Page 40 of One Thing Leads to a Lover

To say nothing of both.

A footstep sounded on the stairway, and he looked up from the page he’d been pretending to read while the boys resumed work on yesterday’s river map—one of their failures, they’d confessed. He frowned. This would make the second interruption of the morning.

The footman, Lewis, looked appropriately contrite as he delivered yet another note—no, the same note, Langley realized as he retrieved the folded paper from the tray in his hand.

The boys looked up too, their curiosity piqued. One quelling glance from their tutor sent them scurrying back to their work—no squabbles over the blue paint, today—and once their heads were bowed over the map, he slowly unfolded the note.

Beneath his earlier answer, Amanda had written just two words, in her delicate, feminine hand.

Dinner, then.

Not a question, this time. She had pressed down so firmly when making the point that the tip of her pen had nearly gone through the paper. Barely even a request. In fact, it rather looked like…an order.

Slowly he refolded the little square of hot-pressed paper and moved to slip it into the breast pocket of his coat.

“No answer this time, sir?” said the footman.

“No answer,” he concurred, tucking the note out of sight.

At least, not one he meant to make publicly.

Over the course of the afternoon, he found more than one occasion to remove the note from his pocket and reread it. Dinner, then. Oh, but she was clever. By four o’clock, when lessons finished for the day, those words had succeeded in making Langley ravenous.

And his hunger had very little to do with food.

* * * *

Two hours later, his hair freshly combed, his spectacles polished, and his cravat rather too tightly knotted, he followed the boys downstairs to the empty dining room. His rapid glance took in the soaring painted ceiling, silk curtains, crystal chandelier, and a table that would easily seat twenty, though at present only one end was set. Young Kingston directed him to the seat beside Philip, across from their grandmother’s place, as it turned out when that lady swept into the room a few moments later and introduced herself.

“I am Mrs. West, Lady Kingston’s mother,” she said in a voice whose warmth only highlighted its faint northern notes as she dipped into a shallow curtsy. He knew she must be fifty, perhaps even on the far side of that number. But the years had been kind to her, and Mrs. West made every effort to exploit their generosity: the arrangement of her hair, the drape of her gown, even the softening glow of the candles.

He bowed. “Lord Kingston and Master Philip speak fondly of you, ma’am. Stanhope, at your service.”

They had only just taken their seats when Amanda slipped into the room—no grand entrance like her mother. In fact, she was glancing over her shoulder, her attention on something other than the assembled company, and she turned to face them all only when Langley and the boys stood and the scrape of chairs drew her startled notice.

“Oh. I had intended to—am I late?”

A general murmur of dissent went around the table, but Mrs. West said reprovingly, “It’s five minutes past the hour, my dear.”

“Then my apologies for keeping you waiting. Please serve the soup,” she said with a faint smile to the footman who wasn’t Lewis. He had pulled back the chair at the foot of the table for her, with her elder son to her right and the younger to her left.

Langley wondered selfishly whether the extra five minutes had been spent at her dressing table, preparing herself for this little match—of wits? of wills?—in which they seemed to be engaged. Unnecessary, of course. He’d not been indifferent to her loveliness when her wet hair had been plastered to her head and rain had been dripping from the end of her nose.

But if pressed, he would have to admit she looked lovelier still now. Her warm brown hair had been dressed with pearls tonight, each one on a pin, gleaming here and there from a riot of carefully arranged curls. Her bosom rose from the deep, square neckline of a pale green gown, a shade that would have made most people look rather sickly, but which set off her skin like a creamy bud about to burst into bloom.

He suspected he had been caught staring at the hint of bosom that neckline revealed when she fixed him with her dark eyes and said in a voice considerably cooler than her mother’s, “It was very good of you to join us, Mr. Stanhope.”

Dinner, then.

The slip of paper that had carried her order was burning a hole through his breast pocket.

“It would have been churlish to have refused so generous an invitation,” he replied, pointedly enunciating the final word.

“And are you comfortably accommodated in the schoolroom, sir?”

Was that the twitch of a smile about her lips?

“You are kind to enquire,” he said, thinking of the narrow, cluttered cupboard that passed for his bedchamber and the waist-high looking glass, “but your ladyship must already know the answer.”