He’d fallen into a brooding silence. It was some time before he spoke again, and when he did, it was in tones of grave self-reproach. “I shouldn’t have taxed you to walk with me. And I certainly shouldn’t have argued with you while you did so. I find I must apologize once again.”
She looked up at him in order to respond. Her heart skipped a beat. While her eyes had been closed, he’d removed his tall beaver hat. He was watching her now, tousled golden hair glistening in the afternoon sunlight and gray eyes fathomless beneath deeply knit brows. Next to him, Maggie felt small and vulnerable and disconcertingly female. Worst of all, as she met his gaze, she had a sudden, visceral memory of his warm lips closing over hers. It sent a shiver up her spine.
“Good grief,” she said, flustered. “I hope I’m not yet so infirm that I can’t walk across the grass leaning on a gentleman’s arm. I’ve already given up riding, driving, and most every other activity that brings me pleasure. If I’m now too frail for walking, I can’t think what’s left for me.”
“And yet…you claim you are not ill.”
“Nor am I. Not now, at any rate.”
“When?” he asked quietly.
“Three years ago.” Maggie answered his next question before he could ask it. “It was influenza. And according to our village doctor, it has left me frail and enfeebled with a set of what are, apparently, the weakest pair of lungs in the West Country. It’s why I haven’t attended any balls since I came to town. I can’t manage dancing any longer, or any manner of overexertion. I daresay you’ll be lucky if I don’t expire in your curricle on the journey back to Green Street.”
St. Clare saw no humor in her words. Indeed, he seemed to stiffen with something very like anger. “How? Was there an epidemic in the village?”
“Nothing so dramatic as that, thank goodness. An elderly tenant on the outskirts of Beasley Park contracted a virulent strain of the fever. He lasted only four days, and after he was dead, his wife became ill. It was difficult. She had no family or friends. No one to nurse her. I couldn’t let her die alone. I wouldn’t have. My father forbade me going, naturally, but nothing could prevent me.” She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. “I stayed with her until she died three days later. By that time, I had the fever myself.”
“And almost succumbed to it.”
“Yes, well, it was a very near thing until Bessie came.”
And just like that, the aristocratic façade dropped and the icy coldness of St. Clare’s countenance melted under a smoldering explosion of temper. “What in blazes were you thinking? Did your own well-being mean nothing to you? Had you no care at all whether you lived or died? My God.” He raked a hand through his hair. “To risk your own life for…who? The village pariah? A person who’d be mourned by no one? Whose death would go unremarked? I cannot credit it. And now you’re ill—”
“No!” she objected.
“You’re ill,” he repeated, glaring at her accusingly. “For nothing. For no bloody reason.”
“Oh, stop ripping up at me! It’s true, my own well-being wasn’t foremost in my mind, but it wasn’t for ‘no bloody reason.’ I had every reason to go to her when she was dying. I had an obligation.”
“Because you must play lady of the manor,” he said scathingly.
“No. No. Not that I wasn’t… But ministering to the sick was never… Oh, drat you! If you must know, I went because the tenant’s wife…” Her palms were damp beneath her gloves. “I’m sorry, Nicholas, but the tenant’s wife was Jenny Seaton.”
This time St. Clare didn’t object to her use of Nicholas’s name. He merely stared at her as if she’d said something to him in a language he couldn’t understand. “What?”
“The year after you left, she married Ned Jensen. Perhaps you remember him. The cantankerous old recluse who used to shout at us whenever we rode past his cottage?” She swallowed. “He was looking for someone to keep house for him and Jenny told him that marrying her would be less expense than hiring a woman from the village.”
“How touching.”
“It was no love match, but they contrived to rub along. Indeed, I think they were both fairly content for the years they had left.”
“They contrived to rub along.” St. Clare’s mouth curved into a slow, derisive smile. “What an epitaph.”
Maggie wasn’t sure what to make of his reaction. At first, he’d seemed to be almost stunned. But now…Good lord, he was furious.
