The Viscount and the Virgin (21 page)

‘You were the one I always ran to,' she said sadly. ‘I remember that.' She also remembered trotting after Hugh Bredon's sons in the same way she had used to follow after her adored Stephen. And being shocked to find her new big brothers did not automatically pick her up and cuddle her until she felt better. It had seemed like a long time before Rick had gradually begun to respond to her need for affection. Gerry had followed his oldest brother's example, eventually. Though Nick…

She pushed those unfavourable comparisons away, returning to the matter at hand. ‘And then you were gone. And father was gone. And I was not allowed to go near mother—'

‘At least she kept you!' he spat. ‘Have you any idea what it was like for me, being sent to that place for children nobody wants? They told me I should be grateful for being taken in and fed, since my parents and friends had deserted me. Grateful! And every time I ran away and tried to get home, somebody would drag me back, and they would whip me in front of all the other boys and make me wear a red letter
R
pinned to my jacket!'

‘I'm sorry,' Midge whispered, horror struck. How could anyone have been so cruel to a child that clearly
needed love and reassurance? A boy who had just been ripped from the place he had been taught to believe he belonged? The scars on his body were as nothing compared to the scars that experience must have seared into his soul. ‘There
was
a fire,' he said. ‘You said, outside your fancy church, that you wondered if that had been a lie, too. Well, it was not! The chaos it caused gave me the chance I needed to escape.' He held out his hands and looked at the open palms for a brief second, before clenching them into fists and raising his dark head to glare at her again.

‘Where did you go?' She looked at the hoop in his ear and the silver bracelet that adorned his wrist, and thought she knew the answer. ‘You found your way back to your real mother's people.'

Some thing flashed across his face. ‘Not immediately.' The expression settled into one so bitter, Midge knew she was not going to like what he was going to tell her next. ‘I had to survive by begging and stealing for a long time before I found my way back to anyone who would offer me a home.'

‘I am sorry,' was all she could think of to say. Though it was not enough. ‘So sorry,' she said again, as a single tear slid silently down her cheek.

‘So, you maintain she married an old man because he said he would search for me?' He laughed. The un expect ed ness of the sound, harsh and cold, made her flinch. ‘But you and I both know he would not have given me a home. Had he found me. He would have taken one look at the wild thing I had become, and thrown me straight back in the gutter.'

Midge could not deny it was a possibility. Not now
she had seen through Hugh's facade to the coldness at his heart. He might well have said whatever he had deemed necessary to make Amanda marry him, so that he could have control of her fortune and his boys would have a loving mother. But he had not been much of a father to her.

‘What does it matter now, what he might or might not have done?'

‘What does it matter?' he exploded, his rage a tangible force she could feel battering her. ‘I was torn from my home. Forced to live in a way you cannot possibly begin to imagine! And now, I—' he pulled himself up short. Drawing himself up to his full height, he threw his shoulders back and declared, ‘I came to your wedding to spoil your day. Don't you know that? Don't you hate me for it?'

‘No.' Midge looked him straight in the eye as she delivered that truth. ‘And you have no reason to hate me, either.' She felt more tears sting her eyes. Stupid tears, that, since she had become pregnant, seemed to threaten at the least surge of emotion within her. ‘None of what happened to you was my fault, Stephen. I missed you. I have missed you all my life.'

Stephen's eyes narrowed. ‘What do you expect from me, Imo? That we can play at happy families again? As though these years, all the injustice of it, had never happened?'

Midge lowered her head, burying her face in her hands as she saw that that his life had been so harsh, he had been so convinced that everyone he had cared for had betrayed him, there might be no getting through to him. The embittered man who stood before her now was a complete stranger to her. The loving little boy she remembered was gone forever.

He was lost to her. As lost as Gerry.

‘I do not expect anything from you, Stephen,' she sighed wearily. ‘But I would like to ask you a favour.'

