The Deception of the Emerald Ring (6 page)

As inebriated as his companion and slower on the uptake under any circumstances, Percy Ponsonby stumbled into the small circle of light cast by the carriage lamps and peered owlishly at the woman behind Geoff. "I say, Pinchingdale, what's all this?"

All this was very clearly not Mary Alsworthy.

The woman so recently entangled with Geoff yanked back with enough force that her hood slipped back, revealing a confusion of ginger-colored hair that glinted like a fuzzy halo where the light struck the individual strands. It could not have been farther from Mary's sleek fall of black hair, which ran silver and blue in the candlelight like a midnight stream. Mary's eyes were delicately tilted at the corners; this woman's were perfect rounds of shock, primrose to Mary's sapphire. The only similarity lay in the lips, full and generous—though some more generous than others. Mary had never responded like that.

"Well, well, well," said Martin Frobisher, rolling the word over his tongue like a fine port. "Well, well, well."

Once he found a syllable he liked, he stuck with it till the bitter end. At least, Geoff was feeling bitter, not to mention decidedly unwell.

He had just been kissing his future sister-in-law. With considerable relish. That undoubtedly counted as incest under an obscure ecclesiastical law dating to the early years of the Reformation, complete with a punishment involving a sack, a beehive, and a large pot of honey.

In his preoccupation with incest, Geoff realized he had completely missed a crucial step. What was Mary's little sister doing in his carriage in the first place? He felt rather as though someone had just whacked him over the head with a very thick plank. Nothing made sense and the world was still spinning.

"If it isn't little Letty Alsworthy," continued Frobisher, looking like the cat who had gotten the canary that had fallen into the cream pot.

Letty Alsworthy very rapidly snatched her hood up over her head. "No, it isn't," she trilled from the depths, in a palpably false fluting soprano. "Can't you see it's Mary, you silly, silly man?"

Percy might be dim, but even he wasn't that dim. He crossed his arms over his chest, peered into the carriage, and said, "No, you're not."

"How can you be so sure? It's dark."

For a moment, Percy wavered, swayed by the obvious truth of that last statement. He shook his head. "You're still Letty. Can't fool me there. They don't look a'tall alike, do they, Pinchingdale?"

"No," said Geoff grimly, "they don't."

One would have thought he might have noticed that before he swept her into his arms. But it had all happened so quickly . One moment he was at the door, the next his arms were around her, and after that, he didn't remember much at all.

At least, he was trying very hard not to remember. If he could, he would scrape his mind clear with sand, obliterate from his memory the way the swell of her chest had felt pressed against his, the curve of her waist beneath his arm, the arch of her neck as his hand had stroked upward into her hair. None of that, he told himself firmly, had ever happened. It wasn't allowed to have happened.

Unfortunately, there were witnesses willing to attest that it had.

"Well, well, well." Geoff could learn to hate that word. Despite being somewhat wobbly on his feet, Frobisher still managed to direct a creditable smirk at Geoff before stumbling into Percy. "Caught by the oldest trick in the book."

"I say, Frobbers, that can't be right." Slinging an arm around his friend, Percy blinked sagely. "What about that trick played by those Greek chappies—something about a horse " Percy subsided into academic reflection.

"Or, in this case," snickered Frobisher, "a carriage."

"No," protested Percy, shaking his head obstinately. "It was quite definitely a horse. Unless it was a rabbit. Maybe that was it. A rabbit."

"Neatly snared, too. Bagged yourself quite a catch, old girl," lauded Martin, in a triumph of mixed metaphors. "Well played."

Framed in the door of the carriage, Letty violently shook her head. Planting both hands on either side of the door frame, she leaned earnestly out. "It's not what you think. It isn't!"

"I know what I'm thinking," muttered Martin, nudging Percy. "Eh, Perce?"

His gaze was directed well below the lines of propriety. Underneath her cloak, Letty wore nothing but a linen night rail. With its high neck and long sleeves, it might at one point have been perfectly respectable, but frequent washings had reduced it to a whisper. Through the thin fabric, the carriage lamp illuminated the curves of breast and hip in a way far more erotic than mere nudity.

Flushing, Letty snatched the edges of her cloak back together, but not before the image was indelibly imprinted on the eyes of all three gentlemen. Percy, blissfully inebriated, saw not one but three. Percy was a very happy man.

Geoff hastily closed his mouth, which had been hanging open.

