The Misfit Marquess (11 page)

"My dear lady, if it distresses you so, I promise I will not ask you any more questions," he found himself saying, wanting to do what he had always done, wanting to make that despondency recede from her eyes.

"Thank you," she said on a breathy sigh, manifestly relieved. "Perhaps, one day. . . . My lord, I would like to repay your kindnesses in some way—one day, if it is in my power to do so."

"To tell me the truth?"

"To explain everything. Yes."

"You could write to me," he said, indicating his brother's letter with a forced half smile, an attempt to lighten the moment, to make her relief complete.

She responded with a half smile of her own, and he experienced a physical thrill when he saw that the fear had retreated from her gaze. "Yes," she went on. "I would like to tell you all. When I can."

"When you can," he repeated, and the words made some manner of pact between them, as firmly as if they had shaken hands over a bargain. How had this happened? How had they come to a moment where words were not necessary, but the force of her will, her intent gaze, the anxiety there, had been enough to communicate silently with him?

She smiled again, a tremulous twist of the lips.

"Do you still wish to return to your room?" Gideon asked for something to say while he frantically tried to sort through their

conversation, tried to see how it was that he had been made to shape this odd agreement with her.

She smiled again, this time a yes to his question, and he stood to summon the footmen once more into the room.

He remained standing until she was clear of the room, and then he slowly regained his seat. He put one hand to his forehead and planted his elbow atop his desk. His other hand slowly rose to join the first, and he cradled his head in growing exasperation, wondering what manner of fool promises not to ask questions of an addled stranger who has invaded his home.

"A gullible fool," he responded to his own question.

Mama had sometimes manipulated him this way ... and despite having dealt with her moods and fits for years on end, he had still been easily gulled. He had not only let this Elizabeth with-no-surname lead him by the nose, but it seemed to him he had done so willingly.

The absurd part of his eager capitulation to her demand was that he'd had every intention of asking her why she had recognized his description of the dandy, the one who had been trying to remove her ring in that ditch. But now he could not.

"Deftly done," he murmured aloud, and wondered if Elizabeth's face, could he but see it at this moment, would be wreathed in a smug smile. Oh no, she was not stupid, not this stranger who refused to tolerate any more of his questions.

Elizabeth made an awkward transfer from the chair to her bed, dismissed the footmen, and for once felt she deserved the stinging pain in her heel.

It was not that she felt bad for Simons, even though he had explained to her how he had come to lose his fingers, and even though she knew his injury had much longer lasting repercussions than her own.

It was not the promise she'd extracted from Lord Greyleigh that made her feel deserving of discomfort, even though she suspected he had never wanted to promise any such thing.

No, it was the way she had reacted to his presence, to his steady regard when he had fixed his attention on her, that made her now concentrate on her heel's pain, as if to do penance.

His steady regard. She had been keenly aware of his presence in the library, even though he sat across the room from her, even though he spent most of the time with his head down, hard at work. When she had first glimpsed him there, she had begun to order the footmen to carry her elsewhere, but Lord Greyleigh had looked up and seen her, and waved her in. It had seemed churlish to decline once she had already disturbed his peace, and she had wanted a book to read, after all.

It was his appearance, of course, that made him difficult to ignore. His hair had become lightly kissed by gold in the slanting afternoon sunlight, reminding Elizabeth of the luminous painted halos in religious art. And when he glanced up at her, she was shocked as ever by his pale blue eyes, eyes to rival any painted saint's—and a few devil's eyes she'd seen painted as well.

As she moved her leg onto a pillow, hoisting her injured heel, she considered that one thing about the afternoon had been gratifying: Lord Greyleigh had promised not to question her further. It would be good to be done with that particular tension between them. Now she could just be a guest, lingering awhile, until she was gone—no complications, no ties, no worrying constantly about what clue to her past he might wring from her.

