The Lady Most Willing . . . (11 page)

There must be some other room to which she could retreat, perhaps a library or a study;
she didn’t want to watch Marilla chase the earl around a sofa. Her sister apparently
thought a man who displayed that kind of icy precision would make a complacent husband.

Oakley wouldn’t.

There was something buried and formidable about him, something that made all his control
seem a façade. He would
not
be comfortable. She was sure of that. But she was also sure that if Marilla wanted
him, she would take him.

When they were in London, Marilla was hemmed in by society’s strictures. But there
was nothing to stop her here, in this isolated castle. Ever since she was a little
girl, Marilla had taken whatever she wanted—including Fiona’s toys and Fiona’s clothing.
Faced by a little angel with buttery curls, their father had always given in.

Just then Marilla burst out of the drawing room, but the smile dropped from her face
the moment she saw Fiona. “Go away!” she hissed. “You’ll ruin everything. This bodice
is a trifle chilly, so I’m going to fetch a shawl. Then I’m returning to the card
game.”

“I’ll find the library,” Fiona said.

“Just stay in your chamber,” Marilla ordered. “The earl hasn’t come down since luncheon,
but he is obviously very punctilious about his reputation. I don’t want him to recall
that we’re sisters, in case he knows of your disgrace.”

The laird’s ancient butler emerged from the dining room on the far side of the great
hall as Marilla trotted up the stairs. “May I be of assistance, miss?” he asked.

Fiona gave him a warm smile. “Could you advise me as to a room to which I might retire
for a spell? The library, perhaps?”

“In there,” he said, nodding at a door. “Nobody goes in but the gentlemen after supper,
for a smoke and a bit of brandy. If you don’t mind the smell of dogs and good tobacco,
you’ll be comfortable.”

“That sounds perfect,” Fiona said. “You’re my savior, Mr. Garvie, indeed you are.”

“I shouldna be doing it,” Garvie said. “You’re supposed to be marrying the young comte.
By all rights, you oughta be in the drawing room with the rest of them. The laird
won’t be pleased.”

“I’m not the right one,” she assured him. “Any of the other ladies will make a better
mistress of the castle than I. May I beg you to have some tea sent to me, Mr. Garvie?”

Fiona pushed open the door to the library and found it surprisingly cozy, given that
the castle ceilings were so high. Its walls were lined with books, and the roaring
fire in the fireplace didn’t hurt, either.

This was much better than joining the party in the drawing room, playing some sort
of game devised by Marilla to throw herself into the arms of the chilly earl.

She wandered along the shelves, trailing a finger over the leather-covered volumes.
Books on crop cultivation, on iron working, on terracing . . .

Old plays, poetry . . . and
Persuasion: a Novel by the Author of Sense & Sensibility
! How in the world did such a novel end up in the laird’s library? It could not have
been published more than a few months ago.

She read the first couple of pages and instantly began smiling. Sir Walter Elliot—he
who read no book for amusement but the Baronetage—was surely a parallel to Lord Oakley.
Sir Walter viewed those below his estimation with pity and contempt, which was a fair
summary of the way that the earl looked at lesser beings such as she.

She threw herself happily onto the sofa before the fire. It wasn’t exactly a comfortable
piece of furniture—more lumpy than soft—but the inimitable Sir Walter promised to
make her forget any discomfort.

It was a good forty minutes before Mrs. McVittie appeared with a pot of tea, but Fiona
was so engrossed in the novel that she scarcely noticed.

By then she had wriggled into a more comfortable position: head propped on one arm
of the sofa, feet crossed on the other arm. Marilla would squeal like a stuck pig
if she walked in and saw Fiona’s ankles, clad in pale pink silk, but Marilla was in
the drawing room, presumably chasing a blindfolded peer around the furniture, if they
had moved on from cards.

“This is heaven,” she said to Mrs. McVittie, swinging her feet to the floor and smiling
at her. “Thank you so much.”

“Mr. Garvie’s taken a shine to you,” Mrs. McVittie confided, bending over to put another
log on the fire. “He reckons that you’re not the sort to marry, so you might as well
be comfortable. The rest of them are all in the drawing room playing at Pope Joan
and the like.”

“He’s right,” Fiona said. “I am not the type of woman who marries.” She felt only
a tiny pang at that idea, which was quite a triumph.

