“I could say the same for you,” she said, dropping his hands and stepping back to give him an appraising once-over. Completely aside from West’s handsome face, his height, his broad shoulders, there was something simply so entirely masculine about him that Violet had no trouble at all understanding why every eligible and not-so-eligible lady in London paused whenever he entered a room. There had not been so much as a whiff of rumor about a mistress surrounding him since before his curricle accident, however; the ton seemed divided on whether he was merely uncommonly discreet, or whether to view him as something of a romantic figure, mired in the tragedy of his past. The latter speculation was, in Violet’s opinion, unforgivably maudlin, but she did know that he’d had a tendre for a particular lady of the ton before his accident—a lady who had married shortly after said accident, in fact.
“West,” James said, joining them and reaching out to shake his brother’s hand. “What are you doing here?”
“Did you forget that I told you just yesterday that I would be here?” West asked pleasantly. “You were rather in your cups, so I suppose I should make allowances for your memory.”
Violet looked sharply at her husband. James liked to drink, of course, as any gentleman of the ton did, but she had never seen him outright drunk—though she supposed, on reflection, that he could be foxed at his club all the time, and she’d never know a thing about it. The thought upset her.
“I recollect perfectly, thank you,” James said, a definite edge to his voice. “I thought you were joking.”
“And why would you possibly have assumed that?”
Violet knew nothing of the source of their tension, but deciding that some sort of intervention was necessary, she quickly said, “West, you must come to dinner sometime soon. We should be happy to have you. Wouldn’t we, darling?” she asked James, batting her eyelashes at him.
He narrowed his eyes.
She, still batting, narrowed hers in return.
“Is something in your eye, Violet?” West asked politely.
She gave him a radiant smile. “Not at all. But you’ll come to dinner?”
“I’m not sure he should,” James said slowly.
“Whyever not?”
“Well,” he said solemnly, “I’m not certain your health would permit such an ordeal as playing the hostess.”
“Are you ill, Violet?” West inquired, looking concerned. How nice it would be to have her husband look at her with such an expression, rather than the look of vague boredom that currently marked his handsome features.
“It’s nothing at all,” Violet said airily, waving a hand. “A mere trifling cough.”
“That kept you abed for two days,” James said.
“No,” Violet said, smiling dazzlingly at him. “It kept me abed for one day. You kept me abed for the second.”
There was a beat of silence. Violet’s face heated to such a degree that she was certain one could fry an egg on it—not that she knew what was involved in frying an egg. But a great deal of heat was required, she would imagine.
Then, to her utmost astonishment, James slid an arm around her waist, pinning her to his side. It was wildly inappropriate, of course; her mother likely would have swooned had she been present. (But wasn’t that always the case?) She looked up and met his gaze and saw, in the crinkles around his eyes, the telltale signs of barely suppressed mirth.
“I appreciate your concern for my fragile ego,” he said, “but there’s no need to lie about my stamina.” He lowered his voice then, speaking so softly that she did not think even West, closest to them, could hear. “It’s impressive enough without embellishment, as I believe you know.”
Violet leaned closer as well, their faces now mere inches apart. “I am going to stab you with a hairpin if you do not remove your arm from my waist.”
Even as she spoke, however, she could feel it pulsing between them: that wild, reckless energy that had always seemed to draw them together, from the very first evening on that balcony. She imagined herself throwing propriety to the wind and sliding her arms around his neck, dragging his mouth down to her own. The mere thought sent heat crawling up her neck, and she hoped the dim lighting within the box would conceal the telltale flush upon her cheeks.
“Ahem,” West said extremely dryly.
Violet took a quick step away from James, breaking his hold upon her person.
“Yes, well, I am feeling much improved,” she said quickly, as though nothing at all out of the ordinary had disrupted their conversation.
“I should be feeling the same, were I permitted to enjoy an evening out without a nursemaid dogging my steps.” James’s tone was bland, but there was a razor-sharp edge underlying it, and Violet was mildly shocked at his rudeness to West. She risked a glance at her brother-in-law and saw that, far from looking offended, West was eyeing his younger brother speculatively. She would have given a fair amount of coin to have been a fly on the wall at White’s whenever they had met there, but as a lady, she could not even be respectably seen in a carriage on St. James’s, much less within the walls of White’s itself.
“Would you like to join us, West?” Violet asked. “We’ve plenty of seats.” This was certainly true—Lord Julian’s box was spacious, and luxuriously appointed.
West refocused his attention on her, offering her a warm smile. “I should be delighted, Violet. Thank you.”
And so it was that Violet passed the remainder of the play seated between her husband and his brother, aware of the tension simmering between them, and yet unaware of its underlying cause.
All in all, it was a thoroughly vexing evening.
Seven
“What the blazes is going on?”
The following morning, James had awoken at dawn. He had taken his usual early-morning ride in Hyde Park, but the crisp air and sunlight had failed to have their usual invigorating effect upon him. He had returned to Curzon Street only to be informed by Wooton that Lady James was feeling poorly again, and had requested a breakfast tray be sent up to her. James had been strongly tempted to burst into her room again and demand some sort of an explanation, but he held off. He did not entirely understand the game that Violet was playing, but he knew that he did not want to play his next hand without careful consideration.
A reasonable man might simply confront her with the facts as he understood them: she was not ill; she had somehow hoodwinked a dissolute aristocrat into pretending to be her doctor; this was all some sort of misguided attempt to get his attention. Well, if that was her goal, she had thoroughly succeeded; he had not spent so much mental energy on his wife in years. He had a sneaking suspicion that confronting her would lead to a screaming row, and he liked to at least understand what he was rowing about before getting himself ensnared in one.
He directed his coachman to an address on Duke Street. Marriage, he thought, with great disgust. It had its definite advantages, to be sure, but he was beginning to believe that even his favorite evenings spent in bed with Violet had not quite been worth all this trouble.
But then, there’d been that one occasion, on the dining room table . . .
Lost in happy reminiscences, he was at his destination before he’d expected, and mere moments later he found himself being shown into a masculine drawing room, with walls papered in dark burgundy and filled with heavy oak furniture, by a surprised-looking servant. James assumed the man’s confusion was owing to the unfashionably early hour but discovered, upon entering the room, that the servant’s surprise was likely due to the fact that, despite the hour, James was not Lord Julian’s first visitor of the morning.