Rothersthorpe?
He’d come into his father’s title, then. Her insides hollowed out at the thought they’d drifted so far apart she did not even know that much about his life.
Though it had been what she’d wanted.
It had.
‘But Mama Lyddy called him Mr Humming… something.’
‘Hemingford,’ Robert corrected her. ‘That is his family name. Now that his father has died, he has of course inherited the title. He is Viscount Rothersthorpe now. I would have thought you would have known that, Mama Lyddy.’
‘No.’ She’d taken such pains to avoid seeing his name in the Weekly Messenger that she had missed even that.
When you made your bed, you had to lie in it. And it had been hard enough to accustom herself to Colonel Morgan as a husband as it was. Letting anyone suspect she had married one man, whilst mourning the inconstancy of another, would have done nobody any good.
And it would do nobody any good to so much as hint at the truth now, either.
‘Heavens, Robert, surely you know I have never been one to pore over the society news? I left that world behind when I married your father.’
‘But you have been talking about him,’ Robert persisted. ‘Neither of you can take your eyes off him.’
Oh dear. He was not going to let it drop. Now he was like a guard dog with a bone.
‘I was trying to warn Rose to be on her guard. I don’t want her taken in by his handsome face and superficial charm.’
He gave her one of those penetrating looks that put her so very much in mind of his father. He had the same steely-grey eyes, the same hooked nose and eyebrows that could only be described as formidable. Of all Colonel Morgan’s children, he was the one who resembled him, in looks at least, the most.
He reminded her of him all the more when he looked down that beak of a nose and said, ‘You need not worry. I am more than capable of protecting her from undesirables.’
Both Lydia and Rose turned their backs on him, snapped open their fans and began to ply them vigorously.
Men! They were all so…impossible!
Especially the handsome charmers like Rothersthorpe, as she must think of him nowadays. Because, even though she was angry with him, she was still achingly aware of exactly where he was, at any given moment.
She refused to look at him, yet she knew when he returned the plump young lady to her chaperon. And she sensed him turn and begin to saunter straight across the room to where they were sitting.
Her heart skipped a beat when she realised he was coming straight towards her.
That he was going to speak to her.
Well, his first words had better be an apology for letting her down, just when she’d needed him the most.
He came to a halt not three feet before her chair, a sardonic smile hovering about his lips.
And it took all her will-power not to get up and slap it right off his face. She had to remind herself, quite sternly, that this was a public ballroom and she must not cause a scene that would rebound on Rose.
She took a deep breath and snapped her fan shut.
She could be polite and dignified. She could, even though her heart was pounding, her mouth had gone dry and her knees were trembling.
She wasn’t an impressionable eighteen-yearold any longer, but a mature woman, and she refused to blush and stammer, or go weak at the knees, just because a handsome man was deigning to pay her a little attention.
Chapter Two
‘Good to see you, Morgan,’ said Rothersthorpe, his gaze sliding right past her as if she was not there.
After a moment’s struggle, she acknowledged that it was probably just as well he had not spoken to her first. Apart from the fact that it wasn’t the done thing, she still wasn’t fully in control of her temper. Only think how dreadful it would be if he’d said, ‘Good evening, Lydia’, as though nothing was wrong, and she’d let all this bottledup hurt and anger burst forth like a cork flying from a shaken bottle.
As it was, she felt Robert’s hand go to the back of her chair. And when she turned to look up at him, she saw her stepson glaring at him too. He’d placed his other hand on the back of Rose’s chair and taken up such an aggressive posture that not even Rothersthorpe could fail to read the warning signs.
Oh, no. It looked as though there was going to be some kind of scene after all.
But at least it would not be of her making.
Not that Lord Rothersthorpe looked in the least bit daunted.
‘It has been a long time,’ he persisted. ‘Too long,’ he said with a rueful smile and thrust out his hand.
Lydia’s heart thundered in her breast while Robert stood quite still, looking at that outstretched hand. It was only when Robert finally took it, saying, ‘Yes, yes, it has’, that she realised she had been holding her breath. It slid from her in a wave of guilty disappointment. She hadn’t wanted Rose’s evening ruined by a scene, she really hadn’t. But a part of her would still very much have liked to see Rothersthorpe flattened by her stepson’s deadly right hook.
‘I cannot believe our paths have not crossed in all this time,’ Robert was saying as though he truly liked Rothersthorpe. When she’d been relying on him to dismiss him, the way he’d dismissed one penniless peer after another, during the few weeks Rose had been attending balls.
‘I do not spend much time in town these days,’ replied Lord Rothersthorpe. ‘And when I do come up, it is not to attend events such as this.’ He looked around the glittering ballroom with what, on another man’s face, she would have described as a sneer.
‘I have made a point of avoiding the company of most of the set I ran with at one time,’ he drawled. ‘A man has to develop standards at some point in his life.’
Standards? He had always laughed at people who claimed to have standards.
What on earth could have happened to make him sneer at his younger self?
And now that he was standing so close, she could see that there were subtle changes to his appearance which she had not noticed from a distance. Time had, of course, etched lines on his face. But they were not the ones she might have expected. Instead of seeing creases fanning out from his eyes, as though he laughed long and often, there were grooves bracketing his mouth, which made him look both hard and sober.
‘So, the rumours about you,’ said Robert, ‘are all true, then? You have reformed?’
Lord Rothersthorpe smiled. In one way, it did remind her of the way he’d used to smile, for one corner of his mouth tilted upwards more than the other. But although he’d moved his mouth in the exact same way, it was somehow as though he was merely going through the motions.
‘Not entirely,’ he said. ‘I still enjoy the company of pretty young ladies.’ He looked down at Rose in a way that made Lydia’s hackles rise. Had there been just the tiniest stress on the word young? And where had all his charm disappeared to? When she’d been a girl and Nicholas Hemingford had spoken such words, she would have defied any girl it was aimed at not to have melted right off her chair.
But this man, Lord Rothersthorpe, well, she couldn’t quite explain why, but he did not sound charming at all.
And when he said, ‘Will you not introduce me to your lovely companion?’ the expression on his face put Lydia in mind of a…of a…well, yes, of a pirate intent on plunder.
Her