In no time, she had sunk deeply back into the book and had realized that the prescient
Miss Austen had, in addition to creating Sir Walter—who bore such a similarity to
the Earl of Oakley—created in Elizabeth Elliot a perfect portrait of her own sister,
Marilla, who like Elizabeth was indeed “fully satisfied of being still quite as handsome
as ever,” but “felt her approach to the years of danger.” Granted, Marilla was only
twenty-one, but even she had begun to notice the reluctance of English gentlemen to
offer for her hand during her three seasons in London.

Englishmen seemed to be remarkably canny. They buzzed about Marilla like flies in
honey, but they didn’t come up to scratch.

It was much more satisfactory to read about Sir Walter and his daughter than to be
trapped in a cold castle with two versions of the same. While the aggravations and
extravagances of polite society were funny on the page, they were deeply irritating
in real life.

Chapter 11

A
fter luncheon Byron couldn’t stop thinking about the way Catriona Burns looked up
at Bret, eyes shining, her love obvious. His own expectation of marriage did not include
feelings of that nature. His father had taught him well: one’s wife should be a chaste
woman of good breeding. Passion between a husband and wife was out of the question.

The new Countess of Oakley, as his father had instructed him time out of mind, should
be virtuous, well mannered, and above all, show respect if not fawning submission
to her husband.

Respect and submission wasn’t what Catriona felt for Bret.

Envy was an uncomfortable emotion. It felt like a dark, raging burn in his veins.

Before he chose Opal to wed, he had danced with every maiden on the marriage market
who fell into his purview—which left Scottish girls such as Marilla and Fiona to the
side—and then he had made what he thought was a reasoned, intelligent decision.

His thought process had been a bit embarrassing, in retrospect. He had decided that
Opal would make a good mother. He hadn’t known his own mother well, since she had
run away with his uncle—his father’s younger brother—when he was just a child. They
had gone to the Americas, and for all he knew, they were there still.

Still, it didn’t help to know that he had a reason to feel unsure of himself around
women. His father’s freezing tirades, which invariably emphasized female lust, had
clearly affected him.

He would have sworn that Opal was chaste; among other signs, he had never detected
the faintest shadow of desire when she looked at him. Now he thought back to the docility
with which she accepted his compliments, her downturned eyes, and the way she turned
her head to the side . . . He had been a fool.

It wasn’t that he wanted to make a fast woman his countess. An unblemished reputation
was of supreme importance. But . . . he would like to have his wife love him. Enough
so that she wouldn’t leap to another man’s bed.

What’s more, if Bret could make a woman love him, Byron damn well could as well. His
competitive edge rose to the surface. He could make a woman look at him with wild
delight. He could bind her to him so persuasively that she would never look at another.

Marilla Chisholm was an obvious candidate. She was pretty, devastatingly so. Her curls
were soft as butter, and her eyes a delightful blue.

And the fact that her youthful spirits led her to behavior that would be classified
as outrageous by the strict matrons who ruled the
ton
. . . well, that was all to the better. After all, she was trying to kiss
him
, rather than a dancing master. She was probably just innocent of the ways of the
world.

To be fair, his fiancée had not shown any reluctance to accept his kisses, to the
best of his recollection. It was he who had thought to protect her maidenly virtue,
never venturing more than to give her a chaste buss. If he had kissed Opal more passionately,
would she have turned to him, rather than the dancing master?

He rather suspected that might be the case.

One could almost think that she had deliberately planned that he should discover her
in a compromising position. When he’d entered the room, she had seemed neither shocked
nor dismayed. He had stood there, consumed in an incandescent rage, and Opal watched
him as she pushed away her dancing master, smiled prettily, and said, “Well, I suppose
our betrothal is at an end.”

The more he thought about it . . . the more he was convinced the whole scene was calculated.
She probably paid that dancing master for the kiss. That was how much she wanted to
get rid of him. Of
him
, the Earl of Oakley.

Yet his figure was agreeable, if not better than that. His nose was Roman, as Marilla
had pointed out, but not overly so. He was wealthy and titled.