He could be lying about questioning her no more, of course, or ranting despite sounding rational. Yet, without evidence to the contrary, Elizabeth did not think so. Whatever else he was, Lord Greyleigh was not a man who spoke for the sake of hearing his own words; what he said, he meant. His thinking might be muddled—how else had he gained the singular reputation he bore?—but he was consistent within his own thinking at least.

No, it was not his word she doubted, but her own nature.

Damn Radford Barnes to Hades, Elizabeth thought, shocking herself with the blasphemy, but even more with the knowledge that she really would condemn Radford to the flames if she could. She detested him for all he had done to her, but what she hated him for the most, what shamed her to the core, was that the man had awakened in her a carnal longing.

All the passages in the Bible, the ones she used to think she understood, but had not really, now made humiliating sense to Elizabeth. Abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul. . . . Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be bunted? Can one go on hot coals, and his feet not be burned? She could have written one herself: Can a woman know physical love and not be changed?

When she had believed herself married to Radford, she had tried to love him. tried to be all that a wife is to her husband. She'd had no thought that the special license he'd presented was worthless, a forgery, that the man who had "married" them was but a hired accomplice, no more real than the marriage bond she'd thought she'd entered.

She had learned from Radford the pleasure of physical love. God help her. she had enjoyed the intimacy. Up until the night he had revealed his perfidy, she had been content enough in her decision to wed the man, and to take this stranger nightly into her bed. No, not just content, she had been eager.

God had been merciful in one regard at least: she was not breeding. It was in fact her womanly cycle that had finally brought out the dark side in Radford, had finally set him to telling her the truth. Denied her bed four days running, he had resorted to the bottle for entertainment instead. The drink had loosened his tongue and had brought out his true nature. Eyes that had gazed upon Elizabeth with loverlike zeal had then turned dark with a malicious kind of glee. He had shown her the special license and revealed its worthlessness.

"No, 'scuse me, that's not quite true, it's not worthless," he had slurred. "It has quite a bit o' worth. Your papa will pay dearly to have me hand it, and you, back to him."

"Radford?" Elizabeth remembered asking with a quivering voice, but even then, even at that first moment of revelation she had believed him. Even in their brief time together, there had been something missing between them, something that even the pleasure of the marriage bed could not cloak. They were on their bridal journey, granted, but all mention of returning home had been deftly turned aside by him . . . but it was more than just his vagueness about their future together. It had been the occasional look she'd surprised in his eyes, or the way he had phrased a comment, a small hurtful way of saying something to her. She had already begun to wonder if her husband always spoke the truth . . . and, most important, if he spoke it when he said he loved her.

"Now don't you worry, m'dear," he had gone on in a growing sneer. "I'll reward your papa for payin' me for your return by keeping m'mouth shut." He had put a finger to his lips in a shushing motion. "Shhh! No one tells nothin', once m'pockets are full. Everythin' goes back to normal, and everyone is happy. You'll see."

"I shall take you to court," she had declared, wishing she sounded fierce, but even to her own ears she had only sounded devastated.

"No, you will not. Courts bring scandal. Trust me, m'dove, no one's ever taken me to court. It's all 'pay up and hush up,' and your Papa will want it just the same. How else will he ever pawn you off on some unsuspecting half-wit if it gets about you've been diddled with? Just be glad I'll take the money and leave it at that."

Tears had slid down her cheeks, as much from comprehension of her changed circumstances as from the pain he dealt her. She had eloped with him in order to increase Lorraine's chance of wedding her beloved Broderick—and now Elizabeth would have to return home, ruined, bringing scandal to the family name. It was the very kind of scandal that would put paid to Lorraine's acceptance by Broderick Mainworthy's family. Elizabeth did not want to weep in front of this monster who had pretended to marry her, but the thought of the pain that lay ahead for her entire family was too overwhelming.

"Oh, stop that blubberin', you silly cow. Did you think I actually loved you?" he had slurred with a drunken laugh.

