An Escapade and an Engagement (5 page)

Damnation.

He’d half hoped that he would be able to detect some flaw upon
seeing her in broad daylight. She had, after all, been on the far side of the
ballroom the night before. And everyone knew candlelight was particularly
flattering. And then in the park it had been so dark he might well have imagined
her beauty was far beyond that which really existed. But here they were, their
faces mere inches away, and her utter perfection had just literally taken his
breath away.

‘Your Harry…Lieutenant Kendell…must be so dazzled by you,’ he
eventually managed to grate, ‘that he has completely lost his head.’

And perhaps that really
was
the
truth. Perhaps he was no fortune-hunter at all. With those big blue eyes, that
glorious mane of golden curls and that utterly kissable little mouth, she was
capable of ensnaring just about any man she set her sights on. If she had given
the lowly lieutenant the least bit of encouragement, she might easily have
enslaved him.

But she wasn’t going to enslave
him.
He whipped his gaze away from her mouth to glare at a hapless
matron whose own barouche happened to be passing theirs. He was not going to
allow this attraction, no matter how strong, to deflect him from his primary
objective. Which was to marry a paragon of some kind.

He was not only going to learn how to manage his estates to the
admiration of his peers, he was going to marry a woman who would excite envy and
admiration. Not a girl whose very nature meant she was bound to teeter
permanently on the brink of one scandal or another.

‘Um… Actually…’ She faltered on the verge of confessing the
truth. He had just said he admired the way she was not hanging out for a man
with a grand title. It was so rarely she heard any praise for anything she did
that she was loath to admit she didn’t deserve even that.

Not that she
did
think people
should attempt to marry for social advancement.

‘I believe that people should only marry for love,’ she
declared.

‘I might have guessed,’ he said, so scathingly her temper
flared up all over again.

Her own family had been quite needlessly torn apart when her
aunt Aurora had eloped with a man the Earl of Caxton had decided was beneath
her, socially. Her grandfather would still not permit anyone to mention her
name. Which had, according to Josie, wounded her mother deeply. Yet the man with
whom she had eloped had been the son of a gentleman. There had been no need to
banish them both and forbid any communication between the sisters, surely?

There had always been a sort of gaping hole in the family where
Aunt Aurora and her husband ought to have been round which they all had to
tiptoe. And she had long since come to the conclusion that her grandfather had
behaved in a perfectly ridiculous fashion. Just because his daughter had fallen
in love with a man of whom he did not approve.

‘If two people love each other—really love each other—then
nothing should be allowed to stand in their way,’ she said vehemently.

His heart sank. For he’d hoped that in the light of day she’d
somehow wake up and see that Harry was not worth the risks she was taking. And
then he could forget about this detour and return his full attention to the
important business of scouring London Society for his bride.

But the tone of her voice revealed a determination that no
amount of arguing was going to be able to shake. She left him with no
alternative. He was going to have to employ a little subterfuge so that he could
limit her exposure to potential danger, whilst keeping close enough to protect
her should it become necessary.

‘Then who am I to stand in the way of true love?’ he said, with
such sarcasm she just knew she wasn’t going to like whatever he was going to say
next. ‘Not that I condone your behaviour, young lady. Nor his. Especially not
his.’

Ah, that was more like it. She knew how to deal with a man who
spoke to her with just that tone of disapproval in his voice.

She lifted her chin and looked him straight in the eye.

‘You have no right to criticise my behaviour.’

He quite liked it when she squared up to him, he realized,
leaning back against the squabs to study her mutinous expression. When she
dropped the frigid mask she employed to deceive the rest of Society and revealed
her true self. It made him feel privileged to get a glimpse of a facet of her
nature she permitted nobody else to see.

He’d felt like this last night, too, when she’d been pleading
with him to spare her maid. She’d completely forgotten all about acting as
though she didn’t care about anything. Her eyes had glowed with a similar
fervour, and those petal-soft lips had trembled with emotion….

It was only with a great effort that he tore his eyes from
those tantalizingly tempting lips. It made his voice quite gruff when he said,
‘Catching you in the arms of your lover last night gives me
every
right to speak my mind. I know what you are capable of. I know
what you are really like.’

He raised one gloved hand to silence her when she drew breath
to object.

‘And I cannot, in all conscience, just allow you to carry on as
you have been doing. Dammit, if anyone else had caught the pair of you together
there would have been hell to pay. I have no confidence that if I do not,
personally, put a curb on your behaviour you will not carry on sneaking out to
meet him in secret. And it must stop. Do you hear me?’

She nodded, her lips pressed hard together on the reflection
that there was nothing so infuriating as being ordered to do something she had
already decided on doing.

‘Now, it will not be as bad as all that. If you do me one
favour I am willing to arrange for you to see your young man, in circumstances
which will compromise neither him nor you.’

‘You will do
what?
’ How could the
man be so exasperating? She had been relying on him insisting she give Harry up
completely.

‘I will arrange for you two to meet. But only when I, myself,
will be your chaperon.’ He half turned towards her again. ‘Now, look. Everyone
knows I have only very recently sold out. What could be more natural than for me
to be seen about with other military men? Lieutenant Kendell will be accepted
into certain situations if he is with me. And I seem to be exactly the sort of
man your family would encourage you to mix with. The fact that we are here,
riding out together, with only my own servants to chaperon us, is proof of that.
It will be quite easy for me to ensure that you may see each other whenever his
duties permit. In a properly managed, decorous fashion. Not in this sneaking way
in which you have so far engaged.’

She felt ready to explode. The last thing she could do was tell
him he had got completely the wrong idea about her and Harry. He had already
made her feel stupid and selfish. If she admitted that she had fallen into the
relationship in a fit of pique with her grandfather, and was now quite keen to
wriggle out of it again, she would never live it down!

