Scandals of an Innocent (16 page)

He told himself that it was the truth, but the words would not come.

And suddenly, with a blinding shock that shook him to his soul, he realized that he was bitter and furious that he should be the one forced to sell Vickery and Drum, to be the man who had humbled the family pride, when it was his father with his irresponsible profligate ways who had done the real damage years
before. He felt sick and angry that the late Lord Vickery had once more abrogated his responsibility by dying before he had had to sell up, leaving Miles to bear the burden of all that ignominy and to sell his honor along with his possessions. His father, whom he had idolized before their terrible quarrel and cold estrangement…He could see at last that he had kept the Breguet watch for sentimental reasons hoping, perhaps, to keep faith with his father even though at times they had been so bitterly divided. And now at last he saw that everything had gone. He had lost everything and it hurt damnably.

He found that instead of dismissing Alice as he wanted to, he had put his hand over hers as it lay on his arm. Her face was tilted toward him and her lips were parted, pale pink, soft and sweet. In her eyes was something that looked like genuine pain and concern. Miles felt something shift deep within him.

He pulled her to him and kissed her with all the pent-up rage and violence that was in him, pushing the hood of her cloak back so he could tangle a hand in her bright hair and tilt her head to bring her mouth up even more ruthlessly to meet his. He felt her gasp against his lips and then she yielded to him instantly and absolutely, and her surrender lit something wild and primitive in him, and he was aware of nothing other than the unconditional need he had for her and the whirling, painful spiral of their desire. He felt shaken to the depths of his soul and yet somewhere in that raging darkness he felt a core of peace he had not known in a very long time, a peace that only Alice could give him.

He thought nothing of her youth and her inexperi
ence. When he had kissed her in the parlor at Spring House he had been in control, dictating the encounter, planning a calculated seduction and showing her the extent of his mastery. He had had some restraint then, but there was nothing restrained about either of them now as he drew her ever closer and Alice responded, sliding her hands across his back to hold him hard against her. He felt her tug his shirt loose, and then she was running her fingers over his bare chest and shoulders, and the sensation wrenched a groan from his lips. He angled her head to take his kiss more deeply still and felt as though he was falling into a place of mystery, heat and shadows, somewhere he had never been before, somewhere that terrified him and yet offered the most tempting peace and absolute bliss that he could ever wish for, where he did not have to fight for what he wanted because his heart’s desire was freely given and his for the taking….

“Alice!” Lizzie was calling for her from the hall. “Alice, are you all right? Where are you?”

For a moment the words barely penetrated Miles’s brain, for he was so wrapped up in the taste and feel of Alice in his arms. Then he heard the sharp tap of footsteps on the stone floor, and sanity flooded his mind with cold clarity. He let Alice go so abruptly that he had to catch her arm to prevent her from falling. One look at her face told him she was completely stunned. Her hair was disheveled, her eyes were wide and dark with a mixture of shock and the remnants of heated passion and she was pressing her fingers against her lips in a gesture of bewilderment that sent a sharp, unexpected surge of tenderness through him.

Miles’s breathing slowed and the fever in his blood
abated. He felt cold and shocked and disturbed in a manner that he could not quite analyze. A part of him was cursing the interruption, for surely he could have seduced Alice there and then, taken advantage of her honest response to him in order to oblige her to marry him at once and damn the lawyers and their conditions. But another, deeper part of him was so troubled he could not bear to think about it.

“Alice!” Lizzie was practically upon them.

Miles wrapped the cloak about Alice, pulling up the hood and dropping a brief, hard kiss on her lips.

“Lady Elizabeth is here,” he whispered, and to his relief she blinked and lost the look of shock and wonderment that had held her still as a sleeping princess in a fairy tale. She spun around just as Lizzie shot through the study door. Miles took strategic cover behind his desk. He had no wish to display his current physical state to all and sundry and in doing so put Alice in an impossibly embarrassing situation.

“There you are, Alice!” Lizzie exclaimed. “We all thought that Lord Vickery must have carried you off and ravished you by now! I was the only one brave enough to come to your rescue and I am relieved to find you unharmed.” She looked at Miles, making no attempt to offer him false sympathy on his losses.

Miles held Alice’s gaze for a long moment. There was a reflection of his dark desire in her eyes alongside shock and some wariness, but when she spoke she sounded quite collected and a great deal less shaken than Miles felt.

“I am perfectly well, Lizzie, I thank you,” she said. “Lord Vickery—” the tremor in her voice was almost undetectable “—I’ll bid you good day.”

