It was, she supposed, only about half a lie, if one wanted to do the mathematics. Perhaps even only one-third, depending upon how one separated out her deceptions.
Jasper, who’d struggled to his feet, began wheezing and appeared to consider retiring to the floor once more.
“You went to Scotland?” he gasped. “On your own? Toelope?”
Lydia was too afraid to discover whether Arthur’s expression registered equanimity or horror at her words. “I wasn’t entirely alone. I came with Lady Georgiana.”
“Oh, well, that makes it all right then.” Jasper scrubbed his hands over his face several times, then once through his hair, thus committing the rooster version of her brother to its mortal end. “Mother is going to go off her head.”
“Ah,” Lydia said. “Well. Perhaps you ought to let me tell her first. As the”—she was going to hell for this, surely—“the Countess of Strathrannoch. In the flesh. Mother will like that.”
“If she doesn’t bayonet you for marrying without her guiding hand.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lydia said. “Mother would use a rapier. More elegant. Far less blood.”
“Lyd—”
To her surprise, Arthur interrupted Jasper’s pointed questions with one of his own. His hand came warmly to her upper back, his thumb resting on the bare skin above the buttons that closed her gown. “I think my wife’s satisfied your curiosity well enough, and you’ve not yet answered any questions of hers. Why are you here under false pretenses?”
“I am on business,” Jasper said. He stood a little straighter as he faced Arthur, and his voice had taken on that mellifluous tone again. His Mr. Eagermont voice, evidently. “It is important that de Younge not know my true identity.”
“On business?” Lydia stared at him in frank astonishment. “You do not evenlikebusiness.”
“I have been known to dabble—”
“You most certainly have not,” she said. “What did Theo have to do to you to persuade you?”
“Theo?” Jasper blinked, and then, changing course, nodded. “Yes. Theo. He’s involved himself in textile-factory reform. I’ve been tasked with gathering information for him.”
“By… playacting?” It made a kind of sense, she supposed. Jasper was by far the best of the Hope-Wallace siblings at winning friends and mesmerizing innocent bystanders with his charm. If anyone could wheedle information from a roomful of strangers, it was certainly Jasper.
And yet—it also did not make sense. “Why here?” she asked. “Why Scotland, for heaven’s sake? Is de Younge one of Theo’s competitors?”
“He is.”
“In politics or investments?”
“Yes,” Jasper said decisively, and then he pushed himself off from the wall and angled his face toward Arthur. “Don’t think this is over, Strathrannoch.” His voice was icy, but Lydia noticed that this time he kept himself just out of Arthur’s reach as he headed back toward the drawing room.
“’Twas over before it started,” observed Arthur mildly.
It was remarkable. Even from behind, she could see Jasper’s ears turning a rather virulent shade of puce.
“You needn’t antagonize him,” she whispered to Arthur.
“He tried to remove you to a place you didn’t want to be. Brother or no, he deserves what he got and more.”
She blinked up at him. His curls were slightly disheveled, his jacket off and his sleeves falling open at the cuffs. The appeal of him was boggling, really. She wanted to launch herself at him. She wanted to wrap her legs around his waist. She wanted to find out if their height difference would matter if he had her up against the wall and—
“Ah,” she said. “Forget about Jasper. Put yourself back together or they’ll think we’re out here trysting again.”
“Lady Strathrannoch”—her stomach did a neat somersault as he nudged a wayward lock of hair out of her mouth—“I suspect they already do.”
Lydia encountered Georgiana at the top of the stairs, one long hall away from the precious respite of her bedchamber.
“Formidable evening?” Georgiana asked as she surveyed Lydia’s general state of, presumably, pallid bedragglement.
It had not been so very awful at first. Over dinner, she had not needed to speak, and she’d rather enjoyed listening with one ear for the conversation of the Valiquettes and Thibodeaux and with the other for the increasingly less subtle barbs traded by her brother and her faux husband.
