Page 43 of The Lover's Eye
“Marriane had the gall to ask me if she could go to London with her, but the fact is, there is no way in hell my wife is travelling such a distance in her feeble health.I’m like to never get my damned heir as it is.”
“Will anyone else even be a willing sponsor?The Season started nigh on two months ago.”Giles took pains to keep his ravenous curiosity from his voice.
“Only God knows.One has already refused, but my wife can be awfully convincing.”Pemberton cocked his head to one side, shrugging his shoulders lightly.“I should only be too delighted if you’d take the problem off my hands and offer for the girl.”
“I’m afraid the idea wouldn’t appeal to her,” Giles mumbled into his glass.She seemed loathe for him to be in her company tonight.It was killing his confidence, even as he admired her, drank in the privilege of being near her.She was even more beautiful than he remembered, the elusive silvery shade of her gown making her eyes sing.
Pemberton chortled.“I don’t expect she’s picky, after the way Sempill behaved with her.”
The glass almost slipped from Giles’s clammy fingers.Pemberton met his gaze and acquiesced his visible interest.“Captain Sempill took liberties with her.”
Giles’s stomach churned.He thought he might cast up his accounts on the plush Turkish carpet, but managed to swallow once, now twice.“Do you mean to say she was hurt?”
The careful regulation he’d had on his voice was lost.He sounded weak, but that vulnerability was braced against an undercurrent of fury.
“Not so serious as all that,” Pemberton said with a flap of his hand.“Sempill found her walking alone and held her against her wishes.He did nothing more than kiss her—nothing the rest of us haven’t done in our own courtships.The only difference being she didn’t welcome his advances.”
The only difference.Giles could have choked on the vastness of that diminution.“Surely Miss Ridgeway did not confess this to you directly?”
A wicked smile stretched one corner of Pemberton’s mouth, and he swirled his nearly empty glass.“Does my wife look capable of keeping secrets to you?”
“What little I know of Lady Sempill, it’s a wonder she hasn’t forcibly demanded an engagement,” Giles said, speaking in part to himself.Many people would see such an act as rendering Isobel’s virtue irrevocably compromised.
Oh God.Lord Ridgeway seemed like just the sort of old-fashioned man to think that way.Was that why he’d turned Giles away?
“The old tabby knows how to play the game,” Pemberton said.“Though it seems she’s growing impatient.She tried to create a scandal at the Everly’s ball.”
Giles forgot he disliked brandy.The liquid raced down his throat with dry, numb heat as Pemberton explained what had happened.He knew he hadn’t been kind in the village this morning, but now he understood the full, horrid weight of his words.They swirled in his head with nauseating force.
Unless your betrothed deems it necessary for propriety’s sake.
No wonder Isobel wanted to keep her distance from him!That foolish comment had been made in a moment’s reaction; a combination of shock and hurt and envy.He’d had no idea what hardships she had been facing.
He tried to present a mask of calm indifference as he followed Pemberton up the stairs to the drawing room, but his vision flicked a shade slower than the movement of his eyes and he gripped the banister with damp palms.He felt the effects of the drink in his veins, and the full shame of his actions pulsed along with it.How was he going to enter the room and sit near her?How was he going to smile and play some trite game, when all he wanted was to have her to himself and beg her forgiveness?
The task before him was daunting, but when he entered the room and did not find Isobel there at all, he unearthed a new depth to his hopelessness.
“She wasn’t feeling well,” Marriane said, her voice a bit like an echo chamber in Giles’s head.
He endured a few games of Vingt-un, losing pitifully each time.Words seemed to be a near impossibility, and smiling was a complete one.Pemberton’s revelation had reduced him to two things: thinking about Isobel and looking for her.His eyes spent more time on the drawing room doors than they did on the cards laid before him.
When his host and hostess were at last ready to retire, Giles insisted he could show himself to the door.The time spent in that hot room, paired with his overindulgence, had made him perspire, and he wiped his face with a handkerchief before descending the steep staircase.
It seemed the cruelest thing in the world to leave Shoremoss now.He had been lucky Pemberton accepted his forwardness with so much grace and he had gotten to share dinner with her.It was not a trick he could repeat again so soon.
As the footman returned with his hat, coat, and gloves, Giles was struck by an idea.“Might I have a piece of notepaper and a pen?”
The footman stared at him blankly before gazing over his shoulder and up the stairs, as if he expected conflicting orders from Pemberton.Giles sighed, wishing the Shoremoss servants were as sly as his own Mr.Finch.He pulled a coin from his purse and pressed it into the footman’s hand.
“A piece of notepaper.And a pen.”
Perhaps they weren’t sly, but at least they were susceptible to being greased in the fist.He was led to a small desk to dash off his note in blurred haste.
Miss Ridgeway,
I must beg your pardon for my harsh words this morning.I misunderstood your circumstances, but that will be an issue no longer.I have not earned your favor.I do not deserve it.But—
Say you will see me again.
