The Duke of Morewether’s Secret (5 page)

He kicked himself for causing her brow to furrow. Gone was the funny, quick-witted young woman of only seconds before. Now she stood next to him looking every bit as foreign as ever and not in the charming way he usually thought of her. He was rarely this clumsy. Christian grabbed her elbow before she withdrew fully. “I’ve made myself horribly misunderstood. What I meant was I’d rather you call me Christian as the rest of them do.”

A tentative smile curved her lips. “Oh, I see.” She glanced back into the parlor where the ladies were filling a basket with what Christian assumed were the most god-awful and impossible charade clues ever devised. “I can do that. Christian.”

Disaster averted.

His sister’s voice called from the parlor. “Are you two coming?”

“Yes,” he called back trying to keep his annoyance at bay. “May I call you Thea?”

“If you must. The alternative is much too long.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“Althea Eugenia Ashbrook.”

“Eugenia — derived from the Greek for noble?”

“Indeed.” She sounded impressed, which made him absurdly pleased with himself. The bored rake in him snorted derisively.

“So, noble Thea, are you prepared to go to your doom?” Christian jerked his head in the direction of the impatient crowd in the parlor.

“Are you?”

“We’ll go together. You have no idea what hell charades with my family is like.”

Once more, her laugh filled his head with sensual music. God, he’d give anything to hear that symphony all the time. “Oh, it can’t be that bad. Surely you’re overreacting.”

Two hours later, after his mother had begged off and headed for home, the ladies team was beating the stuffing out of the gentlemen. As usual.

“Perhaps they share the same brain?” Dalton suggested.

“Are they cheating?” Thomas said for the third time that night. “I can’t ascertain how they’re doing it.”

“It’s because they’re witches.” Christian declared. “It’s not possible Francesca’s acting ability allowed Anna to guess the time Will Piper found her love note.”

The ladies had decided the theme for this bout of charades would be Most Embarrassing Moments in honor of Thea. They argued it would be a fabulous opportunity for her to get to know them all better. Dinner was over, and it was only fair someone else be made a fool of for a change. It was with a great deal of satisfaction he’d written the errant love letter incident for Anna and convinced Thomas to pencil in the Squirrel/Dog Debacle for his own wife. He chuckled under his breath knowing he’d have a reprieve for the next several hours.

He didn’t consider his sister and the others were every bit as calculating as he was.

Anna had guessed the love letter right away, and she’d laughed it off.

“I seem to remember you crying for weeks,” Christian had heartlessly revealed. He remembered at the time she’d been devastated when the miller’s son had discovered the letter she’s written when she was thirteen.

Anna had kept chuckling. “Oh, I did. Remember how awful that was? I had poured my heart and soul into that letter.”

“Remember how dreamy Will was?” Francesca had recalled, a faraway look in her eye.

“Um hmmm,” Anna replied with feeling.

“You know he runs the mill now,” Thomas had interjected. “Just had his third boy.”

“Oh, how lovely.” Anna had seemed genuine when she said it.

“I’ll bet they’re all as handsome as their father.” Francesca dipped her hand in the basket and stirred around the clues. “Your turn, Dalton.”

Dalton plucked a clue from the basket and grimaced. He handed the ladies the clue and, once it was revealed to them, they all giggled with the secret knowledge — all except Thea, who seemed bothered. Dalton turned to his teammates. “All right, gentlemen, we can get this. Watch me.”

Olivia turned over the glass and the white sand sifted through marking the time remaining for their turn. “Good luck, dearest.”

Christian and Thomas sat together on a settee in almost matching poses of concentration: leaning forward, elbows on their knees. They watched Dalton intently. Dalton screwed his face into a look of shock and alarm. Then, oddly, he seemed to be pantomiming an ape.

“Are you a monkey?” Christian asked.

“No. Just watch me.” Dalton continued doing what looked exactly like a monkey climbing a tree.

“He looks like a monkey,” Thomas agreed.

“I’m not a monkey.” Dalton glared at the two of them. Christian heard snickering coming from the other side of the room, but he ignored it.

Now Dalton pretended to be running, every couple of steps he’d look over his shoulder in surprise.

