Romancing Mister Bridgerton (8 page)

Startled by Eloise's hand waving rather suddenly in her direction, Penelope straightened her spine and said, “Er, yes. Of course.”

But Penelope had a feeling she wasn't quite as firm in her convictions as her friend. Unlike Eloise, she hadn't refused six offers of marriage. She hadn't refused any; she hadn't received even a one.

She'd told herself that she wouldn't have accepted in any case, since her heart belonged to Colin. But was that really the truth, or was she just trying to make herself feel better for having been such a resounding failure on the marriage mart?

If someone asked her to marry him tomorrow—someone perfectly kind and acceptable, whom she might never love but would in all probability like very well—would she say yes?

Probably.

And this made her melancholy, because admitting this to herself meant she'd really, truly given up hope on Colin. It meant she wasn't as true to her principles as she'd hoped she was. It meant she was willing to settle on a less-than-perfect husband in order to have a home and family of her own.

It wasn't anything that hundreds of women didn't do every year, but it was something that she'd never thought she'd do herself.

“You look very serious all of a sudden,” Colin said to her.

Penelope jerked out of her musings. “Me? Oh. No, no. I just lost myself in my thoughts, that's all.”

Colin acknowledged her statement with a brief nod before reaching for another biscuit. “Have we anything more substantial?” he asked, wrinkling his nose.

“If I'd known you were coming,” his mother said in a dry voice, “I would have doubled the food.”

He stood and walked to the bellpull. “I'll ring for more.”
After giving it a yank, he turned back and asked, “Did you hear about Penelope's Lady Whistledown theory?”

“No, I haven't,” Lady Bridgerton replied.

“It's very clever, actually,” Colin said, stopping to ask a maid for sandwiches before finishing with, “She thinks it's Lady Danbury.”

“Ooooh.” Hyacinth was visibly impressed. “That's very cunning, Penelope.”

Penelope nodded her head to the side in thanks.

“And just the sort of thing Lady Danbury would do,” Hyacinth added.

“The column or the challenge?” Kate asked, catching hold of the sash on Charlotte's frock before the little girl could scramble out of reach.

“Both,” Hyacinth said.

“And,” Eloise put in, “Penelope told her so. Right to her face.”

Hyacinth's mouth dropped open, and it was obvious to Penelope that she'd just gone up—way up—in Hyacinth's estimation.

“I should have liked to have seen that!” Lady Bridgerton said with a wide, proud smile. “Frankly, I'm surprised that didn't show up in this morning's
Whistledown
.”

“I hardly think Lady Whistledown would comment upon individual people's theories as to her identity,” Penelope said.

“Why not?” Hyacinth asked. “It would be an excellent way for her to set out a few red herrings. For example”—she held her hand out toward her sister in a most dramatic pose—“say I thought it was Eloise.”

“It is not Eloise!” Lady Bridgerton protested.

“It's not me,” Eloise said with a grin.

“But say I
thought
it was,” Hyacinth said in an extremely beleaguered voice. “And that I said so publicly.”

“Which you would never do,” her mother said sternly.

“Which I would never do,” Hyacinth parroted. “But just to be academic, let us pretend that I did. And say that Eloise really was Lady Whistledown. Which she's not,” she hastened to add before her mother could interrupt again.

Lady Bridgerton held up her hands in silent defeat.

“What better way to fool the masses,” Hyacinth continued, “than to make fun of me in her column?”

“Of course, if Lady Whistledown really
were
Eloise…” Penelope mused.

“She's not!” Lady Bridgerton burst out.

Penelope couldn't help but laugh. “But if she were…”

“You know,” Eloise said, “now I
really
wish I were.”

“What a joke you'd be having on us all,” Penelope continued. “Of course, then on Wednesday you couldn't run a column making fun of Hyacinth for thinking you are Lady Whistledown, because then we'd all know it had to be you.”

“Unless it was
you
.” Kate laughed, looking at Penelope. “
That
would be a devious trick.”

“Let me see if I have it straight,” Eloise said with a laugh. “Penelope is Lady Whistledown, and she is going to run a column on Wednesday making fun of Hyacinth's theory that
I'm
Lady Whistledown just to trick you into thinking that I really
am
Lady Whistledown, because Hyacinth suggested that that would be a cunning ruse.”

“I am utterly lost,” Colin said to no one in particular.

“Unless
Colin
were really Lady Whistledown…” Hyacinth said with a devilish gleam in her eye.

“Stop!” Lady Bridgerton said. “I beg you.”

By then everyone was laughing too hard for Hyacinth to continue, anyway.

“The possibilities are endless,” Hyacinth said, wiping a tear from her eye.