Nicholas had never had a close relationship with Jenny Seaton. He’d never even called her mother. Not that she’d deserved the title. She was ignorant and neglectful, notoriously loose with her favors, and prone to unpredictable mood swings that shifted between maudlin bouts of self-pity and shrieking rages during which she often struck her young son with whatever implements were close at hand.
But whereas injuries inflicted by Frederick Burton-Smythe could send Nicholas into a towering fury, injuries inflicted by his mother had affected him in an entirely different way. Maggie remembered one particular afternoon when, after suffering an awful beating from Jenny, Nicholas had come to their meeting place in the woods at Beasley Park, and laying his head in her lap, had wept with painful, racking sobs while she stroked his hair.
The memory provoked a peculiar feeling inside her. She felt for a moment that she might weep herself.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have told him about his mother’s death. Perhaps Jenny Seaton wasn’t worth even a second of his grief. But the Nicholas she’d known had desperately needed something from Jenny. Unconditional love, Maggie had always thought. That bottomless well of emotion that in the absence of feeling from his mother, Maggie had poured into Nicholas herself.
“I’m so sorry,” she said once more. And, undeterred by the coldness she saw in St. Clare’s face, she held out her hand to him, palm up in invitation. Again, she saw that peculiar shadow flicker across his hard features, but whatever feelings he had about her or his mother or the past didn’t prevent him from taking her hand and holding it protectively in his.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” he said huskily. “You might have died.”
Ah. So that was the source of his fury. Not the untimely death of Jenny Seaton, but that Maggie had risked her own life to care for her. “I did it for your sake.”
St. Clare shook his head. “No.”
“Jenny was all that I had left of you. The last link in the whole world. So, I sat with her. Holding her hand just as I’m holding yours now. I held it until she took her very last breath. I did it because of you. Because I loved you so very much.”
“Confound you, Maggie.”
Her heart gave a mad leap. It was far from a pronouncement of his true identity, but to her ears it might as well have been. She lifted his hand and pressed it to her cheek. “Nicholas—”
“No,” St. Clare said in a low, hard voice. He cupped the side of her face. “No more of this.”
“No more of what? The truth?” Her heart skittered wildly as he touched her. She could feel the heat of his hand through his glove, could sense the tightly controlled power lurking behind the tender stroke of his fingers.
Jane had said he was dangerous. Lethal.
And perhaps he was.
But Maggie wasn’t afraid. “Am I to pretend that the past never happened? That you and I first met the night that Bessie and I came to Grosvenor Square?”
“As far as I’m concerned, we did meet for the first time that night,” St. Clare said. “There’s no need to pretend anything.”
As far as he was concerned.
Her breath stopped. It was the closest thing to an admission he’d given her. An admission—and a warning. He didn’t want to talk about the past. Didn’t want to acknowledge who he was, or what they’d been to each other.
She supposed he had his reasons. Indeed, some of them were obvious. He was pretending to a position that he didn
’t have. Portraying himself as a wealthy viscount for heaven’s sake. And Lord Allendale, of all people, seemed to be encouraging this deceit!
Was it some kind of swindle? A ploy to gain money or power?
“You’re asking me to forget the past,” she said. “But I haven’t forgotten. Not once during all these years. I could never—”
“Miss Honeywell—”
“Maggie.”
“Maggie.” He drew his hand down the edge of her jaw, catching her cleft chin lightly in his fingers. And then he whispered her name again, his low baritone voice holding a softness that bordered on reverence. “Maggie.”
She looked deeply, searchingly into his eyes. “I don’t even know what to call you.”
“Is St. Clare not to your liking?”
“It’s a title.”
“It’s my title,” he said. “But if you prefer it, when we’re alone together, I give you leave to use my Christian name.”
Maggie brightened. “Do you mean—?”
“John.”
She frowned. Not Nicholas then. It was to be John Beresford, Viscount St. Clare. He would admit to being no one else. “John,” she said.