“A monkey running?” Thomas guessed.

“Damn it, forget the monkey,” Dalton yelled. He stopped running and it seemed like he was opening an imaginary window and crawling through it. Again with the exaggerated look of surprise. Now he was on his knees begging someone.

Christian leaded back on the settee in frustration. “Why would a monkey be running and sneaking into a house?”

Thomas shrugged. “I don’t know. Dalton are you acting out the clue?”

Dalton threw a look of fierce frustration at his teammates. “Are you even watching me?”

Now there was definitely laughter coming from the ladies. “Time’s half done.” One of them warned the gentlemen.

“Shhhhh,” Christian waved the warning away. “Start from the beginning and do it better.”

Dalton stalked back to the middle of the room and did the same thing over again but with minor variations.

“Is it a monkey wearing trousers?”

“Or a monkey not wearing trousers?”

Confusingly, Dalton both nodded and shook his head at the same time.

Thomas perked up. “Is part of that right?” Dalton nodded furiously. “The no trousers part?” Again a furious nod.

Christian couldn’t remember any of them having an embarrassing story involving a monkey with no trousers. Maybe it was one of Olivia’s moments? “He made a wild guess. “A monkey with no trousers breaking into a house?”

“Not a monkey!” Dalton yelled.

“A man with no trousers breaking into a house?” Thomas modified his earlier guess.

Suddenly, a thunderbolt struck Christian. He knew exactly what was written on that clue and he was mortified. Already, Thea had heard stories she described as wild and debauched and he hadn’t been able to dispute them. She had also made it plainly clear she found absolutely nothing charming about any of his previous misdeeds. Now his own family was supplying more episodes, proving to the lady he really was among the worst of them. Damn it all to hell.

“That’s not a monkey, it was me and, yes, I had no trousers.”

“Oh,” Thomas turned to him as the realization gelled in his mind. “Oh! The Lady Flockton Escapade.”

Dalton threw his hands down in relief. “Yes. Finally.”

Now the ladies were laughing with a great deal of gusto.

Francesca had tears rolling down her face. “I’ll never forget the look on your face when I caught you climbing in the library window.” She had to pause to catch her breath before continuing, “One leg in, one leg out —” her face was turning an alarming shade of pink, “— and all you were wearing were your drawers.” The last word was drawn out into a squeal of hysteria.

Christian made certain his face was a complete blank, revealing nothing about the quality of his anger with his sister. He even acknowledged it was absurd. Any other night, with any other extra guest, Christian would have led the recounting of the story of how his love affair with the married Lady Flockton abruptly ended when her husband burst into her boudoir and Christian had fled, sans trousers, out the second story window and slid down a rickety drain pipe only to run home half-dressed to be discovered by his sister as he sneaked back into the house through an open window. She had lorded that information over him for months, blackmailing him into all sorts of things he never would have agreed to otherwise.

But not this night. This night, Thea sat across the room and gazed at him not in amusement, but in disappointment. Up to now, even up to this very point, Christian had taken a cavalier attitude about his own reputation, even encouraging it along with the chaps at the club. He often told his own stories if there was a good enough audience, and told them better than his sister ever hoped to. A reputation for a man was a very different thing than that of a woman. His family’s reputation was nurtured and polished, but his own, no — his reputation added to his mystique and, truth be told, he enjoyed it. There was a great deal to be said for the life of comfort and hedonistic splendor of a wealthy, unmarried, titled and good-looking man of the
ton
. Only now, as his well honed but debauched reputation was paraded in front of a stranger whom he wanted to impress, well, damn it all, it was embarrassing. Looking at his life through her eyes, he felt small and frivolous and … stupid.

He couldn’t even blame it on a woman’s tender sensibilities. Clearly Thea wasn’t puritanical. He’d seen her
treasure collection,
and she had an excellent sense of humor. She was fun, as her willing participation in the game’s absurdity proved. But she did not approve of his reputation and it mattered to him.

Why her opinion mattered so much Christian didn’t know, but it did, and no manner of talking down the incident would redeem her opinion of him.

