Page 33 of Not Just Any Earl
“But such a pretty face.” Johnathan shot a sly look at Cross.
“I didn’t notice.”
“Of course you bloody did! You’re a man, aren’t you? I don’t know why you bother to deny it, Cross. It’s perfectly acceptable to admire a lady without becoming betrothed to her.”
“God forbid I ever become betrothed to Juliet Templeton. I’d never have another moment’s peace.”
“You could do with less peace. You haven’t got nearly enough to plague you. It’s not good for a man to get his own way too often.”
Cross rolled his eyes. “This, from you? I’d say you get your way often enough, Melrose.”
“Not a bit of it. Have you forgotten I have three sisters?”
Cross chuckled, and they both fell into a silence made comfortable by a long friendship, each lost in their own musings, until Johnathan disrupted the moment of peace. “I’m going to marry her, Cross. The Lady in Lavender. I’m going to marry her.”
He’d made up his mind to it the same night he’d kissed her, mere moments after she’d fled, and left him alone in the library, her scent still wrapped around him.
Cross sighed, but he didn’t seem surprised. “Yes, I suppose you don’t have much choice.”
No, he didn’t—not unless he wished to be condemned as a rake and a scoundrel—but that wasn’t the reason Johnathan was so determined to make the Lady in Lavender his countess.
He turned the tumbler in his hand, gazing at the play of firelight over the last swallow of rich, dark-red port, glittering like a ruby through the thick crystal. The night of Lady Fosberry’s ball, when he’d been so deep in his cups, he’d thought his uncharacteristic drunkenness a minor rebellion.
In truth, it had been the first in a series of unexpected moments that had altered the entire course of his life, like the first drops of rain preceding a storm that swept all before it, and left everything in its wake forever changed.
Had he not been in his cups, he never would have chased after Lady Susanna, and ended up kissing the Lady in Lavender.
It was strange, the way a man’s entire life could change in the space of a single evening, but wasn’t the mere fact of it having happened evidence that he and the Lady in Lavender were destined for each other? Surely, fate wouldn’t have allowed such an extraordinary chain of circumstances to unfold otherwise?
Johnathan had never thought of himself as a romantic, but perhaps no man ever did until the fates smiled on him, and threw him into the path of the one woman who tipped his world on its axis. That he didn’t know her name, and hadn’t even seen her face, made not the slightest difference at all.
“I only hope the Lady in Lavender will make a proper Countess of Melrose. You have your sisters to think of.”
“There’s never a time when I don’t think of them, Cross.”
“I know.” Cross tossed back the rest of his port. “What’s your opinion of Emmeline Templeton? She’s a quiet young lady, unlike her sister, but she seemed happy enough to talk to you today.”
“She’s…” Johnathan paused, uncertain how to put into words what Emmeline Templeton was. Nothing like any other lady he’d ever known, and not as he’d imagined any lady ever could be, before their visit to Lady Fosberry’s drawing room yesterday.
He was still missing a great many of the pieces that made up the puzzle of Emmeline Templeton, but the more time he spent with her, the more determined he was to find them.
Those eyes, and that guilty flush…
“Unexpected.” It wasn’t quite the right word, but it was the best Johnathan could do. “She’s unexpected.”
It wasn’t until he’d retired to his bedchamber that night, and was staring up at the canopy over his head that Johnathan realized he’d spent hardly any time talking to Juliet Templeton.
He’d meant to do so in hopes of solving the mystery of which Templeton sister was the Lady in Lavender, but somehow, he’d forgotten all about it.
Chapter
Nine
“My dears, the ton has gone mad.”
Emmeline inserted her thumb between the pages of the book she’d been pretending to read—poor Mr. Whateley again—and turned from her place on the window seat, where she’d been daydreaming for the better part of an hour. Somehow, Mr. Whateley’s observations on convex and concave shapes of ground couldn’t quite hold her attention.
Juliet, who’d been staring as vacantly at the fire as Emmeline had been at the window, turned with a dismayed sigh. “Oh, no. What is it this time?”
