Page 44 of The Language of Love

Colin shrugged, turning one foot side from side-to-side in front of him, admiring his shoe.

“Why did you bolt back here so bloody fast?” Henry narrowed his eyes. “You haven’t been back to Whites, have you?” Henry had been livid when he’d learned Colin was on the brink of putting him up for membership at the Tory gentleman’s club.

“Er, no, I got back in time to go to that rout at Lady—” he stopped, a frown marring his handsome features. “Well, damn me if I can recall what lady it was other than to say she wore the most hideous chartreuse turban.”

Henry didn’t think Colin had much room to talk when it came to hideous fashion. He opened his mouth to chide the other man about going to any gathering without Henry in attendance but decided he couldn’t be bothered.

“I remember she lived in a gray or white house,” Colin added, describing half the houses in London. “Or maybe it was red brick?” He shrugged and dragged his cuff over his glass of whiskey.

Henry opened his mouth to warn him to have a care, but he was too late.

Colin glanced down. “Oh, I say!” His eyebrows plunged, and he raised his soaking amber cuff to his mouth and proceeded to nurse on it.

“Come,” Henry said grimly. “Let us go to dinner. I’ll get Flitwick to send up a bib.”

***

Once they’d dined and Colin had changed his shirt, they were an hour later to the ball than expected.

Baron Penistone and his lady waited outside a ballroom twice as large as that at Rotherhithe House, and the baron greeted Colin as if the two men were old friends.

“Dashing, old man, dashing!” Penistone said, himself sporting a revolting waistcoat of lime green and lavender.

Lady Penistone wore a long-suffering look that spoke of decades of patience—and hideous waistcoats.

Henry followed Colin into the welter of sound, heat, and light and they took glasses of champagne from a harried-looking menial garbed in atrocious yellow livery, and then paused to catch their breath.

The massive room was packed wall-to-wall with the crème de la crème of London society. Those attempting to dance were so crowded by onlookers they may as well not have bothered. The heat was stifling and a miasma of perfume, perspiration, and desperation hung over the cavernous room. Desperation because there were a mere nineteen days remaining before most of the beau monde abandoned the city in droves for their country homes. If a person wasn’t betrothed by the end of the Season, it would likely be another nine or ten months before they got another chance.

Since Henry was taller than most of the other guests, he could see over the assembled heads toward the French doors that made up one wall of the ballroom. They’d been flung open to the night, but it was an exceptionally close evening and the air refused to circulate.

“Oh, look! There are Miss Bowman and Miss Susanna Bowman.”

Henry glanced to where Colin was—rudely—pointing, hoping to spy a third Miss Bowman, but Annis’s distinctive blond head was nowhere to be seen.

Colin waved at the sisters, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet and grinning fatuously—all habits that even Lady Sedgwick had not been able to break him of.

Henry couldn’t understand how Colin could bear the two sisters and their domineering mother—whom Henry collectively referred to as the Three Witches in the privacy of his head.

“I say, doesn’t Miss Susanna look smashing?” Colin demanded. When Henry forbore to answer, Colin continued. “She looks so—so—dash it, Parker, I just can’t think of the proper words to describe her.”

Henry could think of a few, but he doubted they were the same ones eluding his bacon-brained employee. The most civil thing Henry could say about the rapacious woman was that she was lovely—as long as one didn’t look too closely into her beautiful eyes, which were sharper than a moneylender’s, or listen to the acid words pouring from her shapely lips.

Henry had just opened his mouth to issue a few cautionary words about not disappearing anywhere with any female when an older woman bear-leading a pallid young chit pushed up beside Colin.

“Good evening, my lord. I was—”

“Ah, yes,” Colin said vaguely, thrusting his empty glass into the woman’s hands without looking down. “I’d love another. Much obliged,” he murmured, shooting his flamboyant cuffs and then strutting like a magpie toward the object of his attention.

The stunned woman held the empty glass in limp fingers as she stared after Colin, her jaw hanging.

Henry took the glass from her unresisting hand and she swiveled slowly toward him, only then noticing his presence.

He smiled down at her shocked face. “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse his lordship for not hearing you, ma’am as he is rather deaf on that side.”

Her pale silver brows shot up. “Is he?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”