How To Rescue A Rake (Book Club Belles Society 3) Page 20

  “In her husband’s barouche…”

  “Dancing naked…”

  “With a rose between his teeth…”

  “No, no, it was an apple…”

  Having heard quite enough and yet, at the same time, nothing complete, Diana set down her half-empty glass and turned away. Only to find the notorious Casanova himself directly in her path.

  “Miss Makepiece, how do you find the waters?”

  She snapped out a breathless, “Wet.”

  His lips quirked. “I meant the taste.”

  “Hot.” Diana had no idea what her face was doing. She stared at his waistcoat, heat rising under her stays. “Bitter.”

  “That would be the sulfur.”

  “Would it? I suppose you would know, being so familiar with Bath.”

  “Are you quite well? You seem a little…upset. Agitated. Has someone upset you?” He looked around as if ready to confront the person, whoever it might be.

  “Not deliberately,” she muttered. “They cannot help themselves.”

  It was the first time they’d had a chance to speak alone since they’d both arrived in Bath. Diana looked around in something of a panic, but neither her cousin nor the Plumtre girls were anywhere in sight. The noisy crowd was making her dizzy as another new surge of people filed in from outside, eager to take the waters before three o’clock.

  “Please don’t trouble yourself, Captain. I am perfectly well,” Diana managed, clasping her reticule tightly in both hands.

  Suddenly he advanced. She backed away. He silently advanced again, she moved back again, and in this way they had soon found a small space by a window.

  “How is Mrs. Sayles?” she asked, trying to be civil. Ah, it was better here. A little more free air. What did he think he was doing, cornering her in this manner?

  “She has a headache”—he paused—“as usual.”

  “Yes, a lot of things go on as usual, don’t they?” Oops. She had not meant to sound so sharp. What did it matter to her what he did when he was in Bath? With his blue eyes. Under tables. Under skirts. With a rose—or an apple—between his teeth?

  “Are you enjoying Wollaford?” he asked.

  “Very much. The Plumtres are excellent company and wonderful hosts.”

  “And Mr. George Plumtre. How do you find him?”

  Bemused by his gruff tone, she looked up and replied, “How do I find him?” The same as the water, she mused, wet. “I turn around quite often and there he is.”

  Nathaniel frowned, heaved his shoulders as if his clothes were too tight, and grumbled, “Jonty tells me his brother is quite smitten.”

  “Is he?” What the devil was he playing at now? Trying to discover the tenor of her friendship with another man. For what purpose? He had made it plain that he would never resume his attentions to her. And she did not want him to, did she?

  He had no chance to say anything more about that or his motives in asking, because suddenly George, Elizabeth, and the younger Plumtres found her again, descending through the mob to reclaim their guest.

  “There you are! I wish you would not wander off from where I left you,” her cousin snapped. “I distinctly told you to stay there. You’re so quiet I hardly know where you are from one moment to the next. It is not convenient to be dashing about Bath trying to find where you’ve gone off to.”

  Diana was confused. She did not know what to be, because nothing seemed to please Elizabeth. If she spoke up, she was putting herself forward in an ill-mannered fashion. If she stayed quiet, she was an inconvenience.

  Nathaniel spoke up. “I moved Miss Makepiece out of the crowd, Lady Plumtre. She did not look very comfortable, and I thought she was in need of some air.”

  “Air?” Elizabeth frowned. “Air? What on earth for?”

  Diana bit back a chuckle and Nathaniel said solemnly, “Why, to breathe, madam. Or does she require your permission to do that too?”

  Her cousin’s countenance wavered between fury and confusion. As usual she took her discomfort out on Diana. “If you were not feeling well, you should have said so. How was I supposed to know? I’m sure I take no pleasure in traipsing up and down the place like a tourist, but you will insist on coming out.”

  “I am not ill, Elizabeth. I was merely—”

  “Always thinking of yourself. Not a thought for me or what I would do when I returned to find you slunk off somewhere.”

  Sir Jonty emerged from the mad throng at that moment and greeted Nathaniel with the usual excessive volume, while his wife continued to mutter and fume under her breath.

  Once again, thought Diana, her moment alone with Nathaniel was over so quickly. Was that why his presence, when she had it, seemed such a luxury now? She wished she had not overheard those women talking. She didn’t want to know all of that. When he looked into her eyes she wanted—

  Oh, she no longer knew what she wanted.

  In any case, she needn’t think he was kind to her for any reason other than his habitual need to rescue every maiden in distress. Even old maidens.

  Nathaniel stayed only for a few brief words with his new friend and to accept an invitation for dinner at Wollaford Park, and then he made a quick retreat.

  George sidled up to Diana. “My mother and Jonty think him a splendid fellow, but in my opinion the captain is a little too…jolly, don’t you know?”

  “I know precisely,” she replied with a tense sigh. He was too…everything.

  * * *

  That evening after dinner, Daisy Plumtre insisted on Nathaniel sitting for her while she sketched his profile for a silhouette.

