Talk of the Ton (Free Fellows League 5)

“Ah yes,” he said, “the worthy burgher, the man whom you marry next week.”

“Precisely.” Wasn’t he going to kiss her? They passed a house with torches burning all the way to the roadway, and the carriage flashed with light for a moment, just long enough so that she caught sight of his brooding eyes.

“How long did you stay drunk in Paris?” she asked impulsively.

He stared across at her, but there was no light in the carriage now, and she couldn’t read his face. He must have taken off his gloves, because he picked up her right hand and began caressing it, large fingers slipping around hers. Her stomach felt a liquid jolt of heat.

“Six months,” he said, just when the silence had stretched so long that she had to babble of something. “I was drunk for six months. And I gather it was on one of my most oblivious evenings that I met you, ma chère.”

But Emma didn’t want to talk of that nonexistent meeting. “And the drinking was due to your brother’s death?”

He leaned forward and put her hand against his lips. The touch of his kiss to her fingertips made the warmth in her belly burst into flame. She suppressed a gasp. She had to appear experienced, not cast astray by as simple a thing as his touch.

“Walter died in October over a year ago,” he said, sitting back again and winding her fingers between his large ones. “He died in a carriage, while up at Oxford. Forgive me if I already told you the details when I saw you last. He was in his third year, and they were larking about—”

He stopped, and his fingers tightened on hers.

“What happened?” she asked, although she knew well enough. She’d been at the funeral, of course. She had pressed his mourning glove with her mourning glove, and murmured something through her black veil, put on for the brother-in-law who would never be her brother-in-law. At the funeral Gil’s eyes had been dead, black, expressionless; she could remember the look in them to this day. And the next thing they’d heard, he’d gone to Paris.

“He was drinking,” Gil said flatly. “There’s nothing unusual about drinking, of course. In some ways, the course of a university career is synonymous with a soak in a brandy bottle. But a man who’s been drinking doesn’t have good control of the reins. Nor yet of his balance. And Walter fell from the carriage, that’s all. Dropped the ribbons, fell out as his carriage swept around a corner.”

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

“They say that he didn’t suffer.”

“I suppose . . . Does that help?”

“Not much.”

She leaned forward then and took his hands, both of them, in hers. The carriage was trundling down a long, dark lane, and so she couldn’t see anything at all. She let her fingers wander over his hands, over the calluses on his fingers, probably from holding reins.

“So I gather you were trying to get drunk enough to fall out of a carriage?”

There was a moment of silence, and she felt a drop of fear. Had she gone too far? But he gave a bark of lau

ghter. “Something like that, I suppose.”

She lengthened her fingers, stretched them over the broad backs of his hands. “And did you succeed?”

“Obviously not.”

She waited. The carriage lurched, rounding a corner.

“I fell out of a number of beds,” he said finally. “Drunk, blind, trying to find my way to a chamber pot. A kind of death. But one always wakes up, more’s the pity.”

“So I’ve heard,” she said. She turned his hands over and began caressing his palms, trying to ignore the fact that her fingers were trembling. “I fell out of a carriage once.”

He went still; she more sensed than saw it. “What happened?”

“I was eight years old, and trundling along to the village in the old pony cart, driven by an ancient—but quite sober—groom. He didn’t know that I was leaning over the side, trying to pull sprays of wild roses into the carriage. He went around the corner just as I grasped a particularly beautiful spray.”

There was a little chuckle in his voice. “I believe I hear the echo of pain in your voice.”

“Straight into the rosebush,” she said mournfully. “I have a scar across my right eyebrow that is still visible.”

One hand slipped from hers and traced the shape of her eyebrow. “Beautiful,” he said, and the husky roll in his voice made her bite her lip. “Your brows fly above your eyes in a particularly fetching fashion. I saw no break, and I feel nothing now.”

“I color them,” Emma said briskly, trying to quell the butterflies in her stomach.