“We ensure Helena accepts, and goes.”
“But will she?”
Louis’s gaze went to the two letters addressed to Helena. “Uncle instructs that I use my best endeavors, but if she proves stubborn . . . I am to give her these letters.”
“Do we know what they contain?”
“No—only that once she reads them, Helena will do as he has ordered.” Louis drew in a breath and dragged his gaze from the fascinating letters. “However, Uncle strongly advises that I wait until we are at St. Ives’s estate before giving the letters to Helena. He says I should not show his hand too soon, not unless she balks entirely at the first fence.”
Louis stared unseeing across the room. “So! We must secure this invitation tonight. I will need to make sure that Helena plays the game hard with St. Ives—that she inflames him and leaves him no choice but to act as we wish. That is the first thing.” Louis glanced at the letters. “For the rest, we will see.”
Villard laid a waistcoat on the dressing tree. “And what of m’sieur’s own plans?”
Louis grinned as he threw back the covers. “Those have not changed. Helena should have been wed long ago. The matter of her marriage is now a difficulty for Uncle Fabien—a liability. The solution I propose is one I’m sure he will support, once he sees its brilliance. It would be nonsensical to lose the de Stansion wealth to another family when we can keep it for ourselves.”
Standing, Louis allowed Villard to help him into his dressing robe. His gaze was distant as he recited what was clearly an oft-rehearsed plan. “When we have Uncle’s dagger safe in our possession and have crossed once more to France, I will marry Helena—by force, if necessary. In Calais there is a notary who will do as I ask for a price. Once our marriage is a reality, we will travel to Le Roc. Uncle Fabien is too much the strategist not to appreciate the beauty of my plan. As soon as he grasps that there is no longer any desirable marriage for the factions to squabble over and that thus I have freed him from their threats, he will fall on my neck and thank me.”
Behind Louis, Villard’s expression betrayed his contempt, yet he quietly murmured, “As you say, m’sieur.”
If Helena had had her way, she would not have attended that morning’s gathering at the Duchess of Richmond’s house. Unfortunately, so Marjorie informed her, it was a tradition as venerated as the masquerade to be held that evening and, therefore, impossible to miss. Helena had had half a mind to appeal to Thierry, more easygoing than his lady, but her host had been absent for the past day.
“He has gone to Bristol,” Marjorie confessed as the carriage rattled toward Richmond.
“Bristol?” Helena looked her surprise.
Marjorie’s lips thinned; she looked out the window. “He has gone to look into some business opportunity.”
“Business? He—” Helena broke off, sensitive to the connotations.
Marjorie shrugged. “What would you do? We are currently monsieur le comte’s pensioners—what is to become of us when you marry and leave?”
Helena hadn’t thought, didn’t know, but thereafter she held her tongue and carped at Marjorie no more.
“Eh, bien,” Marjorie murmured when the carriage eventually drew to a halt and they descended. “Thierry will return later. He will escort us to Lady Lowy’s tonight. Then we will see.”
Helena held to Marjorie’s side as they entered and greeted their hostess. An unexpected tension, an apprehension, stretched her nerves taut. Moving into the considerable crowd, awash with laughter and good cheer, she searched with her eyes, with her senses, and breathed a tight, small sigh of relief when she could detect no glimmer of Sebastian’s presence.
After some minutes of chatting, then moving on, she parted from Marjorie and ventured on alone. She was assured enough, now well known enough, to make her way with confidence. Although unmarried, she was so much older, so much more experienced than girls in their first or even second season, that she was accorded a different status, one permitting her greater social freedom. Speaking to this one, then that, she worked her way through the crowd.
She still had three names on her list, but only Were was confirmed. Were Athlebright and Mortingdale present? Quite how she might engage with them to assess the effect of their touch in the middle of a crowded salon where talk and not dancing, certainly not touching, was the principal aim was a problem—one at which her mind boggled and failed.
Turned too readily aside. After last night, her mind had more troubling thoughts to ponder.
Damn Sebastian! She had constantly, throughout the night, through the silent hours in which she’d tossed and turned and tried to forget, tried to wipe from her mind the sensation of his lips on hers, the warmth of his nearness, the allure of his touch.
Impossible.
She’d spent hours lecturing herself, pointing out how directly against her careful plans falling victim to such a man would be—only to wake from lustful dreams of doing precisely that.
Shocked, she’d sat up, risen from her bed, washed her face and hands in cold water, then stood before her window staring out at the black night until the cold had forced her back to her quilts.
Madness. He had sworn never to marry. What was she thinking of?
It was impossible, more than impossible, for a woman such as herself—an unmarried noblewoman of old family—to become his mistress. Yet to marry a complaisant husband knowing herself driven by a need to be free to engage in an illicit but socially acceptable liaison with another—that, too, was unthinkable. At least to her.
Sebastian, she was sure, had thought of it, but that had never been part of her plans.
Still wasn’t.