Philip speak fondly of you, ma’am. Stanhope, at your service.”
They had only just taken their seats when Amanda slipped into the room—no grand entrance like her mother. In fact, she was glancing over her shoulder, her attention on something other than the assembled company, and she turned to face them all only when Langley and the boys stood and the scrape of chairs drew her startled notice.
“Oh. I had intended to—am I late?”
A general murmur of dissent went around the table, but Mrs. West said reprovingly, “It’s five minutes past the hour, my dear.”
“Then my apologies for keeping you waiting. Please serve the soup,” she said with a faint smile to the footman who wasn’t Lewis. He had pulled back the chair at the foot of the table for her, with her elder son to her right and the younger to her left.
Langley wondered selfishly whether the extra five minutes had been spent at her dressing table, preparing herself for this little match—of wits? of wills?—in which they seemed to be engaged. Unnecessary, of course. He’d not been indifferent to her loveliness when her wet hair had been plastered to her head and rain had been dripping from the end of her nose.
But if pressed, he would have to admit she looked lovelier still now. Her warm brown hair had been dressed with pearls tonight, each one on a pin, gleaming here and there from a riot of carefully arranged curls. Her bosom rose from the deep, square neckline of a pale green gown, a shade that would have made most people look rather sickly, but which set off her skin like a creamy bud about to burst into bloom.
He suspected he had been caught staring at the hint of bosom that neckline revealed when she fixed him with her dark eyes and said in a voice considerably cooler than her mother’s, “It was very good of you to join us, Mr. Stanhope.”
Dinner, then.
The slip of paper that had carried her order was burning a hole through his breast pocket.
“It would have been churlish to have refused so generous an invitation,” he replied, pointedly enunciating the final word.
“And are you comfortably accommodated in the schoolroom, sir?”
Was that the twitch of a smile about her lips?
“You are kind to enquire,” he said, thinking of the narrow, cluttered cupboard that passed for his bedchamber and the waist-high looking glass, “but your ladyship must already know the answer.”
She resented the necessity of his presence, and for that, he could not blame her. She was smart enough, he knew, to be afraid of what it meant. She understood the danger her family could be in.
But at the same time, he suspected that she liked having him there. In part, yes, because he had given her a way to thwart Dulsworthy’s authority, at least temporarily.
That wasn’t all, though.
Her kiss at the ball, her words last night, her sharp, surreptitious glances at him throughout the meal, all suggested she was as fascinated—reluctantly fascinated—with him as he was with her.
Perhaps it was that fact she resented most of all.
The present bout in their strange little skirmish came to a draw when the first course was laid before them. Sounds of silver scraping across china filled the room.
As he ate, he thought again of her peremptory reply to his earlier refusal: Dinner, then. In his mind, the weight of those words shifted, and with it, their meaning.
Dinner. Then…
Who would make the next move?
“I find that your sons have been under most excellent tutelage, Lady Kingston,” he said, breaking into the boys’ minute detailing of their day for their mother.
“They are bright boys,” she demurred, smiling at both of them in turn before correcting herself. “Bright young gentlemen, I should say. Promising scholars.” Then she directed her attention to her plate once more, prodding with her fork at an untasted mound of creamed turnips. “Ready, I suppose, for school?”
The fear behind her question was unmistakable. Both boys echoed the word school with varied degrees of surprise and incredulity, the younger looking less enthused than Langley would have expected, and the elder less alarmed.
“Harrow, do you mean? Like Papa?” asked young Kingston.
“And Lord Dulsworthy,” Philip reminded him.
“Your guardian and I have had some discussion of the matter, yes,” Amanda was forced to admit. “It’s expected of boys in your position. But I worry that your poor mother’s instruction will prove to have been inadequate to the purpose.” At that she sent Langley a beseeching look.
“It will require much more than