Darling Beast

Page 26

“Shall we?” Moll teased and they stepped out into the hall to find John and Stanford waiting.
“Ladies!” John swept them a ridiculously elaborate bow.
“Ass,” Stanford muttered, offering Moll his arm.
That left Lily to take John’s arm as they descended. She’d worked with both Moll and John before and was finding Stanford to be quietly witty beneath his role as the elder actor. In normal circumstances she’d be enjoying herself immensely: a country house, a party, genial colleagues, and the prospect of a week’s worth of good food.
Tonight, though, she simply saw the party as something to endure.
On the first floor was a large salon and Lily glanced around it, mentally trying it on for size for their play. The lighting wasn’t very good—it was an interior room with only two windows at the far end—but the play would be at night anyway and with several dozen candles, it might well do.
She caught Stanford’s eye and when he winked, she knew he was thinking the same thing.
Then their host entered and with him the rest of the house party guests.
The first were Mr. and Mrs. George Greaves, their host’s son and his wife, though, since the older man was a widower, Lily suspected his daughter-in-law had had a hand in planning the party. She was a plain woman in her thirties, quiet, but with an intelligence in her eyes when they were introduced to her. Her husband, in contrast, had a carrying voice that would’ve done him well had he taken to the stage. George Greaves was a big, burly man and still had the good looks age had faded from his father.
Behind them was another, somewhat younger couple. Mr. and Mrs. Phillip Warner were still newlyweds and obviously in love. They made a striking couple, as both had beautiful butter-yellow hair, and Lily couldn’t help thinking they were destined to have a gorgeous brood of children.
Miss Hippolyta Royle was accompanied by her father, Sir George Royle, who had made his fortune in India and been knighted for his efforts. She was a dark beauty who obviously doted on her aging parent.
Besides Miss Royle, there were two other single ladies at the party: Mrs. Jellett, a society widow with a gossiping gleam in her eye, and Lady Herrick, the wealthy—and quite beautiful—widow of a baronet.
Lily was just thinking that the house party was weighted heavily in favor of the ladies when their host cried, “Ah, Your Grace, you’ve arrived!”
She turned to see the Duke of Montgomery, Malcolm MacLeish…
And Caliban.
Only he wasn’t Caliban. Not anymore. He was Viscount Kilbourne, his hair tied severely back, wearing a dusky-blue suit heavily embroidered in gold and crimson, and a cream waistcoat, and looking every inch the aristocrat.
LILY WORE A crimson gown that exposed the upper slopes of her lovely breasts, white and inviting.
Apollo felt a bit as if he’d been hit square between the eyes.
“You did not tell me Miss Goodfellow would be here,” he hissed in Montgomery’s ear.
“Didn’t I?” replied the duke. “Why? Was the information of import to you?”
Oh, the other man knew well enough that the information that Lily would be attending this same house party had been “of import.” In the weeks he’d spent preparing for the house party, Apollo had endured quite a bit of time with the duke. He was frighteningly intelligent, mercurial, and selfish to the point of mania, and had the sort of impish sense of humor that found the predicaments of others funny. Rather like a little boy who enjoyed pitching battles between beetles and worms. Except the duke was much, much more powerful than a little boy.
So it was hard to tell if the duke hadn’t told Apollo about Lily because he was amusing himself—or for some other more nefarious reason.
Not that Apollo gave a damn at the moment.
Over two weeks it’d been since he’d last seen her—two weeks in which he’d gone to bed every night wondering how she was and what she was doing, and waked with the image of her face behind his eyes.
Her lichen-green eyes had widened fractionally when she’d turned to see him, but she’d controlled herself all too soon, plastering on a bright social face that he was beginning to hate already.
His uncle, William Greaves, was making the introductions, but Apollo had eyes only for her.
She curtsied to him, murmuring huskily, “Mr. Smith,” as she did so, for they’d settled on the silly pseudonym for the party.
He couldn’t help himself. It’d been too long and he didn’t know how she felt about him anymore. If she hated him or even—God forbid—believed him to be a bloody murderer.
He caught her fingers and bent over them in a bow he’d learned as a boy and relearned again just in the past weeks. “Miss Goodfellow.”
One was supposed to kiss the air above a lady’s hand, but he brushed his lips over her knuckles, soft, but insistent. He wouldn’t let her forget what they’d had between them.
As he rose he caught the faint glimmer of irritation crossing her face and he was glad. Better he engender vexation or even outright hatred than indifference. Then they were moving past each other and away as other guests were introduced.
“Wasn’t that interesting?” Montgomery chirped as he accepted a glass of wine from a footman.
“Someone’s going to murder you in your sleep one of these days,” Apollo returned, waving away the same footman. He wanted to keep a clear head for the coming evening.
“Oh, but only if they can get past my man-traps,” the duke said absently.
He was probably jesting, but it was entirely possible Montgomery slept with an array of traps scattered about his bedroom. The man was like an Oriental potentate.
“Why did you bring me?” Malcolm MacLeish asked, suddenly and irritably.
The Scotsman’s color was high and his pleasant face was twisted into a sulky scowl. For the first time Apollo realized that he might not be the only insect Montgomery was playing with tonight.
