A Most Unladylike Adventure (7 page)

Suddenly she felt so utterly vulnerable lying here, stretched under him like a wanton, and shifted restlessly, telling her body it had to let go of the glittering fantasy of ever doing that again, with anyone. Then he seemed to find a rampant need of her after all, when she’d thought him spent for the rest of the night and for ever done with her. She felt him roll his hips suggestively within the cradle of hers and, to her shame, something ravenous and desperate awoke in her as well. Breath stuttered from her lips before she could calm it and she heard his grunt of satisfaction, just before his mouth descended on hers in a kiss
that allowed nothing for the tenderness of her bee-stung lips or the newness of sensations as his arousal hardened inside her once more.

Once more she drank in the scent of him, the abrasion of springy masculine hair against her clutching fingertips as she curled her hands into his heaving chest for want of any other purchase on his sweat-slicked body. Whatever he said, she heard the driven sound of his approving, then demanding murmurs as they climbed another summit when she’d thought herself at the top of this particular mountain. Every sense screamed for satisfaction as her eyes searched the darkness for a clue to his feelings when he made her shudder with driven desire, made her cry out for more as he rode her with a tenderness for her once-virgin body that made tears glaze her eyes and allowed her to be glad he couldn’t see her after all.

She sank and rose and twisted and thrashed under him with need and this time she knew where they were bound and tensed for sheer delight as the warmth and golden release of body on body, heart on heart, overrode everything once more. Convulsing helplessly as he drove her mercilessly on and on, until she was left breathless and sobbing for breath and for sanity. He buried his dear, ruffled head in
the curve of her vulnerable throat and let her feel his mouth open on a long, silent shout of rapturous possession.

‘Was that useful of me as well?’ he gasped when he finally managed to pump enough air into his lungs to speak. ‘I’d hate it if you found your one, and apparently only, lover to be inept or unmemorable.’

‘Don’t worry, I don’t suppose I stand much risk of forgetting that if I live to be ninety,’ she murmured gruffly.

With a great sigh of goodness-knew-what emotion, he rolled away from her at last and rested at the side of her as if he didn’t have energy to get himself any farther.
Not because he can’t bear to forsake your arms, Louisa
, a hateful voice warned as he drew in long gasps of air and she felt his lungs expand, even as she had to grasp her hands tightly together above her head in order not to reach out to him. She so wanted to smooth his tense features, to linger over his mightily muscled shoulders and caress his labouring chest that only her own exhaustion stopped her springing up and putting the width of this shady warehouse between them.

‘Nice to know something about me is likely to prove memorable.’

‘There’s nothing about you that isn’t,’ she reassured him before she’d even thought about it. ‘Not that I could ever forget so objectionable a man,’ she added hastily as she sat up at last, hoping he hadn’t read something into her words she couldn’t let herself admit, even in her own head.

‘Of course not,’ he said remotely, as his breath settled and she felt his powerful limbs tense for action.

Luckily he couldn’t see the hand she held up in protest for the darkness that loomed between them. Still she knew the moment he stepped away and began to don his clothing, scrabbling in the dark for the odd garment she’d cast into the wider darkness in the heat of frantic desire. She reluctantly began the task of trying to reorder her own appearance, shucking off an outer layer of dull and overlarge garments because they wouldn’t be needed now. It was too dark outside for him to need a disguise now and she doubted he’d consent to hide his undisputed masculinity under even so sketchy a veil as the extra clothes she’d kirtled about her waist.

‘Even as I hope you’re getting dressed and concealing yourself from me before you rouse me to insanity once more, you’re undressing
yourself, Louisa Alstone. What a very contrary female you truly are,’ he commented out of the gloom and she had to bite back on a sigh of regret, for all that lovely intimacy, that wonderful forgetfulness of herself in him.

She smoothed down her remaining, nondescript skirts and wished that, just once, he could have seen her in her elegant evening finery. She’d be groomed to perfection, she let herself fantasise for a brief moment. Her hair would be brushed into immaculate disorder, every shining lock curled and pinned to show the fiery glow within its apparent darkness. Her gown would fit as only an exclusive Bond Street modiste could shape it and it would be made up of the finest cross-cut silk crepe to cling and lovingly outline her much-vaunted figure. Apparently she was not too tall or too short and would have been the epitome of elegance, if she wasn’t so cold. She allowed herself a wry grimace for the rosy glow her brother’s money cast over her as far as her needy suitors were concerned.