She was going to have to appear to agree to his terms. Oh,
Lord, and that meant that she would have to meet Harry again and tell him to his
face that she did not love him. Could never marry him.

It would be painful. Very painful. But in a way would it not be
a fitting punishment for the way she had led Harry on these past months?

Though she still could not understand why on earth Lord Ledbury
was so keen to act as a go-between. Just when she had been relying on him to put
an end to what was becoming an increasingly untenable situation, he was coming
to their aid—as though he had every sympathy for what he assumed was a pair of
star-crossed lovers.

‘Why are you doing this?’

He took a deep breath. ‘I am going to ask you to do something
for me that means I shall have to take you into my confidence. I am going to
trust you to keep what I am about to tell you to yourself. Just as you are
trusting me to keep my mouth shut about your continuing relationship with
Lieutenant Kendell.’

He was going to trust her with a secret? A great deal of her
irritation with him ebbed away. Even if his words did contain that thinly veiled
threat about
him
keeping quiet so long as
she
kept quiet, nobody had ever reposed any confidence
in her upon any matter whatsoever. On the contrary—all her life her male
relatives had been drumming it into her that she was completely useless.

‘I want you to help a…a friend of mine.’ He frowned. ‘Perhaps
it is best I go back to the beginning. You know I was wounded at Orthez last
February?’

‘No.’ But hadn’t he said something about not being able to
sleep because his leg troubled him? She looked down at it. Then her eyes flicked
to the cane she recalled he’d made use of when he’d limped into Lucy’s ballroom
the previous night.

She caught her lower lip between her teeth, feeling really
ashamed of all the nasty things she’d thought about him just because he’d looked
so grim-faced.

‘Stupidest thing, really,’ he admitted, looking a bit
uncomfortable. ‘My horse got shot out from under me, and instead of jumping
clear I let the damn thing roll on me. Clumsy. I was pretty well out of it for a
while. And then I came to in the field hospital, with Milly defending me like a
tigress from surgeons whose sole idea of a cure is to amputate anything that
looks the least bit untidy. So, you see, she saved my leg.’

He held up one finger as though keeping score.

‘Then, eventually, I got sent back to England on a transport,
while the rest of my regiment pushed across the border into France. Milly’s
father, who was the regimental quartermaster, gave his permission for her to
come with me as my nurse, thank God, else the fever I contracted would most
probably have carried me off.’

He held up another finger.

‘I was weak as a kitten all through last summer. And
desperately hard up. But thanks to Milly’s ingenuity and Fred’s skill at
foraging—perhaps I should mention Fred is, or was, my batman—I slowly began to
recover. And then winter came, and I took an inflammation of the lungs. It
looked as though I was done for, but they both stuck with me even though by this
time I could not even pay their wages…’

‘But you are a wealthy man!’

‘I am a wealthy man
now,
’ he
corrected her. ‘Before Mortimer died I had to live on my pay. And what with
doctors’ bills and so forth…’

‘But surely if you had applied to your family, they would
have…?’

‘I have already told you that you are not alone in being
disappointed in your male relatives, Lady Jayne. I wrote on several occasions,
but never received any reply.’

‘How can that be? Did they not receive your letters? Do you
suppose they went astray?’

‘Oh, no,’ he said, looking particularly grim. ‘The minute my
brother died the family’s man of business came to inform me that I was now
Viscount Ledbury—proving that they had known exactly where I was, and how I was
circumstanced, all along.’

And they’d left him? Hovering between life and death? Oh, how
could they?

‘Would it surprise you to learn that my first reaction on
hearing of my older brother’s death was gratitude—for at last I had the means to
reward the only two people who had shown any loyalty towards me?’

‘Not one bit.’

She was only surprised that he was so determined to do his duty
by a family that had neglected him so woefully. A family that, by the sound of
it, cared as little for him as hers did for her. She found herself wanting to
lay her hand upon his sleeve and tell him she understood all about that
particular kind of pain. But that would be the very last thing he would want.
She knew that for certain because the last thing
she
wanted was for anyone to discover that she was constantly repressing a keening
wail of her own.
Why does nobody love me? Or even like
me?

‘When I learned that I would have to move into Lavenham House
and actively start looking for a wife, I set Milly up in a snug little house in
Bedford Place and gave her a generous allowance. I told Fred to stay with her,
though I would have preferred to have kept him on as my valet. But, you see, she
has no acquaintance in London. I could not just abandon her, after all she has
done for me. It is no exaggeration to say I owe her my life. And, no matter how
bleak things looked, she always looked on the bright side. She kept our spirits
up. It could not have been easy for her, coming to what was to her a foreign
country and having to adapt to its ways. And its climate.’

And then there was the fact that when he’d told her he was
going to have to leave the army, get married and take up his position in
Society, she had burst into tears and told him she was in love with him. Not
that he was altogether sure he believed her, but still… He hated the thought
that everything he did now must be hurting the only person who had ever said
they loved him.

‘I worry about her,’ he admitted. ‘Only last week I went round
to see them both and she came running down to the kitchen dressed in an outfit
that made her look…tawdry. When she told me how much she’d laid out for the gown
I could not believe she’d spent so much and ended up looking so cheap. To be
frank, she desperately needs guidance. From a woman of good taste.’

His eyes skimmed her outfit. She was wearing a carriage dress
of deep blue, a jaunty little bonnet that framed the natural beauty of her face
and chinchilla furs about her shoulders to shield her from the breeze, which was
quite brisk that day.

‘I know it will involve a great personal sacrifice for you to
spend time with a woman of Milly’s class, but I cannot think of anyone else I
would rather she emulate. I cannot imagine you ever choosing anything that did
not become you.’