Lady Iona's Rebellion (18 page)

“I assume so,” Freddie’s voice rose with incredulity. “A duke’s unmarried daughter. I’d almost rather you’d taken a boy to your bed than that chit dressed as one. You certainly shocked me to my toes last night when you were making mooneyes at her while calling her Sir Percival, you did. It was so out of character for you. But then again, you’re under an inhuman amount of stress thanks to your family, I thought maybe you—”

An uncomfortable silence spanned between them. Freddie knew too many of his secrets. Had witnessed too many of his humiliations.

Nathan spiked a hand through his hair. “Why would she leave me?” He thought they had formed an unspoken understanding. Dammit, he should have gotten her to speak the words he had imagined were floating in her head out loud.

“She left you a note.” Freddie’s gaze traveled over to Nathan’s large tiger maple desk. A fresh piece of foolscap was sitting out on the blotter, waiting for him.

Nathan snatched it up.

My dearest and most intimate friend,

Thank you for the lesson in passion
, the letter started. He had to force himself to not crumple it in the rush of anger surging through him. He felt a burning need to dash over to the Newbury household and shake her until she saw reason. Either that, or kiss her senseless. But he did neither. If he wanted to untangle this disaster he’d created for himself, he needed to keep a level head.

After last night, I am convinced you will rush off and do something utterly stupid. I pray you exercise a modicum of self-control, Nathan.

“I’m the picture of self-control,” he argued back. “Do you really know me so little?”

If you have but an ounce of care for my happiness, do not go to my father to speak nonsense of marriage. I will deny you if I must. Please, do not force me to do something so cruel.

Tonight will always shimmer in my memory. Even when I am old and withered, I will look back at that beautiful moment we shared and smile.

“Of course you will. I’ll be by your side making damned sure you do.”

If you never wish to see me again, I’ll abide by your wishes. However it is my deepest hope to continue our friendship.

Fondly yours.

There was no signature. Not even the ornate
I
she’d put on her earlier notes.

Fondly yours
, she’d written.

But she wasn’t really his. The letter had made that much painfully clear.

He’d never felt such a rage toward a woman. He crushed the foolscap in the palm of his hand and tossed it into the fire grate.

It was probably a good thing she’d fled his bed. His apartment. In all his years, he’d never treated a woman with such callousness, not even the lightskirts he’d taken to his bed while a student at Oxford.

Did she think he lacked a heart? And what the bloody hell about his honor? She’d coldly ripped both away from him with the tip of his own pen.

Heaven help her, despite the demands she’d made in her note, he vowed he’d do whatever was necessary to take back both his honor and his heart.

C
hapter Twelve

“What game are you playing, Wynter?”

Nathan didn’t bother to glance up from yesterday’s edition of the
London Times
—the last available copy to be had at Mill’s tiny shop in Kingsmead Square. The sweet smell of leather in the private lending library reminded him of his father’s study at Callaway Abbey. Of home. He wondered if after last night he had any chance of ever seeing his family home again. “You are mistaken. I don’t play games, Talbot.”

A chair leg scuffed against the hardwood floor. “Sir Percival Crumps?” Talbot said next to Nathan’s ear. “Lady Iona? I’d say you are ensconced in a bloody dangerous game considering how the Duke of Newbury is as protective as a bad-tempered lion around his favorite daughter.”

Nathan lowered the newspaper in order to try and read Talbot’s intent.

Trouble went hand in hand with such damning secrets and trouble he already had in excess.

Not only had Iona left him like a thief in the night with only that terse note to chill his heart, Miss Darly had sent a letter of her own to his apartment that morning. In it, she’d detailed her expensive demands. If they weren’t met, she vowed she would take up with Edward again and let the cards fall where they may, as it were. Unfortunately Nathan was still paying the creditors for the exorbitant sum she’d received from him almost two years earlier. He simply didn’t have the funds to buy her off for a second time, not while maintaining his current lifestyle.

And then there was Mrs. Jane Sharpes, his former mistress. Before leaving his apartment that morning, he was still berating himself for taking Iona to his bed and trying to convince himself that she would forgive him if he went to her father to plead his case, when a footman arrived at his door and announced Jane’s unexpected arrival in Bath. She urgently had to see him, the footman had told Freddie, who in turn informed Nathan with a sneer set on his unhappy lips.

