“No. He arrived yesterday but no one’s seen him till nou. Lord Case said he’s passed the day at the hermitage up the hill.” She chuckled. “Can ye imagine it, Miss Caulfield? An English laird preferrin’ prayer to play?”
He turned his head to Cecilia Anders and an odd little jitter of moths fluttered through Ravenna. His jaw was smooth and strong, his hair almost as dark as hers and falling just short of his collar. Miss Anders laughed at something he said and he smiled. From across the room, Ravenna saw his clean-shaven cheek crease.
Her entire body went hot. Then cold. Then hot again.
Impossible.
As though he sensed her alarm, he looked over his shoulder and his attention alighted upon her. With that slight smile still shaping his violently bruised lip, he inclined his head to her.
“Why, Miss Caulfield,” Lady Iona said, “ye’ve already got an admirer. Well done, lass!”
It could not be. Yet there he stood, purple lip as evidence.
He was a lord? The son of a marquess? The brother of an earl? Wasn’t that just her poor luck? She might have had some success at chastising a stable hand. Now her attacker far outclassed her. No justice would come to her now.
But she could see justice done elsewhere. Nodding to Lady Iona, she continued toward mousy Ann Feathers and the Whitebarrow twins. As she approached, Ladies Penelope and Grace seemed to be studying Miss Feathers’s reticule.
“Well, isn’t this clever, Grace?” Lady Penelope said.
“Oh, yes, Pen. So many beads,” Lady Grace said with a thin smile.
“Beads on reticules and fans were delightfully au courant . . .” Penelope fluttered her fan before her mouth and added in an audible whisper to her sister, “Last year.”
Miss Feathers fingered the sparkling beads sewn in a clever little swirl pattern on her reticule. “Papa bought this for me on Bond Street in January.”
Lady Penelope offered her a moue of pity. “Well, that explains it. All the best shops in town close up after Christmas.”
“Do they?” Like everything about her, Miss Feathers’s eyes were round as carriage wheels.
“I doubt it.” Ravenna stepped into the little circle that crackled with cruelty and misery. “She said that to make you feel poorly, Miss Feathers. Your beads are quite nice. Nicer than anything I’ve got, certainly.”
“Oh, that is an enviable recommendation, isn’t it?” Lady Penelope’s half-lidded eyes gleamed.
“Dear Miss Caulfield,” Lady Grace purred. “Wherever did you find that gown? In the housekeeper’s chamber?”
“In fact, yes,” she said, her neck burning. It wasn’t true. But when Petti had tut-tutted the gowns she’d had made up for the trip, she’d told him that delicate muslins and silks weren’t for her, that she would only ruin such finery and she felt much more comfortable in sturdy woolens anyway. More herself.
“Oh, dear,” Lady Penelope said. She was subtler than Grace, and her gaze slipped from Ravenna back to Miss Feathers. “Wasn’t your mother a housekeeper once, Miss Feathers?”
“She was cook to an earl when my father and she became acquainted,” Miss Feathers whispered.
“A cook? Ah. That explains it,” Lady Grace said, glancing at Lady Feathers’s rotund form. “But dear Miss Caulfield.” She turned back to Ravenna. “You must have spent the entire summer season last year at the sea.”
“I did not.”
“Then however did your skin acquire that delightful . . . glow?”
“Perhaps she is fond of walking, Gracie,” Lady Penelope said. “Do you remember last season when you strolled every day for a week on Viscount Crowley’s arm in the park? Even a bonnet and parasol did not entirely protect you from the sun.”
“But surely strolling on a viscount’s arm has not been Miss Caulfield’s trouble, Pen,” Lady Grace demurred. “Has it, Miss Caulfield?”
“Oh, I suppose you’re right, Grace,” her sister said. “But perhaps she is an avid rider. Sometimes that can give a girl a dreadful tan. Do you ride, Miss Caulfield?”
A footman appeared beside Ravenna with a silver tray of glasses filled with sparkling white wine. She didn’t usually drink wine. She must get out of this place. With all her might she mentally willed the sun to shine and the snow to melt and reached for a glass.
“Allow me.” The voice from the shadows the night before, deep and wonderfully autumnal and decidedly not-a-stable-hand’s voice, sounded at her shoulder. With his scarred hand he removed Miss Feathers’s half-empty glass from her fingers and replaced it with a fresh glass, then offered another to Ravenna. She was obliged to accept it, no matter that he had not looked at her, though he must recognize her.
“Good evening, my lord,” Lady Penelope said upon a curtsy. Lady Grace and Miss Feathers followed suit. All three of them stared at him as though he were a god. Ravenna stood immobile. She would curtsy to a man that had attacked her in the dark when Sir Beverley’s pet pig flew.
“Miss Feathers, as you are my sole acquaintance among this lovely quartet,” he said with a smile that said he was thoroughly aware he was making every female in the room breathless, “would you be so kind as to make introductions?”
Miss Feathers obliged. The twins curtsied again, deeper this time. Lord Vitor Courtenay, second son of the Marquess of Airedale, bowed.
“What happened to your lip?” Ravenna said to him. “It looks sore.”
Miss Feathers’s fingers darted to her mouth.
“Thank you for your kind concern, Miss Caulfield.” His eyes were very dark blue and still rimmed with the longest lashes Ravenna had ever seen on a man. Beauty and virility and confidence and sheer privileged arrogance combined to remarkable effect. No wonder these silly girls stared. “It was bitten,” he said.
“Oh, dear.” Lady Penelope pouted sweetly. “That must have been alarming.”
“Not terribly. I have been bitten by cats before.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “This one,” he said, turning his dark, laughing gaze upon Ravenna, “was otherwise charming.”
“What about the bruise on your brow?” Ravenna said. “Did the cat do that too?”
“I fell off my horse,” he said with a slow smile, his gaze dipping to her mouth. “I injured my leg in the moment too.”
He was entirely unrepentant, and vastly handsome, one of those overindulged noblemen she’d heard plenty about from Petti, the sort who behaved in any irresponsible manner he wished yet was never obligated to answer for it. Just like the prince, she supposed.
“Oh, that is a shame,” she said. “To be abused by both a cat and a horse in succession doesn’t say much for your rapport with animals, does it? Perhaps you shouldn’t have anything to do with them.”
“Actually, it rather strengthens my resolve to pursue the opposite. What sort of a man is he who shrinks from challenges, after all?”
A shiver of panic mingled with the odd heat slipped through her. Something about his smile . . . How did his mouth look so familiar?
Because when he had been pressing her body into the straw, she had stared at that mouth.
She hadn’t.
She had. In fear, of course.
Fear or not, his mouth was perfect, both at rest and grinning and marked with a purple wound. And he knew it.
“My lord,” Lady Grace said sweetly. “You mustn’t fault Miss Caulfield for misunderstanding the ways of gentlemen. Her father is a country vicar. It is not to be wondered at that he could know nothing of noble resolve.” The very breath that issued from her lips condescended.