Loving Julia (30 page)
By the time the evening was finally over, Julia had a headache. She said a civil farewell to her hostess, and those of the other guests to whom she had had occasion to speak, and a smiling one to Lord Carlyle. He was really a very nice man, she thought, then dismissed him from her mind as she followed the countess and Caroline into the carriage. One good thing about the countess’ displeasure, she thought, was that at least the drive home would be silent, so her aching head could recover in peace.
But it was not to be. Caroline was full of chatter, and what was not in praise of the performance was spent extolling the virtues of Lord Carlyle.
“He is so handsome, do you not agree?” she trilled. “So truly distinguished looking, and very much the man. Exactly how I like a gentleman to be, do you not agree, Julia?”
“He seemed very nice,” Julia responded in a small voice, wishing that Caroline would hush and that the carriage wheels would not bounce so lustily over the cobblestones.
“Very nice!” Caroline sounded scandalized. “Why, he is considered quite a catch, you know. He has been on the ton for years, ever since his wife died. But I’ve never heard of him asking for an introduction to a lady before. You must have made quite an impression on him, Julia.”
“Julia does seem to make an … impression on widowers, does she not?” The cool voice belonged to the countess. It was devoid of any real expression, but the look in the older woman’s eyes was malicious in the extreme. She could mean only one thing, of course. Just as Julia’s person had attracted Lord Carlyle’s notice, it had also attracted Sebastian’s. Julia, feeling her cheeks begin to burn at the silent accusation, found herself suddenly grateful for Caroline’s inane chatter.
“His wife was dark, like you. He must like dark women. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he should be interested in you? He would be quite a catch, you know. Besides being Lord Carlyle, which title has been in existence since practically the Norman Conquest, and being a very handsome gentleman, his purse is as deep as anyone’s and he never stinted his late wife. Of course there are the children—he has three, you know—but then Sebastian mentioned that you had spent some time with Chloe, so you must be fond of children. Poor little girl, Chloe, I mean, she—”
“Would you hush your senseless chatter, Caroline?” The dowager didn’t frown, but the look she bent on Caroline was taut with displeasure. Then those blue eyes, so like Sebastian’s, shifted to Julia again. “Of course Julia made a show of being interested in Chloe. She would be a fool if she didn’t. But you’ll catch cold at trying to catch Sebastian through his daughter, my girl. Like myself, he is a most un-fond parent. It must be in the blood.”
“You and Sebastian are very much alike,” Caroline agreed, then appeared horrified at what she had said. “Of course, not that I mean to imply that he is not fond of Chloe, because I am sure he is, or that you are not fond of him, because you know you are, Margaret, underneath everything—”
“You are a fool, Caroline,” the countess said with chilling precision, her attention focusing on her daughter-in-law again. “I despise Sebastian, just as he despises that chit of his. Edward was the son of my heart. If Sebastian did not look so like me, I would swear that the midwife had slipped a changeling into my bed. He is everything that is displeasing to me: cold, arrogant, cruel.…”
“Very much like yourself in fact, ma’am?” Julia had not been able to listen to that icy denunciation in silence. Sebastian was not here to take his own part against this heartless woman. Therefore, she would take his part for him. She could not bear to hear him abused, and especially not by one who should love him.
Those icy eyes met Julia’s heated golden ones. “You do have a tendre for him, don’t you? You are more foolish than I thought. Sebastian feels nothing similar for you. It is not in his nature. I have never seen him display a fondness toward anyone. Me, his mother, he despises. He disliked his only brother, and felt contemptuous of his father, who I must admit was deserving of it. I felt the same way myself. That poor stick of a wife of his he was civil to, but no more. And as for his daughter, I laugh when I think of that wretched little mite. Sebastian married for a son, a son to carry on our name, and what he got was a girl who is not even normal but a freak! She—”
“Stop it!” Julia could not listen to any more of this woman’s poison. “How dare you call her that? Chloe is not a freak, but a lovely little girl! And if Sebastian cannot show affection, whose fault is that? Yours, you nasty old woman, for never showing him any. You should be ashamed!” The faces of Chloe and Sebastian rose in her mind. Chloe, just a child who desperately needed love. Sebastian, a man grown, who needed the same thing. That this woman, who was mother to one and grandmother to the other, could say such things, could deny them the affection that was theirs by right and custom, infuriated her. Sebastian might be too armored against emotion to denounce his mother as she deserved. But Julia had no hesitation about doing it for him.
