Page 73 of A Duke's Keeper
Others engaged Camille while he contemplated where best to start. Lord and Lady Quickner were acquaintances already on neighborly acquaintance. The Stratfords held a sizable estate up north.
Camille’s nervous laughter drew his attention at the curious questions and words of praise from more than half the table. Renard raised his glass to enjoy watching her squirm when his gaze locked on the unidentified object Lord Quickner had spat across the table.
Under the guise of replacing his glass, Renard plucked the object from beside the flower arrangement and stared down at what would have been Lord Quickner’s last meal, befuddled at how a ball bearing would have found its way into a gentleman’s drink.
He rolled the ball between his thumb and forefinger, the perfect size and shape to block a man’s airways. It had been an idiotic mistake. An egregious one. If Camille hadn’t been here and known the exact maneuver, Lord Quickner would most definitely have suffocated.
Glancing her way, he saw Camille’s lady companion doing a remarkable, but futile, job redirecting the attention of the gentleman beside her while Camille made a good show of lifting the soup to her mouth without taking a bite.
For a woman who despised theton, she was well on her way to ingratiating herself to every renowned family in attendance. Lord and Lady Quickner were wealthy and well-liked, not to mention patrons of an elite pleasure house with its own tight-knit community. She may as well have saved the queen for how every partygoer fawned over her sparse but articulate words of what she called, “An educated deduction in leverage and pressure.”
The woman had figured out how to clear the viscount’s airways through a miraculous moment of calculation, a complicated problem he suspected would take modern physicians years to solve. Women were a marvel. He was reaffirmed that engaging special tutors all these years for Charlotte had been the right decision.
He clasped the ball in his fist and felt his skin tingle against the cold metal.
An unforgivable mistake. A life in the balance.
A feeling of fate’s kiss left him shivering despite the warm and inviting atmosphere.
It seemed history was destined to repeat and reinvent itself over and over, leaving innumerable deaths in its wake. But today, history’s machinations had lost to a superior mind.
An angel, Lord Quickner had called her.
How Renard prayed it was true. Fate’s grip on him grew persistent, the unseen noose tightening around his neck with each minute he didn’t settle his affairs.
His gaze went back to Camille and lingered, the swelling of emotion in his chest more than awe. She defied every natural and tragic event. Defied fate itself.
He’d been damned with the darkest of futures, and it would take a miracle, an angel herself, to break his curse and set him free.
He hoped, when the time came, she’d say ‘yes.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Camille was alltoo happy to excuse herself from the suffocating praise and attentions of those at the dining table to read the missive the footman had laid discreetly beside her plate. Seeing Renard engaged in a lively debate with his table neighbor, she met Syd’s hawk-like gaze and slipped out of the room.
In the quieter adjoining hall, Camille tore the envelope open and read Madam’s new orders.
Angel,
Forget the donation. Return at once.
M
A flood of thoughts had her stomach twisting. Another body? Had her mother had another episode? Camille checked the back of the letter, inside the envelope, any place Madam may have left a clue to what had prompted such an urgent call home. Camille bit her lip, her gaze flicking back to the dining room.
She still needed to talk to Renard. Her gaze returned to the summons in her hand. But there were others whose needs were more important right now.
She cursed and hunted down a footman to fetch her writing supplies and to find the lord and lady of the house immediately.
After Camille left a note for Renard explaining that she was being summoned back to the Pony and that she would be happyto receive him there when he returned to town, her and Syd’s sudden departure not an hour later meant a scramble to find a driver to take them back to the city, a concession Lord and Lady Quickner were more than happy to make.
The rifts in her relationship with Renard remained not entirely uncrossed, but as all the interruptions thus far had proven, now was not the time or place.
She stood in the drive outside the manor, Lord and Lady Quickner offering, again, the use of their six-horse phaeton.
“It will be far more comfortable and quite fast. You’ll find no other vehicle a match in two counties,” Lady Quickner said.
“That’s most kind, but we will take Madam’s victoria,” Camille said for the fourth time.
