Chapter Six
The breakfast room at Somerset House had been arranged, at Tristan’s precise and prior instruction, for forty-two guests. The long table was dressed in white damask, the centerpieces an exercise in restrained good taste; white roses and trailing ivy, candles already lit against the grey morning light, the silver laid with the kind of symmetrical perfectionthat only Mrs. Richards and her considerable force of will could produce on short notice.
It looked, in other words, exactly as he had planned it.
The woman seated to his left had not been in the plan.
He was managing, he thought. Tolerably well, all things considered. He had shaken hands and accepted congratulations and smiled with sufficient warmth that his great-aunt Cordelia had taken his face between her small gloved hands and told him he lookedexactlylike his father, which was not a compliment he particularly welcomed but which he received with good grace. He had guided Imogen through the receiving line with his hand at the small of her back—a detail he had introduced without calculation and which he was now trying very hard not to think about—and she had said precisely the right things to precisely the right people with a naturalness that suggested she had been rehearsing for this morning her entire life.
She was, he was beginning to understand, alarmingly competent and undeniably charming.
He had not yet decided how he felt about that.
“So.”
The voice arrived beside him as he reached for his tea, and Tristan did not need to look up to identify its owner. He had known Flynn Cavendish for twenty-two years, which was to say he had known him for long enough to recognize the particular note of suppressed hilarity that currently inhabited that single syllable.
“Cavendish,” Tristan said pleasantly. “Do sit down.”
Flynn sat down. He was, as always, the kind of man who made sitting look like a performance—long-limbed, easy, with the slightly irreverent air of someone who had inherited his title young and spent the intervening years deciding that it entitled him to say whatever he liked to whomever he liked, consequencebe damned. He had a pleasant face, which he arranged now into an expression of elaborate innocence.
“Lovely ceremony,” Flynn said.
“Thank you.”
“Bride looked—” He paused, with the timing of a man who had once, briefly, considered the stage. “—different than I remembered.”
“Yes,” Tristan said. He lifted his tea. “I found her improved.”
Flynn regarded him for a long, assessing moment. To his credit, his expression betrayed nothing to the rest of the room. Tristan had always appreciated that about him—whatever Flynn thought or said in private, he understood, in public, the value of discretion.
“When,” Flynn said, very quietly, helping himself to a piece of toast with enormous ease, “were you going to tell me that you had apparently developed an uncontrollable passion for the other one?”
“There was not, as you may imagine, a great deal of opportunity.”
“She’s Eliza Reeding’s friend.”
“Her dearest friend,” Tristan said. “Or so I am reliably informed.”
“And Miss Reeding herself is?—?”
“Indisposed.”
“Mm.” Flynn buttered his toast with great attention to the corners. “She eloped.”
It was not a question. Tristan said nothing, which Flynn appeared to take as confirmation.
“Naturally.” Flynn bit into his toast. “So Eliza Reeding has eloped with some unsuitable person, you have arrived at your own wedding breakfast with an entirely different woman on your arm, and you are asking me to believe that this is the resultof—what was it you told old Pemberton in the receiving line—’a connection that could not be denied’?”
“I told Pemberton I had found the lady of my heart. Which is appreciably more dignified.”
“It is,” Flynn allowed, “considerably more than that. It is so far outside the bounds ofanything I have ever known you to say or feel or apparently believe inthat I am wondering whether I have taken a blow to the head this morning without noticing.”
“I am a complex man,” Tristan said.
Flynn looked at him.
Tristan looked back.