A painful sensation struck her midriff. Rose was as deaf to warnings as she’d been herself at that age. She couldn’t see the danger. And nor, apparently, could Robert, because he was performing the introduction.
‘This is my half-sister, Miss Rose Morgan,’ said Robert. ‘It is entirely on her account we have all uprooted ourselves and come to town this spring.’
‘Enchanted,’ said Rothersthorpe, bowing low over her hand. ‘London society will be all the better for having such a beauty adorn its ballrooms.’
‘And this is my stepmother, Mrs Morgan,’ continued Robert, while Lord Rothersthorpe continued to gaze at Rose. ‘Though, of course, you already know her.’
Rothersthorpe turned his head. The expression of admiration which he’d bestowed upon Rose vanished without trace.
‘I would hardly claim to know her,’ he replied, making her a curt bow. ‘Our paths crossed, briefly, almost a decade ago. I seem to recall that you came to town for the sole purpose of catching a husband?’
There was a distinct note of accusation in his voice, which was monstrously unfair. She could have snatched at those rambling words and held him to account for them. Instead, when he’d made it so obvious he regretted them the moment they’d left his lips, she’d let him escape.
‘You know very well that I did,’ she therefore replied. In fact, she’d told him quite plainly that if she didn’t find a husband before the end of the Season she was going to be in a pickle. And he’d brushed her concerns aside by making a jest about things never being so bad as you feared when the time came to face them.
‘And since,’ he said with a hard smile, ‘in those days, I was virtually penniless, that naturally meant you did not waste much of your time upon me.’
It had not been like that. Why was he twisting it to make it sound as though she’d been in the wrong?
‘Not when you made it so very clear that you did not wish to get married, my lord,’ she retorted, confusion temporarily diluting her annoyance. ‘No woman with an ounce of self-respect would wish to be accused of setting her cap at a man so clearly averse to the notion of getting leg-shackled.’
‘Touché.’ He raised his hands to acknowledge the hit. ‘It is true to say I was young and enjoying my freedom far too much to sacrifice it. However, now,’ he said, turning his attention back to Rose once more, his expression softening, ‘I have matured to the point where the prospect of matrimony no longer terrifies me. On the contrary, now that I am a respectable man of means, marrying is not only the next logical step for me to take, but one which I find most desirable.’
Lydia felt as though he’d slapped her. The prospect of marriage back then had terrified him. She’d seen it on his face, understood it from the way he’d vanished without trace after uttering what she might have interpreted as a proposal, if she hadn’t known him better.
Mrs Westerly’s words rang in her ears, for the second time that night. ‘You mark my words, when the time comes, he will marry an heiress…’
An heiress. She looked at the predatory way he was examining Rose. Rose, who was not only incredibly wealthy, but extremely pretty too.
Had it been only this evening, before setting out, that she’d decided she’d never been in better looks? Oh, she’d dismissed Rose’s comment that she looked like a fairy princess as the nonsense it was. She was too curvaceous nowadays to warrant that description. Not that she minded. She’d been positively scrawny when she’d been Rose’s age. Worn down by cares that the Colonel had lifted from her shoulders. From the moment she’d married him, her health had begun to improve. And bearing and feeding a child had even bequeathed her a bosom of which she was positively proud.
She was better at picking out clothing that suited her, too. The pastels Mrs Westerly had told her to wear for her own début had always made her look completely washed out. Whiteblonde hair, greyish-blue eyes and milk-white skin could really make a girl look, according to the acid-tongued reigning beauty that year, like a streak of pump water.
So she’d been pleased with the ensemble she was wearing tonight. The rich blue of her underskirt brought out the colour in her eyes, though it was the gauzy overskirt, sprinkled with spangles, that had caused Rose to make the comment about fairy princesses. She’d even decided not to worry that the neckline was a touch too daring, that there was nothing wrong with revealing what she now regarded as her best feature. Besides, the pearls that nestled between her generous breasts had always boosted her confidence. Colonel Morgan had given them to her on her wedding day, telling her she was a pearl beyond price. If he’d only said it on that occasion, she might have dismissed the words as idle flattery. But he’d kept on saying it, right up to the day he’d died. Even when he’d taken to giving her diamonds, these pearls remained her favourite. Because they made her feel…valued.
But now she felt as though she’d become invisible because Lord Rothersthorpe had eyes only for Rose.
‘But I am being remiss,’ he said, turning towards her with an obvious effort. ‘I really ought to offer my condolences on your loss. Although…’ he paused, his eyes scanning her outfit slowly, before returning to her face ‘…you are so clearly out of mourning that I wonder if it is indelicate of me to remind you of Colonel Morgan’s demise at all.’
It felt just as though he’d honed sarcasm into a sharp blade and thrust it between her ribs. The others might have missed it, but she’d seen the barely concealed contempt with which he’d assessed the finery with which she’d been so pleased, not half an hour since. And it all became too much.
‘Do you think I ought to go about in blacks for ever?’ She felt Rose flinch, though she was too angry to tear her gaze from Lord Rothersthorpe’s sardonic eyes.
‘And if it was indelicate to remind me of my husband’s demise,’ she continued, in spite of Robert clamping the hand that had rested on the back of her chair firmly on her shoulder, ‘why did you do just that?’
‘Naturally,’ put in Robert, while Lydia was floundering under the horrible feeling that Lord Rothersthorpe was deliberately trying to hurt her, ‘we had to delay Rose’s come-out until we were out of full mourning.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ Lord Rothersthorpe said mechanically, ‘if I have caused any offence.’
But he didn’t look the least bit sorry. On the contrary, she’d seen a flare of something like satisfaction flicker through his eyes when he’d goaded her into lashing out at him. And just to prove how insincere his apology to her had been, when he turned to Rose, his face showed nothing but compassion. ‘The death of a parent is always a difficult milestone in one’s life.’
A parent, but not a husband, was what he meant.
‘I trust it would not be inappropriate for me to ask if you would care to dance? Is it too soon for you to think of it?’
‘Not at all,’ said Rose, leaping to her feet.
‘Oh, but, Rose,’ said Lydia, ‘you really ought not…’
Lord Rothersthorpe turned to her and smiled. Mockingly.
‘If you remember me at all, Mrs Morgan, surely you recall that I never pay the slightest attention to anything a girl’s chaperon might have to say?’
Oh, but that twisted the knife in the wound he’d already inflicted. To refer to her as a chaperon…
She knew his opinions of chaperons, all too well. He’d never had a good word to say about any of them and now he was calling her one, to her face.
And it was no good reminding herself that a chaperon was exactly what she was. She knew what he meant.
Her eyes stung as the last vestige of hope that she might ever have meant anything to him at all curled up and blackened, like a sheet of paper tossed on to an open flame.