“Oh, I suppose to remind you of your obligations,” Montgomery replied carelessly. “And to have fun, of course.”
The question was, whose “fun” was he counting on? Apollo had an uneasy feeling it was the duke’s own.
He glanced away from his sponsor and over to William Greaves, the reason he was here in the first place. His uncle was an ordinary-looking man, a bit pompous, a bit weak about the mouth, but was he capable of ordering the senseless murder of three men merely to entrap his nephew? It didn’t seem possible, but if it hadn’t been he, then who?
Apollo could detect no hint of a family resemblance in his uncle, but his cousin, George, had been a revelation. Like Apollo, he was a big man, well over six feet, with broad shoulders and brown hair. His facial features were rather better formed than Apollo’s own, but there was enough similarity that it made seeing the man like catching his own reflection in a mirror out of the corner of his eye. It puzzled him at first, this sense of familiarity, until he realized what it was: they moved alike, he and his cousin.
Apollo frowned, thinking, only to be interrupted by Montgomery. “Try not to look too much like the tragic hero of a melodrama, if you please. We’re at a party.” And with that he sauntered over to Lady Herrick, who was not only quite a beauty but apparently wealthy as well.
Just Montgomery’s type, Apollo thought sourly. Poor woman.
“He collects people, you know,” the architect said. “Like a spider collects flies. Traps them, ties them up in silken threads, and keeps them until he has use of them.” MacLeish turned to Apollo, his blue eyes very cynical for one so young. “Has he collected you, too?”
“No.” Apollo was watching Lily again, as she threw back her head in laughter at something Mr. Phillip Warner had said. Her throat was long and white and he wanted, rather violently, to lick it until she stopped laughing at other men’s jests. “He may think he has me, but he’ll find he’s very much mistaken.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” MacLeish murmured, following his gaze, “but ’twas I who was mistaken in the end.”
Apollo spared a glance at the other man and then moved away without comment. Whatever was going on between Montgomery and his architect, he hadn’t the time for it.
His eyes were fixed on Lily.
CALIBAN—NO, LORD KILBOURNE—was coming toward her and Lily wasn’t entirely certain what to do. She’d been aware of him this entire time, for his eyes seemed to burn into her back no matter where she moved in the room. It really wasn’t fair: it was he who had disappeared into thin air without so much as an explanation or word to her whether he was all right or not. And now he’d turned up at a house party of all things, still using that ridiculous name, Mr. Smith. Had he even invented an appropriate Christian name to go with Smith? A thought struck her, low and terrible. Dear God, she didn’t even know his proper Christian name! She’d let him kiss her and yet didn’t know the first thing about him. The realization made her bitter and a little unwise.
“What’s your real name?” she demanded as he made her side, and if she had to blink back wetness from her eyes, she told herself it was tears of anger.
He glanced around, presumably making sure no one could overhear him. Fortunately, Mr. Phillip Warner had moved away to flirt with his own wife and no one was within earshot.
He replied in a very low voice, “Apollo Greaves, Viscount Kilbourne.”
Apollo? Apollo? She nearly goggled.
Well, he certainly couldn’t use Apollo with Smith—what an entirely inane name. Almost as bad as Caliban when one considered it. What mother looked down at an infant son and thought, god of light? No one could live up to a name like that. Especially since he had a twin sister…
Lily’s brain stuttered to a stop and she realized simultaneously both who Apollo-the-god’s twin sister was and who Apollo-the-man’s twin sister must be.
“Your sister is Artemis Batten, the Duchess of Wakefield,” she hissed.
“Hush,” he muttered.
“Your sister’s a bloody duchess.”
“Yes?” He looked at her oddly, as if everyone had a duchess as a sister.
“Which means the duke is your brother-in-law.”
“He’s rather an ass, if that makes any difference.”
“It doesn’t,” she said decisively. “It truly doesn’t. Why are you even talking to me? I’m the blasted help.”
“You are not and you know it,” he said impatiently. “I need to talk to you. To explain—”
“I’m paid to be here,” she said with as much dignity as possible under the circumstances. “And you’re born to all this”—she waved her hand at the room, which, ill-lit though it was, still had a gold ceiling—“and more. You and I have nothing—absolutely nothing in common. I don’t know why you’re here, but I’ll thank you to stay away from me.”
She pasted a smile on her face and moved away from him as gracefully as she could. There was no need to cause a scene, just because her heart was breaking. Ridiculous, really. When he’d been a penniless workman in a garden, shabby and mute, he’d been well within her reach. Now that he was cleaned up and dazzling in his expensive clothes—that waistcoat alone must have cost more than she’d make in half a year—he was as high above her as the sun itself.
Apollo, indeed. Perhaps his name really did fit him.
If he was the god Apollo then she was merely a shepherdess or suchlike. Someone quite lowly and of the earth, not the sky. Shepherdesses might mate with gods in mythology but it always ended rather badly for the poor mortal.
And she had good cause to know that such was the case in this world as well.
The butler entered at that moment and announced supper and they went in to another dark room, this one long and narrow so as to fit an endless mahogany table. Lily found herself seated with the Duke of Montgomery on one side and the delightful Mr. Warner on the other. Directly across from her was Mr. George Greaves with Mrs. Jellett on one side and Mrs. Warner on the other.