Now that he thought about it, not one female, including those he'd spent enough time with to start betrothal rumors circulating, had ever presumed to try to engage him in a discussion about love, let alone expect him to actually profess it.
Charise Lancaster, however, was obviously not so practical or so sensible. She clearly expected her fiance to discuss it-at length, no doubt-and that was something Stephen intended to avoid for his sake and her own. Once her memory returned, she was going to hate him for all his deceptions, but she would hate him far more for humiliating her with false protestations of undying affection that he didn't feel.
Two footmen stepped forward as he reached the drawing room and swept open the doors. His forehead furrowed in thought, Stephen walked past them and then over to the sideboard, where he poured sherry into a glass. Behind him, the doors closed silently, and he turned his attention to the most pressing problem at hand. Within the next minute or two, he had to invent some truly plausible explanation to give her for his blatantly unloverlike behavior the last night they'd talked, and for avoiding her since then. When he'd first gone upstairs to see her, he'd intended to apologize and soothe her with a few vague platitudes. Now that he had a better idea of her temperament, he had the uneasy conviction that she wouldn't settle for that.
15
Seething and hurrying, Sheridan clasped the front of the long lavender gown closed as she rushed down the hall from her bedchamber, past startled footmen, whose heads turned in unison as she passed, their mouths agape. Just when she thought she must surely be coming to the living areas of the house, she emerged onto a balcony with a white marble banister that continued downward in a wide, graceful spiral for two full stories before it ended in a vast entrance hall below.
Snatching up the hem of her gown, she ran down the staircase, past framed portraits of what must have been sixteen generations of the arrogant earl's ancestors. She didn't have the slightest idea where he was or how he expected her to find him. The only thing she knew for certain was that in addition to all his other unpleasant traits, he'd spoken to her as if she were a piece of his chattel, and that he was undoubtedly relishing the prospect of hauling her downstairs like a sack of flour in front of his servants if she didn't meet his deadline.
To deprive him of that pleasure, she was willing to go to almost any lengths. She could not imagine how she could have been in her right mind and still have agreed to bind herself for life to a man like him! As soon as her father arrived, she would break her engagement and ask him to take her home at once!
She didn't like the earl, and she was quite certain she wouldn't have anything in common with his mama either. According to the chambermaid, this gown belonged to the earl's mother. It was appalling to imagine an elderly dowager such as his mother, or any other respectable female for that matter, prancing around at balls or entertaining visitors in a flimsy, frivolous lavender gown with nothing but silver ribbons to hold the bodice together or keep the entire front from coming open. She was so angry and so absorbed in her own woes that she didn't give even a passing notice to the splendor of the great hall with its four immense chandeliers, glittering like giant tiers of brilliant diamonds, or to the exquisite frescoes on the walls and intricate plasterwork on the ceiling.
As she neared the bottom step, she saw an elderly man in a black suit and white shirt hurry into a room that opened off the main hall on the left. "You rang, my lord?" she heard him say in the doorway. A moment later, he backed out, bowing reverently, and closed the doors. "Excuse me-" Sherry began awkwardly, tripping on the hem of her gown and reaching for the wall to steady herself.
He turned, saw her, and his body froze. At the same time all his facial features seemed to twist and quiver in some sort of palsied shock.
"I'm perfectly all right," Sheridan hastily reassured him as she righted herself and jerked the hem from beneath her left foot. Noting that he still looked a little queer, Sheridan held out her hand to him and said, "Dr. Whitticomb said I'm well enough to come downstairs. We haven't met, but I am Charise… um… Lancaster," she remembered after an awkward pause. He raised his hand toward hers, and since he seemed uncertain about what to do next, she took his hand in hers, and prompted with a gentle smile, "And you are-?"
"Hodgkin," he said, sounding as if he had a blockage in his throat. Then he cleared it and said again, "Hodgkin."
"I am happy to meet you, Mr. Hodgkin."
"No, miss, just 'Hodgkin.' "
"I couldn't possibly address you by your surname alone. It's disrespectful," Sheridan said patiently.
"It's required here," he said, looking harassed.
Indignation made Sheridan's left hand clench on the front of her gown. "How very like that arrogant beast to deny an older man the dignity of being addressed as 'mister!' "
His features contorted again, and he seemed to stretch his neck as if gasping for air. "I'm sure I don't know whom you might be referring to, miss."
"I am referring to…" She had to think to remember the maid's answer when Sheridan had asked her the earl's name. It had seemed the woman had recited an entire litany of names, but his family name had been… Westmoreland! That was it. "I am referring to Westmoreland!" she said, refusing to dignify his name with his own title. "Someone should have taken a stick to his backside and taught him common courtesy."
On the balcony above, a footman who'd been flirting with a passing chambermaid twisted around and gaped at the entrance hall, while the maid banged against his side in her eagerness to lean over the banister for a better view. A few yards from Sheridan, four footmen who had been filing decorously into the dining room carrying platters suddenly crashed into each other because the lead footman had stopped dead in his tracks. Another white-haired man, younger than Hodgkin but dressed exactly like him, materialized from the dining room, scowling ferociously as the lid of a silver chafing dish hit the marble floor with a crash and rolled into his leg. "Who is responsible for-" he demanded, then he, too, looked at Sheridan and seemed to momentarily lose control of his expression as his gaze ran over her hair, her gown, and her bare toes.
Ignoring the commotion around her, Sheridan smiled at Hodgkin and said gently, "It's never too late, you know, for most of us to see the error of our ways if they're pointed out to us. I shall mention to the earl at an appropriate moment that he ought properly to address a man of your age as 'Mr. Hodgkin.' I could suggest that he put himself in your position and imagine himself at your age…"
She stopped in puzzlement as the elderly man's white brows shot up into his hairline and his faded eyes seemed to pop out of their sockets. Anger with the earl had overruled her sense for those moments, but Sheridan finally realized that the poor man was obviously afraid of losing his position if she interfered. "That was foolish of me, Mr. Hodgkin," she said meekly. "I won't say anything about this, I promise."
On the balcony above and in the hall below, servants exhaled a collective sigh of relief that was abruptly cut off as Hodgkin opened the doors to the drawing room and they heard the American girl say to the master in a haughty, unservile tone, "You rang, my lord?"
Stephen whirled around in surprise at her choice of words and then stopped dead. Choking back a laugh that was part appalled and part admiring, he stared at her as she stood before him, with her pert nose in the air and her gray eyes sparking like large twin flints. In sharp contrast to the stony hauteur of her stance and expression, she was clad in a soft, billowing peignoir made of voluminous lavender silk panels that draped off both her shoulders, leaving them beguilingly bare. She was clutching the front closed, which lifted the hem just high enough off the floor to expose her bare toes, and her titian hair, still damp at the ends, was spilling over her back and breasts as if she were a Botticelli nude.