“At your service, Miss Lister,” Miles said. “I will call on you tomorrow.”

Her gaze flickered to meet his. “Will you?”

“You may be certain of it.”

Lizzie grabbed her arm. “Come along, Alice! I want to show you my latest purchase! I have bought the prettiest set of china ladies….”

They went out into the hall, Lizzie chattering like a magpie. Alice did not look back. Miles heard her footsteps fade away and then she had gone.

Miles shook himself, trying to dispel the disturbing sensation that something profound had occurred between him and Alice. It was no more than lust, pure and simple. The flare of intimacy between them when she had reached out to him counted for nothing in any emotional sense. He did not wish to have any deep connection to Alice. He only wanted to sleep with her—and to have her money. He had been bored and blue-deviled by the sale, momentarily angered to think of his father’s profligacy. Alice had wanted to offer comfort and so he had taken it from her physically. He was still hard to think of her. He should have seduced her on the desk and thus compromised her so thoroughly that the lawyers would have had to retire in scandalized defeat, Lady Membury’s conditions were laid waste and a priest would have been sent for immediately.

Once again the image of Alice came into his mind, but it was not the fantasy of Alice lying in wanton submission beneath him but of her reaching out to comfort him in his loss, her pity and concern somehow touching his soul. Miles swore violently. His mind was being turned by this fever he had for her. That was the only explanation. And there was only one cure.

Three months be damned. Lady Membury’s conditions be damned. He would have Alice and he would have her money, too. She would surrender to their mutual desire. He would see to it that she did. And next time he would not behave like a gentleman. He would lock the door, ignore all interruptions and seduce her with the ruthlessness of the true rake.

I
T WAS SNOWING
the following morning. Pushing aside the heavy drapes that kept out both the light and the drafts from her bedroom, Alice saw that the sky looked like a fat white eiderdown that was spilling flakes like feathers in thick, whirling clouds. She pulled the curtain back as Marigold knocked on the door and came in, bearing a tray with a cup of hot chocolate and a plate of toast upon it.

“Get back into bed, miss,” Marigold scolded. “You will take a chill standing there in your nightgown!” She put the tray down on the nightstand and knelt to light the fire in the grate.

Alice watched, remembering the long, cold winter days when she had risen in the dark to start her household duties, breaking the ice on the water in the kitchen before she could heat it, aching as she carried her housemaid’s box from floor to floor, sweeping the grates, lighting the fires, running back and forth with endless tasks until she was numb with cold and exhaustion. She knew that her mother considered her hopelessly kind to the servants—to Marigold and to Della the underhousemaid and to Cook and to Jim the footman and Jed the coachman—but Alice knew she would never forget how harsh was a servant’s lot and
she did all she could to soften it. They were warm and well fed, the best-paid servants in the Yorkshire Dales, granted days off from their work to visit their families, a doctor brought in for them if they were sick, their workload as light as Alice could make it.

“A lack of occupation is both a virtue and a necessity for a gentlewoman,” Mrs. Lister had told Alice importantly, when Alice had insisted on showing an interest in the work of the kitchen and the stillroom. “Our idleness is a reflection of our wealth now.” Alice, who hated to be idle, had not contradicted her mother but had then gone directly to the kitchens and helped Cook pickle some pears.

“I suppose that Mama will not stir from her room, as she knows it is snowing,” she said now, as Marigold stood up, dusting her hands, and the fire leaped into life.

Marigold smiled. “Mrs. Lister has already taken her morning tea, has read the leaves and is now settling down with Mrs. Porter’s novel
The Hungarian Brothers.
They are most dashing, so she tells me.”

Alice sighed, not over her mother’s choice of reading matter, but because she knew that all her plans for the day would now be canceled. Since becoming a lady of leisure, Mrs. Lister considered herself too delicate to go out in the cold winter air, a ridiculous affectation, Alice thought, for a woman who was as tough as Yorkshire grit. Still, she supposed that her mother had earned the right to be a little lazy if she chose. It was merely a shame that her own plans had to suffer as a result, for now she would not be able to go out to the shops or the spa and gain a little fresh air and company, since her chaperone was supposedly indisposed.

Looking at the swirling snowflakes that were
sweeping past the window on a stiff breeze, she thought it unlikely that there would be much company in the village, anyway. Miles Vickery, for instance, would be unlikely to come over the hills from Drum in such inclement weather, especially as it was the second day of the sale of Drum Castle and its contents. She knew that Lowell was hoping to purchase some of the farm machinery and would no doubt take pleasure in the financial ruin of a man he so richly detested.

