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James let out a breath and lowered his eyes, resigning himself to the tirade that was to follow, comforting himself in the knowledge that it would only be witnessed by the servants in the room, for he and his mother dined alone that night.
Now, as Lady Henrietta clapped her hands as she won the round, he tried to put his mother’s disagreeable words from his mind.
A rake I may be, but not a happy one.
Lady Henrietta, the game concluded, sashayed over to his side and seated herself on the bench. ‘Well, Lord Thorburn, did you admire my bowling prowess?’ she asked, her large brown eyes wide with affected innocence.
James saw through her airs. Lady Henrietta hadn’t an innocent bone in her body. She was as conniving a lady as one might ever have the misfortune to meet in London society. But in that she was not so very different from the rest of the ladies, except for those who were only just making a debut, and even they had an edge of sophistication he found distasteful.
Not like Katherine Norwood.
Not like Katherine Norwood, at all.
‘Such prowess is enough to make any man quail to challenge you,’ James said to Lady Henrietta.
Touching the blonde curls artfully styled at the sides of her face, she preened, pleased with the comment. ‘I should like to think I might charm them enough to draw them in,’ she said.
‘Indeed, you are a veritable Cleopatra, as beauteous as you are treacherous,’ James said.
She assumed he was joking, but he was not.
‘Oh, Lord Thorburn, what a flatterer you are,’ she laughed.
In his mind’s eye he compared her to Katherine Norwood. No two ladies could have been more different. Where Lady Henrietta looked as pampered as a princess, Miss Norwood had the simple air of a country girl accustomed to the outdoor air. Miss Norwood’s dark blue eyes held wisdom and innocence—James found them fascinating. The mind behind them intrigued him even more. She seemed without pretension, and yet...clever. He had never met anyone like her.
If ever I were to choose to spend an afternoon in a lady’s company,James thought,I should far prefer to do so with Miss Norwood, rather than someone like Lady Henrietta. How extraordinary.
The revelation quite unsettled him. It went against everything he had ever been taught—that good breeding mattered more than any other consideration, when evaluating the female sex. That lowborn girls would be coarse and abrasive. That he would someday meet a nobleman’s daughter and fall in love, whilst girls from other walks of life could only be considered amusing in passing.
It seems that there is much that I have believed that has no basis in reality,James marveled.
Such thoughts were wholly new to him, and this disrupted his pervasive sense of discontent as much as his encounter with Miss Norwood had.
‘What an unreadable expression you wear, my lord,’ Lady Henrietta observed. ‘What can you be contemplating?’
James blinked and met her dark eyes.
‘I have discovered the most wonderful thing, Lady Henrietta,’ he confessed.
‘Oh?’ she said, her eyebrows arching in genuine surprise. Such declarations were unheard of from the famously sardonic Lord Thorburn.
‘Yes. A brief encounter, seemingly of no consequence...can change the course of one’s life,’ he said.
‘You cannot mean it,’ Lady Henrietta said, her mouth curving into a smile.
At the back of James’s mind, he noted the look, and knew that it likely meant she thought he was talking about her—but he could not be bothered with correcting her.
‘I do mean it,’ he said, focused still on his recollection of Miss Norwood.
I must see her again.
’Twas a simple realization, but it affected him profoundly.
Indeed, his life had changed when he met her. He could not deny it. He could only see where this new course led.
Chapter 3
Kate