Being caught kissing Letty Alsworthy in his carriage was bad enough. Being caught kissing Letty Alsworthy in a night rail

Who ever knew that she could look like that?

Geoff hastily banished such dangerous irrelevancies. Moving to block Letty from the others' view, he said ominously, "If you'll excuse us for a moment, gentlemen?"

"I don't know, Perce," drawled Martin. "Can we trust them alone together?"

Geoff ignored him, which was usually the best way to deal with Martin Frobisher.

"Where is Mary?" he demanded in an urgent undertone, keeping his eyes scrupulously above Letty's neck. It was an unnecessary precaution, since Letty was clutching her cloak closed with enough force to turn her knuckles white.

Letty glanced over her shoulder at Percy and Martin with wide, hunted eyes. "She's not here."

"I realized that."

Letty flushed and pressed her eyes closed, as though for composure. "I mean, she was delayed."

In the course of his work for the League of the Purple Gentian, Geoff had interrogated all sorts of liars. Some adopted a guise of innocence, others feigned indignation, still others a dithery, forgetful manner, as though recalling a story piecemeal might lend to its veracity. But all of them had one thing in common. It wasn't the shifting eyes, because he had seen accomplished liars who held his eyes throughout, and did it with a conviction that could hoodwink the agents of the Inquisition.

It was something in the voice itself, a hollow ring where the kernel of truth ought to have been. Geoff could hear it the way an accomplished singer could pick out the difference between an A flat and a B sharp.

Every instinct he possessed screamed that Letty Alsworthy was lying.

No matter what his instincts told him, the notion of Letty Alsworthy engaging in a deliberate entrapment of her sister's suitor was equally incredible. He didn't know her well, but in the course of his courting her sister, they had said the odd hello, danced the odd dance, all in perfect good humor and goodwill. She had never hung on his arm, pursed her lips in his general direction, or tried to wheedle him out onto a balcony (none of which could be said about Mary's closest friend, Lucy Ponsonby, who had relentlessly attempted all of the above). Letty was a good-natured, straightforward sort, and he had never seen her use the flirtatious flutterings and wiles that made so many of the Season's debutantes a blight on civilization.

But there was something about the way she said "delayed" that sent all his internal alarm bells ringing. It was a prevarication, and a poor one.

And then there was that night rail.

"Did Mary send you?" Geoff asked, deliberately keeping his voice neutral.

A pause, and then Letty shook her head again, this time in negation. "No."

Geoff's face settled into hard lines. "I see."

It was like discovering that the Archbishop of Canterbury had a sideline in smuggling French brandy.

"Sniffing around the carriage, looking for ye, she were, my lord," came the mournful voice of his coachman from the box.

Letty stuck her head out the door in indignation, nearly losing her grip on the edges of her cloak in the process. Percy watched with interest, but he was doomed to disappointment; the fabric held together. "You threw me in! You practically kidnapped me!"

The idea of MacTavish, the most confirmed misogynist since John Knox had his infamous encounter with Mary, Queen of Scots, voluntarily kidnapping any woman would have been laughable had Geoff had any inclination to laugh.

Innocent. Ha. That kiss ought to have alerted him that Letty Alsworthy was anything but innocent. It had been a toe-curling, reputation-compromising, clothing-tightening kiss, the sort of kiss Saint Paul had had in mind when he had said it was better to marry than to burn. A few moments more, and the carriage would have gone up in flames.

Caught by the oldest trick in the book, indeed.

"Doing it a bit brown, aren't you, old girl?" drawled Martin. "Best save your breath for other things, eh, Pinchingdale?"

"What in the devil are you doing here, anyway?" demanded Geoff. He probably ought to have asked earlier, but between the kiss and the night rail, his faculties were not in their best functioning order. In fact, they seemed to have migrated somewhere below his waist.

Percy's face lit up. At last, a question he could answer! "We were just—"

"—protecting the lady's honor," cut in Martin smoothly. "Now that you have been seen."

"Hard to see much," contributed Percy, squinting in illustration. "Dark, y'know."

Not nearly dark enough, thought Geoff. Any darker, and Percy and Martin wouldn't have recognized him. Any darker, and none of them would have seen that disastrous night rail. It was the night rail that really did it. The kiss he could lay at his own door—he, after all, had grabbed her—but why go out in a night rail unless it was for the purpose of being compromised? Especially a night rail like that, which combined the specious illusion of innocence with a transparency to make a courtesan blush. And then there was her hair, tumbling down over her shoulders in a wanton mass that suggested dalliance and decadence.

