Much Ado About You

Page 47

If Mayne wasn’t more careful, Tess would catch wind of his ridiculous infatuation with Lady Godwin.He lit a candle, only to find that it wasn’t so late at night. Mayne was likely to be awake. Lucius dismissed the fleeting thought that he would be carousing, celebrating his last night of bachelorhood. Even when they were boys together at Eton, Mayne was never coarse: wild to a fault, violent in his passions, desperate in his affections: never coarse.
Lucius dressed and then walked down the long hall, checking the sitting room, the music room, the breakfast room. It was in the library, that sanctuary of male pursuits, that he found Mayne.
He was sitting in his favorite seat before the fireplace. The fire had burned to mere embers. He was sitting as if frozen, long legs stretched out, a glass in one hand, and a decanter on the floor close by the other. His shirt was pulled from his trousers, his eyes were half-closed, and his face was set in rigid lines.
“Where’s Rafe?” Lucius asked.
“I drank him into his bed,” Mayne said, not even turning his head. “That’s not easy, with a four-bottle man like Rafe, but I’ve done it.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve fallen into a megrim on the very eve of your wedding?” Lucius said, still from the doorway, a surge of rage that he didn’t understand lending his voice a harsh undertone.
Mayne raised his eyes and took a moment to focus on him, and then tossed back the rest of his glass. “She might have fallen in love with you, you know,” he said conversationally.
Lucius’s heart thumped in his chest. He walked forward and casually nudged the decanter in passing.
It almost turned over, but Mayne’s hand shot out and caught the neck, just in time. “Watch my claret,” he said, sloshing a quantity into his glass.
“I see no reason why she should fall in love with me as opposed to you,” Lucius said.
“You’re a gentleman,” Mayne said, rolling his head backward and staring at the ceiling. “She’s a lady, for all she cut off her hair and started wearing clothing that would have made a high-flyer proud.”
Lucius blinked. Apparently he’d mistaken the lady at issue. Mayne was talking about Lady Godwin, the woman he’d fallen in love with last spring, whereas he himself was thinking…of another woman.
“Helene might have loved you,” Mayne continued, his voice rough and unsteady. “Might have loved you enough to stay away from that muckworm of a husband of hers. I’ve figured it out. Helene needed an antidote to him—to all his opera singers and the Russian dancers on the dining room table. So she turned to me, but I wasn’t good enough either. But if I had been you, all that politesse, pretty manners, old-fashioned virtues…” His voice trailed off.
“Lady Godwin, by all accounts, is in love with her husband,” Lucius said uncompromisingly, sitting down opposite Mayne. “No pretty manners could have changed that.”
“Nonsense,” Mayne said. “I wouldn’t have gone near her if she were happy with her husband. She and Godwin hadn’t lived together for ten years.”
Lucius didn’t say anything. Mayne knew as well as he did that whatever had been the case previously, Helene, Lady Godwin, fairly glowed when the earl entered a room these days. And Godwin might have had an opera singer or two around the house a while ago, but he had eyes for no one but his wife now.
“Well, aren’t you going to say something?” Mayne said belligerently, glaring at Lucius.
“You’re foxed. I would suggest you retire. If you remember, you are embarking on married life tomorrow morning after breakfast.”
Mayne didn’t take that very well. He narrowed his eyes and his speech grew even thicker. “You’re turning into a pretentious little prig, do you know that? You were never exactly easy in your manner, but now your prudery is close to sinful.”
“Since you’re cast-away, I’ll ignore that,” Lucius said calmly.
“Above correction, are you?”
“No. But above fighting with a man who’s drunk as a wheelbarrow.”
“I’m not drunk,” Mayne said, returning his glowering eyes to the fireplace. “I wish I were drunk.”
Lucius refrained from comment.
“I’ve no doubt you think I’m jug-bitten,” Mayne said with a heavy sneer. “A gentleman of your caliber finds himself on the go from a glass of milk.”
Lucius got up and walked to the door, but Mayne was out of his chair in a violent surge of unsteady limbs.
“You didn’t used to be like this,” he said, jerking Lucius back by the arm. “I remember you casting up your accounts into the Thames—or are you too abstemious to acknowledge such a thing?”
Lucius turned to face him, pulling away his arm so swiftly that Mayne swayed and almost disbalanced. “I was seventeen.”
“Stubble it,” Mayne snapped. “The only thing that’s changed between us is that your blasted mother decided you were smelling of the merchant classes. And since then you’ve been a regular Holy Willy.”
Lucius froze. “I would greatly prefer that you didn’t comment on my mother.” His voice had the smooth threat of a pope chastising a junior devil.
But Mayne was too far intoxicated to have an ear for innuendo. “We’ve handled the subject of your family with kid gloves for years. The hell with it. She may be the daughter of an earl, but she’s a right b—” He caught himself, just in time.
Lucius just waited. He was leaning against the door, arms folded over his chest.
But Mayne had seemingly realized that he was on the verge of causing a breach from which there could be no recovery and was sorting through his rather bleary brain, trying to find a way to rectify the situation.
“Yes?” Lucius asked, his tone excruciatingly polite and just as icy. “Surely there is more that you would like to get off your chest?”
Mayne had apparently decided that he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamp. “I don’t really give a damn about your parents. I’ve always thought your mother was a mean-spirited woman who never got over the shock of her own marriage. Now you—you’re turning into the type of self-righteous prig whom no one really likes, even if they pretend that they do.”
Lucius felt the blow to his chest as if it were physical. Mayne turned and dropped into his chair again.
“Your father is a small-minded wart on the ass of—of—of the ton,” he added, with rather less clarity than could be desired.
Lucius turned, but Mayne’s bleary voice from the depths of the chair stopped him. “You’d better drop all that stiff-rumped nonsense before it’s too late, before you turn into an even bigger wart yourself.”
Lucius stood for a long moment, his jaw clenched, thinking longingly about smashing Mayne’s nose into the back of his throat.
But when he strode over to see if Mayne wanted to add a final insult that would tip the whole conversation over into violence, he heard a snore.
Mayne had spilled the rest of the glass of claret on the white linen of his shirt. His hair was tumbling over his forehead. He looked drunk—drunk and miserable.
Lucius stood for a moment, eyes narrowed, staring down at his friend. He stopped in the hall and told a footman that the earl was in need of assistance.