John. St. Clare. My lord. What difference did it make? Whatever he wanted her to call him, he was Nicholas. Her Nicholas. And yet…
And yet, as she said his name, she trembled. She trembled as if he were the stranger he pretended to be. As if he were not Nicholas Seaton at all.
St. Clare’s mouth tugged into a crooked smile. “You needn’t look as if you’d just swallowed poison.” He tipped her face up to his, his thumb caressing the voluptuous edge of her bottom lip. “Here. Say it again.”
A warm blush rose in her cheeks. “John.”
His hand still holding her chin, St. Clare lowered his head to kiss her.
Maggie’s eyes closed. Her pulse was soaring just as it was used to do when one of her hunters was approaching a particularly treacherous fence. That unique mixture of fear and joy and primitive exhilaration. It was mother’s milk to a Honeywell. Her lips parted softly in breathless anticipation.
But before St. Clare could capture her mouth, he froze. The sound of carriage wheels and faraway laughter drifted on the afternoon breeze. He gave a short, rueful laugh. “The fashionable hour has begun.”
Maggie stiffened. She wasn’t a young miss just out of the schoolroom whose reputation must be zealously guarded, nor was she one of those unfortunate souls whose every movement was governed by the dictates of propriety. Nevertheless, there were rules.
She was an unmarried lady sitting with an unmarried gentleman. Sitting intimately with an unmarried gentleman. And not just any unmarried gentleman, mind. The Viscount St. Clare. The very man who had put a bullet through Frederick Burton-Smythe’s shoulder.
She gave an inward groan. George Trumble had warned her about the gossip, and what had she done but gone and thrown fuel directly onto the fire.
“We must go.” She pulled away from him, rising so quickly that she nearly toppled over on the skirts of her pelisse.
St. Clare was up in a flash, steadying her. “Easy,” he murmured. “They’re a few minutes away yet. We have time.”
“To exit the park completely unobserved?”
“That, I’m afraid, would be impossible. But there’s time yet to get you and your reputation safely back in my curricle. After that, we shall be nothing more than another couple out for an afternoon drive.”
“But everyone is already talking. If Fred hears—”
“What does that signify?” He swept up her bonnet and placed it back on her head, swiftly tying the ribbons before she could formulate an objection. “Burton-Smythe isn’t your father.”
“No, but…Beasley Park and my money and…Papa’s will…” She looked up at him. “Oh, you don’t understand how things are now!”
St. Clare paused a moment in the act of putting on his own hat. His mouth was set in a grim line. “No, likely not. But I very soon shall, make no mistake.”
The Earl of Allendale had often remarked upon his grandson’s extraordinary cold-bloodedness. It was a trait St. Clare had learned in hard school. Never to be a slave to his Beresford temper. Never to let emotion get the better of reason. In most cases, he’d discovered, an icy reserve could disarm an opponent more effectively than harsh words or a show of physical strength.
Still, he’d never been entirely certain whether his grandfather approved of his glacial demeanor.
Until now.
Seated in the earl’s lavish drawing room in Grosvenor Square—two sets of shrewd, blatantly acquisitive eyes examining him as if he were a forged painting—St. Clare would have wagered a great deal that his grandfather not only approved of his coldness, but that he admired it, too.
Pity the old earl was incapable of exercising the same degree of restraint. It hadn’t taken but one mention of his long-deceased son for him to fly straight up into the boughs. “Why in blazes would you have heard of my son’s marriage? You cut his acquaintance, along with the rest of society. Did you expect him to send you a formal announcement of his betrothal? An invitation to his wedding?”
Mrs. Lavinia Beresford, the widow of the earl’s second cousin and mother of the man who, but for the existence of St. Clare, stood to inherit the earldom, was a painfully thin woman with birdlike features and a deceptively featherbrained air. Upon arriving at Grosvenor Square with her son fifteen minutes before, she’d perched herself on the edge of the drawing room sofa and set up an endless chirp of sharp-edged chatter.
