A Rake to the Rescue

by Elizabeth Beacon

  ‘I didn’t—when did I say that?’

  ‘You said no when I asked if there was any hope for me.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘You agreed I was not enough for you,’ he said.

  ‘Not as a furtive lover,’ she said as if he was a fool to misunderstand. ‘I have Toby and you are going to get your daughter back to make it impossible as well. Being the best parent you can be reshapes the whole world.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, the one certainty in his life at the moment being the complete love he felt for his little girl the instant he laid eyes on her in her mother’s arms and Delphi would not even let him hold the little mite. ‘I admit I fought against the attraction I feel towards you because whatever I mistook for love twisted me in knots and now you don’t believe me.’

  ‘I am plain and already a mother, so I could be a good enough wife for your good enough life.’

  ‘You are not plain, very far from it. I won’t let even you call yourself so. Champion made you think so to keep the wolves away when he was at sea, but you are so far from plain I have to wonder about your eyesight after all, Henrietta. Now I love your witchy eyes behind the schoolteacher spectacles you hide behind, so keep them on if you really need them and look in the next mirror you come across with their help and see what I see. Your hair is rich and hot and wonderful as well, and as for that mouth, madam, it is a snare for any unwary male who looks at you as if you are much like any other woman, then longs to feel it move under his until he can hardly sleep of a night. Your trouble is you listen to those who don’t adore the look of you and take the word of a fool who doesn’t as if every word Champion said was gospel. I think the obvious gets less wonderful with time, but I could look at you for a lifetime and never be bored. No, don’t turn your head away and refuse to listen to me. We matter, Hetta. You matter. At least listen to me while I try to convince you I shall love you until my dying day whether you want me or not. I know you wed Brandon Champion far too young to realise he could never make you happy, but he has bent you out of shape as a woman. That is not my fault, so please don’t punish me for his sins as well as my own. At least you have had appalling taste in husbands until now, so I won’t have to fight the memory of him to get to your heart. I curse the fates for landing you in the man’s lap when he could never deserve you if he lived to be an ancient admiral and gave up chasing other women the day you married him, but at least he will never be much of a rival for the prize of your best husband.’

  ‘I don’t think Bran was capable of being faithful, but I shall not marry again,’ Hetta told him with a snap.

  ‘Why not? Champion was too deeply in love with himself to love you with all his heart and soul, but you cannot dismiss love and marriage because he was a fool.’

  ‘And you are not?’ she said with irony so bitter she was surprised there wasn’t a breakaway Hetta wilting on a sofa or beating her fists on a wall.

  ‘Maybe I am, but I still love you,’ he argued with the frown that did things to her insides she didn’t want to think about right now. ‘Only a striving, restless, bad-tempered and independent-minded female will do for me, so isn’t it lucky I found enough sense to fall in love with you at last, Mrs Henrietta Champion?’

  ‘Hetta,’ she corrected absently and saw hope spark to life in his dark Haile eyes that she couldn’t quite let him believe in yet. ‘And you are right about one thing. I never loved Bran as a wife should love her husband. I have held back from living my best life because I was so afraid of making another huge mistake, but I still won’t wake up tomorrow morning looking lovely as the dawn. I cannot endure seeing your disappointment every time you open your eyes to find me in your bed instead of a beauty like Lady Drace.’ She saw him flinch and it looked like confirmation she was right. ‘I don’t want to hurt you, Magnus, but it would be foolish of me to jump into another hasty marriage and end up even more disillusioned.’

  ‘No, don’t put me in the same category as Champion. I won’t sit on his shelf, preening myself for being so handsome and splendid. This feeling I have for you is so different I refuse to rank it with anything I felt for Delphi. I love my child, Hetta, but Delphi’s stony face when I was pleading with her to marry me forced me to see what a fool I was to think she had loved or ever even truly wanted me as a man. It hurt like hell at the time, but I am glad she did refuse me now because I would hate to be married to her and longing for you instead. I don’t care about your fortune either, despite what the gossips will say when you marry me.’