His face took on a sardonic cast that was very discouraging, but Midge decided she might as well ask anyway. He could only say no. And then she could simply walk back to Shevington Court and face the music.

‘I came out yesterday in such a hurry, I forgot to bring any money. And I need to go to London.'

She needed to see Nick. He was the one person on earth who must, surely, miss Gerry as much as she did. With whom she could mourn the loss of that laughing, carefree young man. Oh, she knew it was a forlorn hope, considering the coldness he had exhibited towards her after Hugh's death, but any kind of hope for shared fellow-feeling was better than the certainty of the total isolation she would face on returning to Shevington Court. And she knew, too, that the earl would not permit her to travel anywhere for quite some time. If Stephen would not help her out…she choked back a sob, lifted her head and gazed up at him imploringly. Just a few days with Nick, that was all she was asking for. A few days away to come to terms with everything.

‘Will you take me there?'

‘Take you to London,' he echoed. ‘After so short a time, you are ready to leave your husband? Or are you chasing after him?'

She flinched at the very notion she would demean herself by pursuing a man who had only ever feigned interest in her, and a chilling smile slashed across his face.

‘If you are so set on ruining yourself, who am I to stand in your way? I will settle up and order a carriage. It will be my pleasure to take you to London.'

‘Yes,' she said, regarding him sadly. ‘I thought it would.' For Stephen did not care a fig for her reputation. In fact, the blacker he could make things look for her, the better pleased he would probably be.

 

Midge dozed in the coach, nearly all the way to London, while Stephen rode along side on his magnificent black stallion. It was only when they drew up outside a house in Blooms bury Square that she realized she had not made her intentions plain.

‘I meant to ask you to take me to my stepbrother's lodgings,' she said as he opened the coach door.

His face closed. ‘So, all that talk about missing me, wanting me to be part of your family, was just words! I might have known you were just using me!'

‘No,' she protested. ‘It is not like that…'

But he was striding away, shouting to the coach man to take her wherever she wanted to go. He mounted the steps of his house, and the door banged shut behind him.

Only then did she see that for all Stephen's apparent hardness, some thing about what had passed between them at the inn must have touched him. Because he was furious that she had not intended to make her stay in London with him.

She sank back into the squabs, reeling at her capacity for doing the worst possible thing on any given occasion.

 

But late that same night, Midge was back at Stephen's house, banging in desperation on the front door. If she had truly alienated him, she had no idea what she would do!

The dark-skinned servant who opened the door was
garbed in green, though Midge had never seen the like of the cut of his coat before. And he wore a turban wound round his head.

While she gaped at him, he said impassively, ‘State your business.'

‘I need to see Stephen. Please.' When he did not give a flicker of response, she added, ‘I am Imogen Hebden. His sister.'

The Indian servant stood back and waved her into the hall. When she had entered the house, he closed the front door behind her and led her into a small parlour, in which a fire crackled cheerfully in the grate.

‘I shall go and tell Stephen Sahib that you are here,' he said before melting away.

Midge made straight for the fire and sat on the chair closest to it, toeing off her sodden shoes. When she had put the dainty satin slippers on the day before, she had assumed she would only be sitting on a sofa all day, or at most, going down the stairs to dine. She had not thought she would tramp through woodland, take a coach to London, and then spend hours walking the streets. The soles had worn through hours ago. And then it had come on to rain, and she had not known whether it was worse to have shoes full of holes, or no coat or bonnet to keep out the wet. She felt, and was sure she looked like, a half-drowned rat, with her hair plastered all round her face and down her neck. She was surprised the servant had let her in. None of the houses she had ever visited before employed servants who would have shown in a woman in her condition without question, and sat them down in front of a fire.

She heard the door to the hall open again, and when she looked round, Stephen stood in the doorway,
jack et less, his waist coat still un but toned. He had brushed his long hair neatly back off his face. And removed his earring. And the quality of the evening garments was so fine, the style of what he was wearing so conventional that all in all, she decided, once he had donned a jacket, he would not look out of place at Almack's.

