Page 45 of The Devilish Pleasures of a Duke

“From the best china?”

“Naturally.”

Emma gave her an approving pat and charged forth to face her rival. She held high hopes for the future of young Charlotte, whose perception and reticence had thus far protected her from their scandalous ancestry. It remained for Emma to demonstrate by example how a proper gentlewoman should defend herself without sinking to low behavior.

Hypocrite, a small voice taunted her as she strode briskly down the hall. What sort of example did you set the other night? For that matter, what unspeakable transgression were you tempted to commit only a few minutes before Charlotte interrupted?

The possibilities, however intriguing, did not bear contemplation.

Not that she was in a frame of mind to ponder the ramifications of a secret romance. Her temper flared the moment she set her eyes upon the trim, fashionably cloaked brunette awaiting her in the drawing room. She paused for a moment to admire the adorable straw hat with a jaunty ostrich feather that gave Lady Clipstone a certain piquant air.

Alice Clipstone. Oh, how her very existence taunted Emma.

It went without saying that neither woman allowed her hostility to show. Indeed, they might have been two long-lost relatives reunited at a family affair. They exclaimed over how well the other looked. They inquired after the health of their loved ones—as if they had not been figuratively at each other’s throats for months.

“May I offer you more tea?” Emma inquired when the initial period of pretense drew to its inevitable end.

“Heavens, no,” Lady Clipstone replied. “I shouldn’t take you from instruction, having so rudely arrived without announcement. Or have you canceled lessons for the day? I shouldn’t blame you what with all the recent…excitement.”

Emma’s nostrils narrowed. Ah. There it was. The first cut. A rapier tip dipped in arsenic.

The scented, high-buttoned gloves had come off. It appeared that for Alice, at least, all pretense of gentility would be abandoned for this private moment. Emma felt the calmer for sensing her adversary’s lapse into antagonism. Alice had never been able to graciously accept that Emma’s academy drew more applicants than she could accommodate and that she, the usurper, had to make do with those her rival rejected.

“There are always classes,” she said with a negligent shrug. “One studies the social graces from dawn until dinner. Charlotte, as you know, is well qualified to instruct, and I have employed the re-doubtable Miss Peppertree. Right now she and the girls are in the library enjoying a sketching lesson with Lady Dalrymple.”

Alice’s eyes lit up. “Hermia? You’d trust those tender minds to a—”

“A what?” Emma said in an ice-edged voice.

“Well, to a woman who paints unclad aristocrats for public consumption,” Alice said with a sly pause. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t avidly sketching a certain duke’s heir as we speak.”

A guilty flush stole into Emma’s face. There was the rub her rival had been waiting for. Adrian and the incident at the wedding party. It might conceivably have sunk to the bottom of the scandal broth in a month or two, had Emma immediately placed as much distance possible between herself and her outrageous defender.

Still, Alice knew nothing of that indiscretion—Emma would be forced into exile alongside an even more infamous dictator before she would allow the truth to be known. “If Lord Wolverton wishes his portrait painted, then I…I am—”

She broke off.

A sense of foreboding stole over her at Alice’s sudden, enrapt silence. In trepidation she turned to see what had so captured the woman’s attention.

Some furtive movement at the window. Her brother Heath—and Adrian, his handsome, broad-shouldered figure a silhouette against the dying sunlight. For a surprising moment Emma’s throat constricted in regret. He was fully dressed in a heavy charcoal-gray coat and black silk hat. As if, well, from what one could deduce from his dashing shadow as he walked past her sight, he were leaving.

Wasn’t that what he’d been telling her? Both of them knew it was for the best. A man of his talents could take care of himself, but—

She forced her gaze back to Alice, only to find the woman studying her in brittle curiosity. “What were you about to say, Lady Lyons?” she inquired in an innocent tone.

Emma would not allow herself to be unsettled by her opponent. “Actually, my dear, I was about to ask what brought you here this late in the day.”

Uninvited. Unaccompanied, too, unless that surly old footman Emma had spotted lingering in the entry hall meant to pass as a companion.

“Surely we did not have an appointment planned that I had forgotten?” she went on artlessly. “If not, I really must excuse myself. You see, we’re expecting a new arrival, a special student—the Earl of Heydon’s niece. I expect you’ve heard of her.” Emma paused. “I believe her bags have already arrived.”

“Hasn’t everyone heard of Lord Heydon?” Alice asked. “He once considered offering the academy his sponsorship, didn’t he?”

Emma wavered, reminding herself a lady would end a conversation before it drifted into more dangerous ground. Nor would she keep stealing peeps out the window at a certain beautiful rogue. “He has been gracious enough to consider us, yes. As for—”

“Goodness,” Alice said, clapping one hand to her cheek. “What a featherbrain I am. That’s the reason I’ve come.”

Emma swallowed over the knot of apprehension that tightened inside her. “The earl sent you?”