Dangerous to Love (27 page)

Pretty,
that was what had impressed itself on Julian’s mind. Long lashes, dimples, a slight build, and now a scar to disfigure the whole. One day, he promised himself, there would be a final reckoning. One day, he would come face-to-face with “Pretty,” and then .  .  .

The image faded and Serena’s face took possession of his mind. A coldness such as he’d never experienced before seemed to invade his soul, chilling his blood to ice. She had to be behind it all. Nothing else made sense.

In the weeks since he’d been incarcerated in this hellhole, he’d retraced in his mind everything that had passed between them since their first encounter. By her lights, she’d had motive enough to send him to the colonies ten times over. She’d told him that she would find a way to punish him and he had not taken her seriously.

God, she had known how to play him. Those little throbbing cries of arousal, her uninhibited response to him, her sweet surrender—all of it was sham. Even her role as Victoria had fooled him. She was playing for time while she set things in motion. For all he knew, Flynn might have been her accomplice. If the pain in his jaw had not been so excruciating, he would have laughed at himself.

He had trusted her, wanted to protect her from the fate he had devised for her father. The irony was supreme. He was the one who was trussed up like a side of beef in a butcher’s stall. Once again, a Ward had triumphed over a Renney.

“Pretty” had told him what his fate would be. Fourteen years as an indentured convict on a tobacco or sugar plantation. And if he ever returned to England, they would get rid of him permanently.

He would return, nothing was more certain, and he damn well refused to serve his term for whatever crime was on the trumped-up papers the captain of the ship had in his possession. He would find a way to return to her.

He flexed his hands in his manacles. He would find a way to return to her. He closed his eyes as the pleasurable images formed in his brain.

A
s the weeks dragged by, Serena was afflicted with one complaint after another. She came down with the sniffles, then the ague, and was almost over it when she succumbed to the influenza. By the time she was on her feet again, she was a shade of her former self. Everyone, her family included, assumed that grief for her father’s death was at the bottom of it. This was only partly true. It was the uncertainty over Julian that was taking its toll on her.

There had been a few flickers of hope from time to time. Rumors about Julian rose up and died away at regular intervals. Some said that he had escaped to the colonies to make a new life for himself; others had it from someone who could not be named that he had flown to the Continent and was last seen in Paris. One rumor soon substantiated as fact was that there were no charges pending against Julian and that the authorities were no longer looking for him.

Serena first heard this rumor from Flynn, but she had been afraid to give it much credence. When Jeremy repeated it over the tea tray on one of the few occasions he was able to tear himself away from his accounts and ledgers, her heart lurched against her ribs.

“This means, of course,” said Jeremy, “that the way is clear for him to return.”

“It could be a trap,” Clive pointed out. “You know, once he shows his face, the powers that be will pounce on him.”

Serena’s hand shook so badly that her teacup rattled in
its saucer. Raising the cup to her lips, she pretended to drink from it.

“No,” said Jeremy. “It’s no trap, leastways, that’s not how it appears to me. I had it from Lord Kirkland, and if anyone should know, it should be he.”

“You know,” said Letty, “I never could credit that Julian Raynor was a Jacobite.”

“No more could I,” responded Jeremy. “In point of fact, I rather suspected that he was a government agent.”

“What makes you say so?” asked Clive sharply.

“What? Oh, it’s just a rumor that is circulating in my club. They say that his arrest and escape from custody was a sham, a ploy to escape retribution from the members of some Jacobite sect he had infiltrated.”

“If that is so,” said Serena carefully, “then it were better for him if he stayed away, else his enemies may yet find a way to punish him.”

“I hardly think so. It seems to me that if the way has been cleared for his return, his friends at Whitehall must be satisfied that he stands in no danger.”

After this conversation, Serena’s hopes took a gargantuan leap. Julian was a man of wealth and property. It was inconceivable that he would not return to resolve his financial affairs once the threat of arrest was gone. She must contain her impatience until that day arrived. Whether he was a Jacobite or a government agent no longer mattered to her. Her sufferings had taught her that the only thing that really mattered was that somewhere, somehow, Julian was alive and well.

In the months that followed, she forced herself to put a good face on things, though there were long stretches when she hardly had enough energy to rise from her bed and face one more dreary day. There was no escape route now to claim her attention. Either the trickle of fugitives had dried up or Clive and Flynn had decided between
them that their little group had had its day. Even if they had decided to continue with it, she no longer had the heart for it.

For the first time, they began to put into practice what Jeremy had been preaching for so long. The staff was drastically reduced; when no tenant could be found for Ward House, Riverview was let; their finest thoroughbreds were sold off; gowns were refurbished or made over. It appeared to Serena that the period of mourning, when there were no parties or balls or entertainments of any note, was a foretaste of what was in store for them. For Letty’s sake, something had to be done, and so she told Jeremy.

“I don’t know where the money is to come from,” she said, “but something must be done for her. She has a dowry, so there is every hope that she will make a good match. And to do that, she must go out in society and meet young people of her own age.”

For the first time in a long while, Jeremy smiled. “Well, of course she must! And you also! Why do you suppose I have been such a tyrant these many months if not to secure the future for all of you? I am determined to see my two young sisters creditably established once this period of mourning is over. Don’t despair. We are not paupers yet.”

The conversation left Serena with plenty to think about. Jeremy was determined to see both sisters creditably established, not just Letty, but
her
also. Though Jeremy would not say so, once she and Letty were married, they would no longer be his financial responsibility. And, if either she or Letty made a brilliant match, they might be expected to bring money into the family to help settle their debts. Clearly, for the family’s sake, it was their duty to marry.

