With This Kiss: Part Three (5 page)

The duke’s mouth fell open.
“What?”

“The entire estate,” James repeated. “I will pay you an allowance, and no one need know except for the solicitors. But I will
not
be responsible for you and your harebrained schemes. I will never again take responsibility for any debts you might incur—nor for any theft. The next time around, you’ll go to prison.”

“That’s absurd,” his father spluttered. “I couldn’t—you couldn’t possibly—no!”

“Then make your good-byes to Staffordshire,” James said. “You might want to pay a special visit to my mother’s grave, if you’re so certain she would have been distressed at the sale of the house, let alone the churchyard.”

His father opened his mouth, but James raised a hand.

“If I were to let you keep the estate, you’d fling Daisy’s inheritance after that which you’ve already lost. There would be nothing left within two years, and I will have betrayed my closest friend for no reason.”

“Your closest friend, eh?” His father was instantly diverted into another train of thought. “I’ve never had a woman as a friend, but Theodora looks like a man, of course, and—”

“Father!”

The duke harrumphed. “Can’t say I like the way you’ve taken to interrupting me. I suppose if I agree to this ridiculous scheme of yours I can expect to look forward to daily humiliation.”

It was an implicit concession.

“You see,” his father said, a smile spreading across his face now that the conversation was over, “it all came well. Your mother always said that, you know. ‘All’s well that ends well.’ ”

James couldn’t stop himself from asking one more thing, though, God knows, he already knew the answer. “Don’t you care in the least about what you’re doing to me—and to Daisy?”

A hint of red crept back into his father’s cheeks. “The girl couldn’t do better than to marry you!”

“Daisy will marry me believing that I’m in love with her, and I’m not. She deserves to be wooed and genuinely adored by her husband.”

“Love and marriage shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath,” his father said dismissively. But his eyes slid away from James’s.

“And you’ve done the same to me. Love and marriage may not come together all that often, but I will have no chance at all. What’s more, I will begin my marriage with a lie that will destroy it if Daisy ever finds out. Do you realize that? If she learns that I betrayed her in such a callous way… not only my marriage, but our friendship, will be over.”

“If you really think she’ll fly into a temper, you’d better get an heir on her in the first few months,” his father said with the air of someone offering practical advice. “A woman scorned, and all that. If she’s disgruntled enough, I suppose she might run off with another man. But if you already have an heir—and a spare, if you can—you could let her go.”

“My wife will
never
run off with another man.” That growled out of James’s chest from a place he didn’t even know existed.

His father heaved himself out of his chair. “You as much as called me a fool; well, I’ll do the same for you. No man in his right mind thinks that marriage is a matter of billing and cooing. Your mother and I were married for the right reasons, to do with family obligations and financial negotiations. We did what was necessary to have you and left it there. Your mother couldn’t face the effort needed for a spare, but we didn’t waste any tears over it. You were always a healthy boy.” Then he added, “Barring that time you almost went blind, of course. We would have tried for another, if worse came to worst.”

James pushed himself to his feet, hearing his father’s voice dimly through a tangle of hideous thoughts that he couldn’t bring himself to spit out.

“Neither of us raised you to have such rubbishing romantic views,” the duke tossed over his shoulder as he left the room.

Having reached the age of nineteen years, James had thought he understood his place in life. He’d learned the most important lessons: how to ride a horse, hold his liquor, and defend himself in a duel.

No one had ever taught him—and he had never imagined the necessity of learning—how to betray the one person whom you truly cared for in life. The only person who genuinely loved you. How to break that person’s heart, whether it be tomorrow, or five years, or ten years in the future.

Because Daisy would learn the truth someday. He knew it with a bone-deep certainty: somehow, she would discover that he had pretended to fall in love so that she would marry him… and she would never forgive him.

Two

T
heodora Saxby, known to James as Daisy, but to herself as Theo, was trying very hard not to think about Lady Corning’s ball, which had been held the night before. But, as is often the case when one tries to avoid a topic, the only thing her mind saw fit to review was a scene from said ball.