‘What is it now?' he demanded brusquely as he stalked across the room towards her. ‘What do you want?'

‘I—' she swallowed nervously, and got shakily to her feet ‘—I am sorry to be so bother some, but I need a place to stay for the night. Nick said…Nick said…' As her mind went back over the painful inter view she had just had with her step brother, the room seemed to tilt around her. Just as the floor began to swim upwards towards her face, she felt Stephen's strong arms catch her, and she found herself lying, not face down on the hearthrug, but rather more decorously, upon a sofa.

She rather thought she must have fainted completely for a few seconds, because Stephen was pressing a drink into her hands, and she had no recollection of him going to fetch it.

‘When did you last eat?' he demanded, his brows drawn into a scowl so tight she imagined he could very easily give himself a headache, without having to drink a single drop of brandy.

‘This morning. At the inn,' she confessed. Stephen had been in sis tent that they break fast before setting out. And although the last thing she had felt like doing was eating a mouthful, so anxious was she that word of her whereabouts might already have got back to Shevington Court, and someone would come to haul her back in disgrace, she had remembered how effectively Pansy's
remedy for nausea had worked the day before. That plate of toast had kept her stomach calm all the way to London.

‘You are wet through,' he said. ‘What has happened to you? Why are you not with this other so-called brother of yours?'

‘Well,' she sighed, ‘he did not think it would be at all proper to have a married woman staying in his lodgings. Especially one who looked like she had been dragged through a hedge back wards.' She pushed a hank of wet hair off her face, and took a hefty swig of her brandy as her mind went back over that painful scene.

‘I do not begin to understand what you thought you might accomplish by coming here,' Nick had said icily.

When she had began to stammer that it was be cause of the letter he had sent, he had pokered up, and stated, ‘Germanicus is dead. There is nothing you can do about it. And if you think I am going to let a woman looking like that—' he had scathingly eyed her dishevelled appearance ‘—into my rooms then you are very much mistaken. I have prospects now, you know, Imogen. And I am not going to put my future at risk by letting you drag me into whatever scandal you are brewing. Now, I suggest you take yourself off back to your marital home, where you belong, and stop behaving like some kind of tragedy queen.
I
shall call on
you
there, at a more conventional hour.'

‘You will do no such thing!' she had shouted at him, furious with herself for persistently refusing to admit how exactly like Hugh his middle son was. Totally self-centred and cold-hearted. All Hugh had cared about was books. And all Nick cared about was his career.

And she would rather die than go crawling to Monty's house in Hanover Square! She had immediately discounted any thoughts of returning to her aunt and uncle, too. Though her aunt might be sympathetic to her plight, her uncle was bound to be furious with her for coming up to London on an impulse, and alone.

‘I shall go and stay with my
true
brother,' she had spat at Nick. Well, he had been upset that she had not intended to in the first place, hadn't he?

‘Yes, that's right, the one who is half Gypsy. But let me tell you this,' she had said, jabbing Nick in his bony chest with her forefinger. ‘He is twice the man you are. Ten times!'

Nick's thin lips had twisted into a sneer. ‘The way you look I am sure you will fit right in with his camp on Hampstead Heath, or wherever they happen to be.'

‘He,' she had boasted, ‘has a very large house on Blooms bury Square, as it happens.' And with her nose in the air, she had turned and clattered down the dingy communal stair case of the cheap lodging house where Nick had rooms.

It was not until she had got into the street that she remembered she had no purse. She would have done anything rather than go back into Nick's rooms and beg for the means to procure a cab. Besides, it was not that far. The coach Stephen had hired had not taken a quarter of an hour to take her to Nick's lodgings.

And so, in high dudgeon, she had set out to walk to Blooms bury Square.

But those dratted indoor shoes! Ruefully, she rubbed at her wet and blistered feet. She had been limping before she had reached the first corner.