My Lady, My Lord by Katharine Ashe Page B

they were to wear. How a woman ate more than a soupçon of food at a time, he hadn’t the foggiest.
    His clothing, however, provided the least heinous of his discomforts. There simply could not be anything more to say on the subject of gardenias. The duchess and her friends, most of them comfortably over the age of sixty, had already spent an hour discussing the plant from root to petal. But they seemed no closer to finalizing the meandering discussion than they had at its start.
    He would escape if he could. But he’d come with his own mother. At half past four, just as he was preparing to settle down in Corinna Mowbray’s parlor with a full snifter of brandy in the hopes that it would stabilize his unsteady hands, Lady Charlotte Chance had appeared at the door, nearly knocking him off his chair.
    She’d given the glass of spirits a moment’s thoughtful consideration, then said they ought to be on their way. The duchess and the Ladies’ Society for the Advancement of Horticultural Diversity expected them.
    Ian slouched back into his hard wooden chair. The old termagant’s parlor didn’t boast any other sort of seat. He’d never liked the duchess. A drawing room furnished with chairs fit for a boy’s school now seemed reason enough for his antipathy. He pretended he was anywhere else. He’d not yet heard a word that convinced him these ladies were interested in horticultural diversity of any sort. Anyway, he couldn’t give a damn about gardening.
    In his imagination he conjured Amabel’s ruby lips. Then he allowed his imagination to wrap those lips around his—
    “Isn’t that so, Lady Corinna?”
    The mirage of the Widow Weston on her knees faded. Lips pursed, the duchess’s wrinkled stare fixed on his face.
    “Of course,” he replied promptly. He was growing accustomed to Corinna’s voice coming from his throat. It was lower from within her head, and pleasing. Something of a surprise.
    What quirk of fate or demon from the depths of Hell had contrived this? Tea and gardenias be damned, his situation topped all for inducing desperation.
    “Of course they wilt more quickly in Powder of Abicum, or of course they appear at their best two days after full bloom, dear girl?” the Countess of Evanston queried.
    “Oh.” Damn and blast. “Both, I daresay.”
    Was this truly how Corinna Mowbray spent her afternoons? No wonder she was such a cold fish. But his mother seemed interested in the conversation.
    It’d been the devil of a thing pretending to be Corinna during the ride over. Struggling to ape her prim manners, he’d silently prayed she wasn’t doing anything with his friends to shame him. Until she returned, he wouldn’t even know if he’d lost the thousand he’d bet on the fight or made a tidy bundle.
    Damn. Blast. Damn.
    His mother stood. “I apologize for our early departure, ladies,” she said in her customarily gracious tones. “Lady Corinna’s father expects her home for dinner before the opera.”
    The opera? Tonight?
    No chance in hell.
    Ian stood, treading on the hem of his ugly black gown and jostling the tea tray as he righted himself.
    “I beg your pardon,” he mumbled, nodded his head—he wasn’t about to curtsy,
damn Corinna Mowbray’s infernal devotion to social mores
—and followed his mother from the room.
    “You seem pensive today, Cora,” she said as they moved down the steps to the carriage.
    His mother called her
Cora
? Since when?
    “I had less sleep last night than I required.” Not a lie. If he’d been inside his own body he would have slept until at least sunset. He picked up his skirts to ascend the carriage steps and tripped again.
    “I noticed you and Ian speaking together yesterday at the exhibition.”
    Speaking
was an enormously generous term to describe that encounter. Irritation pinched at him, chased by guilt. How much had his mother noticed, precisely?
    “What did you and Corinna find to talk about?” she asked.
    Her prudery. His immorality. The