Kasey Michaels - Lords of Notoriety - The Ruthless Lord Rule / The Toplofty Lord Thorpe

“No accounting for tastes, is there?” Rachel offered, having approached the scene while Mary was otherwise occupied and was just then sitting herself down on the chair another servant had secured for her. “I had to discard my idea of patterning a character after the girl, though. After I had her say hello, I found she had precious little additional to add to the conversation. I didn’t realize how difficult it is to find inconsequential things to say—do you think that means I’m a blue-stocking? Perhaps that’s why I’ve been left so firmly on the shelf all these years.”

“You’re bright blue through and through, Aunt,” Mary confirmed, then added, “but your mind is not what has kept you from the altar. It’s your foolish pride that keeps you and Sir Henry from making a match of things. Isn’t it time you forgave him for a young man’s indiscretion?”

Rachel looked at her charge, her confusion easy to read in her face. “Henry’s indiscretion? Whatever are you jabbering about? It wasn’t Henry who destroyed our engagement. It was my indis—” Rachel’s voice broke off suddenly as she realized what she had been about to say.

Perhaps the sun was too warm on her head, Mary thought as she reached to retrieve the bonnet she had discarded earlier. How could she have been so mistaken? From the few slips Sir Henry had made in her presence, she felt sure that he was the one responsible for the termination of the engagement just a week before the wedding. But now Rachel was saying Sir Henry was the injured party and she the one who had done something to cause the breach. “Forgive me for being so presumptuous, especially with a woman who is supposed to be my mentor of sorts,” Mary apologized with a singular lack of contriteness, “but I do believe the time has come for you and my so-intelligent uncle to sit down together and go over the particulars of your estrangement in a bit more detail. Somebody seems to have scrambled the facts a bit, if I’m right.”

“I don’t care for a sad rehashing of long-ago sins, Mary,” Rachel replied almost regally. “I have done my penance by donning my caps and playing the loving aunt to a series of nieces and nephews as they found their way into the world and beyond the need of my care. Why, seeing Lucy safely raised and launched was more than enough atonement for a dozen sins worse than my fleeting infatuation with Lord Hether—er—Mary! Isn’t that Tristan over there, beside the buffet table?”

Rachel’s impulsive confession was enough to keep Mary’s attention riveted to her even if Mother Nature had at that moment decided to shower the assembled guests with hail the size of oranges, but nothing could keep her attentive once Tristan’s name was mentioned. “Where?” she asked, already craning her neck in the direction Rachel had named. “Oh, drat, there he is, looking booted and spurred and ready to ride, as usual.” Realizing she was looking more than a little interested in the man, she quickly busied herself retying her bonnet strings, asking Rachel in a whisper, “Is he looking this way? Does he see me? Don’t wave to him, maybe he’ll go away. How do I look? Drat this hot sun, I vow I look as wilted as yesterday’s flowers.”

Rachel could barely hide her smile as she watched Mary lost in uncharacteristic confusion, and silently congratulated herself at settling both her current charge and her troublesome nephew with so little fuss. Oh, Lucy and Jennie would doubtless take all the credit for the match, but that didn’t bother Rachel. She only wished to have everyone neatly established so that she could leave London as soon as possible. Her plan to live quietly in the city had been foolish, she saw now, but who could have foreseen Henry coming to beg a favor of her after the way she had disgraced him all those years ago? She hadn’t written a word of her novel since going to live in Henry’s house—was only using the novel as the camouflage she would need once Mary was safely married and her past buried once and for all beneath her new husband’s name—but Henry wasn’t to know that. Just as he wasn’t to know that she still loved him with every fiber of her being—for as much good that would do her when she was scribbling away in some cottage at the back of beyond.

What Rachel knew she definitely didn’t need was to have Mary sticking her inquisitive little nose into affairs that were none of her business. If she had kept her past indiscretions a secret from Lucy and Jennie—and especially from Tristan—all these years, she was not about to allow Mary to stir up all that old heartache now! Thank heavens for Tristan, Rachel rejoiced silently, marveling as she did so that she would ever have reason to thank Tristan for anything, for he would keep Mary too busy for any dangerous snooping. So thinking, Rachel decided to give the struggling romance a bit of a nudge. “Does he see us, you ask?” she answered Mary just as that young woman was about to take another covert peek herself. “Why, yes, if that marvelous smile is any indication, I do believe he has. My goodness, do I mistake my man? I almost believe Tristan to actually have a certain spring to his step as he makes his way to us.”

“He’s probably just come from turning two hapless souls over to the high executioner for speaking French in a public place. Just the sort of thing to cheer him up, I do believe,” Mary snapped, but her words held no real sting.

“Oh, Mary, you mustn’t refine too long on Tristan’s little follies,” Rachel interposed, trying to calm the waters before this meeting between the two ended in yet another useless confrontation. “He has apologized for believing you part of that French plot—besides, Henry told me just this morning that they have captured three men who supposedly were working to raise funds for a ship to sail to Elba. Why, that may explain Tristan’s absence these last days, don’t you think?” But before Mary, whose head had come up with a jerk at Rachel’s words, could answer, the older woman gave a very uncharacteristic shriek. “Oh, Lord, Tristan! No! ”

Mary looked first to her companion and then, with some shock, toward the buffet table, where she had last seen Tristan, looking so dangerously handsome. But he wasn’t there. He was running full tilt to place himself in front of the runaway curricle being dragged along behind a pair of wild-eyed stallions before it could cut a path of death and destruction through the throng of assembled guests.

TRISTAN HAD RIDDEN HARD most of the night in order to get back to London, the three conspirators he had run to ground in a hedgerow tavern near Maidstone having been handed over to the trustworthy agents Sir Henry had so fortuitously supplied.

His haste was hard to explain, even to himself, considering his oft-spoken distaste for silly affairs like this Venetian breakfast, but he knew Mary was to be in attendance and that thought served as the spur that had sent him galloping along the moonlit paths that led to the city. It was juvenile really, this burning desire to report the success of his mission to Mary in person, but he could not help but harbor the hope that the arrest he had made would put him back in Mary’s good graces—if indeed he was ever there in the first place. At least she would be made to see that he had not entirely been hunting out mare’s nests when he was investigating her background. After all, there had been a plot to free Napoleon, and the arrests proved it.

Of course, there was still that little matter of her true identity—and Rule’s fear that she presented a danger to Sir Henry if there was even a trace of scandal in her past. Tristan wasn’t about to turn a blind eye to that possibility, no matter how uncomfortable he felt about his earlier, erroneous assumption that Mary Lawrence could be in the pay of some French conspirators.