The girls she had overheard chattering about her resemblance to a boy weren’t even being particularly unkind. They weren’t saying it
to
her, after all. And she wouldn’t have minded their comments so much if she didn’t have the distinct impression that the gentlemen at the ball agreed with them.

But what could she possibly do about it? She stared despairingly into her glass. Her mother’s fear of just that assessment—though Mama refused to acknowledge it—had led to Theo’s hair being turned to ringlets with a curling iron. The gown she’d worn, like everything else in her wardrobe, was white and frilly and altogether feminine. It was picked out in pearls and touches of pink, a combination that (in her opinion) did nothing but emphasize the decidedly
un
feminine cast of her profile.

She loathed her profile almost as much as she loathed the dress. If she didn’t have to worry about people mistaking her for a boy—not that they really did, but they couldn’t stop remarking on the resemblance; at any rate, if she didn’t have to worry about that—she would never again wear pink. Or pearls. There was something dreadfully banal about the way pearls shimmered.

For a moment she distracted herself by mentally ripping her dress apart, stripping it of its ruffles and pearls and tiny sleeves. Given a choice, she would dress in plum-colored corded silk and sleek her hair away from her face without a single flyaway curl. Her only hair adornment would be an enormous feather—a black one—arching backward so it brushed her shoulder. If her sleeves were elbow-length, she could trim them with a narrow edging of black fur. Or perhaps swansdown, with the same at the neck. Or she could put a feather trim at the neck; the white would look shocking against the plum velvet.

That led to the idea that she could put a ruff at the neck and trim that with a narrow strip of swansdown. It would be even better if the sleeves weren’t opaque fabric but nearly transparent, like that new Indian silk her friend Lucinda had been wearing the previous night, and she would have them quite wide, so they billowed and then gathered tight at the elbow. Or perhaps the wrist would be more dramatic… .

She could see herself entering a ballroom in that costume. No one would titter about whether she looked like a girl or a boy. She would pause for a moment on the top of the steps, gathering everyone’s gaze, and then she would snap open her fan… . No, fans were tiresomely overdone. She’d have to come up with something new.

The first man who asked her to dance, addressing her as Miss Saxby, would be treated to her slightly weary yet amused smile. “Call me Theo,” she would say, and all the matrons would be so scandalized they would squeak about nothing else the whole night long.

Theo
was key: the name played to all those infatuations men formed on each other, the way their closest relationships were with their friends rather than with their wives. She’d seen it with James. When he was thirteen he had positively worshipped the captain of the cricket team at Eton. It stood to reason that if she wore her hair sleeked back, along with a gown that faintly resembled a cricket uniform, all those men who had once adored their captains would be at her feet.

She was so caught up in a vision of herself in a severely tailored jacket resembling the Etonian morning coat that at first she didn’t even hear the pounding on her door. But an insistent “
Daisy!
” finally broke through her trance, and she pushed herself up from the settee and opened the bedchamber door.

“Oh hello, James,” she said, unable to muster much enthusiasm at the sight of him. The last thing one wants to see when in a melancholic fit is a friend who refuses to attend balls even when he knows perfectly well that all three weeks of her first season had been horrific. He had no idea what it was like. How could he? He was devastatingly handsome, rather charming when he wasn’t being a beast, and a future duke, to boot. This embarrassment of riches really wasn’t fair. “I didn’t realize it was you.”

“How could you not realize it was me?” James demanded, pushing open the door and crowding her backward, now that he knew she was decent. “I’m the only person in the world who calls you Daisy. Let me in, will you?”

Theo sighed and moved back. “Do you suppose you could try harder to call me Theo? I must have asked you a hundred times already. I don’t want to be Theodora, or Dora, or Daisy, either.”

James flung himself into a chair and ran a hand through his hair. From the look of it, he’d been in an ill humor all morning, because half his hair was standing straight up. It was lovely hair, heavy and thick. Sometimes it looked black, but when sunlight caught it there were deep mahogany strands, too. More reasons to resent James. Her own hair had nothing subtle about it. It was thick, too, but an unfashionable yellowy-brown mixture.

