Chapter 44

Taking her place on the satin upholstered chair Devorlane Hawley had pulled out from the small supper table for her, Cass hoped her expression was both neutral as a basin of tepid water and completely befitting someone who had spent the afternoon quietly cloistered in the library as opposed to someone who had been forcibly restrained from leaping from a moving coach and nearly fracturing her skull.
Dining with the devil required a certain length of spoon, after all. She wouldn't want it looking as if such behavior was anything less than normal.
Opening her napkin, she set it on her lap. Why was she so afraid to step back into Chessington with him? In a few words? She wasn't. She'd just been a little fraught.
"Thank you so much, Lord Hawley, I am perfectly comfortable."
Well, she was. And if she wasn't, the only body it would be over was her own dead one. He reached across her and uncorked the champagne. As the bubbles fizzed she offered the glass her coolest stare. Opening her napkin was one thing. Drinking from this tainted cup another.
"Is the wine not to your taste?" He set the bottle back in the silver ice-bucket on the mahogany sideboard.
"If it's not are you going to pour it down my soddin' throat, pray tell?"
He sat down in the chair opposite, instantly adjusting his trouser knees. "I think you'll find I'm not going to do anything, except enjoy this supper."
"That's a change. I'm surprised you're not going to call out Carson and drive me around and around the driveway. Or worse."
His gaze flicked her. "Don't give me ideas."
She shrugged, flicking her own gaze over her crystal glass. Waterford, with a slight chip to the base. "The wine is fine, I suppose. But the company now-such a shame, don't you think, something can't be soddin' done about that? But there ... "
When her revulsion for being owned frothed like a stormy current beneath her skin, flowing in her veins instead of blood, why had she come back in here when the choice was hers? Because he needed her help? Because she'd retreated to somewhere she needed extricating from being unable to extricate herself?
Well, it wasn't to be nice as he was being, had been since, that was for sure.
In other words? Why not come back in here after the little contretemps she'd got in out there in the coach? Show him all was calm, all was bright.
But if he thought she was going to be happy about it he had another think coming. A large one. No. That would be shiny bright, to quote Ruby. And if he thought she was getting back into bed with him, that would be even shinier. Not when the wine glass was so interesting. Maybe worth a few bob more than she'd thought too.
"Alas, the terrible crosses one bears in life," he said.
"Really?Are you speaking for yourself, being Christ soddin' Almighty now?"
"May I remind you though, it was your choice to come back in here?"
"You know, you speak as if I had one."
"We all have choices."
She tucked a stray tendril of hair behind her ear. "The belief of those allowed the luxury is always mighty to behold, my lord."
"Hang it all, are you going to sit there all night like this, making a thing of the fact you chose to come back in here of your own free will?"
How rattled were the mighty getting.
"Came? Not exactly because I wanted to, please do let me assure you of that. But I'm sure it shouldn't be hard if you want to find someone more entertaining. Isn't it the season for Mummers after all?"
He flung his napkin on the table and rose. "On that you must forgive me, seeing as it's ten years since I saw an English Christmas."
She reached for the wine glass and let the bubbles fizz on her palate as he crossed the rug in the direction of the fire Etti had lit to remove the chill from the room.
"And whose fault is that, for pursuing a bellicose career, my lord? Rattling your little saber, making the world an unsafe place for us all to live?"
He cursed as he knelt down and selected a log from the basket. His leg of course. Right now if there was an effigy of the ungrateful bastard she'd sat up half the night nursing, she'd stick pins in it right there to make sure it hurt some more. Then she'd go to bed and sleep the sleep of the just, if not the dead.
That little triangular section of chest where his cravat had loosened, the darkened hollows along his sensuous mouth, and as ever, despite the careful combing of his sable hair, those little stray ends that seemed to defy whatever attempt he made to slick them, were going to work no magic on her here.
And nothing he said, or did, would change that.
He dusted his palms clean. "Have you found anything yet?"
"Find anything? How you, or anyone else, quite expects me to find anything in that pile of old rubbish you gave me is beyond even my capabilities to know, or understand. But rest assured when I do you'll be the first to know."
"You're sure, are you, the old man was your father?"
"Old man?" Cass stared harder at the glass. At her fork and knife too. "If you're meaning Lord Armstrong-"
"Aren't you?"
"He was my father, Lord Hawley. I just don't know I'm that happy calling him old, if you don't mind that is. He is still something precious to me."
"Did I ever tell you I'm twenty-seven, Ardent was thirty when he died, and Tilly is thirty-two?"
"Goodness." With no difficulty Cass failed to prevent her attention from wandering from the fork to the silver sauce boat-slightly tarnished, nice engraving, three guineas, depending on where it was sold. She tucked another tendril of hair behind her ear. "We are spilling a tray load of beans tonight-"
"A change from stealing them."
"But if you were going to save the most interesting facts about you all, that I should never have guessed, till last-"
"Not exactly. But Tilly, being oldest, remembers other Armstrongs at Barwych."
"She-"
"She told me so this afternoon when you were in the library. One of these childhood things. You know how a stray memory can just come back."
Her throat dried. Her gaze froze on the sauce boat. Other Armstrongs? Would he tell her about them? After she'd been rude as ... well, rude as a word Ruby used a lot.Probably not.
Besides, he could be telling piggy pies. It made sense though, didn't it, of this business that Lord Armstrong had never married. Yet here she was. Maybe she couldn't find anything because he wasn't her father? Maybe she should be looking at his brothers, or sisters?
Being rude was stupid. If it meant being nice, she'd be nice. Nice? She'd be exemplary.
"You mean, a-a cousin, a brother perhaps?"
He shifted on the rug to avoid a shower of sparks. "Actually she said it was a tinker."