‘The top layer was meant to be for you,’ she managed to tell him when she could make it sound as if it didn’t matter.

‘For me—devil take it, woman, do you take me for a molly?’

‘How could I?’ she muttered under her breath, but he heard her all the same.

‘You certainly know different now, if you ever did,’ he confirmed smugly.

‘Would you like me to provide you with a testimonial?’

‘Thank you, but your brother would undoubtedly kill me, so I’ll pass on that.’

‘As well, perhaps, but the clothes were meant to be a disguise.’

‘Good heavens, I think you really mean it. You really are the oddest female,’ he told her as if he had more important things on his mind and she seethed in the darkness as she fumbled for the key under her skirts and then searched about for the wretched thing on her erstwhile resting place.

‘Looking for this?’ he asked, suddenly in front of her and she felt as much as saw the outline of the cleverly wrought key held out to her.

‘You stole it?’ she accused rashly.

‘Just as you must have done,’ he confirmed lazily. ‘It’s always as well to be prepared, as you undoubtedly know.’

‘You took it while you were busy seducing me?’

‘Not exactly while, more afterwards, and I
dispute your definition, since you seduced me as surely as I did you. Don’t try to denounce me as the despoiler of innocence when you begged to be deflowered. No—correction, you convinced me you were as experienced as the lovely Eloise and had nothing left to deflower. Which of us do you think anyone would believe, once they knew you kidnapped me and lured me here in a questionable guise, my dear Miss Alstone?’

‘I have no intention of broadcasting my seduction, so if that’s what you’re worried about, Captain Darke, stop plaguing me with slanderous suggestions and be reassured that I’ll never tell a living soul.’

‘Yet Mother Nature has a way of catching out the most secretive of lovers. So what about any child we made tonight?’ he asked all too seriously and her heart stuttered in its tracks at the bare idea.

‘It would take more than that to make one,’ she managed to say scornfully, even as part of her marvelled at the very notion.

‘No, sorry,’ he said with a fine act of light-hearted indifference, ‘unfortunately I can’t close my eyes to the fact that it often takes a good deal less than we just managed between us.’

‘Well, there’s certainly no need for you to sound so smug about it.’

‘That’s not smugness, it’s resignation. We must marry, my dear.’

‘Over my dead body,’ she managed to whisper between gritted teeth.

‘I admit it’s not what either you or your brother would have wanted, but I’ll not have a child of mine running about the place, blithely learning petty theft and fraud at its mother’s knee.’

‘I can’t be a mother,’ she gasped as if the very idea pained her, which it did, acutely. She let the insult pass her by as she stood horrified by the suddenly very-present possibility that he might be right.

‘I think we may shortly find that you can, like it or no,’ he mocked her.

‘No, no, I mustn’t,’ she said, hugging her arms about her suddenly trembling body and trying not to come apart in front of him. ‘No,’ she whispered again in horror at the very idea as she sat suddenly back down on her much-maligned coffee sacks and rocked backwards and forwards at the desperate possibility of it.

‘I’ve heard of being wise after the event, but this is ridiculous, Miss Alstone,’ he told her. When she didn’t reply, but continued to
rock blindly, as if she’d forgotten he was even there, he moved to kneel beside her and hold her still.

He was almost tender as he soothed her and whispered meaningless words of comfort as he felt the dry sobs that shook her, for all her faint attempts to put the usual armour of indifference back in place.

‘I
can see how a lady like you might be horrified by the bare notion of bearing my child, but I promise it won’t be as bad as you think, Louisa. We will contrive to look after it somehow between us, and even if I’m not the husband you would have chosen, I’ll try to be an easy one on you and a good father to our children, whenever they should come.’ Hugh Darke was promising her all the time she tried to take in what had happened and how stupid she’d been to make him think he had to vow anything to her, let alone marriage.

