Erika ran with that over the course of the next few days. She stayed in London, searching for the appropriate outfit. And this time, she didn’t want attention in a general sense. She wanted his attention. Only his.
Not just his attention, if she was honest. His approval.
And when she tried on the perfect dress, cut to enhance rather than expose, it felt like his hands on her body. As if he lounged there in the corner of her dressing room, his eyes ablaze and his mouth that unsmiling line that made her heart flip over.
The night of the engagement party, she was dressed, her hair pulled back into a neat chignon at her nape, and ready to go long before it was time to leave Devon and make the drive to the Markham family’s stately home in Wiltshire.
Possibly, she thought wryly,you are a little overexcited.
She waited in the ancient gallery in her mother’s lover’s sprawling house. She stared at the dark portraits that lined the walls, each featuring some ancestor or another of his with the same red jowls he sported himself, and found herself very thankful indeed that her mother’s taste in men had been much better when she was younger.
“My goodness, Erika,” came her mother’s stilted, affected voice from the stairs—as if she’d sensed Erika was entertaining uncharitable thoughts about her and had rushed to remind her why each and every one was true. “Are you ill?”
Erika turned to watch her mother come toward her. As ever, Chriszette was resplendent. An ice sculpture best enjoyed from a safe distance. Her blond hair was swept back from her smooth face and secured with combs. She wore a sweeping, elegant gown that made the most of her trim figure. She was a striking woman with a regal bearing and flashing blue eyes that made everyone around her feel as if really, they ought to curtsy.
And she certainly liked it when they did.
“Do I look ill?” Erika asked lightly. Because there was no telling how her mother would strike. Chriszette was like a snake. She was quite happy coiled up in the sun, until she wasn’t. And sometimes she moved so fast you never even saw the strike coming until you bled.
“I have never seen you look so...appropriate,” Chriszette said, her accent making her sound sharper than she perhaps meant. Then again, perhaps not.
“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” Erika said with perhaps more determination than enthusiasm. “Thank you, Mother.”
Chriszette did not like to be calledMother. Her blue eyes cooled considerably, which was always hard to imagine as she started out so devoutly frigid. She glanced toward the stairs, and Erika knew that she was looking to see if her lover had heard Erika admit to their relationship. A fate worse than death.
“Darling,” Chriszette said with a smile that heralded the coming venom, “only very beautiful and very clever girls can afford to hide their assets. I assumed you knew that.” She swept her eyes up and down, taking in every inch of Erika’s body. “If you don’t put on a little show and make sure they’re looking at all that bare skin, they might remember that you’re a university dropout who shuffles aimlessly from one place to another, effectively homeless. What is cute in one’s twenties is a character flaw in later years. You’d do well to remember that.”
The old Erika would have screamed back at her, which was what Chriszette wanted. The more of a mess her daughter was, the more she could make herself the maternal victim. The old Erika had known this as well as the current Erika did, but this was the first time that Erika did nothing but smile back at Chriszette. And fail to otherwise react.
A faint frown creased her mother’s brow. “No one likes a born loser, Erika,” she said. “But as you know, they are often dazzled by a whore.”
“Thank you, Mother,” Erika said, and she was shaking a little, but she didn’t let it own her. The choice was hers, and she chose to let far more powerful things make her cry. Becausehealways sweetened that pot with a few orgasms. She nodded her mother. “I bow to your example, as always.”
And her mother’s lover appeared then, cutting off whatever vicious reply Chriszette might have planned to make.
The car swept them off for the long drive to Jenny’s father’s estate, where the party was being held in as much ancient, feudal splendor as possible. Right down to the selling of the bride, if Erika wanted to get technical.
And it wasn’t until she’d followed her mother up the grand stairs that led into the soaring hall, then waited her turn while Chriszette left her coat and fluttered all over her lover, that Erika found herself attacked by her own nerves.
She told herself not to be silly.
Which...didn’t really work.
After handing off her own coat, she drifted toward the grand ballroom. Chriszette liked to make an entrance, so the party was already in full swing as she swept inside.
Erika, for perhaps the first time in her life, didn’t particularly want to make a scene. So instead, she headed farther into the house, toward one of the less trafficked entrances to the ballroom. Then she stood there for a moment. Jenny was moving through the crowd, looking beautiful and bright and elegant, as always. Jenny’s father trailed along with her, looking puffed up and proud—an upgrade from his usual puffed up and pompous.
And then Erika saw her brother, looking as grim and determined as always.
It had been one thing to find a lovely dress. To take on faith that her mother was wrong and Dorian was right. That she had more to offer than too much skin on display at an otherwise excruciatingly proper party like this one, teeming as it was with the sorts of people who appeared regularly inTatler, yet found their presence in its pages appalling.
She found it was one thing to do the things she’d done with Dorian, and admit the truths he’d wrung out of her.
But it would be something else again to look her brother in the eye. Then apologize for not only disappointing him, but for going out of her way to disappointherself, too. And then taking it out on him. For years.
Her stomach twisted, then plummeted to the marble floor at her feet.
She must have been kidding herself. Or so hopped-up on endorphins that she’d forgotten that Conrad was hardly anybody’s idea of the sweet, genial older brother. He wasn’t the sort to kick a football about or help his younger sister with her maths. On the contrary, Conrad was a dark cloud of a man. He was so severe. So exacting. And he had a way of looking at a person that reminded Erika of their mother when she was poised to strike. Only worse, because Chriszette prized meanness.