She had stifled her tears until he had fallen asleep, intoxicated and snoring on the inn's bed, and then she had gathered her jewelry, stolen one of his carriage horses, and ridden out of his life.

But some things could not be ridden away from—and one of them was her schooling in the ways of the flesh. Once that gate had been opened, there was no shutting it again.

When she looked at Lord Greyleigh, admittedly a strange man of peculiar look and even more peculiar ways, still she saw the man beneath the trappings. She knew what existed under a man's waistcoat, under his unmentionables, and, Heaven help her, men were no longer the sexless creatures they had been to her once innocent eyes.

She saw now wide shoulders where a woman's were more narrow, and narrow hips where a woman's were wide. She saw tone of muscle under a well-cut coat; she saw the way an Adam's apple pushed at a man's cravat; she saw a difference in the way a man balanced on his feet. Where men had once been "un-women" to her sinless mind, now she saw them as "males," and Radford had been of a male beauty such as to make her lips part and her breath catch.

Lord Greyleigh was such a male, although Elizabeth would have been hard-pressed to explain why. He was handsome in his own extraordinary way, but it was more than that. There was some quality to his voice, as well, the deep timbre of it, yes, but also what he said. She supposed it was that she could not always guess what he might say, and not knowing was interesting, even stimulating.

It did not matter, of course, and her awareness of him as a male was wholly inappropriate.

She had known he was exasperated with her in the library, that her presence had disturbed his work, but she had not wanted to leave. It was interesting, fascinating even, to watch a man at work, to see him bite a lip in consternation at something in his logbooks, to see him stand and stretch and be heedlessly male in his movements.

Elizabeth had begun to study men in this new way, with these newly opened eyes, almost from the moment Radford had first taken her in his arms after their hasty "marriage" in a little village chapel. No man was outside her circle of regard: footmen, innkeepers, hawkers calling their wares in the street—all of them were intensely fascinating. Some for their muscles, their "foreignness"; some for their speech, the pitch of their voices or the amusement of their banter; some for a certain savoir-faire that was difficult to define but now easy for Elizabeth to see. She felt as if she had been living in a fog, near these fascinating creatures called men, but yet removed from actually seeing them fully.

Some were coarse, some profane, some polished, and others too effeminate, but all engaged Elizabeth's senses in a way they never had only a few weeks earlier.

Which, sadly, just went to prove her utter lack of judgment. Men could harm her, control her, forbid her what she wanted, and thwart her.

To be fascinated by men was like being fascinated by one of the lions in the Menagerie at the Tower: they were a marvel to behold from afar, but a woman would be a fool to ever climb into the cage with them. One knew it, one understood it, one feared the creature's power.. . but something made one want to open the trapdoor and reach out to the very thing that could destroy one.

Elizabeth could not even say it was all Radford's fault, for he had only awakened in her a desire that was already there, lying dormant. She could not blame the lion for having its allure. She could only blame herself for responding so avidly to it.

And, God save her, she feared her impulses, feared they could lead her to an even darker future.

In simple, honest terms, she was ruined. She would be removed from Society for six months, maybe more, dependent on Lorraine's situation. During that six months, people would wonder where Elizabeth had gone. People would whisper. Once she did come home again, Elizabeth knew that, as a matrimonial prospect, she could not look high—if she married at all.

Oh, someone might want her to wife despite the whispers. An older man whose wife had perished, leaving him with a half dozen children, perhaps. Or a Cit, possibly, looking to align his lack of a good surname with that of a knight's daughter.

For that matter, Elizabeth did not fear being alone, for Papa would see that she had a home and a small income. Indeed, she could live with Papa and Francine, even though there would be little enough happiness there.

No, what she feared was that any path she took, alone, or with Papa, or with a man she married for convenience, she would never know love.

No matter how brief it had been, for a very short while she had been happy, and had meant to be a loving wife. The physical act had been wonderful, because she had believed it was meant to be wonderful, had believed that she was married to a man who loved her so much he had needed to marry her in haste or die from wanting her.