“Don’t forget about the rain,” Thomas added to Francesca’s retelling. Then, God have mercy, his best and oldest friend in the entire world turned to Thea and added to Christian’s misery by informing her that particular evening there had been a torrential downpour thus Christian ran the four blocks home in the rain with his white cotton short clothes plastered to his skin rendering them damn near transparent.

“So essentially,” Anna finished the tale, although he almost couldn’t hear her over the raucous laughter filling the room by all but Thea and himself, “Christian ran home naked. Through the streets of London. With an outraged husband giving chase.”

Finally, someone besides Thea noticed he was not rolling around in a fit of glee on the settee like an idiot — something that could not be said for Thomas. “Oh, misspent youth.” Dalton said, in what sounded like a weak attempt to deflect the harmful effects of everyone else’s rapture at his embarrassment, and clapped him on the back.

“Can we move on, please?” Christian asked and leveled a look at his sister.

“Of course.” His sister wiped her eyes and attempted to get control of herself. She gave him a questioning glance which he ignored, but she did shake the basket of clues again and lifted it high for Anna to select one.

This time when Anna showed the gentlemen her clue to act out, Christian was relieved to see the Newfoundland/Squirrel Fracas had everything to do with his sister and nothing to do with him. The next clue was his to pantomime, and he was able to act out Thomas’s accidental dip in the Serpentine well enough that his team guessed it before the time ran out.

His mood improved each time he exchanged a smile with Thea, especially after she guessed the fall in the lake even though she didn’t know who the clue belonged to. Christian was even beginning to believe the evening hadn’t gone so badly. Perhaps his reputation in Thea’s eyes could be salvaged.

And then the floor fell out from under him. When Olivia stood in the middle of the room and pretended to row a boat, and then pinwheel and flail her arms before obviously falling into to the water, Christian was irate. In fact, irate was probably a bit too tame for the feeling that crept up his back and pinched at his shoulders. He didn’t even wait for one of the ladies to guess the clue before he stood from the settee and strode purposefully across the room.

“Wait,” Francesca called to him, “where are you going?”

“Elsewhere.”

“Christian, come back,” she implored and suddenly his sister was at his side in the long hallway. “It’s just a game.”

“I understand that.” His voice remained steady. He had absolutely no one to be angry at but himself. He was the one to stupidly fall out of the tiny sailboat during the ill thought out rescue of Olivia from a kidnapper several years ago. He was the one who acted childish at the time, but he wouldn’t act that way tonight. He had every intention of leaving his sister’s home with his dignity intact.

“Are you angry?”

Christian pulled his elbow from her grasp. “I’m weary of being the butt of the evening’s festivities.”

His sister wrinkled her nose. “I’m sorry. We were a little hard on you this evening, I suppose, but usually you don’t mind. Usually, you’re oddly proud of your sins.”

“Yes, well.” Christian didn’t finish the sentence or the thought. He wasn’t even sure why he was so upset.

Francesca peered at him intently. “Anna was right.”

That wasn’t helpful. “I sincerely doubt it, whatever she said.”

“No, she was. You like her.” Francesca nodded knowingly.

“Anna? Of course I like her. She’s been living in my house for a decade.”

She quirked an eyebrow at him. “Don’t be obtuse. You like Miss Ashbrook, and who can blame you She’s charming and lovely and interesting.”

Christian shrugged her off. “I’m late for another engagement.” He had nothing to do. Nothing. He supposed he would wander over to the club and find a card game, but his favorite marks were sitting in the other room with the lovely foreigner.

“Don’t worry.” Francesca turned to go back to her guests.

Damn
. Nothing inspired spine wrenching worry like the phrase
don’t worry
. “Don’t do me any favors, Frankie.”

“Trust me.” She waved over her shoulder. “Good night, brother dear.”

Trust me
was infinitely more terrifying.

Chapter Five

Thea made every effort to make the most of her time while in London. She toured all the museums and the menagerie, rambled through the Tower of London and imagined being imprisoned there, and spent scads of her inheritance on clothes. The afternoon spent at Berkeley Square enjoying a bergamot ice from Gunter’s was among the most amusing. She and Anna wagered on the skill of the waiters as they dodged traffic, darting back and forth from the shop to the waiting customers across the street with trays of ices.