The countess was looking at her as if she had suddenly grown two heads. Apparently she was not used to being shouted at, or spoken to as Julia had spoken to her. Sebastian was invariably icily polite to his mother, Julia recalled, even when he was threatening her. But she did not feel an instant’s regret about what she had said or the manner in which she had said it. She looked the countess right in her soulless eyes and ignored Caroline’s horrified sputters as she attempted to smooth over the ghastly scene.
“Stop clearing your throat, Caroline, you sound like a chicken whose neck is being wrung,” the countess said coldly. Her gaze had never left Julia. Those blue eyes no longer reminded her of Sebastian’s, Julia realized as she met them without an outward sign of a qualm. Sebastian’s eyes had been many things in the time she had known them, but never this, never evil.
“You will regret speaking to me in such a fashion,” the countess said finally.
Julia felt a shiver feather its way down her spine as the carriage thankfully rolled to a stop in front of the house.
The following morning a nosegay of purple and gold pansies was delivered for Julia, along with a charming note from Lord Carlyle. As she accepted the tribute from Smathers and pressed it to her nose, breathing deeply of the soft fragrance of the flowers, Sebastian came in through the front door.
He was dressed for riding in a severe black coat that emphasized the silver-gold of his hair, buff breeches, and a pair of highly polished boots. A silver-topped riding crop was in his hand, and he surrendered this and his hat to the footman who opened the door. From the disordered waves of his hair and the healthy flush of color in his cheeks, he had obviously just returned from an early morning gallop.
His eyes narrowed as they found Julia, who looked back at him with a pleasure she could not quite disguise; even frowning as he was at the moment, he was handsome enough to stop her breath. Her eyes traced the flawless lines of his forehead and chin, the straight, high-bridged nose, the stern mouth with its slightly fuller lower lip, the broad shoulders and lean hips and long muscular legs, returning to meet the celestial blue eyes. They were anything but celestial now as the dark brows met above them in a frown of irritation.
“Tributes from an admirer already?” The smoothness of his voice did not quite conceal the hint of a sneer. “I would scarcely have thought you would have had time to make any conquests as yet. You do work fast, don’t you?”
“Lord Carlyle sent them. I met him last night.” She sniffed the velvety blooms again, pretending not to notice his annoyance, then held them out for his inspection. “Aren’t they lovely?”
“Lovely.” If anything, his voice was even more curt than before. His eyes ran over her, lingering on the white swell of her flesh above the low round neckline of her pale lilac morning gown with its trimming of deeper lilac ribbons. There was a restlessness in his eyes that was not like him, and Julia rejoiced as she saw it. She disturbed him, she knew. She also knew that the fact angered him extremely.
“Have you breakfasted yet? If not, you might join me. I want to talk to you, and now seems as good a time as any.” Even in issuing an invitation, his tone was clipped.
“I’ve had chocolate, but I can always manage to eat a little more.” She twinkled at him, not one whit disturbed by his sour mood. If anything, she welcomed it. It was not like Sebastian to display anything so human as irritability.
“If you don’t stop eating like you expect a famine to strike tomorrow, you’ll get fat,” he warned in a jaundiced tone as he gestured to her to precede him up the stairs to the breakfast room. A jaunty swishing of her full skirts in his direction was the only reply he received.
Breakfast was strictly a serve oneself affair, and the array of dishes on the sideboard was truly astonishing, especially considering the fact that Sebastian was the only member of the household who habitually rose early enough to partake of it.
The countess and Caroline always remained in their rooms until noon, and Julia usually breakfasted in her chamber on the sweet chocolate and rolls for which she had developed a passion. But (strictly to be sociable, mind!) she helped herself to toast points and preserves, and a rasher of bacon. That, along with a cup of tea, and on top of the chocolate and rolls she had already consumed, would make for quite an adequate second breakfast.
