The Heiress Effect (Brothers Sinister #2)

She’d handed him her cloak. As if he were a servant. A footman came up to Oliver, apologetically taking the unwanted burden from him, but it was too late. He could see the horrified smile on Whitting’s face, the one he didn’t quite seem able to repress. Bradenton, too, gave Oliver a too-amused smile.

He was long past the point of getting angry at little slights, and this one hadn’t even been intentional. But God, she was a disaster. He almost felt sorry for her.

Bradenton gestured behind Oliver. “Miss Fairfield,” he said, “there is another man here to whom you have not yet been introduced.”

“There is?” Miss Fairfield turned and finally set eyes on Oliver. “Goodness. I didn’t even see you when I came in.”

She’d seen him. She’d just thought he was a servant. A simple mistake; nothing more.

“Miss Fairfield,” Oliver said smoothly. “A pleasure.”

“Miss Jane Fairfield, this is Mr. Oliver Marshall,” Bradenton said.

She put her head to one side and looked at him. She was pretty. That annoying part of his brain couldn’t stop noticing it in spite of the garish way she’d rigged herself out. Pretty, if you liked the healthy glowing English rose sort of woman. Normally, Oliver did.

He wondered when she was going to realize her error. Her eyes narrowed in concentration, and a frown left a furrow on her chin.

“But we’ve met,” she said.

This was not what he had expected her to realize. Oliver blinked uncertainly.

“I’m sure we’ve met,” she continued. “You look familiar. There’s something about you, something…” Miss Fairfield tapped her lip with a finger, shaking her head as she did. “No,” she concluded sadly. “No. I am wrong. It’s simply that you look so common with that hair and those glasses that I mistook you.”

He looked common?

Another woman delivering an insult of that magnitude would have emphasized the word just to be sure that her intent was not mistaken. Miss Fairfield, though, didn’t act as if she was delivering a set-down. She sounded as if she were remarking on the number of pups in a litter.

“I beg your pardon.” He found himself standing just a little taller, looking at her with a hint of frost in his expression.

“Oh, no need to beg my anything,” she said with a smile. “You can’t help your looks, I’m sure. I would never hold them against you.” She nodded at him, as graciously as a queen, as if she were doing him a tremendous favor. And then she frowned. “I’m so sorry, but would you repeat your name again?”

Oliver gave her his stiffest bow. “Mr. Oliver Marshall. At your service.” Don’t take that literally, he almost added.

Her eyes widened. “Oliver. Were you named, perchance, after Oliver Cromwell?”

That was definitely not a genuine smile on his lips. His forgery nearly cracked under the strain. “No, Miss Fairfield. I wasn’t.”

“You weren’t named after the one-time Lord Protector of England? Why, I should have thought that he would be an example that your parents would have wished you to emulate. He started out common like you, didn’t he?”

“The name implies nothing so grand,” he managed to get out. “My mother’s father was named Oliver.”

“Perhaps he was named—”

“No,” Oliver interrupted. “Nobody in my family had hopes for my posthumous execution, I assure you.”

He almost thought she smiled at that, but the twitch at the corner of her lips disappeared before he was even sure it was there. There the conversation ground to a halt.

One, two, three…

As a boy, Oliver had gone back and forth between two worlds—between the heights of the upper class, so freezingly polite, and the more cheerful working class world that his parents inhabited. There was a frozen silence that Oliver associated with these moments of upper-class awkwardness. It was that moment when every man around made a calculation based on manners, and decided to hold his thoughts to himself rather than speak aloud and risk rudeness. He’d been on the receiving end of that silence all too often as a boy: when he’d admitted that he’d spent a summer in manual labor, when he’d referred to his father’s former occupation as a pugilist… In fact, for those first years until he’d learned the rules, silence had followed just about every time he had opened his mouth.

For all that it was supposedly born of manners, that silence could cut. Oliver had been on the outside of it often enough to know precisely how deeply. He glanced over at Miss Fairfield.

…four, five, six…

Her lips were smoothed into placid acceptance. Her smile was open and honest. There was no sign that she even noticed the tension.

“Who else will be joining us this evening?” she asked. “Cadford? Willton?”

“Not, uh—” Hapford glanced around. “Not Willton, he’s…indisposed.”