  ‘I have not said I will do anything of the sort and you are not in the least bit humble deep down, are you?’ Hetta protested.

  ‘I am trying,’ he argued ruefully. ‘I suppose I must learn if I am going to work for my living.’

  ‘I don’t care how rich or poor you are. I will not marry you without a very compelling reason to risk tying myself to a tyrant in breeches.’

  ‘Isn’t love enough?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said truthfully and he didn’t exactly look delighted about a not-quite dismissal if he really did love her. The thought of him as her lover thrilled every part of her, but she wasn’t ready to admit it until she felt a lot more certain of herself and him. ‘And don’t glare at me. I won’t let you bully me into saying yes,’ she told him bluntly.

  ‘Want to lay a bet on how long you can resist?’ he asked with an edge of temper in his deep brown eyes. He stopped pacing to glare a challenge that sent her heart leaping into her mouth and made her breathing come fast and shallow.

  ‘How much?’ she countered recklessly.

  ‘A chance. If you won’t say yes to me, then don’t say no either. Give me space and time enough to convince you I will be your best and last husband.’

  ‘Modest,’ she said with rather flippant irony, but from the spark of devilment and hope in his eyes he knew as well as she did it wasn’t an outright no this time and hope was fluttering to life deep inside her. ‘And Bran was not exactly stiff competition for the title.’

  ‘Whereas being wed to you would be the biggest challenge of my life, Hetta. I would feel blessed every day I woke up with you in my bed, glaring back and letting me know I must still work to convince you we did the right thing by saying yes for a lifetime. Make no mistake about it—I want you at the heart of my life. I want you pretending to be grumpy and too engrossed in our vast tribe of offspring to hammer me into the shape you want me to be. I want to refuse to be hammered and relish every battle and skirmish while I seduce you into believing in who you really are and, speaking of seduction, I want you right here and right now. I have wanted to get past those spectacles and kiss you insensible since the second time we met. You should be careful how you provoke me now it’s not only a want, but a driving need.’

  ‘I am not the provoking one. You are,’ she grumbled even as the heat in his gaze made her knees weak and her heart beat thunderously.

  ‘Want to bet?’ he asked softly again and bent his head to meet her eager lips and put a stop to all this talk with a searingly hot kiss.

  Everyone for several miles around ought to feel such an earthquake happening nearby, Hetta decided hazily. A kiss never felt like this with Bran, though, did it? she heard her inner Hetta remark pointedly, as she reached up an unsteady hand to caress the back of his neck as she had longed to on the way here. He groaned about that frustration and her own heartbeat galloped. Her hands were busy among his sooty curls and why should she hold back now she had the springy gloss of them under her fingers? Here were strong bands of muscle at the joint of head and neck that felt so vulnerable when he was bent over to seduce her with this sweet madness. His hands went places guaranteed to awaken sensuous possibilities. Had Magnus ever stroked and worshipped his Delphi’s curves and slenderness as eagerly as he was seducing hers? The throaty purr of content about to let him know this was wondrous stuttered into a sigh of regret.

  ‘Stop thinking of the
m,’ he murmured in her other ear and she reluctantly opened her eyes.

  ‘I can’t. They are always with us,’ she whispered. ‘Your Delphi had so much of you, how can I forget her?’

  ‘Because she didn’t want me and I never knew her. Losing you because of her seems so appalling I refuse to even consider it.’

  ‘Lady Drace has gone, so what do you have to lose?’

  ‘You can say that, held in my arms, seeing what you do to me?’

  ‘Yes. I think I must have learned too much about passion and not enough about love from Bran to believe I could outshine such a natural beauty in your bed.’

  ‘Then you are right, Mrs Champion,’ he said bleakly.

  ‘I told you I was,’ she said numbly.

