One Night of Scandal (Avon Historical Romance)

by Teresa Medeiros

  He touched his fingertips to the burnished oak. He wanted to imagine her snuggled safely in her bed with her new doll tucked in her arms. But she had rejected his offering and any comfort it might have provided. He listened outside her door for several minutes, but didn’t hear so much as a restless whimper.

  As he turned away, determined to seek the cold comfort of his own bed, the first wild wail shattered the sleeping silence of the house.

  Hayden froze, the hackles on his neck rising. Was it his imagination or was the cry louder than usual? More agonized? Angrier? Or had his fortnight in London simply sharpened his senses? Made his every nerve ending even more exquisitely attuned to the subtle nuances of loss and pain? When the second wail came, he didn’t even flinch. Because he knew that as jarring as those unearthly cries were, the worst was still to come.

  Someone was playing the piano. Lottie’s steps faltered as the distant melody drifted to her ears, slow and haunting and sweet. At first she couldn’t place the piece, but then she recognized it as the first movement of a Beethoven sonata, the one they’d began calling the “Moonlight Sonata” after his death.

  The song was beautiful, yet seemed to be mourning some unspeakable loss. Lottie felt her throat tighten. For a disjointed moment, she wondered if perhaps she had never left her bed to go in search of a ghost, but had somehow drifted into a dream. A dream where she was doomed to wander the lonely corridors of Oakwylde Manor forever with only the flickering flame of her candle and that haunting melody to guide her.

  Following its siren song, she glided down a curving flight of steps to the main floor. She hadn’t heard a single wail since she’d come creeping out of her bedchamber, clutching the candlestick in her trembling fingers. She drifted through the moonlight-dappled entrance hall and turned to the right, wandering for several minutes until she finally found herself in a broad corridor lined on both sides with closed doors. She paused to listen, cocking her head to the side. The plaintive notes seemed to be coming from both everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. Cupping a hand around the guttering flame of her candle, she worked her way down the hall, trying each door in turn. They all opened effortlessly to her touch, revealing rooms that were dark and silent.

  Just as the movement climbed to its passionate crescendo, she reached the double door at the far end of the corridor. As soon as her fingers curled around the brass doorknob, the music abruptly stopped. Lottie jerked back her hand. The silence cut a dark hole in the fabric of the night, leaving nothing but the ragged sound of her own breathing.

  She slowly reached for the doorknob again, holding her breath as it began to turn. Then stopped. She gave it a sharp rattle. Nothing. The door was locked. She slumped against it, thinking that if she were as brave as she’d always fancied herself to be, she would be feeling disappointment, not relief.

  She drew in her first even breath only to find it clouded with the perfume of night-blooming jasmine, heavy and cloying. A chill draft whipped through the corridor, snuffing the flame from the candle and leaving Lottie in darkness.

  She had feared being alone in the dark. But not being alone was far worse. She could sense a presence lurking just behind her, dangerous and feral.

  A low growl came out of the shadows. “Damn you to hell! Why can’t you stay where you belong?”

  The candlestick clattered to the floor as a pair of hands seized her and spun her around, pinning her roughly against the door.

  Chapter 9

  If I was to survive his treachery, I would have to take matters into my own hands…

  THERE WAS NOTHING SPECTRAL ABOUT THE hands that gripped her. They dug into her shoulders, radiating a raw heat that stirred the gooseflesh on Lottie’s arms more surely than any icy draft.

  It took her a dazed moment to realize she hadn’t been abandoned to complete darkness. Moonlight spun a pale web through a stained-glass fanlight set high in the wall above the double doors. But until her eyes adjusted, it was only enough light to reflect the wild gleam of her husband’s eyes.

  Hayden looked more than capable of doing murder in that moment. With each ragged breath, his nostrils flared and his heaving chest brushed hers. His knee was flexed between her thighs, making escape, or even struggle, impossible. As his gaze slid down to her trembling lips, all she could do was hang limp in his embrace and wait for him to either kiss her or kill her.

