Focus, she ordered herself.This was the riskiest part of her plan.With a silent apology and a deep fortifying breath…Caroline shoved her mother into the Serpentine.
ChapterFour
“A young man like you needs the steadying influence of a good woman,” the Marquess of Huntingdon said, continuing along the well-worn track of his thoughts in much the same way his flawless pair of matched blood bays pulled his curricle smoothly down Rotten Row.
The crowd parted before the Marquess of Huntingdon as if by magic.The magic of social precedence, Fitz supposed.Father didn’t appear to notice that he barely needed to twitch the ribbons; meanwhile, mounted on Arion and keeping pace alongside the curricle, Fitz had to devote at least ninety per cent of his attention to keeping other riders from blundering into his horse’s sides.
Not for the first time, Fitz wished they set a horsemanship examination before they let people into the park.No doubt it would clear the place out considerably.
“Is that what my mother was for you?A steadying influence?”Fitz asked, frowning down at a dandified stripling fighting with a mare that was clearly too much horse for him.Kneeing Arion gently around the poor, confused mare, Fitz took a moment to lean close enough to her rider to murmur, “If you keep sawing at her mouth like that, she will throw you, and you will deserve it.”
The boy blanched but loosened his grip on the reins at once.Fitz inclined his head in approval, giving the lightest of touches to his mount’s sides to catch up with his father’s carriage.
“What’s that?”his father demanded sharply, looking round.“Keep up.No, boy.I was nothing like you.My father would never have stood for it.I’ve been too soft on you.”
Fitz had never met his grandparents, but even amongst the Haute Ton, they had been known as rigid sticklers for propriety and status.From certain things Father had said through the years, Fitz rather thought he was fortunate to have escaped their acquaintance.
“What a trial it must have been to you,” Fitz said, forcing lightness into his tone, “to be saddled with a dullard like me.”
“You have a brain, if you would only care to use it,” Father replied irritably.“If you would only work hard and apply yourself.Something I’ve never known you to do.”
Apply myself to what, exactly?Fitz wanted to ask, but he didn’t have the heart.Spirits sinking, Fitz felt a tendency to brood coming over him.His life was just so…aimless.He felt as if he was constantly searching for something without the slightest hope of actually finding it, because he was damned if he even knew what it was.
Bleak, that.
There were flickers of light and hope here and there, candles in the darkness, as it were, and Fitz perked up as he recalled the moment the evening before at the Lamington rout.The kiss, yes—that had been more along the lines of a blazing bonfire than a wee candle—but then there came that moment after Miss Caroline Quick had taken her leave of him and gone back to her mother’s side.
Fitz had eyed the older woman speculatively.Trim little figure, full head of hair of an ashier blonde than her daughter’s platinum mane, and a sky blue gown in the latest mode that showed a measure of taste as well as an interest in fashion.He liked the way she smiled at her daughter, warm and friendly, as if she relished the sight of Caroline.
Quite different to the stern-jawed disapproval that usually greeted Fitz when he strayed into his father’s line of sight—and different, too, from the way his own mother’s gaze had flitted over her children as though they were irritating obstacles to her enjoyment of life.
It must be quite nice, he thought, to have a mother like Caroline’s.Which, he supposed, hewouldif Caroline’s schemes bore fruit.Lady Quick would become Fitz’s stepmama if she married Father.
That reminded him.Fitz had scanned the room quickly for the old man, wondering if he’d noticed Lady Quick at all, as Caroline seemed to think he would.And there it was, the moment that had sparked a tiny candle to light—the look on his father’s face as he stared across the ballroom, directly at Lady Quick.
He’d looked as if someone had bludgeoned him about the head with a dead fish.(Fitz knew what that looked like, as he’d done it once to Blinkers Blankenship on a dare.)
That dead fish look on the Marquess of Huntingdon’s face was enough to get Fitz out of bed the next morning in time to convince his father to go for a drive.
And here they were, and just in time too, because in the next instant as he was realizing that he really ought to be keeping watch for the delectable Miss Caroline Quick and her lady mother, a commotion erupted near the wooden fence bordering the path.Fitz spied the tree Miss Quick had instructed him to look out for at the same moment as he saw Miss Quick herself, waving her arms frantically in his direction, her face a picture of distress.
“What on earth is going on over there?”Father wondered, echoing Fitz’s thoughts, but even though Caroline hadn’t elucidated every detail of her plan the evening before, he was already familiar enough with her forthright style to recognize a cue when it was waving in front of his face.
“Let us go and find out,” he said, urging Arion to cut a path through the throng beginning to gather by the spindly tree on the riverbank.
Behind him, Fitz was aware of his father authoritatively moving the crowd of gawking onlookers aside.But even though he knew, on one level, that this was no doubt all part of Caroline’s grand scheme to trap their parents into matrimony, there was another—more primitive—level on which Fitz only knew that the woman he’d kissed and held in his arms needed his help.Needed him.
Blood racing and mind going blessedly calm and focused, Fitz reined Arion to stand beside the fence and swung out of the saddle and over the barrier in the blink of an eye.He didn’t even register the other people gathering round as he strode to Caroline’s side.All he saw was her upturned face, the welcome in her wide, violet eyes.
It took everything he had not to sweep her into his arms.
“You came,” she sighed, as if she was both relieved and smugly satisfied.
“I’m here.What do you need?”
A splash from behind her had Fitz glancing over her shoulder only to see a very wet, very bedraggled, very unhappy lady attempting to find her footing in the silt of the Serpentine’s bank.
Alarmed, Fitz immediately moved to help the poor woman, only to find Caroline’s small, gloved hand on his arm, holding him back.