As soon as Nathan had tugged on his pantaloons and tied his cravat, he’d rushed off to the address the footman had provided. His heart had been caught in his throat all the way over. He could think of only one thing urgent enough to lure Jane to the dull and unfashionable town of Bath in the middle of summer. A pregnancy.

His child.

A child that without marriage would be born a bastard.

He’d withdrawn from Iona, denying himself the pleasure of filling her with his seed because he hoped to spare her the danger of suffering that very damning and potentially ruinous complication.

He hadn’t been so careful with Jane.

Fortunately his worries about Jane’s condition had been unfounded. Even so, what he discovered at the tidy residence Jane had rented was even more shocking. Jane was willing to give him everything—in exchange for one little sacrifice.

Iona.

His body tightened at the thought of her.

That adorable minx was going to be his downfall unless she would agree to become his partner in more than secrets and shadows.

“Do you think I enjoy the inane frivolities of Bath?” Talbot’s voice reached into Nathan’s head and dragged him from his straying thoughts.

“I beg your pardon,” Nathan said.

“Do you think I enjoy Bath?” Talbot repeated with a bit of agitation.

“How should I bloody well know?”

“Well, did you know Lady Iona danced a waltz with me at every ball this past season? That she went riding with me through Hyde Park every Tuesday?”

“So you followed her to Bath looking to make her a wife?”

Talbot nodded.

Nathan’s spirits sank. Winning Iona’s devotion was beginning to appear as impossible as enticing a flitting butterfly to settle on only one flower.

And Jane was back in his life with her tempting offer to give him everything he could ever desire, save for one thing…

“Lady Iona gives so much of herself but never exclusively to one person for long,” Nathan grumbled. “Two years ago, I followed her from Bath to London. Some days I feel like I have been following after her ever since.”

“Ah,” Talbot said. He tapped the edge of the paper. “And what are you after? Is it a wife you are seeking or a challenging conquest to win?”

Nathan turned his head away, refusing to answer such an insulting question.

“I should have known. You are in love with her.”

“What?” Nathan protested. He tossed down the newspaper. “She and I share a friendship, I will admit to that. But love?”

“You aren’t running fast with her reputation, are you?”

“Of course not…at least…” A heat burned in Nathan’s chest as he clearly remembered how he’d taken her innocence last night and claimed her. He should be celebrating his success not brooding over her stubborn note. “I am trying to preserve her good name despite her recent antics.”

Talbot shook his head. “Then it is love.”

Nathan’s heart sank a little deeper into his boots. “I don’t think I know what that word means anymore. I am interested in winning her hand for the same reasons you are.”

“I doubt that,” Talbot said, rising from the table. “I am penniless and she is not.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize—”

Admitting to such a thing ate up a large chunk of a man’s pride. Nathan would have been in a similar position if his father had cut off his allowance after he’d admitted responsibility for Miss Posey Hartfield’s pregnancy. For some unfathomable reason, a modest sum still arrived every quarter in his London bank account from his father’s man-of-affairs. That, added to his own investments, had kept him living a relatively comfortable lifestyle.

“Not many know. I have my pride and a long list of creditors who are willing to bet that my family’s fortune will one day turn. Marriage into a well-endowed family such as the Newburys would go a long way to restoring what my father has lost.” Talbot gave a deep sigh. “There is always the younger sister.”

Nathan was unable to believe what he was hearing. “I do not understand,” he said. “You’re not going to blackmail me for what you know?”

“Alas, no. Instead I rather think I should tip my hat to you. There isn’t a lovelier or more sedately proper lady in all of England. Your powers of seduction must be even more potent than I suspected. I, for one, was beginning to think it would take a miracle to thaw that frosty heart of hers.”

“Her heart is far from frosty, Talbot. Unfocused perhaps but never frosty. But even so, it still might take a miracle to win her.”

And then there was Jane, all willing and smiles.