  Reason slowly returned to his eyes, chasing the shadows of madness before it. “You?” he rasped, shaking his head. When he lowered his mouth to her throat, she could only turn her head aside, helpless to resist. He nuzzled the silky flesh of her throat, breathing her in like a stallion scenting a mare he was about to mount. “I don’t understand. Why are you wearing that cursed perfume?”

  Lottie shook her head, her own breath growing short. He seemed to be consuming all of the air in the corridor. Instead of pushing him away, her traitorous fingers clung to the front of his shirt, drawing him even closer. “What perfume? I’m not wearing any scent at all.”

  He released her abruptly and took a step backward. For some reason, she felt even more vulnerable without his hands on her.

  He swiped an unsteady hand over his face. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, his voice gruff. “Why aren’t you in your bed where you belong?”

  Lottie thought it might be a less than prudent moment to remind him that she now belonged in his bed. “I was in my bed. But how was I to sleep with all of that frightful noise? It was enough to wake the dead.”

  She regretted the words the instant she said them, but it was too late to summon them back. Although she would have thought it impossible, Hayden’s face grew even more closed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Why, of course you do! You must have heard it. The wailing?” She waved a hand at the door behind them. “Then someone in there playing the piano as if their poor heart was breaking?”

  “I heard nothing,” he said flatly, refusing to so much as glance at the door.

  “What about the jasmine? You can’t deny that you smelled the jasmine.”

  He shrugged. “One of the maids must have passed through here earlier with some fresh cut blooms from the garden. I simply mistook their fragrance for your perfume.”

  Lottie didn’t waste her breath reminding him that in this barren and windy clime, jasmine probably wouldn’t bloom until June, if then. “And I suppose the wailing I heard was just the wind whistling down a crack in one of the chimneys.”

  “Have you a better explanation?” he asked, his gaze a direct challenge.

  Lottie moistened her parched lips with her tongue before blurting out, “I thought perhaps it might be a ghost.”

  Hayden simply stared at her for a long moment, then snorted. “Don’t be a silly goose. Despite what the scandal sheets print to sell their miserable rags, there are no such things as ghosts. What did you think?” he asked. “That my dead wife had returned from the grave to warn you away from me?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me. Was she given to fits of jealousy?” As Lottie surveyed the pagan beauty of his thick brows and unshaven jaw, it was hard to imagine any woman not being jealous of such a man.

  “When she didn’t get her way,” he replied softly, “Justine was given to all manner of fits.”

  Shamed by his candor, Lottie pressed a hand to her still thudding heart. “It wasn’t the ghost who nearly frightened me to death. It was you.”

  “Well, that’s one method of murder no one’s ever accused me of. I doubt your family would have been amused, but I’m sure the gossipmongers would have found it a novelty.” He leaned against the wall, giving her a mocking glance from beneath his dark lashes. “So tell me, Carlotta, if I had frightened you to death, would you have come back to haunt me?”

  She considered the question for a moment before nodding. “I most certainly would. But I wouldn’t drift about moaning and wailing or play some pretty piece on the piano. I’d bang on the bottom of a kettle and sing all seven verses
of ‘My Wife’s a Wanton Wee Thing’ at the top of my lungs.”

  Her reply startled a laugh out of him. His open smile transformed his face, deepening the boyish crinkles around his eyes and restoring a wayward dimple to his cheek. As he studied her, the lingering warmth in his eyes suddenly made her acutely aware of her own appearance.

  He had a rare gift for catching her at a disadvantage. While she had wanted to appear the very height of sophistication the next time they came face-to-face, here she stood in her ragged cotton nightdress and bare feet with her hair tumbling around her shoulders like a little girl’s. But he wasn’t looking at her as if she were a little girl. He was looking at her as if she were a woman.

  “You really ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she told him. “This is the second time today that you’ve ambushed me.”

