Miranda Jarrett - Regency High Society Vol 2 - Sparhawk's Lady / The Earl's Intended Wife / Lord Calthorpe's Promise / The Society Catch

He looked up from the toast to his sister and brother-in-law in time to see them exchange one final kiss before Jack went to his own chair at the opposite end of the table, one more moment of such wordless tenderness that Jeremiah again looked hastily away with the same unfamiliar pang of regret he’d felt with little Johnny. What must it be like to love, and be loved, that much?

“You’re looking well this morning, Jeremiah,” declared Jack heartily, unaware of Jeremiah’s thoughts. “Though Desire was ready to give you up, I knew it would take more than that single sword swipe to finish a man like you.”

“I never gave him up!” said Desire indignantly. “I knew he wouldn’t die. Jere’s too ornery, even if that ‘single sword swipe’ was a gash as long as your arm, and then there was the infection on top of that, and floating in the sea for days on end.”

“It wasn’t quite that bad, Des,” said Jeremiah uncomfortably, wishing they’d find something else to bicker over. He was feeling better this morning, well enough that for the first time he’d dressed in the new clothes his sister had ordered for him when his own were lost. A fop’s rags, he grumbled as he’d looked in the mirror, but still he’d admitted to himself that the dark green coat looked handsome enough, and he’d taken extra care with how he’d tied his neckcloth and brushed his hair. The world seemed a more promising place this morning, and he didn’t want to be reminded about how close he’d come to dying. “Though I suppose I should be grateful for your confidence in my orneriness.”

“Orneriness be damned,” said Jack as he cut into the ham and poached eggs that the servant had placed before him. “If Jeremiah’s looking well this morning, I’m more willing to credit it to his own constitution and a good night’s sleep.”

“I wasn’t much for sleep last night. No time.” Jeremiah pulled Caro’s bracelets and earrings from his coat pocket where he’d left it for safekeeping and shoved them across the polished mahogany toward Jack.

Desire gasped, and Jack frowned and lay down his knife and fork.

“I had a visitor,” continued Jeremiah. “A lady who first found her way to my bedchamber and then tricked me into cozening some old sweetheart of hers into believing I was a highwayman. Gave me her jewels to prove it, too, as well as the man’s purse.”

Jack groaned. “Caro Moncrief.”

“Caro Moncrief?” repeated Desire incredulously. “In my house? In my brother’s bedchamber?”

“Aye, in my bedchamber.” Jeremiah was enjoying the sight of his usually unruffled brother-in-law squirming a bit, though for Desire’s sake he hoped the woman wasn’t yet another of the admiral’s former sweethearts. “Now, Jack, maybe you can explain how she came to be there. She said she’d told you all about it, which is a sight more than she ever bothered telling me.”

Jack sighed as he toyed with the fork on the plate before him. “She didn’t tell me everything. Caro never does.”

“Oh, honestly, Jack, if you’re not going to tell my brother about her, then I will,” said Desire. “The Countess of Byfield is even more lowborn than we poor Americans are, Jere. Her mother was an expensive woman of the town who actually sold her daughter to Byfield when she was scarcely more than a child. You can imagine the talk when the old earl married her.”

“Is he that much older?” Jeremiah remembered the stiff, startled way Caro had responded when he’d first kissed her. No wonder, with that kind of experience.

“Oh, Byfield’s vastly older!” said Desire with relish. “You’d take him to be her father at the very least, maybe even her grandfather. They almost never go out in society, but when they do it’s clear enough that they’re both, well, a bit peculiar. Goodness only knows what they do together in private. He makes her dress all in white, sometimes in classical dress all the way down to sandals on her bare feet and leaves in her hair, and he encourages her to do and say whatever she pleases as if she were some child brought down from the schoolroom to act clever for company. And then, of course, there is the dragon-of-a-dowager countess.”

“Desire, love,” said Jack mildly. “You’re gossiping.”

Desire rolled her eyes with mock dismay. “I’m not gossiping, Jack, I’m merely warning my brother before he becomes too enchanted with the creature.”

“To protect my virtue from a fallen woman?” asked Jeremiah with amusement.

“No, you great idiot, to keep you out of the courts! She’s never given the earl any children, so the heir is his nephew, and when the poor old man was lost at sea two years ago—”

“You mean she’s a widow?” That surprised Jeremiah; from the way Caro had spoken of her husband he’d assumed the man was snoring safely in his bed at home.

Desire shrugged. “Well, that’s what the world assumes. But Lady Byfield refuses to believe it and have her husband declared dead, and you can imagine what the nephew says about her to anyone who’ll listen. He’ll seize on any chance he gets to discredit her—what he’d make of her meeting a lover in our woods!—and I’d rather you didn’t get yourself tangled in the middle of it.”

“And I think your warning comes too late, sister mine,” said Jeremiah smugly as he swept the jewelry from the table and into his hand. A widow, and a baseborn one at that. His spirits rose a little higher. Maybe Caro Byfield tumbling into his path was a sign that at last his luck was changing. Lord knows it couldn’t get much worse, but she’d be a first-rate way to improve it. “Her being a widow changes everything, doesn’t it? You know I’ve always had a special fondness for consoling widows.”

Desire’s brow puckered with concern. “Oh, Jere, please don’t! This isn’t some whalerman’s merry lady that you can dally with for a week and then leave behind.”

“Two weeks, Des, two weeks.” His smile widened as he rose from the table. “Then I swear I’ll put the whole Atlantic Ocean between me and the pretty little countess. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

“Jeremiah, wait.” Jack’s expression was troubled as he, too, rose to his feet, the heavy damask napkin in his fist. “She didn’t ask you, did she?”

“To come to call? Nay, she didn’t, not in so many words, but I’d think her tossing her diamonds at me was invitation enough.”

“Not that, Jeremiah. She means to ask you about Hamil Al-Ameer.”

Jeremiah stopped, frozen with his hands gripping the back of his chair. She meant to ask him about Hamil. Hamil Al-Ameer: the man who’d robbed him of his ship, his crew, his friends. The heathen bastard who’d destroyed his peace, made him a shaking coward, kicked him bleeding from his own deck to die in the black waters of the night.

Blindly he stared past Jack and his sister, struggling to find something, anything, to make himself forget. Outside the window, Johnny and Charlotte were playing with a small, fat dog with pointed ears that jumped into the air for the ball they tossed. Desperately Jeremiah tried to focus on them: the two laughing children dressed in white, the green lawn still glittering with dew, the fat little dog jumping and twisting again and again for the red ball, innocence and sunshine and laughter.

But not for him. God help him, never again for him.

Blackstone House, home to the last six earls of Byfield, was much as Jeremiah expected. Larger than his sister’s house, surrounded by far more land, Blackstone House was an elegant jumble of architectural fashions, from the oldest, sprawling wing of Elizabethan brick to the front facade of pale green limestone, a model of Palladian order, and arches with Doric pilasters that rose the full three stories high to the roof.