“How odd. Lady Honoria said almost that very thing to me when she attended my last dress fitting. Had she not been there I would have looked like a frigate in full sail.” She indicated the simple but elegant gown she wore, which he had to admit flattered the girl greatly.
“Ruffles and bows?” he whispered in her ear as the dowager countess rose to her feet to greet them.
“A veritable shopful.”
Daedalus laughed out loud.
“Really, Whitcombe,” the Dowager Countess of Breadmore drawled, nose in the air.
“Yes, really, Countess.” He inclined his head, kissed his niece, and headed to the spot where he’d last seen Miss Perriton. By the time he arrived the group consisted of Lady Honoria, Captain Atherton, Carrington-Bowles, Julia Amherst, the barrister Stephen Forsythe and his wife, Lady Jane Forsythe, who had been the widow of Baron Trevellyn. He had not intended to have a conversation with Miss Perriton in the midst of so many of her friends. And he assumed they were all friends as they were laughing together quite merrily. From their expressions as he drew near, the subject of their laughter was him.
“Lady Honoria, please tell me you are not sharing tales of our childhood with Miss Perriton,” Daedalus said in the pause whilst the orchestra prepared for the next dance.
“Perish the thought,” Honoria said. “Miss Perriton was explaining her aversion to beautifully handsome men. The sort who cause women to take leave of their senses.”
“How fortunate for me I do not fall into that category of men.” Silence fell so swiftly and so hard he wondered if the entire ballroom had not heard him. Perhaps not, but the faces of his companions could not have been more shocked had he stripped naked and danced a gavotte. “What?”
Miss Perriton reached up and plucked his spectacles off his nose. Three young ladies dressed in virginal white chose that moment to walk by and turn their heads in his direction. They immediately plowed into a hapless footman carrying a tray of glasses. Once the noise of breaking glass and shrieking women subsided his spectacles were shoved unceremoniously back onto his face. Whilst two footmen scurried to clean up the mess the three ladies continued to stare at him as they crossed the ballroom.
“That doesn’t prove anything,” he said, rather indignant at their inference. “I do things like that all the time.
“That is because without those spectacles, according to my lady wife,” Captain Atherton said with a grin. “Your ability to see is that of an octogenarian dowager after half a bottle of brandy.”
“Which accounts for my appreciation of your paintings,” Daedalus shot back. “Miss Perriton, I am given to understand that the Earl of Breadmore has expressed an interest in courting you.” Well that certainly threw a damper on the laughter.
“How nice for him,” was Miss Perriton’s reply.
“I like her,” Forsythe said.
“Told you you would,” Atherton said.
Daedalus had had enough, of everything he suspected. The orchestra began the strains of the next dance. “Shall we, Miss Perriton?” She obviously didn’t need his protection from Breadmore, but he most definitely needed an answer of some sort to his request, among other questions. “I believe this is our dance.”
“Is it?” She threaded her arm through the elbow he winged at her. “I don’t remember giving my assent.”
Carrington-Bowles chuckled and whispered something about Daedalus being in some sort of trouble.
“Am I?” Daedalus asked as he and Miss Perriton walked not toward the dance floor, but toward the terrace outside the open French windows.
“Are you what, Lord Whitcombe?” She steered him across the terrace and down the steps into Breadmore’s torch-lit gardens.
“In trouble.” Their feet crunched as they rambled down one of the graveled paths toward a small folly at the far end of the gardens.
“Do you want to be?”
He had no answer for that, at least none he’d thought through completely. Not that he had formed a complete thought from the moment she’d taken his arm. Something about this woman turned him into a blithering idiot. He drew in a deep breath, a breath redolent with the scent of roses.
“Lord Breadmore’s gardens are lovely, are they not?” she asked as they climbed the steps into the folly, hidden almost in its entirety by the profusion of climbing rose vines wrapped around the columns and walls of the Grecian-themed structure.
“Breadmore has nothing to do with the beauty of these gardens.” She stilled next to him, no doubt at the venom in his words.
“The Dowager Countess then.” Miss Perriton withdrew her arm and wandered to the other side of the folly. In the dim light of several lanterns scattered about the small room, her face and the skin bared by the cut of her gown glowed golden ivory. She settled onto a stone bench, carved in the form of aklinai, a Greek bed, and spread her skirts about her.
“The Dowager Countess is as hard as that bench. I doubt she could persuade a weed to grow. I still find the idea of her growing her son in her own body impossible. Perhaps she farmed the process out to a willing servant girl.”
“You certainly make no effort to tender your opinion of your in-laws with even an ounce of civility, Lord Whitcombe. Why is that, I wonder?” She gazed up at him, head tilted slightly to one side.
“If we are to become intimate, Miss Perriton, I would suggest two things,” he said pouncing on the opening she unintentionally gave him. If this woman ever did anything without intention. “First, I will endeavor to always offer you my unvarnished opinion, and I will expect the same of you.” He stepped closer until his evening shoes brushed the outer edge of her skirts.