  His smile faded, leaving Lottie with a keen sense of loss. He picked up a delicate vase from a marble-topped pier table, turning it over in his hands. “If I could have sent word of our nuptials ahead, I would have. But I didn’t dare risk Allegra finding out I’d taken a wife from one of the servants. She would have run away before we even arrived.” He spoke as if that were a common occurrence.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about her? Were you afraid I’d run away as well?”

  “Would you have?”

  “I don’t know,” she responded truthfully. “But I do know that I might have handled the situation with a bit more grace if you had warned me that I was to become a mother as well as a wife.”

  “If you’ll recall, when we met I wasn’t looking for either.”

  What Lottie recalled was that moment in Mayfair when he had turned to look at her in front of the fire. Whatever he’d been looking for, in that moment she would have almost sworn he’d found it. If the woman from Mrs. McGowan’s had arrived a few minutes before she had, would he have looked at her the same way? Would he have framed her powdered face in his hands and kissed her rouged lips as if she were some long lost piece of his soul he’d never known he was missing? Lottie wondered if he would ever look at her that way again and what she might do if he did.

  He returned the vase to the table. “As you may have guessed by now, I traveled to London to seek a governess for my daughter. She’s getting to be too much for even Martha to handle.”

  Remembering the woman’s firm grip on Allegra’s ear, Lottie found that doubtful.

  “She’s always been a difficult child, but in the past few months, she’s grown utterly impossible.”

  “I seem to recall hearing the same thing about myself on occasion,” Lottie confessed.

  “Imagine that,” he replied dryly.

  “There are some fine establishments that specialize in making the impossible possible. Have you ever considered sending her away to school?”

  “Of course I have.” He raked a hand through his hair, the gesture fraught with frustration. “I’d like nothing better than to get her away from this place, this house…” Me. Lottie heard the word as clearly as if he’d said it aloud. “But she simply won’t hear of it. Every time the subject is broached, she throws such a terrible tantrum that I fear for her health. Last month when I mentioned a school in Lucerne, she nearly stopped breathing altogether and the doctor had to be summoned. Which is why I decided to journey to London and take matters into my own hands.” A bitter smile twisted his lips. “But thanks to the efforts of the gossipmongers and scandal sheets, I met with little success. After all, what respectable woman would accompany a man with my reputation to Cornwall?”

  Lottie gazed at him, realization slowly dawning. “No respectable woman, I suppose, but perhaps one

  who’d lost her respectability? One whose reputation was in ruins?”

  Without replying, he shifted his gaze to the shadows.

  After a moment of awkward silence, she asked softly, “Why marry me at all? Why didn’t you simply hire me?”

  “Even with a chaperone, I could hardly bring an unmarried young woman into my home to teach my daughter.” The uncharacteristic gentleness of his words only deepened their sting. “Especially one I’d allegedly compromised.”

  Lottie told herself she should be grateful for his honesty. At least he’d disabused her of any girlish romantic notions before she could make even more of a fool of herself than she already had.

  Thankful that she’d always landed the leading role in the amateur theatricals at Mrs. Lyttelton’s, she managed a brittle smile. “I’m gratified to learn that you gained something from our little marriage of inconvenience besides an unwanted bride. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to get back to my bed before the wind starts whistling down the chimney again or playing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ on the piano.”

  As she made to brush past him, he closed his hand over her arm, tugging her to a halt. “If you expected more from our union, my lady, then I’m deeply sorry.”

  Gently but firmly disengaging her arm from his grip, Lottie tipped her head back to meet his gaze. “Don’t be, my lord. After all, the only thing you promised me was your name.”

  Without so much as a candle or a ghostly melody to guide her, it took Lottie four tries to retrace her path back to her bedchamber. A wailing white lady would have been a welcome distraction, but she encountered nothing more frightening than a small, forlorn mouse who looked as lost as she felt. For the first time it occurred to her how curious it was that not a single servant had come to investigate the mysterious noises. They would all have to be stone deaf or drunk in their beds not to have heard those rending cries.

