“Do you like my reticule?” She set her saucer on the table with a clink and retrieved a puddle of pink silk that lay nearby. She held it out for inspection.
The object in question was embroidered with pink roses, which in turn sported pink leaves and pink thorns. It was of a size to fit a calling card—a pink calling card. Dyed pink feathers were sewed to the bottom. The handbag was not merely pink. It was fatally pink.
Gareth searched for an appropriately supportive response. “It seems…serviceable?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Oh. Because I took it with me when Alex took me driving, and he said it would spook the horses. He made me sit on it the whole way, and then he only took me in a single circuit around the park.” Laura looked up at Gareth.
That look in her eyes—that damnable look that said that even after all his missteps, Gareth’s opinion still mattered—made him hunch his shoulders. It made him wish he’d done one thing to deserve it. Madame Esmerelda had accused him of being an automaton. Around his sister, he felt like a clumsy marionette, poorly jointed, unable to manage even the simplest tasks. How she would laugh if she could see him now.
“Do you think,” Laura asked in a small voice, “that my fiancé hates my reticule?”
Questions like these were more perilous than a company of marauding Turks. There were no right answers to give, not ever. Gareth tried anyway. “I rather suspect he likes your reticule. It’s just that he’s a man. He’s not going to waste his time poring over needlepoint flowers, even if he is marrying you.”
As soon as his sister winced, Gareth realized waste had been the wrong word. That his clipped delivery had struck the wrong tone. Because it had never been the tea or the cucumber sandwiches, with or without crusts, that rendered this endeavor futile. It was Gareth. He had no notion of pink silk and embroidery. And damn him, he had no notion of this woman before him. For all that she was his sister and the closest flesh and blood that he had on this planet, she was still a mystery to him.
They’d been playing out this scene ever since Laura was four and Gareth twenty, when in one of his short visits to his stepfather’s estate, she’d invited him to a tea party with all her dolls. At the time, he’d thought that if only she were a bit older, if only the minute chairs in her chambers were a tad larger, perhaps he’d be able to converse with her.
But now she was nineteen. She was too much a lady to pelt him with shortbread and shriek that he was ruining her party.
Laura had turned her head, as if to contemplate the elms outside the wide windows. Her hands twisted the silk of her reticule round and round until the embroidered petals distorted into harsh lines. “And what do I do,” she said quietly, “if he stops liking me?”
If that’s what you fear, then you shouldn’t marry him.
But saying that would be stupid and utterly selfish. Because Gareth couldn’t shake the fear in his own mind that once she married, she would have no further need of her inept brother. She would figure out that these afternoons were a waste, and Gareth would be utterly displaced. Her invitations would slow from monthly to bimonthly events. They would eventually turn into salutations exchanged in passing at the opera. If Laura were at all rational, she’d have stopped inviting him years ago.
A real older brother would know precisely how to reassure his sister at a moment like this. He’d be able to alleviate the agitation that had her wringing the neck of her reticule. He would tell jokes and solve all her problems. But Laura had an ungainly lump of a brother, all marquess, and Gareth hadn’t the faintest idea how to comfort anyone.
Just as she always invited him, Gareth always tried. “If you’re really worried your fiancé won’t like you, I’ll double your settlement.”
Her eyes widened, and her mouth crumpled.
“What?” he asked. “What did I say this time?”
“Is that what you think of me, Blakely?” Laura choked on the words. “You think you have to bribe Alex to care for me? That nobody will love me unless you pay him?”
No.
Gareth had hoped to buy Laura’s love for himself. How could he make her see? He’d tried to bail himself out of these situations before, but all he ever managed was to reduce her to tears. Once a conversation started sinking, there was little choice but to abandon ship. Long experience had taught him that the way not to respond in situations like this was to enumerate the ways in which she was wrong. Somehow, every time he tried to explain that he hadn’t meant what she heard, it came out sounding like “you are an irrational goose.”
Instead of allaying her fears, he sat in his chair and gripped his plate until the delicate edge of the china cut into his hands.
Then he’d been silent too long, an entire species of error in its own right.
“Very well.” Laura’s voice trembled. “Double it. I don’t care.”
Nothing had changed since she was four except the chairs. He was still ruining everything.
Madness, a physician had once told Gareth, was repeating the same events over and over while hoping for a different result. That was why Gareth had no fear he would fall in love, no matter what Madame Esmerelda predicted for him. Love was watching his sister choke back tears. Love hoped that month after month, she would continue to issue invitations. And love believed, against all evidence, that one day, he would get it right, that he would learn to talk to her as a brother instead of the cold, unfeeling man she must have believed him to be.
