Heiress in Red Silk (Duke's Heiress #2) - Madeline Hunter Page 0,36
chatting with each other. A few nods aimed their way, but conversations continued. Then, like a slow-moving wave rolling through the space, silence fell.
Nicholas had entered, escorting Miss Jameson. He walked her through the drawing room toward the hostess. Aunt Agnes waited, sitting like the queen at a presentation at court.
Every eye followed their progress. The women appeared interested. The men looked stunned. Miss Jameson wore a beautiful dinner dress, one that Kevin recognized as being commissioned at the modiste’s that day. Its pale lilac hue, subdued but shimmering, had been enhanced by cream embroidery and two tiers of lace near the hem. Someone had dressed her hair differently, so curls dangled somewhat recklessly alongside her face. She wore no jewels.
He tore his gaze away. He looked at Walter, who seemed incapable of blinking, while Nicholas introduced Miss Jameson to Aunt Agnes. He noticed Walter’s wife, Felicity, watching her husband’s reaction, and her smile growing tighter.
Walter must have sensed the attention. He looked over and smiled broadly at his wife. Then he glanced askance at Kevin. “Pretty enough? Damnation, man.”
* * *
It was, Rosamund decided, a very pleasant party. The Radnor family was full of opinionated people, some of whom assumed the entire world ached to hear their views on social and political events. The result was a noisy gathering, with a few arguments making for good theater until the eldest male cousin, Walter, decreed they end.
“Enough of that now,” he would intone, like a schoolmaster calling for order. In most cases he succeeded in ruining a very lively discussion.
Rosamund held to her plan of speaking briefly and carefully. It worked because little conversation was expected of her. The rest of them probably concluded that she was dull. As for her manners at the meal that would follow soon, Mrs. Markland had drilled her in the deployment of all that cutlery upon hearing she would attend a dinner party.
“Let us go down,” Lady Agnes finally announced.
“Time to go down,” Walter repeated, as if doing so required his agreement.
Because all Kevin’s cousins were male, and two others besides him were unmarried, the men outnumbered the women even with the two aunts helping to balance things. When they all lined up to go to dinner, she found herself last in the female line next to Kevin. Behind her straggled the youngest cousin, Philip.
Philip appeared to fancy himself as a fashionable man about town, from the way he dressed and also how he managed to pose rather than just stand normally. He kept sending her amiable smiles, and twice in the drawing room tried to start conversations. In both cases Minerva quickly crowded him out. “Trouble, every mincing inch of him,” Minerva had whispered the second time. “Profligate, indebted, and a wastrel. If he gets the chance he will ask you for money.”
At dinner she found herself sitting between the duke and yet another cousin, Douglas. She wasn’t sure she had met Douglas in the drawing room. Indeed, she could not remember seeing him before. All the Radnor men looked a bit alike, however. Clearly all peas from the same pod, each with his own distinction. Chase had that large-boned, rugged handsomeness and the duke a smoother, more typical kind. Kevin’s deep-set eyes and regular features set him apart, and Walter’s version of the Radnor appearance had a very predictable look, as if one had seen him a hundred times before. This one, Douglas, managed to be unremarkable, despite owning the same eyes and dark hair, the same height and good looks.
Kevin, she noticed, was placed across the way and farther down, out of earshot. Far away from her and from their hostess, who sat very close to her indeed. After a bit of eating, Lady Agnes’s dark eyes settled on her. “Tell me, my dear Miss Jameson. From where do you hail? I hear some accent. Subtle, but there nonetheless.”
Agnes’s voice shrilled through the noise at the table. Right across from her own place, Rosamund saw the other aunt, Dolores, abruptly stop talking to Walter and focus anew.
Not everyone gave Agnes center stage. Minerva kept chatting with Walter’s blond, pretty wife Felicity. Chase asked some question of Philip. Kevin, however, gazed right down at his aunt.
“Richmond,” he said. “You know that.”
“She lives there now,” Agnes said, cocking her head. “But I daresay she wasn’t born there, were you, Miss Jameson?”
“I was born in Oxfordshire.”
“Ah, yes, I can hear it now. Was your father in trade there?”