Page 14 of An Honorable Deception
He didn’t disappoint her. “Isn’t she engaged to what’s-his-name now? That ship-building expert fellow? She won’t want to be bothered with us.”
“It’s so adorable that you think she wouldn’t drop Mr. Durst in a second if you crooked your finger.” Eugenia Ballantine, daughter of the most prosperous shipping magnate in the region—whose brother was now dead, thanks to Mother’s scheming—had been enamored with Yates for years.
Yates held his hand up before him, bending each finger in turn as if they were a mechanism he’d never used before. “I didn’t know my fingers had such power. I shall have to guard that most diligently, lest I have every young lady in England swooning at my feet when I think I’m only hailing a cab.”
She snorted another laugh. “You probably ought to becareful of that in general, Lord Strongman. You’re already the subject of plenty of female tittering.”
And if he ever grinned like that at the masses of eligible young ladies, heaven help them all. “Am I now? And what is this tittering about? My impossibly good looks? My unfailing charm? Oh, I know—my capuchin monkey.”
More laughter filled her throat, making her realize that she hadn’t spent nearly enough time at Marigold and Yates’s house this Season. No one else ever made her laugh so much . . . and she’d needed it. Missed it. She hadn’t known it until now.
“I daresay if those pretty young things knew they’d be competing with Penelope for your heart, they’d declare defeat and sulk in a corner.” She looked over her shoulder, half expecting the monkey to come hooting her way toward them, having heard her name. But no, all was still quiet in the stables. No chattering monkey in evidence, no roaring lion, no slinking snow leopard.
Yates’s smile skewed a bit, went sardonic. “Idaresay if they saw this place and knew the state of the estate, they’d lift their pretty little noses and scoff me out of London.”
“Hardly.” Lavinia turned around, walking backward a few paces so she could look out over the Fairfax lands. The beautiful house of golden stone needed some work, yes. The expansive landscaping had been reduced to its bare minimum near the house and tumbled into absolute, stunning wilderness toward the North Sea that made up one of the estate’s borders. And she knew for a fact there were only two aging horses in the stable stalls—the others were filled with retired circus animals. But there was magic here. And sometimes she thought there was a bit of it in its new young lord too—if she were in the mood to believe in fairy tales. Which she was, a bit, this morning.
“Don’t you know, Yates? All you need is a rich young bride to set it to rights. That’s what gentlemen do. So if you need help identifying those ladies with the largest inheritances and dowries...” She lifted her brows.
He flashed her a cheeky grin. “I believeyoutop that list, Vinny. Are you proposing?”
She faced forward again. “Don’t tempt me. There is a definite allure to a man whose secrets I already know—and which are noble instead of dark.”
He splayed a hand over his heart, exaggerated hurt on his face. “You think me so boring as that? I’ll have you know that I’m secretly a pirate. A dark knight. A...”
“Circus clown, you mean.” She let her next step close the distance between them so that she could bump her shoulder into his. Well, into his arm. Once upon time their shoulders had been level, but those days had long since fled. Then again, once upon a time he’d have been reduced to stuttering and flushing at the mere suggestion of marrying her.
A strange twang went through her chest. When they were seventeen, before she’d fallen ill, he’d looked at her with adoration. She’d made certain he understood that nothing could come of it.
Last year, when she’d finally rejoined society, she’d been relieved that Yates had got over his old infatuation. He treated her like he did his sister and Gemma. They were friends, family, and that was all she’d wanted from him, despite the fact that she had fine eyesight and hadn’t failed to notice that the preceding five years had somehow turned him into one of the most exquisite male specimens to be found. Her goal had still been to quickly find a suitable husband and get away from the tensions mounting in the Hemming household.
But then it had come crashing down. Her mother, a traitor.Her father, brokenhearted and mourning the wife who was not the woman he’d thought he’d married. How could Lavinia ever take that same risk? Know that she was marrying a truly good man and not one with a list of wretched secrets?
And now Marigold’s whispered words of “gossip” about the men paying Lavinia court made sense. She wasn’t sharing what she heard—she was sharing what she’d learned through her investigations. Which made the future look even more depressing.
She slanted a look up at Yates as he opened the gymnasium door for her. It smelled of sweat and leather and hot metal, but she tried not to grimace at the assault to her senses. “Pirate or otherwise, though, half the ladies in London would give their eye teeth to switch places with me right now, I daresay. Just to see you flex your muscles.”
He rolled his eyes. Which was odd. Heknewhe’d chiseled himself a physique worthy of the Greek gods. He turned the knob for the lights and pointed to a shelf full of ... stuff. That looked like it ought to belong to a medieval torture chamber. “Right. I flex my muscles, and they sneer and tell me I look like a common laborer.”
The words rang some distant, discomfiting bell. She came to a halt beside a mad scientist’s bench, adorned with rods and bars and horrifyingly large weights, and stared at his back. “Did I say that?”
And did he stillrememberher saying that? Was it what made him stride forward, away from her, with such determination?
He pulled a coil of something from one of the shelves and tossed it her way. Only when it landed at her feet and she saw the handles fitted to either end did she identify it as a skipping rope. “Perhaps you ought to do me the kindness of forgetting every insulting thing I said when I was afoolish girl who thought I knew anything about anything. I didn’t.”
He chose another skipping rope for himself and strode her way again, a smile teasing the corners of his mouth once more, lighting the depths of his eyes. “Is that your way of saying youliketo watch me flex my muscles now?”
It was the fact that he flirted so easily, with nary a blush nor a stammer, that made her absolutely certain he didn’t care a whitwhatshe thought of him now.
Another stupid twang. But she mustered a grin of her own. “It’s one of my new favorite pastimes. That’s why Ireallyagreed to this training, you know. To watch you.”
“Good. Perhaps it’ll distract you from the torture.” He pointed at the rope again. “I assume you remember how to use that, my lady of laziness?”
No doubt her attempt at a withering glare was somewhat ruined by how awkwardly she held the handles after crouching to pick it up. “Illness is hardly laziness.”
“An excuse that ended a year ago.” He positioned his own rope—longer than hers by a good bit—in his hands and stationed himself across from her, out of swinging range. “See if you can keep up.”
She couldn’t. Oh, the old skill did come back to her after a moment, and she even smiled as she remembered the many happy hours of childhood spent with a skipping rope, a bright spring day, and the laughter of friends. For a few minutes, it was fun.