“No,” he said flatly. “You’re Daisy to me, and Daisy suits you.”

“It doesn’t suit me,” she retorted. “Daisies are pretty and fresh, and I’m neither.”

“You are pretty,” he said mechanically, not even bothering to glance at her.

She rolled her eyes, but really, there was no reason to press the point. James never looked at her close enough to notice whether she’d turned out pretty… why should he? Being only two years apart, they’d shared the nursery practically from birth, which meant he had clear memories of her running about in a diaper, being smacked by Nurse Wiggan for being smart.

“How was last night?” he asked abruptly.

“Terrible.”

“Trevelyan didn’t make an appearance?”

“Geoffrey was indeed there,” Theo said gloomily. “He just never looked at me. He danced twice—
twice
—with the cow-eyed Claribel. I can’t stand her, and I can’t believe he can either, which means he’s just looking for a fortune. But if he
is,
then why doesn’t he dance with me? My inheritance must be twice as large as hers. Do you think he doesn’t know? And if so,” she said without stopping for breath, “can you think of some way of bringing it up that wouldn’t be terribly obvious?”

“Absolutely,” James said. “I can hear that conversation now. ‘So, Trevelyan, you flat-footed looby, did you know that Theodora’s inheritance comes to thousands of pounds a year? And by the way, what about those matched grays you just bought?’ ”

“You could think of a more adroit way to bring it up,” Theo said, though she couldn’t imagine it herself. “Geoffrey isn’t flat-footed. He’s as graceful as a leaf. You should have seen him dancing with cretinous Claribel.”

James frowned. “Is she the one who was brought up in India?”

“Yes. I can’t understand why some helpful tiger didn’t gobble her up. All those plump curves… she would have made a lovely Sunday treat.”

“Tsk, tsk,” James said, a glimmer of laughter coming into his eyes for the first time. “Young ladies in search of husbands should be docile and sweet. You keep coming out with these appallingly malicious little remarks. If you don’t behave, all those matrons will declare you unfit, and then you’ll be in a pickle.”

“I suppose that’s part of my problem.”

“What’s the other part?”

“I’m not feminine or dainty, nor even deliciously curvy. No one seems to notice me.”

“And you hate that,” James said with a grin.

“Well, I do,” she said. “I don’t mind admitting it. I think I could attract a great many men if I were simply allowed to be myself. But pink ruffles and pearl trim make me look more mannish than ever. And I
feel
ugly, which is the worst thing of all.”

“I don’t think you look like a man,” James said, finally inspecting her from head to foot.

“You know that opera dancer you’ve been squiring about?”

“You’re not supposed to know about Bella!”

“Why on earth not? Mama and I were in Oxford Street when you passed in an open carriage, so Mama explained everything. She even knew that your mistress is an opera dancer. I have to say, James, I think it’s amazing that you got yourself a mistress whom everyone knows about, even people like my mother.”

“I can’t believe Mrs. Saxby told you that rot.”

“What? She’s not an opera dancer?”

He scowled. “You’re supposed to pretend that women like that don’t exist.”

“Don’t be thick, James. Ladies know all about mistresses. And it isn’t as if you’re married. If you carry on like that once you
are
married, I’m going to be terrifically nasty to you. I’ll definitely tell your wife. So beware. I don’t approve.”

“Of Bella, or of matrimony?”

“Of married men who run about London with voluptuous women with hair the color of flax and morals that are just as lax.”

She paused for a moment, but James just rolled his eyes. “It’s not easy to rhyme extempore, you know,” she told him.

He obviously didn’t care, so she returned to the subject. “It’s all very well now, but you’ll have to give up Bella when you marry. Or whatever her replacement’s name is by then.”

“I don’t want to get married,” James said. There was a kind of grinding tension in his voice that made Theo look at him more closely.

“You’ve been quarreling with your father, haven’t you?”

