The Importance of Being Wanton - Christi Caldwell Page 0,18

to mean?”

“It means that there is no way you’d be here if it didn’t in some way have something to do with your former betrothed.”

The father to the lady in question came close to consider the placement of his last shot before continuing on.

Former betrothed.

Charles picked up his glass and stared briefly into the contents.

In the first weeks following their Hyde Park meeting, he’d not been able to even think those words without needing the help of a bottle to drown them out. Given he was driven to merely sipping from a modest snifter felt an improvement, indeed.

He and Derek remained silent, with Charles not again speaking until the marquess had taken up a place closer to the viscount. “Is it really so hard to believe that my being here has nothing to do with Emma?”

“Yes,” his brother said bluntly. “In fact, I’d wager the only reason you’re here is because of Miss Gately.”

His brother was only partially right. Charles’s daily calls to Emma’s father had begun because of her, and might have everything to do with her. “It isn’t so bad as all that.” Far from it. “In fact, I’ve quite enjoyed myself,” he admitted as their father took his shot.

Craaack.

“You?” His brother laughed. “You’re enjoying . . .” He waved the tip of his stick at the two older men, who were pretend-jousting with the ends of their cue sticks as improvised rapiers. “Is it really so hard to believe that you, a connoisseur of fine spirits and finer women, have settled into domestic life, minus a . . . wife?” His brother snorted. “Yes, I do find that hard to believe.”

“Quit your dillydallying, Derek,” their father shouted. “You are holding up our game-play.”

“Yes, quit your dillydallying, little brother.” Charles ruffled the top of Derek’s black curls in the way he’d always hated.

Swatting at his hand, Derek moved into position.

“Such is the way of second-born sons, isn’t it, though?” Lord Rochester said commiseratively to the viscount, and both fathers went on to lament the inherent problems in heirs and spares.

“Oh, yes, jolly good fun, indeed,” Derek muttered, bending over the table and aligning his cue with his ball.

Charles laughed, tossing back another drink of his brandy while his brother took his shot—one that went predictably wide, as Derek was predictably bad at the game.

“Come, I know it is hard to fathom that I might enjoy being here, but I have moved on from pursuing Emma as determinedly as I have.” At least, enough that he no longer spoke of it daily. But he still wondered at what might be, and visited in the hopes that he could gather some way in which to earn the lady’s notice that was more . . . favorable than it had been before.

His brother gave him a look.

Charles’s neck went hot, but he’d be damned if he allowed any man, let alone his younger brother, to bring him to any more of a blush than that. “Very well,” Charles allowed. “My visits may have begun as one thing, but that isn’t the case anymore.”

“May?” His brother was unrelenting.

Adopting an air of complete disaffectedness, Charles swirled the contents of his drink. The problem with wearing one’s heart upon one’s sleeve, as Charles had for as long as he had, was that anything he said about his relationship with Emma Gately—or rather, lack thereof—was suspect, at best. “I am not as devastated as I was,” he said simply. At least, not to the point of making a public arse of himself. “In fact, I am grateful to Miss Gately for opening my eyes to some of the . . . simpler pleasures I’d previously been missing out on.”

“Such as playing billiards with our father and the viscount?”

“Such as playing billiards with our father and the viscount,” Charles said, drawing forth all the elder-brother patience he could.

Derek dissolved into a paroxysm of laughter, doubling over from the force of it.

“So nice it is, seeing your boys getting along so well,” Emma’s father was saying to Charles’s.

“Oh, yes, getting along so well.” When the older gentlemen’s attention was firmly away, Charles turned up two middle fingers, and his brother howled all the more, the corner of his eyes leaking with tears of his amusement.

Muttering to himself, Charles silenced the remainder of the choice words he had for his brother and his explosion of levity. After all, it was hardly Derek’s fault. When Charles had been five and twenty, he’d been of a similarly like and erroneous