But he hadn’t bothered to woo Opal. In fact, he’d been something of a pompous ass
about it, bestowing his hand upon her with the expectation that she would consider
it life’s greatest blessing.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t recognize the prototype. His father had judged people solely
on their claims to bloodlines and estate. No maid in the late earl’s presence raised
her eyes above shoulder level unless spoken to. No child, including his own, spoke
unless invited to do so. No woman, including his own wife, expressed disagreement
with one of Lord Oakley’s opinions, at least to the best of Byron’s memory.

He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. He might have inadvertently fallen
into some of his father’s habits of mind and conduct. But that needn’t mean he had
to retain them; he was, after all, possessed of a free will. The late earl had been
a cold-blooded man whose only deep concern was for his reputation. He had sent Robin
to Rugby after the comte died because of what people would say if he didn’t; but he
wouldn’t let Robin come home on holidays because of the French “taint” in his nephew’s
blood.

He, Byron, didn’t have to take after his father. He could be spontaneous and warm.
Amusing, even.
Charming
. All those things that Robin was and he wasn’t . . . but only because he hadn’t ever
really tried.

He couldn’t imagine himself in love—but he could damn well make a woman fall in love
with him. For a moment he considered Fiona Chisholm, but there was something in her
gaze that suggested she was unlikely to succumb to tender feelings. Some sort of reserve
that echoed his own.

Lady Cecily was pretty as a picture, but his friend Burbett had mentioned that he
was as good as betrothed to her, so there was no point looking in her direction.

That left Marilla. She was lively, beautiful, and—for the most part—well mannered.
Her joie de vivre would keep him young. He could play blindman’s buff with his children
someday.

Byron took himself downstairs that afternoon resolved to win Marilla’s heart. He would
begin by reiterating the request he had made to her to address him by his Christian
name.

If he married someone like Marilla, it would prove to Taran that he wasn’t stuffy,
like his father. The more he thought on it, Marilla was practically perfect. The other
young ladies seemed to regard her as something of a leader: witness the way that they
followed her suggestion of blindman’s buff.

Leadership was a good attribute for a countess.

He reached the bottom of the stairs, hesitated, and then turned into the library rather
than the drawing room. Even given his new determination to consider Marilla as a countess,
it was something of a relief to find that she wasn’t in the room.

In fact, the library’s only occupant was Marilla’s sister, Fiona. She lay on a sofa
before the fire, reading a book, dark red curls tumbling down one shoulder. Her spectacles
were surprisingly winsome, he thought. Really, it was enough to make one think that
they might become fashionable.

As he walked over to the fireplace, she looked up from her book, and her brow creased
for a moment. He could tell perfectly well that she had momentarily forgotten who
he was. This was a woman truly unimpressed by his consequence.

“Lord Oakley,” he prompted, adding, “but please call me Byron; we are all on terms
of the greatest familiarity at Finovair.” It wasn’t at all hard to ask her that. In
fact, he would rather like to hear his name on her lips.

She swung down her legs, rose, and dropped a curtsy. “Lord Oakley,” she said, her
eyes shadowed by curling eyelashes.

Byron bowed to the young lady and then walked over to stand in front of the sofa.
He nearly sat down without being invited to do so, because that was the way people
on easy terms behaved. Or at least, so he thought. But his breeding got the better
of him and he remained on his feet. “We all agreed to address each other by our Christian
names,” he informed her, hating the hectoring tone of his voice even as he spoke.
“Mine is Byron.”

She regarded him silently for a moment. Her eyes were just as green as they had appeared
last night, and her spectacles perched on a delightfully pert nose.

“In fact, you and my sister made that agreement between you, though I must presume
that the Duke of Bretton and Catriona have agreed to the same informality. Does all
this lack of ceremony distress you?” she asked, avoiding use of his name, he noticed.
And
not offering to allow him to use her own.

“I am not accustomed to it,” he admitted. “Do I remember that your name is Fiona?”

“Yes,” she confirmed, again not granting him permission to address her as such.

Despite himself, he felt a little stung. “I apologize for interrupting your reading,”
he said, making up his mind not to leave the room directly, because it was
good
for him, one might say
instructive
, to remain with people who took no account of his importance. Fiona certainly fell
into that category. “May I ask what volume has caught your interest?”

The earl was dangerously beautiful, Fiona thought. But so controlled. Did he even
perspire when he made love? Did his face turn red, did he make inelegant noises, did
he . . .

