Remmy’s hair? Tuggable? Well, Tessa had tugged on it before, but that had been because she’d been ten and he’d teased her past all patience. Not because… because… Lord Brawly’s hand had been tangled in Lady Chattaway’s hair earlier… tugging.
Heavens. This was absurd. The young women were clearly addled. But then the next group she passed discussed the same thing.
“They say shirtless.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
Tessa rolled her eyes and popped out from between them, closer to Lady Chattaway.
Then all the air was sucked from the room, and everyone turned to the doorway, so she did too.
Remmy stood like a conquering hero, his legs spread wide and straining his buckskins, earring glinting on one lobe, neckentirely bare, and a rather voluptuous woman on each arm. They clung to him like briars to skirts, and they stared up at him with glassy eyes and slightly parted lips.
He cut through the crowd like a hot knife through butter and situated himself in a corner where the light from windows could not reach. The women stayed close, continued clinging, whispering in Remmy’s ear now and then, making him produce a deep chuckle that shook free an avalanche of feminine sighs from one end of the room to the other. He poured drinks for his little cohort, and they settled into a sultry little circle. Could circles be sultry? Oh yes. She’d seen it in Italy. She recognized it now.
Remmy must have sensed Tessa’s regard. He caught herwatching, winked over a raised glass, hiding behind it the corner of the faintest grin. She recognized that grin, and relief rushed through her. She knew what he was up to now. This was a drama, a play, a bit of mischief.
The rogue.
Tessa slipped toward him.
And came right up against the aching need for a drink of her own in the still too-slender form of her father. The first time she’d seen him in six years. He was a little bowed, a little grayer, his skin thinning and creased and so unlike the man she remembered.
“Tessa!” Her father sounded surprised. “I… We did not know you would be here.”
That her greeting. After six years. To think there’d been days, most of her life, really, when his lips had formed a song as he’d looked at her, when his eyes had held stars, and his words had been full of…
She wouldn’t cry.
“Father, it’s lovely to see you.” She sounded much too formal and stiff. But that’s what they were now. Formal. Stiff. Strangers. “Is Mother here?”
“Yes.” He nodded near the bookshelf by the fireplace where her little mother with flyaway orange curls stretched an arm toward a tome much higher above her head than she could reach. “I should go help her.”
“Of course.”
“You should… stay here. And, if you do not mind, stay out of her line of sight.”
Tessa bit her lip, nodded. “I—” Too high. She cleared her throat. “I will.” Better. At least she’dsoundedbetter.
There was a high wavering wail no one could hear but her, though, and it made the room shift beneath her like the boards of a ship. She clutched a fist near the stone heavy in her belly. She wouldn’tcry,andshe wouldn’t be sick.
But she would watch her father as he stepped backward, as he turned, as he walked away. She watched hoping he’d turn back, that the gravestone firmness of his mouth would give way, just once—a tiny crack—to allow the corner of his mouth to grin. A sign. A little message that he still loved her.
But it never did.
And with a half hour until dinner, and her stomach empty as a hip bath awaiting water—except for that stone—she moved once more toward Remmy in the corner.
And once more found herself waylaid, a too-loud conversation bringing her to an abrupt stop.
“Do you think Mr. Ives,” a young woman Tessa didn’t recognize said, “is as scandalous as the Brazen Belle says?”
“Pardon me?” Tessa slipped slightly between the two women. When they blinked at her she asked, “Who is the Brazen Belle?”
The women shared a look.
One said, “You do not know?”
