Page 29 of Vanquished By A Viscount
Charlie would have found that warming, but moments later, as the footmen brought in the first course, Lady Eudora let out a horrific, and decidedly fake, sneeze.
“Oh! I do beg your pardon,” she said a moment later, here eyes bright with energy as she pressed a hand to her rather low-cut bodice. “I seem to have caught a cold because of today’s adventures. Perhaps you would be so kind as to attend me once this supper is over, Dr. Pettigrew?”
A good half the people at the table rolled their eyes at the silly woman’s ploy.
“Er, I had intended to make an early night of it,” Pettigrew said, his face and neck coloring as he stared intently at his soup. “I am quite exhausted after assisting our driver in dislodging the carriage from the mud this morning.”
“Your carriage was stuck as well?” Gray asked the man. It was clearly a means of drawing the conversation away from Lady Eudora, which Charlie approved of.
“It was,” Pettigrew said, his enthusiasm for speaking suddenly increasing. “The roads were in a state. Were you stuck as well?”
“We were,” Gray said, glancing Charlie’s way.
“All of the carriages encountered difficulties of one sort or another,” Lady Carolina added.
“One did not need the gift of sight to see what a delightful palaver it all was,” Lady Suzanne laughed with her in the kindest manner possible, given the circumstances.
“Dr. Pettigrew was ever so heroic,” Lady Eudora said, raising her voice and looking around as if the conversation were a small dog that had escaped in the room that she was desperate to find and secure.
The trying woman was ignored.
“Our carriage ended up in a ditch,” Charlie added, helping Pettigrew avoid being trapped by Lady Eudora as surely as the carriages had been trapped in the mud. “It was necessary to alight and help our driver push it out. Once we did, a wheel broke.”
“How awful,” Lady Winifred said, gazing at Charlie with the assessing look of a woman still trying to determine if she had a chance of becoming the next Viscountess Broxbourne. “Whatever did you do?”
“We waited in the carriage while our driver returned to the house for help,” Charlie said.
He forced himself not to look at Grayson. Doing so would give the game away to anyone who had even the slightest inkling of their inclinations.
Gray evidently sensed the need for subterfuge as well, though he took an entirely different tack than Charlie. “It was misery,” he said. “To be confined in a damp, leaking conveyance with a man like Lord Broxbourne for more than an hour is more than I thought I would be forced to endure.”
Charlie was in the process of setting down his soup spoon, but the vigor of Gray’s comment caused him to drop it loudly against the bowl. He scowled down the table at Gray. Subterfuge was one thing, but making it sound as if he was an ogre was entirely different.
“The time would have been more happily passed if I had been stuck with someone capable of intelligent conversation,” he fired back.
Gray’s expression hardened and his blue eyes lit with fire. “One is only as adept in conversation as one’s companion,” he said curtly.
If the man was playing some sort of game, it needed to stop. Although Charlie believed it was more likely that Grayson was merely reverting to his usual, odious self and that the interlude of peace they had experienced earlier was just that, a fleeting interlude.
Unexpectedly, their short exchange opened floodgates of another sort.
“There was no conversation at all to speak of in our carriage,” Lady Patience said with a sniff. She picked up her cutlery and stabbed into a vegetable on the plate that had just been placed in front of her while staring across the table at Lord Iverson.
“Truly?” Lady Winifred said, her back going straight. “I found the conversation delightful.”
“Yes, I suppose you would,” Lady Patience mumbled.
“There was a slight misunderstanding,” Lord Iverson said in a tight voice.
“A misunderstanding, was it?” Lady Patience said, biting down sharply on the vegetable she’d speared.
Even Charlie felt the pain of that gesture in his groin.
Lady Patience wasn’t the only one with a complaint about the failed excursion. Moments later, Lady Winifred’s Aunt Violet said something about the hunger pangs she’d experienced from going so long without sustenance. Mr. Lindhurst lamented the loss of his favorite pair of boots. And when Miss Kennedy, Lady Patience’s chaperone, declared that she had never endured such an unpleasant morning in her life, the scales tipped too far.
“I cannot control the weather,” Barbara sobbed, standing so quickly her chair nearly tipped back. “I have done everything I can, but I cannot wish the rain away and force the sun to shine.”
All conversation at the table ceased. The prickly guests stared at Barbara as if she were the one who was at fault instead of them for airing their complaints.
