Free Waking Up With a Rake by Connie Mason, Mia Marlowe Page B

her mother and the viscountess moved on.
    Across from Lady Harrington, a Lord Percy was flirting rather shamelessly with the young baroness and didn’t even flinch when the lady’s husband cast him a pointedly wicked glare.
    Nothing to fear from a toothless lion, Rhys figured Percy had decided.
    When the baroness began ignoring him, Percy turned his attention to Miss Amanda Pinkerton, who sat on his right side. With a few artful blandishments he had the dark-eyed beauty blushing in no time. Evidently, Lord Percy was a flirt of opportunity, not strategy.
    “I say, Miss Pinkerton,” he said, “I do hope you’ll save a spot on your dance card for me when you arrive in London. You’ll have the young bucks lining up, I shouldn’t wonder.”
    “Amanda is being brought out by Lady Cowper and won’t have much say in the composition of her dance cards.” Doctor Nigel Pinkerton, Amanda’s father, glowered at Percy from his position across the table on Lady Harrington’s left.
    Rhys decided there were no flies on Pinkerton. He respected men who protected their women. In short order, Pinkerton had sized up Percy and arrived at the correct number. The doctor had also befriended Horatio Symon when they were both in India. In fact, Amanda was born there and had only recently made the long cruise home with her father in order to have a proper London Season come spring. From what Rhys could gather from cryptic mentions, her mother, like many an English rose, had wilted and died in the East.
    The last guest at the table was Colonel Billiter. He too had spent time on the Asian subcontinent, but served in the military instead of working to develop trade as Horatio Symon had done. If he’d heard of Rhys’s less than distinguished service in France, the colonel gave no sign when Olivia’s mother had introduced them.
    The table was long enough to accommodate another twelve guests without crowding. The extra chairs were empty at present, as was the seat at the distant head of the table. With so many of his purported friends gathered round, Mr. Symon was conspicuous by his absence.
    Mrs. Symon had assured Rhys that all the places would be filled by week’s end. A much larger house party was planned as soon as the general mourning for Princess Charlotte was lifted.
    “We’ll have a sober little party of friends and family until then. Once it’s decently possible, we’ll shake off the winter doldrums with finer festivities,” Mrs. Symon had told him grandly. “We don’t want you to report back to the Duke of Clarence that we country mice are deadly dull.”
    But no matter who joined them in the days to come, Rhys marked the members of this “sober little party of friends and family.” One of them, he was sure, had tried to harm the host’s eldest daughter.
    Why? Which of them stood to gain if Olivia didn’t wed the Duke of Clarence?
    Mrs. Symon was still worrying the topic of Olivia’s “accident,” picking at it as if she might unravel the horror of it like a knitter unravels a misshapen row of stitches. “I swear, I feel an attack of the vapors coming on every time I think about what might have happened to our dear Olivia.”
    “What about what did happen to poor Molly,” Olivia said softly. Rhys heard guilt in her tone.
    “She’s still alive and, with any luck, will remain so,” Rhys said. By the time he’d left the stable that morning, the head groom had rigged a tackle and sling so the mare’s front half was lifted off the ground, giving the injured joint a chance to heal. “Mr. Thatcher is making every effort to save her.”
    He was rewarded by Olivia’s small smile of gratitude for his understanding, but then she turned her gaze to her plate, refusing to look at him again.
    Mrs. Symon recaptured the conversational ball. “Well, horse doctoring aside, thank heaven Lord Rhys was there to save the day.”
    “Hear, hear,” Lord Percy said, taking the opportunity to clink his glass with the baroness’s