  Mrs. Ashby and Mrs. Plumtre were together by the fire, talking of old times, Caroline yawning loudly beside them. Jonty, his wife, Susanna, and George played cards, but Diana sat alone with her book, apparently absorbed in it. Even when George asked her to advise him at cards she politely declined and said she wanted to finish her chapter. But oddly enough, Nathaniel had noticed not a single page turned while he watched her. It was a rainy evening and occasionally she looked up to watch the raindrops on the window. Then she bent her head again over the open book, pretending to be engrossed in the story.

  “Miss Makepiece is very fond of her book,” he whispered to Daisy. “Do you suppose she reads sermons? From her grim face it seems likely.”

  “I believe it is a novel—a romantic story.”

  He shook his head. “I suppose she thinks she’s safer reading about romance than enjoying any herself.”

  Daisy was busy tracing the shape of his nose on her grid-covered paper. “Don’t sigh so heavily,” she exclaimed, “or you’ll blow out the candle!” After a pause she added, “What do you mean, she’s safer reading it?”

  “That must be how she gets her thrills,” he whispered, trying not to move his lips too much. “She strikes me as the sort who doesn’t like to get a hair out of place or a stocking wrinkled for a gentleman.”

  Daisy giggled. Across the room, Diana looked up but almost immediately down again. Still her page didn’t turn.

  Nathaniel added in a louder whisper, “Romantic novels cause young ladies to expect too much. Make them think a man ought to be everything at once and never have any faults. A poor fellow like me doesn’t stand a chance when a lady’s head is filled with that nonsense.”

  Daisy huffed, forgetting her own warning about the candle. “I very much doubt you have any problems once you decide to woo a lady.”

  “On the contrary. My charms have been known to fail on one particular lady at least.”

  “The one who refused you?”

  “Yes,” he growled, reminded of that pain anew.

  “And did she read a lot of romantic novels?”

  He nodded. “She seldom had her nose out of them.”

  “You must not have made it worth her while to put her book down, then.”


  Nathaniel turned to look at Daisy, but she immediately shouted at him for spoiling his profile.

  “Now I’ve made your nose too bloody big again!” she exclaimed, tossing another crumpled sheet of paper to the carpet.

  “Daisy!” her brother George shouted wearily from the card table. “Language!”

  She screwed up her face. “I don’t see why other people can use that word and I can’t. I’ll just start making up my own curses. Such as…as…fergalumph!”

  Nobody answered her so she set to her task again, frowning determinedly. “Do sit still, Captain. I’ve never known such a fidget!”

  All those paper roses littering the floor were the subject’s fault, apparently, not the artist’s. He asked the girl how much longer this would take. “I shall have to stretch my legs in a moment before they seize up with old age,” he told her. “Unless I have something to amuse me and take my mind off the cramp.” He glanced over at Diana again.

  “It won’t take long if you stop talking and moving your great big head about.”

  That made Diana look over the top of her book, her eyes shining with amusement.

  “Miss Makepiece thinks I have an excessively large head too. See? She smiles. Although she tries to hide it.”

  Across the room Lady Plumtre grew annoyed that a conversation was going on without her. It was not to be borne. Looking about for a scapegoat, she quickly found one.

  “You should put that book away and join us over here, Diana,” she exclaimed. “What can possibly keep you so engrossed?”

  Diana looked up. “I would like to finish—”

  “You’re no company at all with your nose in a book. There is time enough for that when you are alone.” Lady Plumtre addressed the other players at the table in a lazy drawl. “My cousin has not had much benefit of good society, so you must excuse her. She is either too withdrawn or too excitable, as I pointed out to her the other day.”

  Again Diana attempted to be heard. “I did not mean to be rude, but you are all occupied and I am almost—”

  “Books are all she cares about,” her cousin exclaimed. “It is all the entertainment she is used to, I suppose.”

  Diana read on, not letting Lady Plumtre’s snide words force her away from her book again. She was evidently accustomed to being berated by her family.

  “Poor Miss Makepiece,” Daisy whispered. “She ought to throw that bloody book at Elizabeth. I would if I were her.”

  But Diana would never be so demonstrative.

  He longed for her to speak up again, as she had the first night he was there at Wollaford. What had changed her back into the solemn woman afraid to smile?

  He’d played the fool before in an effort to make her laugh. He’d teased her to try and raise a reaction. The only thing he had not done, Nathaniel realized now, was pay proper court to her.

  After so many years of deliberate misbehavior, he wasn’t sure he knew how.

  And why should he want to?

  Her opinion of him was clearly not much altered, but while she was there without her mother whispering in her ear, perhaps he had a chance to change her view of him. There was hope. That first dinner, when her face had shone and she’d conversed freely, had granted them both a fresh beginning.

  There would be a certain amount of satisfaction in proving her mother wrong and showing Diana Makepiece that he wasn’t the unmitigated scoundrel she still thought him. He could be a gentleman. He could make her look at him with something other than scorn.

  Perhaps he could get Diana to put her book aside without sighing as if it was a great annoyance to face life itself.

  “Miss Makepiece,” he called out to her, “Miss Daisy Plumtre continues to draw me with a monstrous great nose. I think she makes me look like Punch the puppet. Do come and help us.”

