Yes!
He didn’t need to boast, even to his closest friend, about the affection that Sylvie felt for him. Such emotions were best left unvoiced. Sylvie was an aristocrat, from the tips of her delicate gloved fingers to the jeweled heel of her slippers. The daughter of the Marquis de Caribas, who luckily escaped with his estates intact from the carnage in Paris, would never insult herself or him by naive murmurings. He loved her, and she knew it.
She accepted it, with a tiny bend of her head, as her due.
And he…he was almost afraid that what he felt went beyond love. He trembled just to be standing next to her, bored his friends by speaking about her whenever she wasn’t near, found himself watching her whenever she was.
As if she felt his eyes on her face, she looked up and smiled. Her face was a perfect triangle, from her delicately flaring eyebrows to her high cheekbones. There was nothing superfluous about her, nothing loud, nothing inelegant. “Stop looking like that!” she whispered to him in her enchanting French lisp. “You make me feel quite odd.”
Mayne grinned at her. “Good,” he said, bending over so that he breathed it into her ear. “I want you to feel quite odd.”
She gave him a reproving little frown and turned back to her prayer book.
At the altar, Imogen looked up at Rafe and said clearly, “I do.” Relief was clear in every lineament of Rafe’s body. He bent his head and kissed his bride, ignoring the bishop, who was still reading out of his prayer book. Mayne grinned. That was just like Rafe; up to the very last moment he was worried that Imogen would realize what a poor bargain he was.
“Why should she marry me?” he had demanded, the night before his wedding. “God, I want a drink at times like these.”
“Well, you can’t have one,” Mayne said. “Normally, I would assume that she’s blind and desperate. But since she shows no signs of infirmity, and she’s clearly not desperate, being one of the richest young widows in the ton, not to mention beautiful, I can only conclude that she’s lost her wits.”Rafe ignored him. “She says—” the raw emotion in his eyes caught Mayne by surprise—“she says she loves me.”
“As I said, she’s cracked,” Mayne said, instinctively trying to lighten the conversation. “Perhaps she’s taking you for the title. She wants to be a duchess. In fact,” he said, warming to the task, “I’m fairly sure that Imogen said as much to me. Wasn’t I supposed to marry her at one time? Of course, a duchess is better than a countess.”
“Least said about you and Imogen the better,” Rafe growled, and there was a note of deep warning in his voice.
But it had to be said, clearly, before the wedding. “We never even kissed, not really,” he told Rafe. “I kissed her twice, to make her see that our friendship was nothing more than tepid.”
“I should kill you for those two kisses.” There was a swirl of danger in Rafe’s voice.
“She didn’t enjoy them, and neither did I.”
“Damned if you haven’t made hay with all my wards. You were engaged to Tess, and stood her up at the altar—”
“Not my fault!” Mayne put in. “You know perfectly well that Felton asked me to leave.”
“Jilted one of my wards, kissed another one twice—”
“I’ve had nothing to do with Annabel,” Mayne said hastily. “Nor Josie either.”
“Well, on that subject,” Rafe said. “I want you to help me with Josie. Not with your usual shenanigans.”
“I’m almost a married man.” At least, he would be as soon as he could talk Sylvie into setting a date.
“Josie is having a difficult time on the market. And it’s only going to be more thorny once Imogen and I leave on our wedding trip.”
“What’s happening to her?” Mayne was genuinely surprised. “I would have thought she’d take like wildfire: she’s intelligent, witty, and damned beautiful. And didn’t you and Felton give her a dowry, besides the horse from her father, I mean?”
“She made an enemy of some neighbors of Ardmore’s in Scotland, a couple of ne’er-do-wells by the name of Crogan. Apparently, one of them was courting her up there, wanting the dowry but not her. Well, once she learned the truth of it, she—she—”
“She what?” Mayne asked, trying to picture Josephine Essex growing violent. “Struck him?”
“She dosed him with a medicine that cures colic in horses,” Rafe said flatly.
“Colic in horses? Dr. Burberry’s Colic Juice?”
“Apparently it’s something she created herself. Stop laughing, Mayne! The lad was near death for a week, apparently, and lost over two stone in weight.”
Mayne was bellowing with laughter. “That’s Josie! Did I tell you about the time she arranged for Annabel to be thrown from a horse so that Ardmore could rescue her?”
“Apparently this Crogan was an ass. Josie says he should be grateful for the slimming program.”
“You’ve unleashed a poisoner onto the innocent male population of London,” Mayne said with relish. “If she doesn’t like one of her suitors…” He snapped his fingers.
“Crogan said he wasn’t attracted to her because she was too fat.”
“Fat?”
“She does have a generous figure.”
“So what?”
“Crogan took revenge. He wrote to several friends of his. Oh, he didn’t say anything about the colic medicine; no man wants to confess that he’s lost two stone because he was unable to leave the privy for days. He called her a prime Scottish hoglet.”
Mayne’s lips tightened and every impulse toward laughter disappeared. “Ugly. But who would pay attention to the opinion of some Scottish farmer?”
“He was sent to school at Rugby.”
“Darlington!” Mayne said.
“Precisely. Darlington. Apparently Crogan was a schoolboy acquaintance.”
“That’s very bad luck.”
“It’s Darlington’s wit that’s the problem.”
“Darlington generally limits himself to scandal of the sexual kind. Surely Josie has not embroiled herself in that sort of thing? Why, she’s only been on the season for a few weeks.”
“We’re six weeks into it,” Rafe said. “You simply haven’t noticed.”
“Sylvie loathes being bored, and I’m afraid that Almack’s is nothing if not tedious.”
“Josie hasn’t created a scandal. But Darlington has swept up a storm of gossip on behalf of his despicable friend Crogan by putting a wager in the books at White’s that the man who marries Josie will have a liking for pork.”
Mayne said something under his breath.
“Men of sense have paid no attention to it, of course. But young men tend to be fairly shy in their matchmaking, and there’s a sour group of young bucks watching whoever dances with Josie and then making fun of him. The truth is that she’s lost the boys of her own age, the ones who should be courting her.”
“Give me their names,” Mayne said between clenched teeth. He’d spent so much time with the Essex sisters over the past two years that he felt as if they were his own wards. Or his own sisters.