“It is maybe too much for me. I do not know anyone.”
“What you need, my sweet, is a guide.” Even his laugh was lecherous. “We wouldn’t want you to lose your way, now would we?”
She should giggle. She should give his arm a flirtatious swat. And she should say, “Oh, your grace, whoever could show me the way?”
And she did.
Then she felt it on the side of her face.Hisgaze. She followed the feeling and met stormy gray eyes boring into her. The breath in her lungs suspended mid-breath. Never had a man made her heart race by the sheer force of his gaze.
Not until this man.
Her husband.
Right.
Chapter Sixteen
Adark forcebuilt inside Jamie—his blood burned with it—as he watched Rothesbury’s gaze rake across Hortense like she was his for the taking.
His jaw tensed, his hand clenched a glass of water until his knuckles showed white, the compulsion to do violence to both Rothesbury and Wellington threatening to propel him across the room.
“Lord Clare, it isn’t polite to stare at one’s wife,” came a pouty, feminine voice to his right.
The lady to his left giggled. “One would think you besotted with her.”
He was about to offer up a protest when the first lady gave his arm a light swat with her fan, her eyes flashing flirtatiously. “Andthatmost definitely isn’t done in polite society,” she said. “To love one’s wife?Tsk-tsk.Sode trop.”
“Of course, you did marry her by special license,” observed the second lady.
“And the marriage was only this week?” asked the first.
“Quite.” He would keep private the fact that he and Hortense had wed only a few hours ago.
“And she’s French?” A return of the poutiness.
“She was born in England.”
“But good as French,non?”
He shrugged, weary of this conversation. Rothesbury was now listing to the side, like a crusty old battleship, and encroaching into her space. His stomach roiled. He understood intellectually that, by charming Rothesbury, she was succeeding at tonight’s objective. She was drawing him into their web. What he hadn’t anticipated was his frustration and nausea at the sight of it.
The ladies to either side of him exchanged a glance loaded with meaning. Though he offered them no encouragement, they weren’t finished with him quite yet.
“Tell me, Lord Clare, what is it they have?” one of them asked. It hardly mattered which.
He heaved a sigh. “Who?”
“French women.”
He rolled his eyes. Could their conversation be any more banal or utterly, fixedly stupid? In unison, they turned speculative glares on Hortense. “Her black hair is nice,” said one.
“And her blue eyes are fine, I suppose,” said the other.
“A bit showy, truth be told.”
“I’ll allow that she is pretty.”
With her silky, jet-black hair and eyes the color of a clear Mediterranean sea, his wife was a diamond of the first water, he didn’t say. Saying so would only arm these two vipers with more poison.