Alice put her teacup down slowly as she thought about Miles. By her calculations it was all of a minute since she had last thought about him. Their kiss was the last thing she had thought about before she had fallen asleep the previous night. He had stalked her dreams. She had woken that morning soft and warm and entangled in her blankets as though in a lover’s embrace, and Miles was the first thing she had thought about. She seemed utterly powerless to think of anything else.

After her agreement to their formal betrothal she had tried to be sensible and keep Miles at arm’s length. It had not been difficult. All she had had to do was remind herself of his ruthless coercion, and she had felt angry and used and belittled. But then she had accompanied Lizzie and her mother to Drum Castle for the sale. She had seen the full extent of Miles’s penury, she had witnessed the humiliation he was facing, she had met his younger brother and had seen Lady Vickery’s and Celia’s outward stoicism and glimpsed their inward despair. She had not expected to like Miles’s family, and it had somehow made things much harder for her that she did. Celia had told her about the loss of the Vickery estates and, when her mother’s back was
turned, she had whispered how the late Bishop Vickery had been a terrible spendthrift who had burdened Miles with appalling debt. Alice had understood then why Miles had needed to marry an heiress and why he had pursued her with such single-minded intent. It did not excuse his blackmail of her. It could not, but she was beginning to understand Miles’s cold outward shell and the reason she felt this strange affinity with him. Like her, Miles had learned early on that life was not fair. She had worked for a living and had struggled and toiled simply to survive. Miles had been burdened with a responsibility that was not his own.

They were more alike than she had realized.

It was instinct and an awareness of that affinity between them that had led her to offer Miles her sympathy and comfort, seeing in the grim and unhappy man before her someone so different from the urbane and confident Miles Vickery that she thought she knew. She had expected him to reject her. Cynical, sardonic Miles would have no time for her words of consolation, she was sure. And he
had
rejected her words and had sought comfort from her body instead.

A ripple of sensual awareness spread through Alice’s body at the thought of Miles’s kiss, turning her insides molten hot. Had Lizzie not interrupted them he would surely have seduced her on the desk and she would have been swept away by her desire for him, dead to any sense of propriety. This heated, feverish need that there was between them was dangerous because Miles was so experienced and she so ill-equipped to resist him. In truth she did not even
want
to resist the pleasure his touch gave her. Thinking of it now made the goose bumps rise along her skin and her whole body tremble.

I am no lady,
Alice thought wryly, reflecting on the money and the time and the effort spent on expensive elocution tutors and etiquette lessons and dancing masters.
It takes more than town bronze to make a lady. I suffer from what the Duchess of Cole would no doubt refer to as immodest impulses.

“Miss?” Marigold said, and Alice realized that the maid had asked her a question and it had gone straight over her head.

“I beg your pardon, Marigold,” she said.

“I wondered if you wished for the promenade dress to be laid out,” Marigold said. “Will you be going out with your handsome lord, miss?”

“No, I don’t think I shall,” Alice said, surprised by a catch of pain in her chest at the thought that Miles was only her handsome lord because of her fortune. “I doubt very much that Lord Vickery will be calling today,” she said. “I shall wear my old blue lavender and help Cook bottle some of the plums or make a cake.”

Sighing, she pulled the faded gown from the wardrobe and dressed slowly. She knew that Miles was an experienced rake and she would be the greatest fool in the world to imagine that there was anything more than lust and money between them. For a moment yesterday, at Drum Castle, she had thought there had been something more profound, something deep and sweet and emotional. She had hoped so, her foolish heart as susceptible as ever. Had there been any true emotion, then her feelings of wicked desire for Miles would have been no sin, no matter how unladylike they were. But without love and respect, they could count for nothing, and where there was blackmail and coercion there could be no love and respect…
With another sigh Alice headed downstairs to the comfort of her cooking.

It was some two hours later that Alice emerged from the kitchens to answer the front doorbell. Jim the footman was fetching some hot water for Lydia, who had seemed more animated in the last week and was even talking of going for a walk by the river. Marigold was upstairs taking Mrs. Lister some hot buttered tea cakes, so there was no one else to do the servants’ work. Alice opened the door and Miles Vickery stepped over the threshold, shaking the snow from his hat. There were flakes of it dusting the broad shoulders of his caped driving coat, and his boots were soaked.