“Perhaps we should all simply look to the left,” Colin suggested as he sat back down. “Who knows, that person may very well be our infamous Lady Whistledown.”

Everyone looked left, with the exception of Eloise, who looked right…right to Colin. “Were you trying to tell me something,” she asked with an amused smile, “when you sat down to my right?”

“Not at all,” he murmured, reaching for the biscuit plate and then stopping when he remembered it was empty.

But he didn't quite meet Eloise's eyes when he said so.

If anyone other than Penelope had noticed his evasiveness, they were unable to question him on it, because that was when the sandwiches arrived, and he was useless for conversation after that.

T
wo days later Penelope found herself once again cutting across Berkeley Square, on her way to Number Five to see Eloise. This time, however, it was late morning, and it was sunny, and she did not bump into Colin along the way.

Penelope wasn't sure if that was a bad thing or not.

She and Eloise had made plans the week before to go shopping, but they'd decided to meet at Number Five so that
they could head out together and forgo the accompaniment of their maids. It was a perfect sort of day, far more like June than April, and Penelope was looking forward to the short walk up to Oxford Street.

But when she arrived at Eloise's house, she was met with a puzzled expression on the butler's face.

“Miss Featherington,” he said, blinking several times in rapid succession before locating a few more words. “I don't believe Miss Eloise is here at present.”

Penelope's lips parted in surprise. “Where did she go? We made our plans over a week ago.”

Wickham shook his head. “I do not know. But she departed with her mother and Miss Hyacinth two hours earlier.”

“I see.” Penelope frowned, trying to decide what to do. “May I wait, then? Perhaps she was merely delayed. It's not like Eloise to forget an appointment.”

He nodded graciously and showed her upstairs to the informal drawing room, promising to bring a plate of refreshments and handing her the latest edition of
Whistledown
to read while she bided her time.

Penelope had already read it, of course; it was delivered quite early in the morning, and she made a habit of perusing the column at breakfast. With so little to occupy her mind, she wandered over to the window and peered out over the Mayfair streetscape. But there wasn't much new to see; it was the same buildings she'd seen a thousand times before, even the same people walking along the street.

Maybe it was because she was pondering the sameness of her life that she noticed the one object new to her vista: a bound book lying open on the table. Even from several feet away she could see that it was filled not with the printed word, but rather with neat handwritten lines.

She inched toward it and glanced down without actually touching the pages. It appeared to be a journal of sorts, and in the middle of the right-hand side there was a heading that
was set apart from the rest of the text by a bit of space above and below:

22 February 1824

Troodos Mountains, Cyprus

One of her hands flew to her mouth. Colin had written this! He'd said just the other day that he'd visited Cyprus instead of Greece. She had no idea that he kept a journal.

She lifted a foot to take a step back, but her body didn't budge. She shouldn't read this, she told herself. This was Colin's private journal. She really ought to move away.

“Away,” she muttered, looking down at her recalcitrant feet. “Away.”

Her feet didn't move.

But maybe she wasn't quite so in the wrong. After all, was she really invading his privacy if she read only what she could see without turning a page? He
had
left it lying open on the table, for all the world to see.

But then again, Colin had every reason to think that no one would stumble across his journal if he dashed out for a few moments. Presumably, he was aware that his mother and sisters had departed for the morning. Most guests were shown to the formal drawing room on the ground floor; as far as Penelope knew, she and Felicity were the only non-Bridgertons who were taken straight up to the informal drawing room. And since Colin wasn't expecting her (or, more likely, hadn't thought of her one way or another), he wouldn't have thought there was any danger in leaving his journal behind while he ran an errand.

On the other hand, he
had
left it lying open.

Open, for heaven's sake! If there were any valuable secrets in that journal, surely Colin would have taken greater care to secret it when he left the room. He wasn't stupid, after all.

Penelope leaned forward.

Oh, bother. She couldn't read the writing from that distance. The heading had been legible since it was surrounded by so much white space, but the rest was a bit too close together to make out from far away.

Somehow she'd thought she wouldn't feel so guilty if she didn't have to step any closer to the book to read it. Never mind, of course, that she'd already crossed the room to get to where she was at that moment.

She tapped her finger against the side of her jaw, right near her ear. That was a good point. She had crossed the room some time ago, which surely meant that she'd already committed the biggest sin she was likely to that day. One little step was nothing compared to the length of the room.

She inched forward, decided that only counted as half a step, then inched forward again and looked down, beginning her reading right in the middle of a sentence.

22 February 1824

Troodos Mountains, Cyprus

Penelope let out a soft grunt of protest when she realized that the page ended in the middle of a sentence. Who had he met? What had happened?
What danger?