  By the time she finally found her chamber, Lottie was feeling quite cross. Tripping over Mirabella, then stubbing her bare toe on one of the unpacked trunks hardly improved her temper. She had no right to be angry, she told herself as she limped back to the bed. Hayden had promised her his name, not his heart.

  Stroking Mr. Wiggles, she huddled against the headboard and gazed into the waning flames of the fire. At least she wouldn’t have to waste any more of her precious time lying around waiting for a wedding night that would never come. Hayden could deny believing in ghosts all he liked, but when he had snatched her up in his arms with that unholy light glowing in his eyes, he had only proven that his passion would never be for her, but only for his dead wife. She would never be anything more to him than a glorified governess.

  Miss Terwilliger’s puckered face rose in her vision. Was she to share the old woman’s fate after all? Was she to squander her youth trapped in a musty schoolroom until both her blood and her passions ran as dry as chalk dust through her veins?

  Her own eager words to her family came back to haunt her: I don’t have to be a wife or a governess. Why, I could be a writer just as I’ve always dreamed! All I would require is some ink, some paper, and a small cottage by the sea somewhere.

  Lottie sat up, gripped by a new excitement. Wasn’t a mansion by the sea preferable to a humble cottage?

  Even among the room’s chaos, it didn’t take Lottie long to find the small leather case she was seeking. Her movements brisk with determination, she unpacked paper, pen, and a brand-new bottle of ink. After stirring up the fire and lighting a fresh candle, she settled herself before the rosewood writing desk in the corner, a purring Pumpkin in her lap.

  She nibbled on the end of the pen for a minute, then scrawled, the bride of lord death by Carlotta Anne Fairleigh across the top of the paper, finishing her name with a majestic flourish. After another moment’s contemplation, she drew a bold line through the whole thing and wrote just beneath it lord death’s bride by Lady Oakleigh. If her husband had nothing to offer her but his name, then she might as well make use of it. Every publisher in London would be clamoring for such a manuscript. Even Miss Terwilliger would no longer be able to deny her talent.

  Mercilessly squelching a pang of conscience, Lottie drew a clean page in front of her. It took no feat of imagination to conjure up Hayden’s face in that moment when he had pinned her against the door, both his eyes and his hands blazing with p
assion. Her pen all but flew across the page as she wrote, I’ll never forget the moment I first laid eyes on the man who planned to murder me. His face was both terrible and irresistible, its dark beauty reflecting the blackness of his soul…

  Chapter 10

  If he was the Master of Hell, then I was now its mistress…

  LOTTIE DECIDED THE NEXT MORNING THAT IF it was a governess her husband wanted, then it was a governess he would have. Scorning the shimmering rose poplins and rich blue velvets that she adored, she unearthed a silvery gray morning gown from one of the trunks. By ripping away the striped sash and popping off the silk rosettes that trimmed the hem, she created a frock as unrelentingly gray and stark as the sky outside her window.

  She tugged her hair into a painfully tight chignon, ruthlessly stripping it of its curls. Not a single tendril was allowed to escape.

  She surveyed her reflection in the cheval glass that stood in the corner, her generous lips compressed into a stern line. All she needed was a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles and a fat hairy mole on her chin and she might be mistaken for Miss Terwilliger. She looked quite ancient—at least twenty-four.

  While she waited for the breakfast hour to arrive, she began to dig through her boxes and trunks. Perhaps this place wouldn’t feel so strange once she surrounded herself with familiar things. She had emptied two trunks and filled every nook and cranny of the walnut tallboy in the corner when she became aware of a most curious sensation. Although she’d read about it in numerous Gothic novels and even written about it a time or two in her own stories, she’d never truly experienced it.

  The hair on the back of her neck actually stood on end.

  The stocking she was holding slipped through her fingers as Lottie slowly turned, wondering if she was about to come face-to-face with the ghost of Hayden’s first wife.