“Thank you,” he said. “It is an inclement day—” Then, as he recognized her, his tone changed. “Miss Lister! I did not expect—” He stopped. Alice knew exactly what he meant. She had heard it so many times before, most recently at one of the Fortune’s Folly assemblies when she had overheard Mrs. Minchin confiding in the Duchess of Cole, “And my dear Duchess, do you know, she actually opened the door of the house herself! So dreadfully inappropriate! But then, once a servant, always a servant, I say…”

“I am perfectly capable of opening the front door for visitors,” Alice said, feeling self-conscious. “It is simple—one turns the handle and pulls. Perhaps you could try it for yourself one day, my lord.”

She waited for Miles to make some stuffy remark about how that would not be suitable, but he just laughed. “Do you know—I might try that. If you promise to be my mentor, of course, Miss Lister.” His gaze swept over her appraisingly, from the hair escaping her hastily contrived chignon to the purple plum stains
on her fingers. It felt like a physical touch. Alice started to feel very hot. “I called to ask if you would care to go driving on Fortune’s Row with me, Miss Lister,” Miles said, “but I see that you were not expecting visitors. Not that you do not look charming…”

“I did not expect to see you this morning,” Alice said, acutely aware that her ancient lavender gown and apron were more suited to a farmer’s daughter than a leisured heiress. “I know you mentioned that you would call, but the weather is so bad I assumed you would not come.”

Miles laughed. “You must think me a poor fellow to be put off by a bit of snow when you are at the end of the journey, Miss Lister,” he said. “After our encounter yesterday I was anxious to see you again.”

Alice bit her lip. She did not want to start thinking about that encounter again. She had only just
stopped
thinking about it.

“I fear that we are not receiving visitors as Mama is indisposed,” she began, stopping as she caught sight of her reflection in the hall mirror. There was a large smear of flour on her cheek. She gasped, her fingers flying to cover it even as she saw Miles laughing at her.

“It becomes you vastly,” he said, but there was an intent look in his eyes that brought the color flaming into Alice’s cheeks.

“I was making a plum pie,” she said. “If you will excuse me, my lord, I think it best for you to leave for now. Perhaps we might meet this evening, in company—”

“I am sorry to hear of your mother’s indisposition,” Miles said, ignoring her blatant attempts to get rid of him, “but perhaps she might agree to your joining me for a short drive? The snow has stopped and the Row
looks very pretty. I would ensure you were wrapped up against the cold,” he added. “You would take no chill, I promise you.”

Alice felt even more flustered now. There was something ridiculously seductive about Miles offering to wrap her up and take care of her. She wiped the palms of her hands down her apron.

“I don’t think—” she began, but stopped as Miles laid one palm against her cheek where the flour still dusted her skin.

“Don’t think,” he said softly. “Come with me.”

Alice closed her eyes. Her skin tingled beneath his fingers.

Come with me…

How easily he could make her forget that he was an unprincipled scoundrel. This unexpected sweetness between them felt like a true courtship rather than the coercion it was.

“I know you do not have to ask—you have the means to command what you are requesting,” she said, angry that with no more than a smile and a touch, Miles could seduce her into liking him.

Her words were sharp and she saw the smiling light die in Miles’s hazel eyes and the coldness return in its place.

“Then you had best go and fetch your cloak and not oppose me,” he said, harshly now. Their gazes clashed and Miles raised his brows. “Why do you wait? As you have reminded me, I can demand whatever I want of you, Miss Lister.”

Feeling a little sick, Alice hurried up the stairs well aware that Miles’s gaze followed her. She felt tense and tired all of a sudden. Just for a moment it had felt as
though there was something so tender between them that it had made her tremble, but it had been just another illusion.

Slipping into her mother’s room, she found Mrs. Lister propped against her pillows and deeply engrossed in her book with her lapdog, Bertie, curled up beside her in his knitted jacket that bore the Lister coat of arms.

“Mama, Lord Vickery is here,” she began. “He asks permission to take me for a short drive on Fortune’s Row. The snow has ceased now but I am not sure that it is a very good idea to go with him.”

Mrs. Lister looked startled. “Lord Vickery has come all this way from Drum in the
snow
to see you, Alice?” Her face broke into a smile. “What devotion!”

“To my money,” Alice murmured, determined to remind her mama that Miles’s reasons for seeking her out were scarcely disinterested.

“Hmm,” Mrs. Lister said. She reached for her empty teacup. “The leaves show me an anchor, which means constancy. Yes, by all means go, my love.”