Someone to Hold

She had last seen him at Westcott House in London on the afternoon of the day she learned the truth about her father and his bigamous marriage to her mother. She had received him and told him what she had just learned, expecting that he would be full of concern for her plight and determination to bring forward their wedding. That had been shortsighted of her, of course, for he was as much a stickler for social correctness as she and it would have been out of the question for him to marry a bastard. He had taken a hasty leave and written to her almost immediately suggesting that she send a notice to the morning papers, breaking off their betrothal.

Now he looked both familiar and . . . alien. As though he were someone from another long-ago lifetime, which, in a sense, he was. She had never before seen that look of contempt on his face directed at her. She had never witnessed him being spiteful. But she recalled that he had openly insulted her in her absence at Avery’s ball and again in Hyde Park during the duel. And she recalled with intense satisfaction that Avery, who must be a full head shorter than he and surely at least a couple of stone lighter, had knocked him down and out with his bare feet.

“I beg your pardon . . . Viscount Uxbury, is it?” Joel said. “But my business is with Mr. Cox-Phillips. When I spoke with him a couple of days ago, he seemed perfectly capable of speaking for himself and of personally asking me to leave if he so desires.”

Camille looked at him in some surprise. He was not quite as tall as the viscount, and he did not have such a splendid physique or as obviously handsome a face. Indeed, he looked even more shabby than usual in contrast to the splendor of Lord Uxbury’s Bond Street tailoring. But he looked suddenly very solid and immovable. And he looked in no way cowed at having been called a fellow and a riffraff petitioner. He spoke with quiet, firm courtesy.

“If this is not the first time you have come to pester my cousin,” the viscount said, “then it is a very good thing I came when I did. And Miss Westcott is not fit company for anyone in this house or any other respectable dwelling.”

“You have come back, then, have you?” the elderly gentleman said from beside the fire. “You have changed your mind, have you?”

“I have not, sir,” Joel assured him. “I have come on a different matter.”

“Do not distress yourself, Cousin,” the viscount said, his manner transformed into something altogether more soothing and deferential. “I shall escort this fellow and his . . . doxy out to—”

“I will distress myself, goddamn it, Uxbury,” the old man said irritably, “if you continue treating me as though I had more than just one foot in the grave. How dare you treat me as if I have an imbecile mind, and not more than half an hour after you set foot in my house? Uninvited, I might add. Go and find yourself a guest room to stay in for a few nights if you must stay while you still have first choice. I daresay the other two claimants to my fortune are springing their horses in the hope of getting here as fast as they can.”

“I will see this fellow and his woman out before I do so, Cousin,” Viscount Uxbury said. “Your physician would not wish you to—”

“My physician,” the old gentleman said, one of his hands closing about the knob of a cane by his side and banging it feebly on the floor, “would not want me to be plagued to death a few days earlier than I will be popping off anyway by relatives who pretend to believe that they have my best interests at heart. And I pay a butler to show guests in and out. I believe I pay him handsomely. Do I, Orville?”

“You do, sir,” his valet assured him.

“Out.” Mr. Cox-Phillips raised his cane a few inches from the floor and waved it in the viscount’s direction. “And you two, come forward and have a seat.”

Joel and Camille stood aside to let Viscount Uxbury pass. He looked haughtily and with considerable venom from one to the other of them as he did so, and Camille could not resist expressing some spite of her own.

“I hope you did not take any permanent harm from the kick you took to the chin, Lord Uxbury,” she said.

His jaw hardened, and he strode from the room. Camille met Joel’s eyes briefly, and it was possible she saw the hint of a smile there. But then he gestured toward the heavy sofa that faced the fireplace adjacent to Mr. Cox-Phillips’s chair. She went and sat down, and Joel took his place beside her.

“May I present Miss Camille Westcott, a friend and colleague who was kind enough to accompany me here today, sir?” Joel said.

The gentleman’s eyes turned upon Camille and examined her closely from beneath bushy eyebrows. “I do not have an imbecile mind, young lady, despite my age and infirmity,” he said. “You were once betrothed to that relative of mine, I recall. Riverdale’s daughter, I believe—the late Riverdale.”

“That is correct, sir,” she said. “I broke off the engagement after it was discovered that my father was already married when he wed my mother and that my sister and brother and I were therefore illegitimate.”

“Hmm,” he said. “That was the reason, was it? It was unsporting of Uxbury to call you a doxy just now, though I am not surprised. A nasty little weasel of a child, he was, I remember. Not that I saw him often. I took pains not to. Families tend to be pestilential collections of people who just happen to share some blood, but mine was always worse than most. Or do all people think that? What is your connection to Cunningham? The word colleague is meaningless without an explanation.”