  Diana hesitated, slowly looking up again over the edge of her book. “How might I help?”

  “He won’t sit still!” Daisy protested.

  “I shall sit still if Miss Makepiece comes here and reads her book aloud to me. I know she doesn’t want to give over reading, but she might at least share the pleasure with us.”

  Diana looked around the room. Her cousin was preoccupied with arguing over the cards, accusing her husband of cheating. Since no one else was paying attention, Diana got up and took a chair closer to where he sat. “I can read to you, Captain, but do not ask me to explain the story up until now, because it is too long and involved and I’m sure you have not the patience for it.”

  “No matter.” He smiled a little. “The sound of your voice will be satisfying enough.”

  She looked askance.

  “I find it has…soothing qualities,” he added. “It is the sort of voice a man cannot tire of.” Just having her seated nearby was pleasing. He reached forward, turned her book over, and read the title. “Ah, yes, I remember the gist of it. A lady named Anne has broken the heart of a sailor by rejecting his proposal. Is that not so?”

  “You are familiar with Persuasion, Captain?” Diana asked.

  Nathaniel stared at her pursed lips and suffered the uncomfortable urge to claim them. “Someone I knew once before was reading it.”

  “Oh, do read aloud, Miss Makepiece,” Daisy cried. “Anything to make him sit still. He is the world’s worst model. If I was sculpting in clay he would have a dozen limbs by now.”

  So Diana began to read aloud.

  “I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago.”

  He watched her mouth, following the gentle bow of her top lip and then the lower. Those lips he had kissed.

  “Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.”

  Nathaniel felt her words fall over him like invisible kisses. Incredible that her voice should still have such an effect on him, after once being so unkind to him. But the speech she read might have come from his own lips.

  “For you alone I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes?”

  Because of her, he had changed his life. Yet Diana was unaware of the part she’d played in his success. He studied her face while she read on, and he imagined kissing the tip of her nose. Licking those naughty eyebrows. Making his way back down to her soft mouth, the color of strawberry flesh and just as sweet.

  “You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others.”

  She was interrupted, her reading drowned out by a loud mazurka suddenly played on the pianoforte by Lady Plumtre, who had given up on cards and evidently did not share her cousin’s love of novels.

  Diana was about to close her book. Nathaniel reached over again and placed his hand on the page to prevent it.

  “Read on,” he insisted. “I hear you.”

  She looked down at his hand spread upon her page.

  “I am listening,” he told her earnestly. “To you.”

  He thought Daisy Plumtre might have dropped her charcoal, but he didn’t know for sure. He knew of nothing but Diana’s fingertips hesitantly brushing across his knuckles, easing his hand aside so she might continue reading.

  However loud her cousin played, the two of them were in their own world in that moment, and nothing could interrupt it.

  Few people ever listened to Diana, he realized. Even when they thought they listened, they did not hear her. But he would listen because he understood the value of what she said. He knew how her words had changed his life once before.

  He didn’t w
ant to miss another sigh from her lips.

  Eighteen

  Fortunately for all the ladies, Captain Sherringham had decided to stay a while in Bath, in some lodgings he had apparently rented before, near Sydney Gardens. He and Jonty were soon fast friends, being of similar social nature and affable character, and thus he was invited frequently on the Plumtres’ outings. Even when he was not expected or had said he was not certain if he could join them, he invariably turned up. And usually he brought Mrs. Sayles too, much to Elizabeth’s disgust.

  Diana learned that Mrs. Ashby was a good friend of Jonty’s mother, and as such she was a fixture at manor house dinners.

  “My dear old friend has fallen on difficult times,” Mrs. Plumtre explained, “and I must look after her. She has no one else, you know”—she lowered her voice—“just that curious niece, Caroline. Well…the less said about her, the better. Oh dear.” A rumble of laughter shook her well-padded frame. “She is a handful, isn’t she? But she might at least be company for my friend, might bring her out of herself.”

  Seated beside Mrs. Ashby one evening, Diana listened patiently to her tales of the angelic Eleanor, apparently a woman of more goodness and accomplishments than anybody else who ever lived. Indeed she was so perfect, her mother explained, that it was no wonder God took her up to heaven at a young age.

  “The bond between a mother and her only daughter is great indeed. Nothing can break it. Even death,” the lady explained drearily. “I have naught else to live for now and wait only for the day when I can join my sweet angel.”

  Diana thought of her own mother in similar circumstances to Mrs. Ashby—an impoverished, genteel lady with a scattering of relatives who apparently did not care about her and had left her to struggle alone since the death of her only daughter. If Diana were gone, her mother would be all alone too, she thought sadly. But her mother did not have friends like the Plumtres on her side.

  “I know it must be very hard to miss your daughter,” she replied gently to the lady, “but I must say, I would never want my own mother to give up on life without me. Like Eleanor, I am an only daughter. I would want my mother to make the most of life, if I could not. Indeed, if I could look down from heaven and advise her, I’d urge her to be happy, to live for me.”