“I am reading a novel called
Persuasion
,” she said, jerking her mind from that disgraceful (though interesting) subject.
As it happened, she had not personally acquired information about intimate encounters
of that nature, but she had heard all about them. Nothing she had heard about grunting,
sweaty encounters sounded terribly appealing.

“You have found your way into the wrong room, Lord Oakley,” she said, tucking herself
back into a corner of the sofa. Her finger marked her place in her novel. When he
first entered the room, the pompous Sir Walter of the novel and the pompous earl in
front of her were confused in her mind; she had blinked at Byron as if he had somehow
materialized out of the book’s pages.

In reality, her comparison wasn’t fair in the least. Oakley was young and remarkably
good-looking, with white-blond hair clipped very short, and winged black eyebrows.
He reminded her of a medieval saint carved from ivory: all dignity, virtue, and pale
skin.

But he was still Sir Walter, under that lovely exterior. A man who could not conceivably
feel other than disgust for her.

“Everyone is doubtless having a wonderful time in the drawing room. They will be missing
you,” she said encouragingly.

“I am too old to play games,” he countered, as if she’d shown the faintest interest
in his age.

“Does that mean you actually played games as a child?” she asked, with a queer mix
of genuine curiosity and a strong wish to puncture his rigid control. He looked as
if he had been born in an immaculately pressed—and elegantly tied—silk neck cloth.

“Certainly, I did.”

Frankly, while the man might be an exceptional physical specimen, he was not a very
captivating conversationalist. All the same, it would be rude to simply resume reading
in front of him. “Is there something I might help you find in the library?” she asked,
her tone once more implying that he should take himself elsewhere.

Instead, he sat down beside her.

Fiona took a deep breath, and then wished she hadn’t. He even
smelled
good, like starched linen and manly soap. She didn’t like English earls. In fact,
she didn’t like Englishmen in general. This one was distracting her from her book.
He made her . . . he made her think about things she had given up.

Men, for example.

She had agreed to marry once, and that was enough. Though, of course, her betrothed
had been nothing like Oakley. Dugald had been an oaf—and a violent, drunken one at
that. The earl didn’t look as though he ever relaxed enough to drink spirits.

“Lord Oakley,” she said, rather less than patiently, “would it bother you greatly
if I continued to read my book?”

“May I ask you a blunt question before you recommence, Miss Chisholm?”

“If you must,” she replied. “But only if you give me the same courtesy. What on earth
are you doing here? You should be in the drawing room being wooed by adoring young
ladies.”

“Adoring young ladies?” He seemed genuinely confused.

“I hope you are not wounded by Catriona’s defection to the duke. Either my sister
or Lady Cecily would be a splendid countess, and I’m certain they are waiting with
bated breath for your return to the drawing room.” A less severe man might have been
thought to smile, she noticed. Perhaps he did smile, with his eyes, though not with
his lips.

“I gather that you deem Miss Burns and yourself as birds of a feather.”

“You wouldn’t want me to adore you,” Fiona assured him. “I have a ruined reputation.
That being the case, I think we could simply skip the part where I try to entice you
into an unwise marriage based on our unexpected propinquity, don’t you?”

“That was a very long sentence.” Yes, he was smiling. Amazing.

“I can translate it, if you’d like,” she offered.

“I cannot decide how I am to take your wit. I seem to be the target of it, so presumably,
I should not laugh. But if I am not to laugh, then who is the recipient?”

Fiona took a swift breath. “You have put me in my place. And,” she admitted reluctantly,
“I deserved it. I should not have made fun at your expense, particularly since my
jests were weak. But, in truth, Lord Oakley, I’m certain everyone is awaiting your
return to the drawing room. I mustn’t keep you with this foolish babble.”

He was silent for a moment. “I suppose I
am
looking for someone to adore me. Though it sounds remarkably arrogant, put so.”

Fiona winced. “I have offended you again. I am truly sorry. I have no right to judge
your demeanor, and I would never consider you in such a light.” She didn’t know where
to look, so she glanced back at her book.

“I’ll leave you to your reading. If I might ask a question first?”

“Absolutely,” she said, and then, unable to stop herself: “Though I’m positively dying
to finish this novel, so I would be grateful if you would ask your question immediately.”
It wasn’t the book, not really. There was something very dangerous about the earl,
doubly so because he was so domineering and arrogant—and yet at this moment there
was also something slightly uncertain about him.