you do that? Perhaps your rakish propensities have not improved with age, my lord,’ Laurel said sharply. Her own behaviour the day before had been decidedly improper and knowing that added vinegar to her tone.
‘My what?’ Several heads turned and he lowered his voice. ‘You were an hysterical girl nine years ago, Laurel, and, it appears, you are as poor a judge of men now as you were then,’ Giles said, his voice silky with suppressed anger. ‘I assisted you yesterday out of a disinterested desire to help a stranger.’ In the look he gave her she read the message that he was not going to mention that kiss unless she did, but that was as far as any truce between them would go. ‘I followed because I was certain I knew you from somewhere. If I had realised who you were, I would have ridden in the opposite direction, believe me.’
Let alone have kissed me, no doubt.
That behaviour was all of a piece with what she knew of his true character.
‘Lord Revesby!’ Phoebe was all of a flutter at their hostility. Laurel realised that she had been paying no attention to where they were or who might overhear. Certainly the tension was too blatant for even good-natured Phoebe to ignore. ‘Laurel! Please, both of you—whatever is the matter? Surely not that old business? Oh, dear, I beg of you, do not make a scene in here, Laurel, it would be fatal to your prospects.’
‘We could always summon a porter to have Lord Revesby removed,’ Laurel added. ‘We did not desire his presence, after all.’
Giles’s smile, if that was what it was, conveyed disbelief that anyone would be capable of ejecting him forcibly. Laurel’s fingers twitched with the desire to box his ears, but she kept her hands clasped in her lap, merely looking pointedly away as he sketched a bow and strolled away to the entrance.
‘I do not think anyone noticed.’ Phoebe cast a glance around the room and sat down again. ‘Of all the unfortunate encounters. Are you all right, my dear? You were positively bristling and I had thought... It is such a long time ago...’
‘I am perfectly all right, Aunt, thank you. After all, as you say, it is nine years since I saw Giles—Lord Revesby—last. The wretched man might still annoy me, but he hardly has the power to upset me, not after all this time.’
Giles had hurt her, betrayed her friendship and, she had realised afterwards with a shock, broken her heart, as well as causing a scandal, confounding their fathers’ mutual plans for their future and, incidentally, sending her godfather’s daughter into an hysterical decline that lasted almost an entire summer.
‘Would you like to leave, Laurel? I think he has gone. We should return home—I could call a chair for you. Or would the walk be soothing?’
‘I am certainly not adjusting my movements in order to avoid one man. I will not be driven out of anywhere by Giles Redmond. Besides, if he is staying while his father is in Bath taking treatments, we might encounter him at any time and I refuse to run away whenever we encounter him.’ She sent a sidelong glance at her aunt. ‘How much do you know about what happened?’
‘Not a great deal, your father’s letter was such a tirade I could hardly make sense of it. But we cannot discuss it here, can we?’ Phoebe fanned herself vigorously with her hand. ‘I know—let us drink our water and then we may stroll back by way of Miss Pringles’s haberdashery shop for that braid I need. We will both find the walk beneficial and then when we get home you can tell me all about it in the privacy of our own drawing room over a nice cup of tea.’
‘Of course. What I can remember of it. After all, it was so many years ago and I was only just sixteen,’ Laurel said with a smile that was intended to betray nothing but rueful regret about an unfortunate incident that was virtually ancient history now.
The smile was very successful, she thought, catching a glimpse of herself in one of the mirrors lining the walls above the dado rail. Especially as she had just lied. Every word that had been spoken that day, every expression on Giles’s face, every stab of anguish she had felt, were still crystal clear. She had lost more than a friend and a neighbour, she had lost the young man she had fallen in love with without realising it.
How very fortunate that she had not married him after all, considering how objectionably he had turned out.
* * *
Hell and damnation.
Giles stalked along the High Street from the Pump Room and turned left into Bond Street, welcoming the stretch to his leg muscles as he climbed towards Queen’s Square and his father’s lodgings. If the old man discovered that Laurel Knighton was in Bath at the same time as his prodigal son it would probably give him a seizure. It was enough to give Giles a seizure, come to that, and his constitution was perfectly sound.
Neither of them had ever discussed Laurel directly in their punctilious, cautious, correspondence. It had taken his father a good month to recover from the worst of his fury over the collapse of his plans to marry his heir to the well-dowered girl next door. Then there had been the scandal over Giles’s flat refusal to do the decent thing and marry Miss Patterson instead, even after he had so gravely insulted her in the midst of the hideous row with Laurel.
Eventually the Marquess of Thorncote had simmered down sufficiently to write in response to Giles’s formal and polite letter informing his sire that he had removed his person—as instructed—as far as possible from the Marquess’s sight. That had taken a while to reach home as, to his father’s indignation, Giles had attached himself to his cousin Theobald’s entourage sailing for Portugal and Theobald’s new diplomatic post with the Court at Lisbon.
His father had replied, acidly, that his instruction to ‘remove’ himself had meant relocating to one of the family’s other country estates. Anyone but a stiff-necked ingrate would not interpret it as a direction to take himself off into a war zone at the age of barely eighteen. Giles would kindly bring himself back immediately if he wished to avoid falling even further into the Marquess’s ill favour. If there was any deeper hole to fall into.
But Giles found he had no desire whatsoever to go home and that had nothing to do with ghastly embarrassment, torrid gossip, furious or fainting young ladies, or fathers demanding satisfaction and reaching for their horsewhips. He wrote a temperate letter of refusal to his parent and made himself at home in Lisbon.
It had been, as Giles was fully prepared to admit, a young man’s over-dramatic solution to a monumentally unpleasant situation. But he soon found that life in Lisbon suited him down to the ground. He grew up fast and hardened up as quickly. Then the quiet gentleman who was believed generally to be the British army officer attached as liaison to the diplomatic corps revealed himself to be rather more than that and recruited Giles into his intelligence organisation. Giles had never imagined himself involved in spying, let alone risking his neck behind enemy lines, but he discovered that it was something he enjoyed and was good at into the bargain.
Now he was furious. He recognised that it was as much with himself for being thrown off balance as with Laurel, the infuriating female. The fact that the gangly, plain, awkward fledgling of a girl had turned into a lovely young woman—at least, she was lovely when she was not glaring at him—only fuelled his own bad temper, for some inexplicable reason.
He arrived at the doorstep of the elegant lodging house and spent a good half-minute getting his breathing under control before he rapped the knocker.
The man who answered was clad in a respectable suit of dark superfine with crisp white linen and had the unmistakable air of being a retired gentleman’s gentleman. He ushered Giles in and escorted him upstairs with a few unexceptional remarks about the weather. At the top he paused. ‘The Marquess has taken all of this floor for his accommodation,’ he said, low-voiced. ‘He is having a good day today, I am happy to say, my lord. His gout has eased considerably and I believe the anticipation of your visit has raised his spirits.’
‘How bad is his health?’ Giles asked bluntly. ‘I would rather have the truth with the bark on, if you please.’
‘You will wish to speak to the medical practitioner who attends your father, my lord, to satisfy yourself. I would only venture