled she felt. She so wanted someone's wisdom. And just as much, she wanted him to stop being remote.

She grabbed his hand and tugged him around behind an enormous column near the drinks table to give them a little privacy from the dwindling groups of people who were passing toward the door leading to the dining room. Away from the chandeliers and their glittering crystals, the little corner of the grand room was shadowy. Behind them, an ornate, gold-painted double door to a balcony was open to catch the breeze.

A heavy pause ensued. She had the sense he wanted to be away from her, and she couldn't understand it. The little fan of lines around his eyes seemed pronounced tonight, as though he were especially tired. He'd probably been up late with some old book.

She caught sight of Edwina across the room, passing through the doorway to go into dinner in company with Maria and Lord Mappleton.

“Ivorwood,” she said quietly, “what is it? You don't seem happy to see me. And you left Jasmine House so abruptly the last time we were together, as though you were taken ill. Was something amiss?” This was as close as she could get to asking what had happened after she'd put the potion in his tea without admitting she'd done so.

She thought he stiffened, but perhaps she was imagining it, because he only said, “Just a temporary indisposition. It was nothing.”

“Then have I somehow offended you?”

“No, of course you haven't offended me,” he said kindly. “I was simply needed in London. And of course I'm glad you and Edwina are here.”

“Then you'll dance with me after the dinner break? I know you're often so busy, but just this once?”

The dancing joke again, Colin thought grimly. Though this time she looked as if she really did wish him to dance with her. He laughed a little, though it sounded dull to his own ears. But what else was there to do when Josie was quizzing him about why he didn't want to dance with her?

Because
having
you
in
my
arms
will
only
make
me
want
to
touch
you
more. Because I won't want to stop.
Because
holding
you
will
make
me
sick
with
wanting
and
jealousy, and I can't bear to be a man who is lusting after his best friend's fiancée.

All words he could never say.

He conjured an ironic smile and shook his head a bit.

“You know how it is for an earl. We have those special, secret duties, and tonight I'm sorry to say they involve a small, opinionated female monkey someone's brought. It's my duty to entertain her while her master is dancing so she doesn't become jealous, and I'm afraid that between her demands and the dances I'm required to share with every matron and debutante in London, the night is already taken up.”

Usually she would be laughing by now, but he caught the shadow of hurt in her eyes and the conjured smile faded from his lips. It had been a mistake for both of them, becoming such close friends. He should never have agreed to watch over her for Nick—it had only given him an excuse to see far too much of her. Now they were so connected in friendship and he needed distance from her, and she wouldn't understand.

She was upset about something, though surely not the dancing? It was practically expected at this point that he wouldn't dance with her.

She downed the rest of the ratafia in her glass. It was an especially potent batch, he'd noticed when he'd taken some earlier, and he was surprised she was drinking it.

One of the little curls that framed her face had gotten caught in the edge of her thick lashes and he longed to brush it away. She was so beautiful tonight that every time he'd looked at her his heart had skipped a beat, and standing there with her was making him feel as though he'd just run a race. Never mind that her pretty white gown exposed more of the gently curved rise of her petite, perfect breasts than he'd ever seen before. All night, he'd forced himself not to look, though it hardly helped.

Ever since he'd come near her in Maria's foyer, he'd been in a constant state of arousal. The proximity of the carriage ride had been hell, and as he'd sat with his knees only a few inches from hers in their insubstantial white fabric, he'd forced himself to list every king of England in order in a futile attempt to take the edge off his lust.

In the ballroom only a few courting couples lingered across the parquet floor, along with the musicians, who'd put their instruments aside while they mopped their brows and drank lemonade. He and Josie were as good as alone behind the wide column with the draping plant fronds to either side of them, which suddenly seemed like a good thing when he saw, to his astonishment, tears brimming in the corners of her eyes.

“Josie?” he said, unable now to maintain the coolness. “What is it? You don't truly wish to dance, surely?”

She drew in a heavy breath and pressed the backs of her hands to the edges of her eyes. “I hate tears,” she said angrily and turned away from him and moved out to the balcony.

He followed her. “Josie?” he said again. She'd stopped in a circle of light from one of the pair of torches lighting the balcony. Her hands were resting on the stone balustrade, and she seemed to be staring at the tops of the trees, whose lower portions glowed in the light of the torches on the ground.

“It's not the dancing with you,” she said, her voice still husky. “It's the dancing with all the gentlemen. I am a terrible person.”

“You are a terrible person because you've been dancing?” He laughed, relieved. “Josie, it's London. Everyone—married or engaged or single, ancient or young—dances and flirts. It's the done thing. You must know that.”

She finally turned around, and he was cravenly relieved to see that the tears were gone. “I do know that,” she said. “But I didn't expect to like it so much.”

“There's nothing wrong with having a good time. It's why you came.”

“No, I came to be a support to Edwina. I'm engaged to Nicholas—I don't need to be dancing with other men. I don't need to be—I don't need to be—admiring them!”

He wished his first gut response weren't jealousy. But he knew it was only a reflex, and he forced himself to assume the measured air of the friend she so clearly needed. Though what she actually seemed to want was a confessor, he thought with a repressed groan. Of course it would have to be him.

“So you find yourself admiring the London gentlemen.”

