did it make? Whatever he wanted her to call him, he was Nicholas. Her Nicholas. And yet…
And yet, as she said his name, she trembled. She trembled as if he were the stranger he pretended to be. As if he were not Nicholas Seaton at all.
St. Clare’s mouth tugged into a crooked smile. “You needn’t look as if you’d just swallowed poison.” He tipped her face up to his, his thumb caressing the voluptuous edge of her bottom lip. “Here. Say it again.”
A warm blush rose in her cheeks. “John.”
His hand still holding her chin, St. Clare lowered his head to kiss her.
Maggie’s eyes closed. Her pulse was soaring just as it was used to do when one of her hunters was approaching a particularly treacherous fence. That unique mixture of fear and joy and primitive exhilaration. It was mother’s milk to a Honeywell. Her lips parted softly in breathless anticipation.
But before St. Clare could capture her mouth, he froze. The sound of carriage wheels and faraway laughter drifted on the afternoon breeze. He gave a short, rueful laugh. “The fashionable hour has begun.”
Maggie stiffened. She wasn’t a young miss just out of the schoolroom whose reputation must be zealously guarded, nor was she one of those unfortunate souls whose every movement was governed by the dictates of propriety. Nevertheless, there were rules.
She was an unmarried lady sitting with an unmarried gentleman. Sitting intimately with an unmarried gentleman. And not just any unmarried gentleman, mind. The Viscount St. Clare. The very man who had put a bullet through Frederick Burton-Smythe’s shoulder.
She gave an inward groan. George Trumble had warned her about the gossip, and what had she done but gone and thrown fuel directly onto the fire.
“We must go.” She pulled away from him, rising so quickly that she nearly toppled over on the skirts of her pelisse.
St. Clare was up in a flash, steadying her. “Easy,” he murmured. “They’re a few minutes away yet. We have time.”
“To exit the park completely unobserved?”
“That, I’m afraid, would be impossible. But there’s time yet to get you and your reputation safely back in my curricle. After that, we shall be nothing more than another couple out for an afternoon drive.”
“But everyone is already talking. If Fred hears—”
“What does that signify?” He swept up her bonnet and placed it back on her head, swiftly tying the ribbons before she could formulate an objection. “Burton-Smythe isn’t your father.”
“No, but…Beasley Park and my money and…Papa’s will…” She looked up at him. “Oh, you don’t understand how things are now!”
St. Clare paused a moment in the act of putting on his own hat. His mouth was set in a grim line. “No, likely not. But I very soon shall, make no mistake.”
The Earl of Allendale had often remarked upon his grandson’s extraordinary cold-bloodedness. It was a trait St. Clare had learned in hard school. Never to be a slave to his Beresford temper. Never to let emotion get the better of reason. In most cases, he’d discovered, an icy reserve could disarm an opponent more effectively than harsh words or a show of physical strength.
Still, he’d never been entirely certain whether his grandfather approved of his glacial demeanor.
Until now.
Seated in the earl’s lavish drawing room in Grosvenor Square—two sets of shrewd, blatantly acquisitive eyes examining him as if he were a forged painting—St. Clare would have wagered a great deal that his grandfather not only approved of his coldness, but that he admired it, too.
Pity the old earl was incapable of exercising the same degree of restraint. It hadn’t taken but one mention of his long-deceased son for him to fly straight up into the boughs. “Why in blazes would you have heard of my son’s marriage? You cut his acquaintance, along with the rest of society. Did you expect him to send you a formal announcement of his betrothal? An invitation to his wedding?”
Mrs. Lavinia Beresford, the widow of the earl’s second cousin and mother of the man who, but for the existence of St. Clare, stood to inherit the earldom, was a painfully thin woman with birdlike features and a deceptively featherbrained air. Upon arriving at Grosvenor Square with her son fifteen minutes before, she’d perched herself on the edge of the drawing room sofa and set up an endless chirp of sharp-edged chatter.
“What have I said?” she asked with a titter. “Surely you didn’t think I meant to imply…? I merely wondered…” She turned her sharp eyes back on St. Clare, the quick