‘You don’t understand,’ she wailed, ineffectually hitting a would-be fist against his rock-like chest as he tried to take her in his arms in an embrace of pure comfort that was
so tempting she had to find a way to make him let her go.

‘I understand that you’re a lady and a very lately ex-virgin and I’m just a common sea captain, but I could say we’ve made our bed and now must lie on it, if only we’d ever got that far.’

‘It’s not that, and I’m not a lady anyway,’ she said vaguely, for it seemed as if they were moving through a dream and she was looking much further back at a reality he couldn’t even guess at.

‘That you are—the whole world knows Miss Alstone is a Diamond of the
ton
, and only the highest born and most beautiful in the land gain that accolade.’

‘The Ice Diamond, the Untouchable Alstone?’ she scorned incredulously. ‘You should be the first to pour scorn on that epithet from now on.’

‘I’ll call out any man who seeks to argue with your icy reputation in public, even while I’m enjoying the real, warm human woman in my bed,’ he reassured her and if she hadn’t been bound up in her own misery she would have surely relished his partisanship, as well as his apparent desire to revisit her bed, however makeshift it might prove to be.

‘I never wanted to make my début among the
ton
,’ she told him blankly, as if not quite sure who she was talking to and all of a sudden she felt him take her misery seriously and draw back to try to see her face in all this frustrating darkness. ‘I certainly never intend to marry and did everything I could to make that fact clear to my family. I would not accept any gentleman’s offer of marriage, could not,’ she explained desolately as if she was in the dock instead of his arms.

‘Since I’m in a very good position to know you were a very proper maiden lady, then why not, Miss Alstone?’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, call me Louisa,’ she demanded with a sudden return to her usual forthright manner and, for a brief moment, she felt horror recede and the world rock back on to its proper axis for the first time in years. Then it was back again, that old revulsion at herself, the familiar, terrible worthlessness of what she’d done, so long ago.

‘Why will you have no husband or child to love, Louisa?’ he demanded imperiously and suddenly she knew he had easily as much noble blood pumping round his body as she could claim to have inherited from the Earls of Carnwood.

‘I can’t tell you,’ she whispered, back in that nightmare. ‘Whatever will you think of me if I do?’

‘How can I say, until you actually tell me what troubles you so deeply? We can hardly say or think much worse of each other than we already have, now can we?’

‘No,’ she admitted hollowly, thinking back to all the names she had called him, all the harsh opinions he’d already voiced about her.

‘Then what does it matter to you what I think of you? If you won’t marry me and insist on bastardising our maybe child, then I’ll certainly think far worse of you than you currently do of yourself, I can safely promise you that much at least.’

‘How comforting,’ she managed to say almost lightly and decided he might as well know the worst about her, if only so he’d agree to walk away and forget her.

‘Tell me, it can’t be worse than a secret I can’t bring myself to tell you in return,’ he soothed ruefully, but she couldn’t imagine anything worse than her own dark misdeeds.

‘It was back in the years before I became a lady,’ she warned him.

‘Before you were born, you mean? I can’t say I approve of the axiom that the sins of the
fathers are to be visited on the sons, or in this case the daughters, so I know that you were always a lady, my dear.’

‘My father certainly had a full hand of misdeeds to hand on, even if that was all he left us.’

‘So I have heard, but as I say, I can’t see why that ought to blight you, any more than it has your brother and sister.’

‘Only me,’ she said so low he had to bow his head to catch it and she felt him so close to her again that her heart seemed to ache over that last inch of space between them.

‘No, you’re an Alstone just as surely as they are. Your parentage is stamped all over the three of you for anyone to see.’

‘Oh, my mother was ever faithful to him—despite his rages and his false promises and the hundreds of ways in which he didn’t deserve her devotion. But once upon a time there were four of us children, and it’s my fault that there aren’t four of us any more.’

‘How can it be? You must have been a child yourself when you lost your brother or sister, for I never heard of another little Alstone going to live with your aunt and uncle after your parents’ deaths.’

‘I was thirteen years old when Maria and
I went to our uncle’s house to be turned from little savages into proper ladies, at least according to him. Maria was sixteen and eager to please, as well as good and dutiful, so she found it far easier to be “civilised” than I did and settled to it without complaint.’