“Yes,” she said miserably, her gaze dropping to the stone floor. “I am ashamed. An engaged woman. I don't deserve Nicholas.”

In the garden below them, an unseen woman's voice rang out in a flirtatious trill, followed by the sound of masculine laughter.

Colin suddenly wished he hadn't made it possible for Josie to come to London, with its shallowness and fast living, as if the city and its people would crush all that was fine in her. But it was wrong of him; Josie didn't need sheltering from life, and London had charms she deserved to experience. He was only envious that he couldn't share all her pleasure in discovering them.

“That's not true,” he said. No woman could have deserved Nick more. “Come, Josie. There's nothing wrong with appreciating the beauty of creation, a great deal of which is found in other people.”

Her eyes darkened with anguish, and he yearned to sweep her into his arms and comfort her.

“Colin, it's not just tonight, though now, tonight, it's suddenly been made more apparent to me. It's as though some part of me that was always asleep, some animal part, has been awakened, and it wants…everything, everyone. It wants pleasures. It's impatient, and it feels terribly forceful.”

“It's an appetite,” he said with an inward slide into despair. God, that they should be discussing this. “Desire…it's an appetite like the craving for food or sleep. Though it is doubtless not an appetite of which young ladies are made aware, or expected to have, except in a very limited way. I suppose the way young ladies are raised, some of them might even avoid having this appetite awakened forever.”

She seemed to mull his words. “So you're saying that desire”—she said the word in a hushed, husky voice that he knew came from embarrassment but which
did
things to him—“is awake in me now like some kind of monster, and I must manage it?”

“It's not a monster,” he made himself say. For all that he wanted her and suffered because of it, he did not condemn what was natural. “It's part of the whole person. Perhaps it's that you are now just more aware of it since you have passed fully through childhood.”

“Childhood! I'm twenty-two.”

He thought of Jasmine House and how old Cardworthy had, in his benevolently dictatorial way, isolated his family and pushed others away. Of how Mrs. Cardworthy had kept to her divan for the last four years, and the way the children had been so little guided. The lack of a governess and Mrs. Cardworthy's anxious self-absorption and the likelihood that whole realms of human experience had never been addressed.

“I mean the way a child looks on things as being the way they always have been. The body's familiar needs of hunger and thirst and sleep are there from birth. Sexual desire is a new appetite when it develops.”

She was blushing furiously—probably helped along by the ratafia—but she wasn't looking away. Josie's courage was one of the things he admired most about her. But this conversation was killing him.

***

Josie's head was whirling a bit, though not in a bad way. It felt daring and extremely interesting to talk about the things they were discussing. And talking about them with Colin was safe.

She realized now when it was that desire had been awakened in her: when she'd gotten on the back of that horse trader's horse and let him touch her. Before then, while she'd enjoyed the admiration she'd received from the few gentlemen she'd encountered in Upperton, it had all been chaste on her part. Admiration was rather distancing if it wasn't returned, and she'd never admired any man in Upperton except Colin, but that was different. She admired him as a person and a friend, not a man.

“It's different for men, isn't it?” she said. “The awareness of desire.”

“Right,” he said in a voice that sounded oddly hoarse.

“You know, Ivorwood,” she said slowly as a thought unfolded, “I think it might be a problem that Nick is the only man I've ever kissed.”

Colin looked as though he were about to choke. “It's not a problem,” he said stiffly. “It's admirable to be chaste.”

She frowned. She'd been chaste all her life, but lately she'd felt such a sense of wanting to throw that off. To rebel against all the rules and customs that bound her life and everyone else's. Her father had been excessive in guarding his daughters, but that had only been an exaggeration of the custom that kept young women apart from the company of gentlemen almost until they were ready to marry them.

She knew it was a stupid wish, this rebellious urge to experiment, but it was pressing on her. She felt unsettled, and she burned to do something about it.

“Just now it doesn't feel admirable to be chaste,” she said, swaying closer to him. She was getting an idea that was giving her that old familiar thrill. “It feels unwise.”

“Now that is certainly the only time I've ever heard chastity called unwise.”

“Hear me out.” Perhaps it was the ratafia, or the dancing, or the truth-telling with Colin, but she felt extra warm, and sort of fuller, larger, smarter. She leaned closer to him and caught the familiar scent of his soap, but she was close enough now to also detect the scent of his warm skin, and it was fascinating.

She looked into his gray-green eyes, which were watching her almost warily under those serious black eyebrows. His large beak of a nose made his face seem arrogant, which made her smile. Colin was too nice to be arrogant.

“I'm beginning to think it might be better,” she continued, “for young ladies to have some experience of gentlemen before they marry.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “That's one of the reasons people go to balls and parties.”

“But there's no chance, really, for young ladies to get to know desire, so that it isn't so mysterious. Hidden things feel shameful. And scary. But also, too enticing.”

He frowned. “We should be going into dinner now, Josie. I think you could benefit from something to eat.”

“I'm not hungry, thank you.” She moved a little closer, and his eyebrows lowered sternly. “I have an idea. Something I want you to help me with.”

“Whatever it is, I have the feeling it's not a good idea. Listen, Josie, I think you've had too much ratafia. It's gone to your head, and you need to eat something.”

“Nonsense. Actually, I haven't felt this good for ages. And it's not as though I'm swaying and swaggering about. I'm not drunk, Ivor W.”