  ‘Not about us, about them,’ he told her so furiously she had to believe he meant it. ‘Lady Drace allowed me to batter against her chilly loveliness for years to get back at my elder brother. Brandon Champion showed you a shallow rake will grab what he wants like a greedy child, then make a woman feel less for giving it to him. If we let them they will destroy our future as well.’

  ‘I thought you said you didn’t have the words?’ she said as that version of them made her shiver at all the lost chances she might be whistling down the wind if he was right.

  ‘They have not convinced you yet, though, have they?’ he said and sounded so flat about it she could not lie.

  ‘Not yet, no,’ she admitted. ‘I want to stay here in your arms and be seduced into knowing we can make a real marriage out of this fascination, Magnus, but I am not sure I can yet. Perhaps I need to believe in me before I can believe in us.’

  ‘Don’t wrap it up in kind words, Hetta. You don’t trust me to love you back with all I am. It hurts like hell, but I will prove to you I mean it if it takes the rest of my life. Champion cozened you into leaping into marriage when you were too young to know your own mind and I cannot do the same, even if you are quite old enough to know your own mind this time.’

  ‘You mean I am no longer seventeen and vulnerable.’

  ‘I can tell,’ he said and his velvet-dark eyes went dreamy and intense and she must be mad to resist this temptation to get to the nearest bed and be very busy about bonding with him as lovers.

  ‘Then we could...’ Hetta let her voice tail off as she saw his eyes go stern, then soften with wicked laughter.

  ‘Oh, we most definitely could, Mrs Champion,’ he murmured as the promise of him being her lover was very real between their eagerly curious bodies. ‘But if there is to be no wedding, then there is no bedding for me either,’ he said as if he was the king of the virtues, not wild Magnus Haile striving to win over his last lover.

  ‘If my husband had been cold and distant in the marriage bed, I could trust passion more, Magnus,’ she said earnestly, and somehow, she had to convince him it really was a problem. The easy words and kind acts of love had melted away like ice in the July sun as soon as Bran got bored and marriage meant they could not walk away and say, Well, that was a mistake. Let us forget we ever met and both move on to try it again with a new lover.

  ‘It can be a snare for a man as well, don’t forget,’ he said rather bleakly and she felt the wrongness of putting memories of Lady Drace using him for her own ends in his eyes again. ‘And don’t expect me to watch another woman sail away with another child of mine I am forbidden to see,’ he said bleakly.

  ‘Oh, I see what you mean,’ she said, her suddenly chilled hands covering her cheeks because she did and she really would not do that to him. ‘I would never walk away from you if we made a child, Magnus. I could not be so cruel to either of you.’

  ‘How flattering you will only agree to wed me for the sake of a child we might make,’ he said flatly, as if the words tasted vile on his tongue.

  ‘There is no satisfying you, is there?’ she snapped, then realised the double meaning in her question as his rigid frustration made an unmistakable fact of his mighty self-control. Bran would have had her on the nearest flat surface by now and never mind who might come upon them while he satisfied himself. She flushed at the thought of sharing headlong passion with a lover like Magnus, glad he could not know how much heat there was in her belly at even the thought of a child of theirs growing inside it. ‘It would not be the only reason I agreed,’ she said carefully.

  ‘Then marry me, Hetta. Let me teach you about loving by practice instead of all this endless theory. You will know the difference because I never felt a tithe of this desperation in my heart and soul for another woman. At least Champion was a good enough lover to make sure you will feel the contrast between lust and love.’

  ‘Not yet. I want to know we are right for one another before we make a family.’

  She wondered at herself for not tipping straight into loving him, but the mirage of it hurt so much last time she did not dare. It had hurt when her heady romance with Bran fell into ashes, but if she made such a mistake with Magnus it would destroy parts of her Bran had never been able to reach. She simply could not push herself over the last barrier and admit how deeply she longed for Magnus Haile until she believed him wholeheartedly.