‘Which you most certainly did not, Louisa, if I know anything about you at all,’ he said with a smile in his voice that made her knees weak. Again she longed to breach that small gap and lean into the comfort he was offering, but somehow forced herself not to. ‘You were a child and no wonder if you were rebellious,’ he continued, her unexpected advocate. ‘You’re an Alstone when all’s said and done, are you not? I never came across one yet who wasn’t as proud as the devil and impatient of the rules—apart from your sister, of course. Even I can see that Mrs Heathcote is almost as good as she is lovely and perhaps provides the exception to prove the rule.’

Another man who had evidently fallen very willingly under her lovely blonde sister’s gentle spell, Louisa decided with unaccustomed bitterness and hated herself all over again. ‘Aye, Maria is the best of us wicked Alstones,’
she said, ‘and I am the worst—I carry my father’s loathsome stamp right through me.’

‘Don’t talk such damnable nonsense, woman, you have the Alstone looks and believe me, they are quite spectacular enough for the rest of us mere mortals to cope with. There’s a glorious portrait of the Lucinda Alstone rumour insists enchanted Charles the Second even more than usual in the Royal Collection and you can believe me, because I’ve seen it, that you’re even lovelier than she was. It’s lucky I found you before Prinny did, really,’ he added and she almost smiled at the absurdity of his cocky reassurance.

‘Oh, really—lucky for whom exactly?’

‘Me, of course, since you’re going to marry me. For him as well, I suppose, since I won’t have to threaten him with
laissez
-majesty when I go after him with my horse pistols for leering at my wife, so long as he never has the chance to leer at you in the first place.’

‘How do you know he hasn’t done so already?’

‘Has he, then?’

‘Just a little, but he called me a pretty child and tickled me under the chin before Lady
Hertford became restless and dragged him away.’

‘Sensible female,’ he approved smugly and she felt the comfort of normality he was trying to create for her and also a lurch of feeling she hadn’t armed herself against. Dangerous, she decided with a shiver, and sat a little straighter, almost next to him as she was.

‘They say he was once handsome and quite dashing,’ she mused so that he’d hopefully forget he’d been trying to plumb her deepest, darkest secrets.

‘According to my mother, he was as pretty a prince as you’d find in any fairy tale, until he became so fat and petulant you can’t help but wonder if he’d have been better finding something to do, besides feel sorry for himself.’

‘You know a lot about him,’ she said suspiciously.

‘Any Londoner in town when he was still Prince Florizel, and not fat as an alderman, could tell you that much.’

‘But your mama wasn’t just a London bystander, was she, Captain?’

‘Never mind my mother, we were discussing yours.’

She sighed deeply and felt the shadow of the past loom until even the deep darkness of
this windowless cavern seemed to be touched by it.

‘She was far more beautiful than I am in her youth, but stubborn as any mule and somehow saw some quality in my father nobody else ever did. Mama never raged about her reduced circumstances or let us children think we were in any way less because we didn’t have servants and fine clothes, or aught but a few second-hand books she managed to squirrel away from my father somehow or another. I deplore her blindness towards my father, for there was never a more selfish or ruthlessly vain man put on this earth than Bevis Alstone, but I can’t bring myself to blame her for it, because she genuinely loved him. In the end I think she thought of him as a particularly naughty child.’

‘How humiliating for him,’ he said gently and she suddenly supposed it had been, so perhaps it was an unfortunate marriage on both sides and her mother would have been far better loving a better man and he a worse woman.

‘He didn’t kill her, though, I did that,’ she finally said bleakly. ‘And Peter,’ she added as if purging her soul of all her bitter crimes at once.

‘Of course you didn’t,’ he told her before she could add another word.

‘How do you know?’ she asked indignantly, almost as if she had to defend her right to the worst crime a human could commit against another of her kind.

‘You haven’t got it in you to harm a newborn kitten, let alone a woman you obviously loved and any kind of brother, even if he took after your sire in every vice available to him, which I doubt, since the rest of you certainly do not.’