He nodded.

“In the library?”

He nodded again.

“Did he try to brain you with that silver candlestick?” she asked. “Cramble told me that he was going to put it away, but I noticed it was still there yesterday.”

“He demolished a porcelain shepherdess.”

“Oh, that’s all right. Cramble bought a whole collection of them in Haymarket and strewed them all around the house in obvious places hoping your father would snatch those as opposed to anything of value. He will be quite pleased to see that his plan is working. So what were you rowing about?”

“He wants me to marry.”

“Really?” Theo felt a not altogether pleasant pang of surprise. Of course James had to marry… someday. But at the moment she rather liked him as he was: hers. Well, hers and Bella’s. “You’re too young,” she said protectively.

“
You
are only seventeen and you’re looking for a husband.”

“But that’s just the right age for a woman to marry. Mama didn’t let me debut until this year precisely because of that. Men should be far older than nineteen. I expect thirty or one-and-thirty is about right. What’s more, you’re young for your age,” she added.

James narrowed his eyes. “I am not.”

“You are,” she said smugly. “I saw how you were flitting about with Bella, showing her off as if she were a new coat. You probably set her up in some sort of appalling little house draped in blush-colored satin.”

His scowl was truly ferocious, which, rather than alarming her, merely gave Theo confirmation. “At the very least, she could have chosen some shade of blue. Women with yellow hair always think that pink shades will flatter their skin. Whereas a blue, say a cerulean or even violet, would be far more pleasing.”

“I’ll let her know. You do realize, Daisy, that you’re not supposed to mention women like Bella in polite company, let alone offer advice on how they should design their nests?”

“When did you become
polite
company? Do
not
call me Daisy,” Theo retorted. “Whom are you thinking of marrying?” She did not like uttering that question. She had something of a possessive bent when it came to James.

“I have no one in mind.” But the corner of his mouth twitched.

“You’re lying!” she cried, pouncing on it. “You
do
have someone in mind! Who is she?”

He sighed. “There’s no one.”

“Since you haven’t been to a single ball this year, I cannot imagine whom you could have fixed your eye on. Did you go to any balls last year, when I was still confined to the schoolroom? Of course,
I
should play an important part in choosing your betrothed,” Theo said, getting into the spirit of it. “I know you better than anyone else. She’ll have to be musical, given what a beautiful voice you have.”

“I am
not
interested in anyone who can sing.” James’s eyes flashed at her in a way that Theo secretly rather liked. Most of the time he was just the funny, wry “brother” she’d had her whole life, but occasionally he turned electric with fury and she saw him in a whole different light. Like a man, she decided. Odd thought.

She waved her hands. “For goodness’ sake, James, calm down. I must have mistaken the sure sign that you were fibbing.” She grinned at him. “Do you think I would tease you about your choice? I, who blurted out my adoration of Geoffrey? At least you don’t have to worry about being entirely overlooked by your beloved. You’re quite good looking; the girls don’t know you well enough to guess at your faults; you sing like an angel when someone can coax you into it; and you shall have a title someday. They would have fallen about hoping to dance with you last night and I could have watched it from the side.”

“I loathe balls,” James said, but he wasn’t really paying attention. He was trying to puzzle something out; she recognized the look.

“She’s not
married
, is she?” Theo asked.

“Married? Who’s married?”

“The woman who has fixed your attention!”

“There isn’t anyone.” The edge of his mouth didn’t curl, so he was probably telling the truth.

“Petra Abbot-Sheffield has a lovely singing voice,” Theo said thoughtfully.

“I hate singing.”

Theo knew that, but she thought he would surely grow out of it. When James sang “Lives again our glorious king!” in church she found herself shivering all over at the pure beauty of it, the way his voice swooped up to the rafters and then settled into an angel’s trumpet for “Where, O death, is now thy sting?” Whenever he sang she thought of bright green leaves in late spring. “Isn’t it interesting that I think in colors,” she asked now, “and you think in music?”

“Not at all, because I do not think about music.”