Heir and a spare...
Jacob Thornton-Spencer never intended to inherit his father's estate-one rarely does when they're the half-disowned second son of a particularly ill-tempered duke-but when his father and his brother drop dead in the middle of a w...
It was unfortunate, then, that behind those lips lived a particularly rude tongue.
Miss Osborne tittered nervously behind a gloved hand. The rest of the group shifted uncomfortably. Nora didn't blame them: despite the educated lilt of his tone, the man was unbearably rude.
Maxwell had made his disdain for her obvious upon that first introduction. Caroline had attempted to contrive a whimsical meeting, and what could have been more romantic than a walk through the quaint village that neighbored George's family estate in Whitehill?
Nora smiled thinly.
As it turned out, the stroll through the countryside village was anything but the fairy-tale romance Caroline had planned. Nora could not blame her cousin. No one would have guessed Ian Maxwell, what with his perfectly charming manners, was a perfectly repulsive ogre. Nor would they have fathomed how far Nora was willing to go to prove her point.
The memory of Caroline's crestfallen face, and an irritating voice that whispered 'wholly unsuitable,' kept Nora from returning to that same stubbornness that had ended with Ian Maxwell decrying surgeon's daughters and Nora knee-deep in self-righteous mud.
"Only a small accident with shoes, I'm afraid," she said. It was a feat of utmost accomplishment, Nora decided, that she kept her voice even. Caroline's mother would have fainted from the shock: Nora Fane had managed to swallow her pride for the sake of decorum.
George laughed again as Nora brandished the offending slippers.
"Dangerous little things!" George shook his head in disbelief. He winked at Nora with an affectionate smile. "Why you women choose to wear such brutal garments, I'll never know."
The conversation teetered precariously close to inappropriate, but the group laughed with him. That was the allure of Lord George Thornton-Spencer. Despite (or perhaps enhanced by) the generations of pompous aristocracy, the acres of enviable land in Hampshire, and his classically handsome looks, George lived with a certain reckless vitality. He was like the dashing hero in a novel: almost too large for everyday life. It attracted the friends and admirers who circled him now, as it did the incomparable Caroline Howard. Nora did not quite understand it, but who was she to doubt her cousin's love?
"Speaking of women," he said with the faintest of frowns. "Where has my fiancée run off to?"
"I haven't seen her since I left for refreshments," Nora murmured after a wave of shrugging non-answer echoed through the group. She had no intention of reminding George that she'd also been with the disheveled lieutenant who'd ruined her afternoon, but the man seemed to suddenly notice his brother's absence.
Miss Osborne, naturally, followed his gaze and pursed her lips. "Did Jacob disappear as well?"
Fighting the urge to glare at the woman, Nora opened her mouth to reassure George that his fiancée and his brother had certainly not disappeared together (or at least, she hadn't disappeared with the more odious of his brothers), but George only shook his head with a crooked smile.
"I suppose I'm not surprised." His smile grew wider with the promise of a private joke. Nudging Lord Grey with his elbow, George continued, "How long did he last at your mother's military ball?"
With a soft chuckle, Grey shook his head. "Barely an hour! And with hardly a goodbye. One would have thought we'd promised the guillotine instead of a gavotte."
"I can't blame him for that," Swift said quickly, only partly under his breath. "I'm not certain which sounds a worse fate."
Another round of laugher circled through the men. Miss Osborne and Lady Grey protested with counterarguments. Margaret sipped her lemonade with a half-smile. As if they'd forgotten Nora was there, they quickly devolved into critiques and praises of dancing. It was a fascinating phenomenon that seemed to happen when she was still and silent: Nora almost felt she had the ability to become invisible. If Caroline had been present to watch the wry curve of her cousin's lips, she would have lamented it as more proof of severely lacking self-confidence. Nora regarded it a useful escape tactic. Unfortunately for Nora's plans of sneaky retreat, her invisibility was limited to those who had no interest in her, and while Ian Maxwell might not have been inspired to helpless love by Caroline's machinations, he certainly held a wicked interest where Eleanor Fane was concerned. His blue eyes narrowed with malicious pleasure.
"Were you really with the lieutenant all this time, Lady Eleanor?" He spoke quietly, but the disbelieving bite of his words cut through his friends' mocking deliberation of the finer points of the waltz. His eyes raked over her wrinkled, grass-stained skirt.
The conversation around them withered within the same number of heartbeats it took for the heat to rise in Nora's cheeks. She was frozen between conflicting desires. Though the lieutenant's determination to not be caught in her presence had chaffed her pride, she, too, had not intention of being trapped into a scandal. Not if said scandal threatened wedding bells. Obviously, Maxwell meant to imply that deadly impropriety. Even so, the sharp insult of Maxwell's words—and the persistent echo of wholly unsuitable—made her tongue itch to counter him: she was a spinster-in-the-making by choice. She meant to drive suitors away. Straightening to her full height, chin held high, thoughtless of consequences, Nora opened her mouth to say so.
"We were delayed," the lieutenant's smooth tenor interrupted before she could speak. Nora's heart stuttered in her chest. "By a group of particularly thirsty ladies."
Hands occupied with lemonade glasses, he could only smile in answer to the chorus of greetings and masculine encouragement. Jacob forced a glass into her hand, the one not clenched around shoe ribbons, and its contents slopped over the edges. The new insult to the previous dirt stains did nothing to improve her appearance. Or her temper.
She meant to make excuses. Something feminine and insipid and unquestionable—like a headache—but Lord Grey, as if still susceptible to her invisibility, spoke over her.
"How long will you be in London this time?" he asked.
The lieutenant hesitated in his reply. It was slight, but his jaw tightened and he swallowed before launching into some convoluted story of woodworms and leaky hulls. The gentlemen, despite their clear lack of nautical expertise, all nodded sagely. Miss Osborne and, Margaret, Lady Grey retreated to their own conversation.
Though Jacob Thornton-Spencer smiled and laughed at the right bits, though he sipped at his lemonade with perfectly mild interest, again, Nora wondered if he was nervous. His hazel eyes moved in sweeping saccades, as if searching for hidden enemies. His posture was as taut and firm as his coat was wrinkled.
"So you're staying for the wedding." Maxwell's voice interrupted Nora's silent summation. "By Jove, it has to have been over a decade since you've been to Whitehill. I wonder if you'll even recognize it."
To Nora, the comment would have been innocuous, if not for the sudden hiss of silence between the men. Maxwell smiled at the lieutenant through a clenched jaw; Swift swallowed thickly. Lord Grey coughed and shifted his weight away from his friend. The women's conversation trailed away into uncomfortable, ringing silence.
George glowered. He was a man of extremes, and the bright laughter that had surrounded him all afternoon shifted into stormy, consuming anger. Though handsome and fair, there was nothing of that gaiety and roguishness in his countenance. Fist clenched, brow furrowed...
Lord George Simon Thornton-Spencer was no Medusa, but if a look could kill?
Nora glanced at the smirking Ian Maxwell.
Someone was flirting with death.
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