‘Well, he didn’t, anyway. Peter was a dear, good boy; if he was a little slower than the rest of us, he loved more to make up for it. You never came across a more endearing soul than him and even the thieves and thugs in our near neighbourhood wouldn’t have hurt him, although we only lived on the edges of a rookery and Kit and I would never have taken him inside for fear of what they would do to him there. He was five years younger than me, so Kit and Ben and I ran riot and played catch-me-if-you-can through St Giles while Maria and Peter stayed home with Mama and minded their lessons.’

‘And Kit is five years older than you at the
very least, so you were not running wild with him at thirteen years old, were you?’

‘No.’ She shook her head slowly, shuddering at the thought of what she’d done and why. ‘He left for the sea when I was seven or eight, but whenever he was home I’d follow him everywhere. Even he stopped trying to prevent me doing so, once he realised I could climb like a monkey and run as fast as the wind from any pursuit, so there really wasn’t much point in him trying to stop me when he knew I’d get out anyway, and find it all the more sport to track him and Ben down when I did. I hated the times he and Ben were at sea and how I hated my father for reducing us all to such straits that Kit couldn’t go to school as Mama longed for him to do. I couldn’t endure the thought that Kit might be lost at sea, while Papa gamed and drank and demanded good food and warm clothes, even if we had to go without so he could present a smooth face to so-called “good” society. I’ve since discovered anything remotely akin to society turned its back years before, but at the time I hated “society” almost as much as I hated the gaming hells for letting him in.’

‘Understandable in the circumstances,’ Hugh Darke said.

‘I was worse than he was, easily as selfish as he was,’ she condemned herself. ‘Anything Mama asked me to do, I ignored. Any task I had to perform because we were too poor for any of us to be idle, I did with ill grace and escaped from the boarding house my mother ran as soon as I could. Then I went into the rookeries and the mean streets around them, so I could play at being all the things girls and boys my own age were forced to do in order to put food in their bellies.’

‘In your shoes, I’d have done the same.’

‘You’d have been off to sea with Kit and Ben and left me more alone than ever, in my own eyes at least.’

‘Well, if I’d been born a girl I dare say I’d have followed in your footsteps, then,’ he assured her with a smile in his voice she suddenly wished she could see.

‘You’re a better man than me,’ she said on the whisper of a laugh. ‘Make that a better woman,’ she added; for a moment, none of it felt bad after all.

‘Best make it neither. I’m very glad I’m a man and you’re a woman, but I still know I’d have felt as frustrated and rebellious in your situation as you did, Louisa Alstone. You’re spirited and clever and if you managed to survive
alone in such a harsh world, then you’re evidently extremely resourceful as well.’

‘Don’t make me into someone better than I deserve, Captain,’ she cautioned.

‘And don’t make yourself into your own demon.’

‘No need for that, I killed Peter and Mama,’ she remembered bleakly and all temptation to take herself at his inflated value disappeared.

‘How?’ he asked and she marvelled that he didn’t draw his arms away or try to set her at arm’s length.

‘Kit and Ben had gone back to sea again and I hated losing their company and the exciting adventures we had, so I ran off one day when I’d finished my daily ration of sewing and chores about the house. It was high summer and the nights were almost as light as the days, so I climbed out of a bedroom window and stayed away all night. I found a roof in Mayfair to sleep on and it was a good deal cooler and more comfortable than our bedroom under the eaves in a rotten old house that should have been pulled down half a century ago. Then I decided to run back through the streets before the world was awake, just for the devilment of it. Except this time I ran through the wrong ones and picked up the typhus
fever,’ she said, then stared blankly into the darkness as she finished her tale. ‘It killed Peter first and then I don’t think Mama could fight it for her grief at losing him. Maria was only ill for a couple of days and I recovered in time to know what I’d done and wish I hadn’t. Maria and I bungled along somehow, running the boarding house as best we could with Mrs Calhoun and Coste’s help, and Papa came home every now and again when he had nowhere else to go. Then Kit came home with his share of a cargo in his pocket and arranged for Maria and me to live with our uncle and his wife. So Kit has paid for our keep and education ever since and I stayed there and tried to make up for the terrible thing I did, but nothing could wipe out that particular sin.’