“That’s not fair play, Vale,” Nesbit said, casting a heated look in his host’s direction. “Dunmere was near unbeatable at university.”
“I know nothing about those pillared institutions,” Anthony murmured, his smoke-gray eyes cooling. “I was born in Limehouse, mate. East End lads don’t typically make it to Oxford.”
Ren smothered a laugh and stepped neatly between Georgiana and Butler-Josephson, taking care to keep his gaze off the swell of her bosom above the scalloped neckline of her gown, though it took effort. She was built like a dream. “It’s been ages since those trifling contests. I hardly recall how to play.” He rolled his shoulders, then picked up a bow and tested its bend before placing it aside and choosing another. He preferred a stiffer stave. “You know my arm gives me fits.”
“I know it gives you fits when it suits,” Nesbit murmured, loud enough for all to hear.
“Let him loose an arrow or two,” Butler-Josephson said, his singsong tone suggesting he’d had too much to drink and it was barely noon. He sidled closer to Georgiana, and Ren’s blood surged, hot and immediate. His fingertips tingled with the need to prove himself. “He’s forty if he’s a day. How good can such an old chap be anyway?”
Bloody fucking good, that’s what. (And he wasnotforty.)
In the end, it was the most fun Ren had had in years.
He stepped easily, almost startlingly, into the role he’d played before his father’s untimely death, before the titles of duke, husband, and father had begun to define him. He was cheerful, gregarious, and a tad arrogant. He laughed, flirted—only with Georgiana, and subtly at that, so rumors didn’t run rampant—and with practiced precision, wiped the field with his opponents. He was not without compassion. He let his aim roam outside the straw target’s perimeter twice to allow the match to continue. He refrained from his old tricks of testing the gust in the air or licking his thumb, then dusting the arrow tip before sending it soaring to further unhinge his rivals.
Proof, perhaps, that the years had endowed him with a solemn degree of maturity. He even managed to exchange places with the Earl of Hopeforth when Lady Amelia Neville entered the crowd, introducing them as if they’d never met. He left them to discuss the weather—banal, but a start nonetheless.
The afternoon only shifted into darker waters when someone brought up the past.
Nesbit fit the nock to the bowstring and let an arrow go that was poorly positioned from the launch. “Still quite the marksman, Dunmere, for a man who once fancied himself an artist,” the earl said, his lips tilting up in sly malice. “I recall your father shooting that down like an ailing pigeon not long before he passed.”
The bow he’d settled against his shoulder vibrated with Ren’s shudder.
“Stay the course, mate,” Anthony murmured at his side.
Ren’s arrow sliced through the tense silence and struck the gold center ring, ending the match though he’d considered drawing it out for another round. “Shall we discuss your activities during that time, chum? I recall a discreet establishment in Covent Garden. Or was it the squalid one off Drury Lane?” He placed the bow on the gear table, bracing himself. “Sketching seems quite frivolous in comparison.”
Before Anthony could further a brawl he’d doubtless enjoy—and, seconds later, join—Georgiana stepped between the men, her hand going to Ren’s chest, sending his temper pooling into the lime-greengrass at his feet. She smelled like peonies and sunlight, and he desired this more than Nesbit’s bones snapping beneath his knuckles.
“You promised to tell me about the exhibition at Somerset House, Your Grace, and I only have a few minutes before I have to prepare for dinner,” Georgiana said, causing Butler-Josephson to sigh and Nesbit to curse.
Ren gave them both a grin of victory as she led him away, tugging lightly on his coat sleeve as she guided him through the crowd assembled to watch a duke and earl fight it out.
She halted at the refreshment table, her exquisitely rounded hip bumping it and sending it rocking. “That was certainly the show,” she murmured, reaching for a seed cake.
“Nesbit always was a haughty prick,” Ren said around a mouthful of a ratafia biscuit.
Georgiana turned to him with the most alluring laugh he’d ever heard. “Oh,well.”
Ren faced her, leaving his hard-bitten persona behind, something he hadn’t done in ages. “There might have been a young lady at Oxford. And I might have filched her from a certain still-vexed earl when he wasn’t looking.”
“The story matures,” Georgiana said, her tongue grazing her lower lip to catch a crumb.
“Indeed,” he whispered, praying she couldn’t see what she was doing to him on a scoundrel’s lawn at a guileless summer party. If his body didn’t settle, he was going to have to sit and place a napkin atop his lap.
Her smile was pure delight, the brightest illumination on the estate, perhaps in all of England. Her eyes shone more gold than hazel in the sunlight, a shade darker than her hair. And her lush form called to him as no other had. He admitted he was taken with every aspect of this unexpected find, his body and his mind in a fevered pitch.
It was a cruelty of fate that he was past the phase of life Georgiana was only now entering.
To keep himself from removing the blade of grass from her bodice, Ren returned to the matter that had brought them together. “AskAnthony to seat Hopeforth next to Lady Amelia at dinner, and place yourself close by, the official start of your matchmaking endeavor. I believe they’re interested but shy. When I left them, they were only beginning to discuss the coming rain. The man’s charm unfortunately knows too many bounds. Though he’s considered honorable, financially stable, and free of any known deviant tendencies, so you’re steering the girl in a sound direction.”
Silent for a beat, Ren realized his state of dress. Wrinkled coat, his cravat loosened about his neck for the match. Dirt-streaked surely, sweat layering his skin. But the enchanting woman before him poured tea and handed him another ratafia biscuit as if nothing were amiss. Georgiana managed him in a way he didn’t recall anyone else doing. She seemed real, exactly as she was, right there for him to grasp, nothing false in her. No greedy aspiring duchess about her. Her gaze was steady, her expression curious but controlled. He suspected she wanted to know more about him—but didn’tneedto know more.
And that made all the difference.
Letting the silence settle, she waited until he was mid-mouthful before saying, “I want you to sketch me.”
“I wasn’t any good,” he choked out before polishing off the tea to wash it down.
