Page 31 of A Wicked Kind of Husband

“Lady Treyford,” his wife said. One would think from her tone that she had waited all year to meet this one woman. “How lovely to see you again. I believe we were introduced the last time I was in London.”

The countess’s expression suggested she had no recollection of meeting Cassandra, but she returned a greeting, as she had to do, given the audience. For all Joshua’s complaints, he had to concede that Cassandra could wield politeness like a scimitar.

Then Cassandra looked up at him, her smile warm as if she was happy to see him too, her eyes soft with something that might have been concern. Mostly likely concern for her precious sisters and her precious reputation and her extremely precious politeness. She stretched up, her body bumping against his, to speak in his ear.

“Joshua, please stop,” she whispered. “I’ll do it.”

“Do what?”

She widened her eyes. The blush rose in her cheeks. “What you said. Your…inducement.”

Oh. Hisinducement. Right. Ah. Well. Her fingers pressed into his arm, her eyes pleaded with him to behave. No surprise that she too was willing to ignore his father’s perfidy for the sake of good manners, but strangely enough, he did not feel any annoyance at her.

So he patted her hand and enjoyed the way the blush deepened in her cheeks.

“Cassandra, my darling,” he said loudly. “Allow me to introduce you to my father, the Earl of Treyford, and my dear stepmother, Lady Treyford.”

The pair of them looked uncertain, his father’s nostrils still flared, but Cassandra’s calming, civilizing influence worked on them too, and they all rose above the seething pit of human emotion to remember they were genteel. They issued tense greetings. Politeness won again.

Then Cassandra addressed herself to Lady Treyford, blathering some nonsense about “the exquisite beadwork on your gown,” and Lord Morecambe appeared and clapped Treyford on the shoulder and led him away under the pretense of discussing horses. The servants had cleaned everything up, and the guests resumed their chatter, and everything returned to normal. Like he had thrown a rock into a pond, and now the rock was gone and the ripples had passed.

Someone else came to claim Lady Treyford’s attention, and Cassandra led him away. He breathed in her fragrance, enjoyed her warmth pressed to him in warning.

“Shall we go home, then?” he said.

She didn’t look at him. “Not yet.”

“We have a bargain.”

She took a deep breath and smiled at someone behind him, still not meeting his eyes. “I will keep to my end of the bargain, but first you must keep to yours. We will stay another half-hour. We will circulate. We will make polite conversation—polite!—and you will make yourself agreeable to as many people as you can.”

“How marvelous you are, my darling, how principled. What you are willing to do in the name of politeness! How delightful, that you will be so polite in public, yet in private—”

“Not here.” Her tone was uncommonly sharp.

“These people—”

“They don’t need to see that you’re upset.”

“I’m not upset.”

She met his eyes then and her free hand covered his. “It’s all right to be angry with him. But you cannot undo it now and you don’t want these people to see that you’re hurting.”

Her eyes were big and concerned, their color neither green nor brown but something utterly new and irrelevant.

“I’m not hurting,” he snapped. “I could not care less about the man. I simply dislike him.”

“Then dislike him more quietly. You’re making people uncomfortable.”

“Heaven forbid anyone might feel uncomfortable.”

“Joshua. Please.”

She bumped against him again and brushed her lips over his cheek. The kiss was light and brief, yet the feel of it lingered long after her mouth was gone. Through the mess in his head, he was vaguely aware that she was soothing him like a skittish horse, but he could not summon up enough outrage to mind. She had a kind of courage and honor that put him to shame. He was curious to see how far she was willing to go with her “end of the bargain.”

“You owe me,” he said.

“I know.”

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