Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

J ack felt he could have choked on the pity in her voice. But rather than voice his own damnable regrets at inheriting a bankrupt earldom, he adopted the careless mask that kept the world at large at bay. “Nothing to be done about it, I’m afraid,” he quipped.

“Nothing but go back to sea,” Lady Ivers averred.

The Divine Miss Conway, she of the piercing blue eyes and golden, angelic hair, sent him a frowning gaze from under her feathery lashes. “Go back to the Navy? But why? Will the peace with France not hold?”

Miss Conway would be as astute as she was beautiful. “The Treaty of Amiens has held—thus far,” Jack explained with a world-weary sort of shrug. “But peace is a fragile thing that must be waged as aggressively as war. Perhaps more so. But, yes, if the Navy will have me back, now that I’m a useless nob, I will certainly go.” He dismissed the whole of the aristocracy, as well as the entirety of the Royal Navy—including his long and storied career as a successful frigate captain—with a wave. “I’ll have to go hat in hand to the Admiralty in London a-begging.”

Miss Conway nodded and tipped her head aside with a solemn sort of smile. “Ah. I understand. You’ll have to be chosen. ”

Well, damn her sparkling eyes. She would be as thoughtful as she was astute. Not that he minded being chosen—it would prove a relief to be judged for his merit rather than selected by his bloodline. But there was something about the way she said it—something too like pity to leave him any less uncomfortable.

“Nonsense,” Augusta Ivers conveniently disagreed. “The Admiralty know a useful man when they see him—and count their share of his prize monies. But I do hate to think you’ll be a tottering old man by the time you win another fortune like the last—if you’re not put to bed with a cannonball first.” She sighed. “And even if you do, the estate will probably gobble that fortune up for debts, same as the first.”

He barely felt the pang of regret for the years of dangerous toil it had taken to earn himself his own independent fortune through prize monies—and at the speed with which the money had been summarily consumed by the earldom’s outstanding financial obligations—so familiar was the feeling now.

But Miss Conway’s lofted brows told him she had not been apprised of his sad tale. Then again, perhaps the story of how Jack had come to inherit nothing but a moldering pile of bricks and debts was old news by now.

Or perhaps she had been too consumed with her own sad tale—her father’s recent fall from favor as the Lord Advocate had been as sudden as his ascent to the plummy post had been in the first place. And rumor had it that her own sister, Maisie Conway, the storied portraitist who was now Lady Carrington, had been a party to that downfall—Lord Carrington certainly had been in his role as the editor of the political quarterly, The Edinburgh Review.

Perhaps that was empathy he saw behind Flora Conway’s sparkling blue eyes.

No. He could not allow it to be. Augusta had already warned him off once. He should not require another telling.

Flora Conway was not for him.

He might not have any money, but he still had his pride. “I’m not so old as to be approaching tottering, Augusta.”

The lady smiled her disagreement and moved on to other concerns. “But surely, you’ll not attempt the journey to London before the end of the festive season? Nothing will be decided during Christmastide—even the almighty Admiralty turns soft and soporific for the season. There’s no sense in your going before Epiphany at the earliest.”

Jack knew she was right. But if there was one thing he could not abide, it was inaction. Or pity. “I needs must attend to Kinloch as well. I cannot always be propping up your walls for you, my dear Lady Ivers.”

“No, I must have you more useful than that,” Lady Ivers agreed on a narrow laugh. “And to that point—I cannot have our dear, sweet Flora sitting alone with no one to entertain her. But while you are arguably one of the most entertaining men in Scotland, Jack dear, you know you simply won’t do. You’re far too much the rogue.”

Jack didn’t mind being damned by such offhand praise—what was one more damnation in the face of so many? “Be that as it may, why do you persist in this ludicrous parade of ne’er do wells?” He gestured economically but dismissively to Colonel Crathie as a stand-in for the collective bags of pants on display.

“What are you talking about—ne’er-do-wells?” Augusta Ivers blustered, playfully rapping her fan against his chest. “I’ll have you know there’s not a single ne’er-do-well amongst my invitation lists,” she insisted. “Solvent to a man—with the exception of you. You can count upon me to be attentive to such important things, my dear Flora. I should never be so negligent as to offer you an acquaintance who was not everything aboveboard.”

Jack made an inelegant sound of derision.

“Well,” Augusta began to admit, “you may be right, Jack—everyone is aboveboard but you .”

He could only smile, even as he offered his riposte. “Pray offer the poor lass something more than a head of hair and a mouth of teeth. A man for her will need to be a great deal more than an old windbag like Crathie. I wouldn’t trust his arse with a fart much less a woman of Miss Conway’s caliber.”

Something in the divine Miss Conway’s expression—the slight pleating at the corners of her mouth, along with a sunrise sort of warmth that rose across her cheeks before she smoothed her face into blander politeness—showed that he had done his part to amuse her whilst he had rather crudely warned her off.

And yet, she surprised him with a little sidelong glance. “I thank you for the compliment, but for myself, I should think that neither a windbag nor a bag of pants is as good as a bag of money. One can certainly be too poor, but one can never be too rich.”

Jack wanted to laugh out loud—he hadn’t expected such wit. “You could have any rich man you wanted.” He gestured to the room. “All you have to is aim your swivel gun of a smile at them to make it so.”

“A swivel gun, is it? Such favor,” she teased with a smile. “You think it really is that easy?”

He knew it was—he had been slain by her smile at a cable’s length, without ever having spoken to her before. “Aye. It is so.”

The damned clever lass aimed that dangerously sublime smile at him. “Any man, you say? Any man but you , Lord Kinloch?”

“Captain,” he injected stupidly in some desperate effort to mitigate the sting of his desperate—and desperately vain—attraction. “I prefer Captain Balfour, Miss Conway,” he said in a lower, calmer tone. “For that title, I earned for myself on my own merit. As did the first Balfours, who were nothing more than pirates and rogues, though successful ones.”

Her solemn smile returned in all its bittersweet glory. “It must be a very satisfying thing to be accomplished.”

It was. Next to making her smile, it was the only satisfaction left to him. But saying so would never do. “I should be better satisfied by being rich rather than accomplished.”

“Would you really?” She looked openly skeptical—he was surprised to find it suited her, this keenness. “For my own part, if I could only have one without the other, I should infinitely prefer the accomplishment. And your accomplishments in your profession led to your money, did they not?”

The look she gave him—a look that somehow saw straight through the cynical, uncaring veneer he had donned like armor—warned him not to lie. God help him, it was impossible. He could feel himself starting to actually like her—her, Flora Conway, the young woman speaking to him, rather that the idealized paragon he had imagined from across the room.

It would never do. “For my own part, the accomplishments were all for the sake of getting rich,” he said. The money he had earned in hard-fought naval prizes should have freed him to have an independent life, free of the constraints of both his family and his profession. It wasn’t that he didn’t like being a navy man, it was just that after eighteen years of service, he was bloody tired of putting himself in harm’s way for a country that seemed indifferent to the sacrifice.

Despite his cynical tone, she seemed to have heard something of what he was so off-handedly trying to conceal. “The earldom has taken all the prize money you earned in the Navy?”

The depth of his regret was so deep he could drown in it. “Every last farthing, Miss Conway. Gone for debts I didn’t even have the pleasure of accruing myself. But enough tragedy. All work and no play has made Jack a dull boy, so let us end this unsupportable segue into the sins of the past.”

“Certainly,” she agreed with the same solemn thoughtfulness before she turned and met his eyes. “For my own part, I had so much rather think of the sins of the future.”