Sparing a glance overhead, Jules closed his eyes. “Doesn’t the sun feel glorious?”
“Yes.” Though he was far more spectacular.
Trailing her gaze over his refined profile, she put her other hand to her middle to still the odd spasm that always occurred when she gazed upon him thusly. She didn’t remember a time she hadn’t loved him, and that he felt the same...
Galloping turtles, such glee made her lightheaded.
Gone was the stiff, stern, unapproachable peer others had mocked for his severity. Jules now let the rest of the world see the man she’d always known existed beneath his prickly, protective exterior.
A contented sigh passed between her lips.
A half an hour later saw Mary settled beneath a tree with a book and several gossip rags, while Jemmah and Jules strolled the gardens. She’d lived in London her entire life and had never been inside Vauxhall.
Father’s pockets had always been in dun territory, made worse by the funds he frittered away on his mistresses.
“Have I told you how beautiful you are today, Jemmah?” Jules deep voice rumbled low in his broad chest.
A pleasure-born blush bathed her that he would think her so. “No, but I know a taradiddle when I hear it. But it does my womanly pride wonders to hear the nonsense, nevertheless. You forget, I have a looking glass.”
He tweaked her nose. “And you, my dear, are blind to your own loveliness.”
“Well, isn’t this a coincidence. I was just speaking of you, Jemmah.”
Upon hearing Adelinda’s spiteful voice, Jemmah spun around.
Boils and bunions.
Attired in a lovely emerald green and peach gown—new and expensive if she wasn’t mistaken—Adelinda hung on the arm of an attractive man Jemmah didn’t recognize.
Where had Adelinda come by monies to purchase a gown of such high quality?
And who was this newest admirer? Another of Adelinda’s unsuitable swains, no doubt.
He might be handsome, but something unnerving, dark and oily, shadowed his soulless eyes.
From the languid way his gaze slid over Jemmah before something more than polite interest sharpened his features, she’d bet all the buttons in France he wasn’t a respectable sort. In fact, he made her want to race home, dive beneath the bedcovering, and pull them over her head to block his leering gaze.
Adelinda’s perusal of Jemmah was no less thorough, but the look in her eye could never be described as appreciative or cordial.
“Miss Dament. Perkins.” Jules still possessively cradled Jemmah’s elbow, and he gave the new arrivals a distinctly cool and the briefest possible greeting.
Not friends, then.
“Dandridge.” Perkins’s equally frosty acknowledgement confirmed her suspicion. The smile Perkins then bestowed on Adelinda didn’t quite reach his shrewd eyes. “Aren’t you going to introduce me?”
Mouth pinched in displeasure, Adelinda raised an annoyed brow.
“My sister, Jemmah. Jemmah, Mr. Samuel Perkins. He owns a club on Kings Street,” she said all smug superiority.
The last was declared as if he maintained a private suite at Buckingham Palace.
“So, Adelinda, this is the younger sister you’ve told me so much about.”
I’ll wager she has.
Perkins’s lascivious chuckle sent Jemmah’s skin scuttling, and unnerved by the predatory glint in his eye, she edged nearer to Jules.
His palm tightened on her arm the merest bit before he looped her hand through his elbow, the movement drawing her closer.
“You misled me, my dear Adelinda,” Perkins said with another slippery upward twist of his mouth. “Your sister’s a diamond of the first water if I ever saw one.”
He dares address Adelinda by her given name?
Appearing like she’d been served amphibians or reptiles for supper, Adelinda managed a sickly smile.
“I’ve nearly convinced Mama to permit you to return home, Jemmah. If you put off your grand airs. After all, you cannot expect to take advantage of Aunt Theo’s benevolence indefinitely.”
Still the same spiteful Adelinda, though granted, a trio of weeks was hardly time enough to change one’s character.
It was long enough to fall more profoundly, marvelously in love with Jules.
“I won’t be returning, Adelinda. Of that you may rest assured.”
Jemmah sent Jules a secretive glance, but her sister saw it.
Adelinda stepped closer, her perceptive gaze narrowed. “If you think—”
“Dandridge, darling. I thought I saw you from across the way.”
Oh, for all the kippers in Kensington.
Two misses determined to trap Jules in their webs, and this one with the audacity to call him darling in public?
Momentary uncertainty skipped about the tattered edges of Jemmah’s composure.
Inhaling a bracing breath, she swung ’round to see Miss Milbourne, accompanied by two men she didn’t recognize, but whose unusual topaz eyes and honeyed hair decreed them Jules’s relatives.
Jules’s forearm stiffened beneath Jemmah’s fingers.
“Miss Milbourne. Uncles.”
Ah, the famed Charmont uncles who believed Jules incapable of making his own decisions.
Tension thicker than custard settled onto the uncomfortable group, everyone eyeing the other with speculation and suspicion.
Miss Milbourne minced closer, absolute perfection in an exquisite ivory and plum confection, all frothy, feminine lace. And she smelled positively divine.
Drat and dash it all.
Why couldn’t she have a flaw or two or three?
Buck teeth?
A hairy mole upon her nose?
Crossed eyes? Fangs?
“I’ve missed you.” She ran her white-gloved fingers down Jules’s chest, and blinked coyly at him from beneath her preposterously thick eyelashes.
Brazen as an alley cat twitching her tail for a mate.
“I’ve been otherwise engaged.” The steely look he impaled his uncles with had them shuffling their feet and raptly examining the foliage.
Cowards.
Acutely aware of the elegantly coiffed, perfumed, and hostile woman standing but inches away, taking her measure, Jemmah arched a starchy brow. She was newly-betrothed to the Duke of Dandridge, and for all of Miss Milbourne’s posturing and attempts to intimidate, the woman was, quite frankly, and most gratifyingly... the loser.
Her condescending gaze flicked to Jemmah, and Miss Milbourne’s pupils contracted to pinpricks as she oh-so casually twirled her parasol.
“So I see,” she drawled. “I’d heard rumors you were doing the pretty and escorting your godmother’s dowdy ward about town. I must say, I never took you, of all men, for a nursemaid, Dandridge. Most decent of you, inconveniencing yourself to oblige Lady Lockhart’s unreasonable requests.”
Adelinda’s giggle, earned her an exasperated glower from Perkins.
“Yes, quite right, Miss Milbourne. No man has ever willingly directed his attention at my frumpy sister.”
At her sister’s barbed insult, Jemmah stiffened and set her jaw against the oath bucking to escape the narrow barrier of her lips.
A duchess doesn’t tell ladies to go bugger themselves.
Miss Milbourne and Adelinda exchanged a gloating glance.