You May Kiss the Bride(20)
Livia now completed another rapid lap around her room. It was well past midnight, but she wasn’t the least bit tired. She couldn’t erase from her mind the image of tall, broad-shouldered Gabriel Penhallow looking down his finely chiseled nose at her. His incredible certainty that she was going through with this charade!
Livia’s brain moved at lightning speed as she started on yet another circuit. Well, she’d show him!
She had a plan.
It was a crazy, impetuous plan, and how she would have liked to see his face tomorrow—no, later on today—when he arrived.
But she wouldn’t be here.
How angry he would be.
How deliciously, wonderfully, splendidly angry.
Chapter 4
After a long night of tossing and turning, during which Gabriel wondered if Grandmama’s suspicion about chicken feathers was actually correct, he in due course made his way to the Stuart mansion, where he was greeted by a lachrymose, shabbily dressed butler and conducted at a funereal pace to the dark, cavernous study of Mr. Charles Stuart, from whom emanated a strong scent of brandy as he sat slumped behind his cluttered mahogany desk.
Twenty minutes later, Gabriel rose to his feet, thus signaling an end to an irritating, not to mention tedious, discussion with Mr. Stuart concerning the marriage of his niece Livia. She was to receive no money, no trousseau, no wedding dress, no jewels—nothing.
“My wife’s in no condition to plan or host anything,” Mr. Stuart had said in his blunt, blustering way, “nor a fancy breakfast, and I’m damned if I’ll spend another penny on that chit.” Rubbing his beard-stubbled chin, he’d added sourly, “Nuisance. Should never have let her come here. Better to have saved my money and left her where she was.”
Gabriel had repressed a quick, unbidden pang of sympathy for Livia. Why should he feel sorry for her? After all, she was the one who had made a mess of his life. Of course, he had kissed her. On the other hand, she had provoked him. Why in God’s name had he allowed her to get under his skin? What was the matter with him? And what was the matter with her, turning him down like that? Just who did she think she was?
Gabriel broke off this frustrating, hopelessly unproductive train of thought, successfully fighting down the urge to bang his head against the nearest wall. “Thank you for your time,” he now said coolly. “Good day.”
“What? Don’t you want to see her? Settle things?”
“Things are settled.” Last night, in the intervals during which he lay awake glumly ruminating, he’d decided to leave immediately following his interview with the Stuart fellow. It would give Miss Livia Stuart her own little taste of the Penhallow way.
He knew it was petty, yet still it gave him a small sense of control in a situation which had spun wildly into chaos. “You may inform Miss Stuart that we’ll come for her tomorrow morning. We go to Bath, where she is to reside with my grandmother and be taught all that she needs to know to properly enter Society as the future Mrs. Penhallow. And you need not worry, sir,” Gabriel concluded with a slight, ironic smile. “The proprieties are to be observed. Naturally I shall be elsewhere.”
And with that, conscious of an ignoble feeling of triumph as he pictured Livia Stuart’s mortification (having put on her best day-dress, no doubt, and carefully done up her hair), he returned to the Glanville mansion, where it would have been difficult to imagine a scene of greater awkwardness.
Lady Glanville and Miss Orr were pointedly cloistered in their bedchambers; Lord Glanville anxiously skittered in and out of any room Gabriel happened to be occupying; harried servants hastened to fulfill the multitudinous demands of his grandmother as she orchestrated the herculean effort of preparing for tomorrow’s journey.
Only Tom Orr seemed oblivious to the strained atmosphere, slavishly following Gabriel around like an overgrown puppy, inviting him to take snuff—snuff, for God’s sake—and wondering out loud if he had a chance with that dashed attractive Miss Stuart, he’d had the most delightful chat with her last night, didn’t Mr. Penhallow find her wondrous agreeable?
Gritting his teeth, Gabriel thought to himself that since evidently nobody had bothered to inform Tom that Miss Stuart was affianced elsewhere, it certainly wasn’t any of his business. He endured Tom’s presence for as long as he could until, after the umpteenth encomium on Miss Stuart’s manifold charms and feeling increasingly certain there was a real possibility that he would end up throttling the Glanville heir before the day was out, he retreated to the library, predicting—accurately—that young Tom would find proximity to all those books repugnant.