In short, love was madness.
CHAPTER FOUR
HE’D EMBARKED on a new species of madness, Gareth thought as he shifted on the soft squabs of the closed carriage. It was the night of the coming-out ball that he and Ned were to attend. It had been almost a week since he left Madame Esmerelda’s quarters, and the visceral pull she had on him should have waned. Tonight he would take the first step in breaking her power over Ned.
And yet…
He had thought he’d figured out Madame Esmerelda. Classified her, genus and species. One fraud, first class; motivated by greed. That ambition on her part was no doubt intensified by an early childhood where she’d not fit a predefined role. And, luckily for him, she was as susceptible as he to the powerful lust that burned between them.
Having identified the problem, the solution seemed obvious: Execute her tasks with maximum alacrity and minimum embarrassment, thus exposing her perfidy to Ned. Take her to bed, enjoy her thoroughly and dispel his unfortunate attraction to her in the most pleasurable manner possible.
He chanced a glance across the seat. She sat properly, her feet crossed and put to the side to avoid his own limbs. She had very carefully avoided his gaze all evening. Without saying a word to him, though, she’d destroyed the mental identification he’d made. She’d become an anomaly. Gareth’s ordered mind abhorred anomalies.
Correction: Gareth loved anomalies. An anomaly meant there was a scientific mystery to explore. It meant some mysterious unknown cause had come into play, and if he could just examine the problem from the right angle, he could be the first person in the world to solve the puzzle. No; the scientist in Gareth adored conundrums. It was the marquess in him, the responsible Lord Blakely, who feared the consequences.
Because under the circumstances, it was dreadfully inconvenient to adore anything about her.
The first burning question in his mind was—why that gown? Oh, he’d sunk to new lows, contemplating a woman’s wardrobe. Gareth was hardly an arbiter of fashion, but even he knew that these days the waist was fashionably pulled in by means of some corsetted contraption. Necklines skimmed the breasts. And sleeves were supposed to balloon like enraged puffer-fish.
He’d looked forward to seeing that remarkable bosom framed by a fashionably low neckline. He’d have engaged in some chance ogling or a brush of his hands against a creamy collarbone. In the dress he had envisioned, such accidents would have been delightfully inevitable.
But instead Madame Esmerelda’s dress was brown—almost black, in the dimness of the carriage. Th
e neck was unmodishly high, and the sleeves had only a hint of a puff to them. No lace, no ribbons and no fancy gold trim. No shaping of the figure.
Her choice of attire was as baffling as it was disappointing. After she’d raged at him the other day, he’d pulled out his notebook and disappeared into his scientific work. When the modiste had come to him in outrage, he’d brushed her away. He had assumed Madame Esmerelda would take advantage of his lack of focus. After all, she could have lived for a week on the price of a single gilt ribbon. Instead, she must have waged war with the modiste to obtain such an unflattering gown. And Gareth wanted to know why.
A first-class fraud, motivated by greed, would have ordered gold netting and badgered Gareth to provide sapphires to highlight the remarkable color of her eyes. It made no sense to do anything else.
He’d been staring openly at her since she’d entered his carriage. She’d gifted him with short glances that smoldered beneath his skin even after she turned her head. Kissing the woman should have given her the upper hand, should have revealed his weakness to her. A first-class fraud would have taken every seductive advantage. She would have kept his gaze and added burning promises with every lift of her brow. She would have taken advantage of the cover of darkness to rest her foot against his. After all, how better to reap the rewards, and potentially cloud Gareth’s judgment?
He’d manfully prepared himself to resist her blandishments—for now.
But Madame Esmerelda was ignoring him as best she could from two feet away, and talking with Ned. And he didn’t know which annoyed him more—that he wished she would try to cloud his judgment, or that it was clouding without any effort on her behalf at all.
Her behavior didn’t fit. Nothing about her fit.
“Ned,” she was saying, “don’t lose sight of what you must do this evening.”
Ned clasped his hands in front of him in barely contained excitement. “We’re going to meet Blakely’s future wife. How should I greet her?”
Gareth winced. From time to time, his cousin was prone to overexuberance. He could imagine the disruption the youth might cause.
Apparently, Madame Esmerelda could, too. She shook her head. “Oh, Ned. Be respectful and mannerly. And remember that Lord Blakely won’t greet her until he’s ready to present the elephant.”
“Oh, very well.” Ned slouched against the seat and folded his arms. “But only because you say so.”
Gareth was not used to being ignored. Most especially not by women he kissed. He was already weary of it. “Madame Esmerelda.”
She looked over, unwillingly.