This thought left her quite shaken. Even if she wanted
to do her duty (which she did not), she was already married. Or was she? True, she had no marriage certificate to prove it. The last she had seen of it was when Julian had pocketed it after the chase in the storm. She had no way of knowing what had happened to it.

In any case it was a Fleet marriage and easily invalidated—that was what Julian had told her. Had he dispensed with their marriage? Would he return for her? Dear God, where was he and why hadn’t he come for her?

Some of these agonizing uncertainties were answered the day Flynn burst into the house with the incredible news that Raynor’s gaming house had once again opened its doors. To a barrage of questions from Letty and Catherine, he replied that no, the major was not in residence, though it was his hand that was guiding the enterprise. He’d had it from no less a person than Mr. Black, the major’s chief operator. It seemed that Raynor had fled to South Carolina where he owned a substantial property, a plantation. That’s where he had been hiding out for the last year, and since the life there suited him very well, that’s where he intended to remain for some time to come. In the meantime, letters had been crossing the Atlantic to his friends and agents in London with instructions on the deposition of his various holdings.

Over the next few weeks, Serena discovered that in addition to the plantation, there was also a house in Charles Town which was equal to anything to be found in England. Charles Town was reputed to be a perfect Georgian city with entertainments to rival those of London—innumerable clubs, assemblies, balls, concerts, and plays, not to mention the most beautiful and cultured women in the world.

These tidbits did not come to her all at once, but in dribs and drabs as the Wards began to resume their place in society. Julian, she learned, had been living the life of
an aristocrat, hobnobbing with the cream of Charles Town society. His holdings in the Carolinas were almost the equal of what he had left behind in England.

She was glad for him, truly glad for him, and so she told Flynn when he warned her not to let her imagination run away with her. There could be any number of reasons for the major’s delay in writing to give her an account of himself.

“All I ever wanted,” she replied mildly, “was to know that he was alive and well. I’m satisfied, Flynn. Truly I am. You can’t think I begrudge him the life he has made for himself in the colonies?”

This was pride speaking, and both she and Flynn knew it. In the privacy of her own secret thoughts, she veered between uncertainty and anguish. She did not want to believe that while she had been drowning in grief for him, not knowing whether he was alive or dead, he had scarcely spared her a thought.

The insidious thoughts dripped into her mind like a slow, corrosive poison. He wasn’t like Allardyce. She refused to believe he was like Allardyce. Allardyce had only wanted her for her fortune. He had cared nothing for her. That last day with Julian, she could have sworn he felt something for her.

If there was one thing she had learned from her experience with Allardyce, it was that some men were dangerous to love. She had taken that lesson to heart. Stephen had been the opposite of Allardyce—comfortable, predictable, safe.

Was Julian dangerous to love? If she had not felt like weeping her heart out, she would have laughed at her own naïveté. Dangerous to love? She had known it from the moment she had set eyes on him.

Other more salacious rumors began to circulate about Julian, connecting his name to a string of beautiful
women in Charles Town. These edifying morsels of gossip were conveyed across the Atlantic by diplomats and merchants who had visited the young colony in the course of their business. Serena absorbed it all in smiling silence.

“Now Serena,” Flynn said placatingly, retreating a step as the familiar fire kindled in her eyes, “give the poor man a chance. You can’t know that the major—”

As the china dish came flying at him, he ducked and it shattered harmlessly against the door. “Serena!” he said reproachfully. “Get a grip on yourself] So the major ’as the odd bit o’ muslin in ’is keeping! What ’as that to say to anything? ’E’s a man, ain’t ’e? That don’t mean nothing to men of the world.”

“You knave!” Her teeth were gnashing together. “You liver-faced, toad-eating miscreant! Why must you always defend him?”

“ ’Cos there might be a good reason for what ’e’s done. For all we knows, the major could ’ave lost his memory. ’Ave you thought of that?”

He ducked again when the silver hairbrush came rocketing across the room, missing his nose by an inch.

“If it were not for you,” railed Serena, her eyes darting around her bedchamber for another missile to launch at him, “I would not have come to this sorry pass! Do you know how I felt tonight, hearing those women’s names coupled with his name?” Flynn did know, and was cautiously inching his way toward the door. Serena went on relentlessly, “It might have been
my
name they were making sport of! And you are the one who made it possible by duping me into that Fleet marriage!”

As she ducked under the bed and came up with the chamber pot, Flynn dived for the door. The chamber pot, empty, thankfully, caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder. “Serena,” he reproved, staggering under the impact,
then he took to his heels when she went for a candlestick.

Bosom heaving, she stared at that closed door for a full minute. Throwing the candlestick from her, she turned away and flung herself across the bed. Remorse washed over her in a flood of tears. Poor Flynn! He had taken the blows that were meant for Julian Raynor. Great wrenching sobs shook her shoulders. While she had been wallowing in despair, he had been sunk in debauchery, living the life of an aristocrat. The rogue! The bastard! He’d written to his friends and agents in London, but not one word to her.

And why should there be? He had never cared for her. The fifty-pound note and the curtain ring in the drawer of her dresser gave ample evidence of his opinion of her. She’d been well and truly trounced by a master in the art of seduction. He’d even
told
her that their Fleet marriage was easily got out of. And like a half-witted moonling, she had let him have his way with her,
she,
Serena Ward, who thought she knew every trick ever invented by an unscrupulous rake to persuade a female to his bed. To such men, the chase was everything, and having caught their prey, they moved on to the next challenge. That’s all she had ever been to him—a challenge that had touched his male pride.