She bristled. “I hardly think I can be taken for the mother of a grown man!”
“Margaret, your son is only six years old,” Lady Knowe said, intervening. “I don’t think he’s been on the earth long enough to demonstrate familial courage.”
Alaric stopped paying close attention after that. He had the feeling that Willa didn’t give a damn about her beauty, or how old people thought she was. In fact, it was more the other direction.
She would be put off by praise. All those poor dogs who courted her during the Season likely wrote poems to her eyes. She would give a poet a sweet smile, count him a fool, and disregard whatever he said thereafter.
His aunt poked him in the ribs. “Miss Haverlock asked a question, Alaric.”
“What punishment did you mete upon the cannibals? The play unaccountably neglected to finish the story,” Miss Haverlock chirped, clearly hoping to be told that he had laid waste to an entire tribe of men he’d never met.
His smile thinned to a grimace. “I’ve never encountered any cannibals, Miss Haverlock. The play is a fantasy written by someone who has never met me.”
The lady seemed unconvinced but she moved on. “Then what really happened in Chapter Six of Wilde Latitudes?”
“It was precisely as I described,” Alaric said. “I don’t have much of an imagination. I merely write down what occurs.”
“Impossible!” she said, smiling at him roguishly. “You must give me more credit, Lord Wilde. I am not one who shies away from the truth. I know perfectly well that natives wear little more than strategically placed coconut shells.”
He managed to stop himself from growling at her.
“You invented clothing in order to spare the gentle sensibilities of your readers,” Miss Haverlock persisted. “But my uncle voyaged to the Antipodes and he told me that the natives are practically naked.”
“There are many islands in the Pacific,” Alaric replied, “and peoples with many different styles of dress on them.”
He wasn’t going to turn away and follow Willa Ffynche to the other side of the room.
That would be absurd—a conclusion he came to at the precise moment he caught sight of her slipping out the door.
WILLA REMAINED IN the ladies’ retiring room just long enough to give herself a lecture. She hadn’t rejected fourteen proposals of marriage—one of them from a future marquess—only to follow in the footsteps of Lady Biddle.
Mooning after Lord Alaric, in other words.
The problem was that he appealed to the worst side of her. One of the reasons that she and Lavinia had come up with an ironclad set of rules governing their debut into society was that they were well aware that correct behavior didn’t come naturally to either of them.
As Willa saw it, Lavinia’s infatuation with the Wilde books had had less to do with their author than with the freedom depicted in the books. Lord Wilde could and did go anywhere he pleased. He could talk to anyone.
Not so for a young lady.
Willa had resisted the books, but the man himself, walking through the drawing room as if the straitlaced world of high society was irrelevant? She felt the pull of his presence as if it were the tide going out.
With a start, she discovered that she was staring blindly into the glass and had bitten her lower lip until it was ruby red. Enough!
She opened the door to the corridor.
Walked through—and froze.
Lord Alaric was leaning against the opposite wall, as casually as if he were waiting to enter the ladies’ retiring room.
He looked up, and all that raw masculinity he wielded like a weapon focused on her. It took everything she had for Willa to say casually, “Good evening once again, Lord Alaric.”
He straightened and gave her a slow smile. “Miss Ffynche.”
“Is there something I can help you with?” Willa managed, proud of keeping her voice from rising to a squeak. Willa Ffynche never squeaked. Or sighed. Or …
The comforting list of rules slipped from her head because the door swung closed at her back, which left them alone in the shadowy corridor.
“I’m not sure,” he said, looking down at her, his eyes curious.
Willa could feel a flush rising in her cheeks. She never blushed. She never squeaked. She never sighed—
“I think I’m having an odd reaction to returning to England,” he said, almost to himself.
“I can certainly understand how you might wish to flee a drawing room full of ladies,” she answered. “People,” she corrected herself hastily. “Drawing rooms full of people, because—because I suppose there is a great deal of solitude onboard a pirate ship.”
She groaned inside. A pirate ship? She sounded like such a ninny.
“Would it surprise you to know that I’ve never been aboard a pirate ship?”