No matter what he did, the tangled web he’d gotten himself into seemed to draw only tighter and tighter around him. He was beginning to wonder whether taking Iona to his bed wasn’t the biggest mistake he’d ever made in his life.

* * * * *

She was in love.

The realization made Iona want to cry. She couldn’t be in love…not with Nathan. Not with anyone. It would be difficult enough to convince her father that she would be happier unmarried.

She had plans for her life. A passion for art to be followed. Her dream of creating beautiful sculptures that would inspire and uplift. Falling in love was only going to make everything more difficult. Still, she didn’t know how to make her heart stop aching.

Her hand moved furiously across the page as she sketched with vine charcoal the image her fingers ached to touch again.

He’s going to hate you
. The thought flitted through her mind along with the memory of the cold note she’d left for him. She’d written it in a state of panic.

“Better to have him hate me than to have him demanding my hand in marriage,” she told her empty bedchamber.

She’d done the right thing. She deserved the chance to discover her strengths. To become more than the obedient daughter. More than the silent wife.

She deserved to hold onto the power she felt growing inside herself every time Nathan unlocked a new piece of her.

Marriage would ruin everything.

She glanced down at her page. Nathan’s laughing eyes met hers. Every sketch she’d made over the last several days had been of him and only him.

What in the world was she going to do?

* * * * *

“Oh, look at my sister, Amelia, she is woolgathering yet again,” Lillian complained rather too loudly not more than an hour later as she fluttered a length of blue silk ribbon in front of Iona’s nose. “If you do not pay attention, Mrs. Langdon will run out of the shades of lace and ribbons we need for the upcoming gala.”

All of Bath was looking forward to the Victory Gala. Worry over the war in France had weighed heavily over the country for far too many years. With Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo last month, a celebration of this magnitude was well overdue. That, along with a recent influx of French fineries, had Mrs. Langdon’s Milliner and Fabric Shop crowded with the local young ladies. The line for counter service reached nearly out the door. Ladies were snatching up bolts of French fabrics, strings of laces and ribbons with ravenous hunger.

None of this mattered in the least to Iona. She glanced at the steely Mexican blue ribbon Lillian was still waving. “That color will not do,” she said and pushed Lillian’s hand away. “None of these will do.”

She stepped away from the counter to let someone else have her place. Lillian didn’t appear to notice. Her sister was holding up a handful of pretty ribbons so they were bathed in sunlight. Amelia nodded several times as Lillian pointed to a particularly lovely yellow strip of satin embellished with small pink flowers.

Iona wandered toward the back of the store.

“First that strumpet of an actress, then these rumors of him trifling with the heart of some hapless young adventuress and just this morning the scandalous widow Sharpes has arrived in Bath. He sent for her,” a voice to Iona’s left said.

Iona turned and spotted next to a display of brightly dyed peacock feathers Miss Frances Cuthbert and the young Mrs. Mary Luxborough with their heads pressed together.

“The high-sticklers will be having fits once they learn of the shameful behavior the wicked lord has brought to our town,” Mrs. Luxborough said clearly enough, the frills on her lacy cap jiggling. “What might be overlooked in London certainly will not be tolerated here.”

Were they speaking of Nathan?

What a question. Of course they were speaking of Nathan. Who else could those gossipy ladies be referring to? But what they were saying couldn’t be right. Nathan wouldn’t have sent for the widow Sharpes.

Iona pretended to admire a pair of straw, high-fluted Angoulême bonnets trimmed with sunset red satin and crimson swansdown. She inched her way closer to the women.

“I wager his father will fly into a rage when he hears how his son has been seducing another young innocent. He will surely disown the bounder this time,” Miss Cuthbert said.

Iona’s stomach churned. Nathan rarely talked about his family and when he did he spoke only in vague terms. But she had seen firsthand the horrific way his father treated him when she happened to pass them on the street outside the Royal Crescent.

Oh, she deserved to be whipped for her arrogance. She’d been as blind as the foppish gentlemen falling all over themselves to win the perfect Duke’s daughter’s hand in matrimony. Poor Nathan, his roguish freedoms must have come at a terrible price. To lose her father’s trust and affection would be unthinkable, impossible—