  ‘I will never sneak into your bed by night and leave in the dawn, Hetta. It has to be daylight and every day for me from now on.’

  ‘Will you wait for me to know if I can offer you all that?’

  ‘Do you think I flit from one woman to the next like a bee after pollen, Hetta?’ he demanded so harshly she had to look him in the eye when she answered or be a coward.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But I was so convinced I was doing the right thing last time, Magnus.’

  He sighed and looked furious and frustrated and as broodingly, hastily magnificent as the first time she laid eyes on him, so she knew she had won some time or he would not be so angry about it. She cursed Bran for easy loving and hard living and hesitated, the grind of unsatisfied desire tearing at her as if her own body was crying out how wrong she was to send him away when she was so raw with wanting him back. No, she could not tell him how much she longed for the fact and fury and sheer male beauty of him in her bed and not trust him to love her for the rest of their lives, so she could not have him until she did.

  ‘I would never act the great lover, then run when our marriage wasn’t what I expected like Champion did, but what’s the point in wasting breath when you don’t believe me? Please go and ask Jem to pack for me and order my horse to be saddled, before I beg or lose control of myself, and we start another darling little one because I got out of control and you lost all your choices after all. I shall be along when I can take my leave without the world knowing I am your very frustrated suitor,’ he said tightly. ‘So please go now, Hetta, while I can still listen to my inner gentleman and let you be, but promise not to forget me while you work out your new life.’

  ‘As if I could,’ she said and felt the fury of frustrated desire inside her as he turned away as if he could not wait to leave. This could be the biggest mistake she had ever made, she decided as she left him standing stiff and solitary and gazing at the road out of the Abrah Valley as if he had already begun to leave her.

  Chapter Eighteen

  A fortnight later her own words echoed in Hetta’s mind like a sentence handed down by a judge. As if she could forget the man. She eyed the unopened letter on her writing slope and thought it typical of him to send it off with such strong strokes of the pen she could see where he’d had to mend it even when he was addressing it to her. She knew without lifting the seal that he was angry with her for the heartache and loneliness of them being apart like this. Fury seemed to glower off the hot-pressed paper and she picked it up, then dropped it as if it might bite.

  ‘Come on, Hetta. Open the dratted thing,’ she chided herself.

  She slipped the paper knife under his seal and smiled at the arrogance of it as she decided he must have had hi
s seal made before he became a working man. ‘M.H.’ sat proudly with his mother’s personal arms and only included his father’s as hers had when she married him. Love for his mother and younger siblings must have been all that stopped him cutting himself off from the Earl and striking out alone years ago.

  Never mind that now. The sooner this first letter was read the sooner they could get his first blasts of fury out of the way.

  Mrs Champion, it began, so she was right.

  How can I call you anything else when you will not commit any of yourself to me?

  He seemed to argue as if he had heard her thoughts. It was all right for her to smile dreamily into the middle distance as she read his impatient words because nobody was here to see her doing it.

  So far the only effect of your embargo is frustration and sleepless nights for me and who knows what for you. I am intrigued to hear if you are heartsore and weary, too, since it seems unfair I suffer alone.

  At least I am a dedicated and industrious employee, because I have to do something with all this time and pent-up emotion. My sister-in-law and even her formidable brother-in-law Carnwood are so impressed I shall be a legend in the city by the time you decide to relent.

  Your faithful, reluctantly obedient servant,

  Magnus Haile

  Hetta eyed his first missive with an exasperated scowl. How could she call it a love letter? Yet she had to smile, despite him making her wait so long for so little. She could picture him writing it with his dark brows almost knit in a dark and furious frown at her for putting them through this separation. She badly wanted to be the last love of his life, though—no chance of being the first when his precious Delphi had sat on that throne in all her expensive glory for so long. If he was to persuade Henrietta Champion he really did love her, then being so typically Magnus and furious about it might be his best strategy yet.