“Indeed not,” she said, flustered. “I know that pirates board English vessels, rather than the other way around.”
The smile in his eyes deepened. “I confess to piratical tendencies.”
Was he implying that he viewed her as an English vessel eager to be boarded? Boarded? Willa felt her cheeks flame, and be damned with that rule about flushing. What on earth made him think she would welcome a blatant proposition of that nature? She was no Helena Biddle.
She flashed him a look and made a move to go, but he caught her arm before she could leave. “I succumbed to a pun, which was outrageously ill-bred of me. I’ve been too long outside of England.”
Willa agreed, so she kept her silence.
“I had no intention of casting aspersions on your chastity.” His voice was peppery and deep. “I’m not used to watching my tongue, and I’ve an idiotic weakness for puns. All plays on words, in truth.”
In that case, he didn’t belong in polite society, because if there was one thing English gentlepeople did, it was watch their tongues.
Perhaps that was why he had spent years wandering the world—so he needn’t be constantly thinking about the implications of every utterance. The realization gave her a strange sensation under her ribs: a mixture of envy, censure, and wariness, all jumbled together.
“I expect attention to language is essential for a writer,” she murmured, tacitly accepting Lord Alaric’s apology.
His fingers slid from her arm, leaving a sensation of heat in their wake.
“I enjoy the discipline of shaping my experiences on the page, but I never imagined gaining all these admirers,” he said flatly.
“Your readers?”
“For the most part, the ladies I’ve met in the drawing room are not readers. They seem infatuated with a character in a play, who has nothing to do with my books.” His eyes were rueful, but sincere. “Not something I welcome, I assure you.”
She was trying not to think about how close to her he was standing in the dim passage. He smelled like mint.
“I’ve been away from England long enough to forget many rules, but I remember the important ones. This one, for instance.” He picked up her hand and brought her fingers to his lips again. “I like this one. What a marvelous way to greet a woman, say goodbye to her, or apologize to her.”
His lips touched her hand and she felt the shock of it down her whole body. Followed by a withering sense of shame. She was not going to succumb to the allure of such a public figure, whether he welcomed his admirers or no.
She withdrew her hand and nodded coolly. “If you’ll forgive me, Lord Alaric.” She strolled past him to the comfort of the drawing room and her boyish suitors—any one of whom could call to mind upwards of a hundred social rules without prompting, and likely thrice that if given time.
She knew he was watching her go, and she did not turn around.
Chapter Six
Diana and Lavinia were standing together, staring out the window. Willa forced herself to walk calmly toward them, pretending that her heart wasn’t racing and her cheeks weren’t flushed.
“What are you looking at?” she asked a moment later, peering out at the lawn. Diana made a noise that sounded like a sob. Abruptly, Willa saw that Diana’s shoulders were shaking, and Lavinia was standing in such a way as to shield her from the room.
She hastily reached into her knotting bag and produced a handkerchief. “Is something wrong?”
“Oh, no,” Diana said unconvincingly, dabbing her eyes with the handkerchief. “I’m merely overtired. I traveled through the night yesterday. Mother didn’t want to insult His Grace with a belated arrival but she was occupied in London. She sent me ahead with my maid, knowing Lady Gray would act as my chaperone, and it was a tiring journey.”
That betrayed a profound lack of understanding of the nature of house parties. One didn’t worry about arriving late; people sometimes appeared a fortnight after the party began.
But while Diana’s late father had been a distant relation of Lavinia’s, her grandfather on her mother’s side had been a Lord Mayor of London—a fact everyone tactfully pretended to overlook while talking about it constantly.
Love at first sight is more romantic when it has a touch of mésalliance about it, and Diana’s grandfather—a rich grocer—was rarely forgotten when Lord Roland’s proposal was mentioned.
“Lady Gray is generally late to every occasion,” Willa said comfortingly.
“We told my mother that the house party began three full days early,” Lavinia said, rubbing small circles on Diana’s right shoulder blade. “Otherwise, we might have arrived a week from now, and you’d have had no chaperone at all.”