“My cousin decided upon the roast beef, whereas many would have chosen the leg of lamb,” the woman seemed to be saying, or maybe that was simply what Owen thought he heard in the midst of her nonstop blather.
Without thinking, he interrupted her, “Do you have a handkerchief?”
With her mouth open, she turned her attention from Whitely, who barely seemed to notice she’d stopped speaking, to Owen. She blinked up at him, then laughed.
Owen didn’t think his request was the least bit funny.
“Why, yes, my lord,” the young lady said after a pause. “Are you in desperate need of blowing your nose?”
He growled with impatience. “Is that what passes for wit amongst the debutantes?”
She paled, compressing her lips, while Whitely bristled on her behalf.
“Here now, Burnley. Let’s not forget we are in polite society.”
It was damnably hard to think about being polite when someone in that very room might be holding the clue to the identity of his sister’s murderer. He shrugged and tried again.
“If you have one about your person,” Owen addressed the young woman once more, “may I see it?”
Obviously annoyed, she raised her arm to bring up her reticule, dangling from her wrist along with her dance card, which Owen noted was well-written upon.What idiots in the ballroom would prefer this addlepated magpie to Lady Adelia?
She opened the drawstrings of her beaded sack and withdrew a handkerchief with a flower pattern instead of plain white.
This, she held out to him.
He raised his hand in dismissal. “Never mind. I’ll see you later, Whitely,” he said and left his friend to the vapid little miss who started on about her tedious cousin again before Owen was out of earshot.
Snagging a glass of champagne from a passing server, he sipped it while searching the room for his next target. The men he knew, those who couldn’t possibly have an anvil on their handkerchiefs, he dismissed at once. That still left a vast number of young swains, new to the social scene or not numbered among Owen’s acquaintances.
Too many!
Despite Lady Jane’s advice to enlist a female’s assistance, he decided to continue the hunt on his own, at least for the time being. He tried a tall, scowling man, managing to get a look at his plain handkerchief before moving on to a stocky fellow with very dark eyebrows, someone who looked capable of wicked deeds.
Owen approached him, interrupting his conversation with others.
“May I borrow your handkerchief?” he asked.
The man frowned, but, after the briefest of hesitations, drew it out of his pocket. Owen saw at once it wasn’t the one he sought but decided he’d best take it nonetheless. Nodding, he stuffed it in his pocket, gave a short bow, started to walk away.
“Don’t you want to put your name on my dance card?” the man asked loudly, making Owen briefly halt his steps and causing some around them to chuckle.
Let it go, Owen told himself, wishing he hadn’t paused at the man’s rude question.
“Come along now. I can waltz with you as well as any of the ladies here,” the man continued, enjoying the limelight. “Maybe better than some, and I’ll even let you keep my kerchief as a token.”
This sent those close enough to hear into peals of laughter.
Owen turned around. “Are you casting aspersions uponmymasculinity oryour own? Do you wish, indeed, to assume the lady’s part in the dance?”
The man’s face reddened. “How dare you?” He drew himself up to his full height, which wasn’t quite past Owen’s chin.
Owen shook his head, but his hands itched to punch the man in his now-florid face for no reason other than he was an annoying fool. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew the linen square and tossed it back into its owner’s face.
Regrettably, it landed more on the top of his head, hanging over his forehead and into his eyes.
“There, now we can pretend this never happened,” Owen advised as the man whipped it off his head to the accompaniment of more raucous laughter.
“Shall we go outside?” came the stocky gentleman’s next question.
