“But I don’t want to play! I hate cards. Hate them with a vengeance!”
“And yet you are going to play because your beloved lord and master decrees it.” Giles heaved his glaring wife out of her chair, which took some time as her sister had chosen quite a low chair and her protruding pregnant belly behaved like a wedge, preventing her from getting the purchase to rise. “I have ten pounds resting on you and Galahad.”
“You have ten pounds resting on Galahad. My part in this game is redundant.”
“Let us not split hairs, Diana.” With the utmost care, Giles helped her into a chair at the card table. “You are hardly redundant. I am banking on you to be as useless at whist as you usually are so that my cousin can shine.”
While Diana grumbled and massaged the side of her belly, Minerva took her seat. “I appreciate that nobody here rates my talent at whist, either, but I can assure you that I have also learned a great deal from my previous defeat and will not be so easily sidetracked again.” In another show of support, her big sister glared at Galahad, who approached the table clutching the softest cushion from the sofa.
He arranged it carefully on his chair, but waited to sit, gesturing for Vee to do so first. “What are our stakes?”
“Hmmm…” Vee pretended to ponder it. “I suppose that depends. Knowing your penchant for wanting to win something that matters and something that would sting to lose, I think I should like to wager for the honor to name your precious club.”
He nodded, impressed by her choice. “I’ll agree to that so long as The Basket of Kittens is completely off the table.”
“Spoilsport—but so long as that is the only caveat, I shall concur. What do you want?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Another truce. Genuine politeness and neighborliness, at all times, no matter where we happen to collide.”
“That would indeed sting.” Vee held out her hand, regretting it instantly when he took it and shook it and reminded all her nerve endings how much they liked to rejoice at his touch.
At Jeremiah’s instigation, they tossed a coin to decide who dealt. Galahad won, but this time as he shuffled the cards with the same showmanship he had displayed the last time, he did not pretend to be unfocused. Nor did he produce a lucky quarter to distract her with, almost as if he knew and respected that she wasn’t daft enough to fall for that ploy twice. Once the hands were dealt, and the trump card turned, he scanned his quickly without sorting them, then snapped them closed while he awaited her first move.
The first rubber was a hard affair, with neither giving an inch, but in the end he won it by three tricks to her two. Vee snatched the second by a whisker in the last trick, bringing them level.
Everything rested on the last rubber, but as the room fell silent while Galahad began to shuffle the cards, an uncomfortable Diana groaned aloud.
“I need to move. This baby has given me indigestion and is currently kicking like a Morris dancer.” She went to stand, and Giles rushed forward to help her.
“Dalton! Fetch my wife some peppermint tea!”
“If we are declaring a break, we might as well all have some tea.” Olivia bustled off to chivy the Sinclair staff while the master of the house walked the mistress around the room as if she were made of glass.
“Tea?” As Hugh turned up his nose, so did Jeremiah, and they both simultaneously headed toward the decanters on the sideboard for something stronger.
“I suppose I am the one who is going to have to check on the children.” Minerva rose, too, leaving Vee entirely alone with Galahad and with no earthly idea what to say to him after all Olivia’s teasing and everyone unsubtly watching to see if there was indeed a frisson still between them despite his treachery in Brighton.
“I think I’m going to enjoy our neighborly truce.” He folded his arms, smug, intent on riling her rather than them sitting in awkward silence after Olivia’s dratted roasting.
“Not as much as I’m going to enjoy walking past The Fluffy Puppy every morning on my way to work.”
“You wouldn’t dare.” His disarming green eyes narrowed. “That’s worse sabotage than the Claypoles’ pigeons.”
“Are you scared, Galahad?” Mirroring his cocky stance, she folded her arms and was staggered to see his eyes flick briefly to the vicinity of her shawl-covered bosom. So fast that if she had blinked, she would have missed it. But she hadn’t blinked. Hadn’t missed it. And now, as she studied him, she noticed that his jaw was suddenly clenched.
Was Minerva right?
Chapter Twenty
When I started volunteering at the orphanage, I could not have foreseen how much it would affect me. But I have found my life’s true calling. Those unfortunate, forgotten, downtrodden children have nobody to champion them—but as I already love each and every one of them as my own and know how it feels to be trampled on and abandoned, at least they shall always have me in their corner…
—from the diary of Miss Venus Merriwell, aged 18
“Is it me, or is it warm in here?” Much to Galahad’s annoyance, Venus had been distracted throughout the first three tricks of the final round, and Diana wasn’t behaving much better. Both women had been fidgeting like fidgeting was going out of fashion. Because all of Venus’s shuffling kept sending puffs of her seductive fragrance his way while she continually adjusted and readjusted her shawl, she was also distracting the hell out of him. With all those brief flashes of cleavage combined with the seductive scent of jasmine, it was a miracle he’d won two tricks.
The second, he knew full well, had come more out of luck than judgment, because he had completely lost track of the cards for a goodtwo minutes during the previous trick that she had stolen. Then lost track, again, during the next for a while, too.
During those missing moments, she had unknotted her shawl and it had slipped on one side, exposing the upper swell of her perfect left breast. He probably could have coped with that if she hadn’t been idly twirling a finger in the stray curl that bounced above her left shoulder, too. Both things had made him hot under the collar, but the way she had bit her lip in the closing moments of the third trick, the way she had slowly drawn that plump, pink flesh through her teeth, had been the final nail in his coffin. Desperate for the torture to end, he’d squandered his highest trump, the ace of hearts, simply because he had no clue what she held anymore.