"Still," Percy continued blithely, "you're going to have to marry her, you know. Devil of a shame."

"Thank you, Percy," said Letty acidly.

Percy waved a hand in a gesture of modest denial. "Least I could do. Always glad to be of service."

Geoff didn't bother to ask what sort of service that might be. The night rail, her enthusiastic response to his kiss, MacTavish's grumbling testimony, even the convenient appearance of Percy Ponsonby and Martin Frobisher might all, taken severally, be explained innocently. Put together, they spelled entrapment. His. It had all been quite cleverly done. If Letty grew bored with matrimony, he had no doubt she could have a brilliant career working for the French Ministry of Police.

Turning his back on the two men, Geoff slammed the carriage door closed.

"Let's get you home, shall we?" It was a command, rather than a question.

"I couldn't agree more," said Letty fervently.

Still clutching her cloak, Letty burrowed back into the corner of the seat, out of range of Percy Ponsonby and Martin Frobisher. She hadn't felt this befuddled since the time she fell out of a tree in the orchard in the process of retrieving her brother's pet bird. She had lain there on her back, with a double cast to her vision and a ringing in her ears, dizzy, vaguely ill, and not entirely sure what had just happened.

Falling out of a tree was nothing in comparison to being kissed. At least, with the tree, she had known where she was. For those first few moments, when Lord Pinchingdale's arms closed around her, and his lips merged with hers, she hadn't known and she hadn't cared.

That dreadful moment when he let go had been worse than hitting the ground from ten feet up. With a jarring thump, she had remembered where she was, and, even worse, who she was. That kiss hadn't been hers. All the affection, all the warmth, all the tenderness in his touch had been borrowed under false pretenses, stolen from the store intended for her sister. It had always been meant for Mary. And she—she had just been in the way.

Huddling her cold hands into the warmth of her cloak, Letty forced herself to focus on practicalities. Having gotten in the way, she somehow had to get out of it again, before she found herself stealing more than a kiss from her sister. It was the worst sort of ill luck that Percy Ponsonby and Martin Frobisher should have stumbled across that accidental embrace.

Or was it? Sluggishly, the outlines of a suspicion began to form. If Mary went to the trouble of arranging an elopement, she wouldn't want to leave anything to chance. As much as Lord Pinchingdale professed to adore her, there was always the danger of being compromised and discarded. They had all heard the stories of penniless young ladies being wooed with promises of marriage, then discarded long before they got anywhere near Gretna Green. A few witnesses, on the other hand, could work wonders in getting a wavering groom to the altar. Percy Ponsonby was the brother of Mary's closest friend . Like one of the larger varieties of canine, Percy was as loyal as he was daft. If Mary had asked him to look in at the Oxford Arms at midnight, Percy was quite likely to obey without bothering with whys or wherefores, especially if he could combine it with a few flagons of anything fermented.

Either way, it was nothing short of disaster. Percy was a good-natured ignoramus, and Letty generally didn't mind him, but Martin Frobisher was another kettle of fish entirely. Letty had never liked Martin Frobisher. The feeling was mutual, especially since that incident last month, when Henrietta Selwick had poured ratafia all down Martin Frobisher's new coat and Letty had committed the unpardonable sin of laughing. Heartily. There had also, Letty remembered guiltily, been a certain amount of pointing along with the laughing. At the time, it had seemed a perfectly reasonable reaction.

The ratafia incident was merely the crowning touch. Frobisher had borne her a grudge ever since the prior Season. Like so many men, he had been dangling after Mary, although whether his intentions were marital or merely amorous had been left highly unclear. Being somewhat keener than most (his own assessment, not Letty's), he had come up with the cunning notion of pressing his suit under the auspices of Mary's impressionable little sister. Unfortunately for Frobisher's amorous designs, Letty wasn't nearly so impressionable as she looked. After accepting the lemonade Frobisher had fetched her, and hearing out his tale of unrequited love, she had flatly refused to lure Mary into a secluded alcove for him. Not only would it be improper, but Frobisher wasn't on any of Mary's lists. His fortune was decent enough, but he was at least four heirs away from a title—not very good odds from a marriage mart point of view. Mary could do far better.