“What have I said?” she asked with a titter. “Surely you didn’t think I meant to imply…? I merely wondered…” She turned her sharp eyes back on St. Clare, the quick movement of her neck causing the ostrich plumes in her hat to quiver. “As one does wonder, you know. Having never met your mother myself. And not knowing any of her family.”
St. Clare looked steadily back at her. He’d known this was coming. His grandfather had prepared him for it. They were to meet such accusations head on. Calmly, but decisively, and without undue protestation.
At least, that had been the plan.
“How would you know them?” Allendale bellowed. “My son was living in exile! He wasn’t courting girls at Almack’s!”
“Oh dear. I have put it badly, haven’t I?” She looked to her son for assistance. “Lionel?”
At nearly thirty years of age, Lionel Beresford bore little resemblance to the “young pup” that St. Clare had heard his grandfather raving about for so many years. He was, in fact, a fairly large gentleman. His height was only an inch or two below St. Clare’s own, and his width was presently straining at the confines of a brightly striped waistcoat and skintight pantaloons.
He had light brown curls brushed into careful disorder. A fleshy chin resting on an elaborately folded neckcloth. And he bore about himself an air of well-practiced indolence.
St. Clare had initially identified him as some manner of aspiring dandy. Within fifteen minutes of meeting him, however, it had become clear that Lionel Beresford was another sort of creature altogether.
“Madre means no offense,” he said lazily. “She’s simply curious. As are we all.”
Allendale glared at Lionel from under ominously lowered brows. “Curious, are you? Damn your impudence. What right do you have to be curious about my heir?”
“We are family, Uncle.”
“Uncle, is it!” Allendale exploded. “I’m no uncle of yours, you encroaching young jackanapes!”
“Oh,” Mrs. Beresford tittered again, this time at St. Clare. “How coolly you look at us, my lord. What you must think. That I would cast aspersions on your parentage! I daresay your mother was an excellent sort of woman, if not, perhaps, as gently bred as one might like. And as for your father, well, he was always wild. Up to all manner of pranks, I’m told. And what he did, dueling with that poor f
eebleminded boy of Penworthy’s was—as many still say—dishonorable—” She stopped and tittered once more at her own tactlessness. “But I shall say no more on the subject. The past is such a delicate subject for us Beresfords, is it not? And yet”—she paused, smiling—“one cannot help unearthing it at every turn.”
“Can’t they?” Allendale growled. “If you’ve come up to town to dig up some sort of a scandal, Lavinia—”
“Scandal? But surely you don’t expect anything like a scandal? People may talk, naturally. But you must rest assured, Lionel and I shall do our parts to put down any doubts—that is to say any rumors—about Lord St. Clare’s legitimacy. Won’t we, Lionel?”
Lionel paused in the act of perusing a valuable-looking curio to pronounce himself at St. Clare’s service. “I stand ready to assist you on every front. We Beresfords must stick together.”
“You? A Beresford?” Allendale gave a crack of laughter. “Your distant ancestor was a Beresford, I grant you, but what you are, my boy, is the descendant of four generations of tradesmen. You’re no more a Beresford than Jessup here.”
The elderly butler, who had just entered the drawing room, graced his employer with a deferential bow. He then proceeded to announce the arrival of Lord Vickers and Lord Mattingly.
“Show them in, Jessup,” Allendale said. “The only thing this farce lacks is an audience.”
“Tradesmen?” Mrs. Beresford echoed when Jessup had withdrawn. “It is true that my late husband’s great grandsire married an heiress, but—”
“A cit’s daughter.”
“Oh no,” Mrs. Beresford protested. “Her father was a wealthy gentleman, yes, but he was no cit. He might have dabbled a bit in trade, but—”
“He owned a manufactory in Leeds,” Allendale said.
St. Clare had heard the story frequently. There had been four Beresford brothers all those generations ago. Charles, the eldest, had inherited the earldom. Harold, the youngest, had married a cit’s daughter. Harold’s own sons had prospered in trade and their sons too, thus supplying the fortune on which subsequent descendants of Harold’s line had lived.
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