“Will you have a kidney?” Sebastian asked with a hint of sarcasm, eyeing her filling plate.
Julia declined with an airy smile, watching as he helped himself to several kidneys, a substantial serving of eggs and bacon, and some toast. Julia, eyeing his meal, rather thought that, if anyone was going to grow fat, it would be Sebastian instead of herself. He could really put away an incredible amount. Strangely enough, the idea of Sebastian with jowls and a pot belly appealed to her. He was so very handsome she sometimes felt she was in love with a figment of her imagination rather than a man.
“What are you smiling at?” He looked up from his meal just in time to catch that glimmering amusement on her face.
“I was picturing you with a pot belly,” she answered, and he almost choked on his bacon.
“God forbid,” he said with loathing, and Julia’s smile broadened.
“I think I would like it,” she said, and his eyes narrowed on her.
“Well, I would not,” he answered crisply. “Which brings us to the subject I wished to talk with you about.”
“Does it?” she said, sounding polite though her motive was to tease him. “How interesting! You wish to talk to me about something to do with your incipient pot belly?”
He put down his fork and stared at her with such disdain that she would immediately have been chastened—if she had not known that he deliberately used that look when he wished to achieve just that effect.
“I understand that you had words with my mother last night,” he said after a moment. With some difficulty Julia resisted an urge to stick out her tongue at him. It was strange how Jewel Combs seemed to pop up in her when she least expected it.
“News certainly travels fast around here, doesn’t it?” Julia was still deliberately trying to get a rise out of him. He had been so distant since she had arrived in this house—and she was tired of him being distant.
“From Caroline to her maid to Leister to me,” Sebastian responded. “There is no need for you to take up cudgels on my behalf. I am perfectly capable of defending myself should I feel the need.”
“I cannot sit there and listen to that woman say such things about you,” Julia muttered. “It makes me want to slap her. Besides, I was defending Chloe as much as you.”
“I thank you for your championship on my daughter’s behalf as well as my own, but in future I wish you would not. Agreed?”
“No, we are not agreed! If you wish to allow your mother to say that you are an unnatural son and father and cold and cruel and incapable of affection, then you may do so. But if she says such things in my presence, then I reserve the right to protest!”
Sebastian put down his fork and stared at her. She was delighted to see that he looked faintly exasperated.
“Does it not occur to you that my mother may be speaking nothing more than the truth, in my case at least?”
Julia took another bite of toast, chewed, swallowed, and met his eyes. “No, it does not. You are many things—including a distrusting, dishonest swine—but you are not incapable of affection. You are fond of Chloe, for one—no, don’t deny it, I have seen the evidence with my own eyes. And I believe you are fond of me.”
His eyes widened at this last. They gleamed very blue suddenly as they stared at her. “Do you indeed?”
The soft syllables were as much a warning as the hissing of a snake. Julia met those blue eyes dauntlessly. Faint heart did never win fair maiden, she reminded herself—or in this case fair gentleman.
“You are just afraid to admit it.”
“On the contrary, I am not the least afraid to admit that I am, as you say, fond of you—at least in a particular way.” The leer that he offered her in accompaniment to this last made hot color wash into Julia’s face. But she refused to allow any other outward sign of embarrassment to show.
“And I am fond of you in that way, too,” she said cordially, taking a sip of her tea with as much calm as if they were discussing the weather. “But I rather think that there is more to our feeling for one another than that.”
He was looking at her now with the icy mask back in place so that she could not read anything in those glacial blue eyes.
“You are, of course, entitled to your opinion.” With deliberate care he touched his lips with his napkin, then laid it down beside his plate before getting to his feet. “If you will excuse me, I have things to attend to.” And before she could answer, he was striding from the room.
Julia reacted to this flagrant breach of good manners—a gentleman never left a lady sitting at a table—with a tiny smile. The smile widened as her eyes found his barely touched plate.