“One was quite enough, thank you.”
“Your color is returning already,” Amelia said with some amazement. “You’re not so green.”
“Yellow, I thought,” Mr. Gladdish put in. “Except for the purple under the eye. Very regal-like.”
“Harry.” Thomas looked quite close to the edge of his patience.
Harry leaned closer to Amelia. “Those ducal types never get black eyes. Always purple. Goes better with the robes.”
“There are robes?”
Harry waved a hand. “There are always robes.”
Thomas took hold of Amelia’s arm. “We’re leaving, Harry.”
Harry grinned. “So soon?”
Amelia waved with her free hand, even as Thomas tugged her away from the bar. “It was lovely meeting you, Mr. Gladdish!”
“You are welcome any time, Lady Amelia.”
“Why, thank you, I-”
But Thomas had already yanked her from the room.
“He’s very sweet,” Amelia said as she skipped along beside him, trying to keep up with his lengthier stride.
“Sweet,” Thomas repeated, shaking his head. “He’d like that.” He steered her around a puddle, although not so deftly that she didn’t have to take a little hop to save her boots.
The coachman was already holding the door open when they approached. Amelia let Thomas help her up, but she’d not even taken her seat before she heard him say, “To Burges Park.”
“No!” she exclaimed, popping her head back out. “We can’t.”
Good heavens, that would be a disaster.
Chapter 10
Thomas stared at her for longer than was strictly necessary, then motioned to the coachman to leave them to their privacy. As Amelia was already half hanging outside the carriage, he was not required to lean forward in order to ask, “Why not?”
“To preserve your dignity,” she said, as if that made perfect sense. “I told Milly-”
“Milly?”
“My sister.” Her eyes widened in that way women affected when they were frustrated that their companion (usually male) could not immediately discern the nature of their thoughts. “You do recall that I have one.”
“I recall that you have several,” he said dryly.
Her expression turned positively peevish. “Not that it could have been helped, but Milly was with me this morning when I saw you-”
Thomas swore under his breath. “Your sister saw me.”
“Just one of them,” she assured him. “And luckily for you, it was the one who can actually keep a secret.”
There should have been something amusing in that, but he wasn’t seeing it. “Go on,” he ordered.
She did. With great animation. “I had to give my mother some reason for abandoning Milly on the Stamford high street, so I told Milly to tell her that I’d come across Grace, who was running errands for your grandmother. Then she was to say that Grace invited me back to Belgrave, but that if I wished to go, I had to depart immediately, because the dowager had ordered Grace to return right away.”
Thomas blinked, trying to follow.
“Because I had to have a reason why I did not have time enough to go into the dress shop and inform Mama of the change of plans myself.”
She stared at him as if he ought to have a response. He did not.
“Because,” she added, noticeably impatient now, “if I spoke to my mother directly, she would have insisted upon coming outside, and pretty though you are, I must confess to being at a loss as to how I might disguise you as Grace Eversleigh.”
He waited until he was certain she was finished, then murmured, “Sarcasm, Amelia?”
“When the conversation calls for it,” she returned, after a beat of highly irritated silence. She looked at him, her brows arched almost defiantly.
He looked at her, hiding his amusement. If arrogance was the game, she would never win.
And indeed, after but five seconds of their staring competition, she took a breath, and it was as if she’d never halted her recounting. “So you see why I cannot return to Burges just yet. There is no way I could have gone to Belgrave, visited with whomever it was I’m supposed to have been visiting with, and then gone home again.”
“Me,” he said.
She looked at him dumbly. Or rather, as if she thought he were dumb. “I beg your pardon.”
“You shall have to have been visiting with me,” he further clarified.
Now her expression turned incredulous. “Mother will be beyond delighted, but no one else will believe it.”
Thomas was not quite certain why that stung, but it did, and it turned his own voice to ice. “Would you care to explain that comment?”
She let out a laugh, and then, when he did not say anything, jerked to attention and said, “Oh, you’re serious.”
“Did I give you some indication that I was not?”
Her lips pressed together and for a moment she almost looked humble. “Of course not, your grace.”
He did not bother to remind her to call him Thomas.
“But surely you must see my point,” she continued, just when he thought she was through. “Do I ever visit with you at Belgrave?”
“You visit all the time.”
“And see you for the prescribed ten minutes, fifteen if you are feeling generous.”
He stared at her in disbelief. “You were far more amenable when you thought I was drunk.”
“You were drunk.”
“Regardless.” He bowed his head for a moment, pinching the bridge of his nose. Blast it all, what was he going to do about this?
“Is your head bothering you?” she asked.
He looked up.
“You do that”-she imitated his gesture-“when your head is bothering you.
He’d been doing it so much during the past twenty-four hours, it was a wonder the spot wasn’t as bruised as his eye. “Any number of things are bothering me,” he said curtly, but she looked so stricken he was compelled to add, “I do not refer to you.”
Her lips parted but she did not comment.
He did not speak, either, and a full minute passed before she said, her voice careful, and indeed almost rueful, “I think we shall have to go. To Belgrave,” she clarified, when his gaze caught hers.
“I am sure you were thinking as I was,” she continued, “that we could simply take the carriage out to the country and while away an hour or two before returning me home.”
He was, actually. It would be hell on her reputation, were they discovered, but somehow that seemed the least of his concerns.
“But you don’t know my mother,” she added. “Not as I do. She will send someone to Belgrave. Or perhaps come herself, under some guise or another. Probably something about borrowing more books from your grandmother. If she arrives, and I am not there, it will be a disaster.”
He almost laughed. The only reason he did not was that it would be the height of insult, and there were certain gentlemanly traits he could not abandon, even when the world was falling down around him.
But really, after the events of yesterday-his new cousin, the possible loss of his title, his home, probably even the clothes on his back-the ramifications of an illicit country picnic seemed trivial. What could possibly happen? Someone would see them and they would be forced to marry? They were already betrothed.
Or were they? He no longer knew.
“I know that it would only hasten a ceremony that has been preordained for decades, but”-here her voice became tremulous, and it pierced his heart with guilt-“you don’t want that. Not yet. You’ve made that clear.”
“That’s not true,” he said quickly. And it wasn’t. But it had been. And they both knew it. Looking at her now, her blond hair shining in the morning light, her eyes, not so hazel today, this time almost green-he no longer knew why he’d put this off for so long.
“I don’t want it,” she said, her voice almost low enough to be a whisper. “Not like that. Not some hastily patched-up thing. Already no one thinks you really want to marry me.”