She stared down at the journal, absolutely
dying
to flip the page and see what happened next. But when she'd started reading, she had managed to justify it by telling herself she wasn't really invading Colin's privacy; he'd left the
book open, after all. She was only looking at what he had left exposed.

Turning the page, however, was something else altogether.

She reached out, then yanked her hand back. This wasn't right. She couldn't read his journal. Well, not beyond what she'd already read.

On the other hand, it was clear that these were words worth reading. It was a crime for Colin to keep them for himself. Words should be celebrated, shared. They should be—

“Oh, for God's sake,” she muttered to herself. She reached for the edge of the page.

“What are you doing?”

Penelope whirled around. “Colin!”

“Indeed,” he snapped.

Penelope lurched back. She'd never heard him use such a tone. She hadn't even thought him capable of it.

He strode across the room, grabbed the journal, and snapped it shut. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“Waiting for Eloise,” she managed to get out, her mouth suddenly quite dry.

“In the upstairs drawing room?”

“Wickham always takes me here. Your mother told him to treat me like family. I…uh…he…uh…” She realized that she was wringing her hands together and willed herself to stop. “It's the same with my sister Felicity. Because she and Hyacinth are such good friends. I—I'm sorry. I thought you knew.”

He threw the leather-bound book carelessly onto a nearby chair and crossed his arms. “And do you make a habit of reading the personal letters of others?”

“No, of course not. But it was open and—” She gulped, recognizing how awful the excuse sounded the second the words left her lips. “It's a public room,” she mumbled, somehow feeling like she had to finish her defense. “Maybe you should have taken it with you.”

“Where I went,” he ground out, still visibly furious with her, “one doesn't ordinarily take a book.”

“It's not very big,” she said, wondering why why
why
she was still talking when she was so clearly in the wrong.

“For the love of God,” he exploded. “Do you
want
me to say the word
chamberpot
in your presence?”

Penelope felt her cheeks blush deep red. “I'd better go,” she said. “Please tell Eloise—”

“
I'll
go,” Colin practically snarled. “I'm moving out this afternoon, anyway. Might as well leave now, since you've so obviously taken over the house.”

Penelope had never thought that words could cause physical pain, but right then she would have sworn that she'd taken a knife to the heart. She hadn't realized until that very moment just how much it meant to her that Lady Bridgerton had opened her home to her.

Or how much it would hurt to know that Colin resented her presence there.

“Why do you have to make it so difficult to apologize?” she burst out, dogging his heels as he crossed the room to gather the rest of his things.

“And why, pray tell, should I make it easy?” he returned. He didn't face her as he said it; he didn't even break his stride.

“Because it would be the nice thing to do,” she ground out.

That got his attention. He whirled around, his eyes flashing so furiously that Penelope stumbled back a step. Colin was the nice one, the easygoing one. He didn't lose his temper.

Until now.

“Because it would be the nice thing to do?” he thundered. “Is that what you were thinking when you read my journal? That it would be a nice thing to read someone's private papers?”

“No, Colin, I—”

“There is nothing you can say—” he said, jabbing her in the shoulder with his index finger.

“Colin! You—”

He turned around to gather his belongings, rudely giving her his back while he spoke. “Not a thing that could justify your behavior.”

“No, of course not, but—”

“OW!”

Penelope felt the blood drain from her face. Colin's yell was one of real pain. His name escaped her lips in a panicked whisper and she rushed to his side. “What's—Oh, my heavens!”

Blood was gushing from a wound on the palm of his hand.

Never terribly articulate in a crisis, Penelope managed to say, “Oh! Oh! The carpet!” before leaping forward with a piece of writing paper that had been lying on a nearby table and sliding it under his hand to catch the blood before it ruined the priceless carpet below.

“Ever the attentive nurse,” Colin said in a shaky voice.

“Well, you're not going to die,” she explained, “and the carpet—”

“It's all right,” he assured her. “I was trying to make a joke.”

Penelope looked up at his face. Tight white lines were etched in the skin around his mouth, and he looked very pale. “I think you'd better sit down,” she said.

He nodded grimly and sagged into a chair.

Penelope's stomach did a rather seasickish sway. She'd never been terribly good with blood. “Maybe I'd better sit down, too,” she mumbled, sinking onto the low table opposite him.

“Are you going to be all right?” he asked.

She nodded, swallowing against a tiny wave of nausea. “We need to find something to wrap this,” she said, grimacing as she looked down at the ridiculous setup below. The paper wasn't absorbent, and the blood was rolling precariously along its surface, with Penelope desperately trying to keep it from dripping over the side.

“I have a handkerchief in my pocket,” he said.