Page 14 of Lessons for Marquesses
She pushed off the wall, her legs still quivering. “Come now. I thought my jest worthy of at least a grunt.”
He cocked his head, his hair falling away from his face. Something white flickered beneath the shadow of his carved cheek.
“Well.” She bit her lip, and after taking a few steps, turned back to the man. He stared, nothing more. Another jest then. Her father’s favorite. “What is that, sir? You want me to describe what just happened? Why, I thought you’d never ask.”
She strolled to the door and took her mark. “So Mr. Fisher enters. He’s bald. No, not true. We must give credit where it is due.” She wiggled two fingers behind her crown. “That’s his hair. And then Bertie—we’ll call him Bertie—shouts, ‘Get out you scoundrel or I shall sue you for criminal conversation! Five pounds for every day I’ve been shackled to my wife! Forty miserable years with the nag!’”
She did a swift calculation. “By the by, that’s seventy thousand, give or take.”
The man’s gaze shifted to the fall of her breeches. He finished his drink with a narrowed study.
Georgiana planted her hands at her hips. “Then, Fisher says,‘Come now, Bertie. You’ve only been wed three months,’and Bertie replies,‘Three months? That’s impossible.’”
Thump. The man struck his glass to the table. “But it feels like forty years.”
Her arms dropped to her sides, confounded by the heat of his voice, almost a growl. It did something. Something stifling to her lungs, like knocking the breath straight out of them.
The man rose in one fluid motion from his chair. He was tall,taller than her, and his strides were long, in a splendid imitation of a direct charge aimed for the door.
She stepped in front of him. “Sir, if I may introduce?—”
He knocked her shoulder as he passed and disappeared from the room.
“Well.” Not satisfying at all considering he had made her feel all jumbled inside. “Buggeryou, sir.”
Hopefully for him, someone in Newmarket was peddling a sense of humor at a fair price. Georgiana snorted at the notion of fair. Every transaction during the race meeting was designed to fleece.
That man had never been fleeced. She could learn a thing or two from him. Maybe knock a few men on their shoulders, not give a damn about courtesy or grooming, not care aboutanything.Then she’d win more than a race.
She retrieved her cocked hat, tried to revive it, failed, and twisted on her heel toward the man’s vacated chair where he’d left the paper. She retrieved it, grimacing at the ache in her hand. Fisticuffs had heretofore appeared painless for those serving up the fists.
She scanned the racing paper. No one had died. No prices raised. Tomorrow, an auction was to be held at ten a.m. and a match race between…
Her heart hurtled against her ribcage.
Minion had been pulled from the Fordyce Stakes.
CHAPTER FOUR
Nicholas Clayton,the seventh Marquess of Eastwick, arrived at the lower rooms of the Jockey Club and halted at the men blocking the entrance as they ogled the spectacle moved to the street.
“Excuse me,” he said.
The men swiveled to gaze upon him and swiftly parted.
Nicholas threaded through the melee, knocking those who blocked his path. Spying an empty space against the White Hart Inn, he dropped back against the brick. Unable to quell his shaking, he removed a flask from his coat.
When Nicholas had heard the youth’s voice in the Hazard Room, he had thought it had come from a female. Clear, melodically pitched, if breathless. And breathless, like the youth had been running for his life through the woods of war. Like René Durand.
The youth’s face had been feminine. There was no masculine tell at his breeches. But there had been the wig, the trim fawn suit, gentleman’s boots. He had looked Nicholas in the eye, like a man. The youth’s high cheeks had lacked any blush when he had jested on adultery.
So many people that youth could be. Yet Nicholas had felt his heart—he hadn’t felt it in years—as if it were being wrenched from his chest. The youth was, in Nicholas’s deranged mind, René Durand’s ghost, the French soldier, arrived in Newmarket and seeking vengeance.
He cracked his fingers. They ached from the constant clenching. Awake or asleep or fucking. Nothing cured it completely. He drank again from the flask, knowing drink made for miserable mornings.
“Quite a drubbing, eh?” a man said beside him.
Nicholas studied the stranger in the red velvet suit, a diamond pin stuck to his cravat, the signet ring adorning his pinky finger. No one had awakened this fop at four in the morning to ready for a march. He had never lain in a tent imagining his death. Would it be today? What would it feel like to die? Would he care when he did?
