Is in search of a wife possessed of fortune
Of which he might exchange his title for a portion.
You will know him by his manner fair, and courtly air
And by the beauty of his golden hair.
“Too kind,” he muttered.
She looked up, and his face was akin to that of someone whose foot had been trampled by a milk cart. “If you’re not enjoying this, may I stop?”
He leaned back and recrossed his ankles. “And miss the end? Many say that’s the best part. Please, read on.”
“Very well.” She took a deep breath and recited the rest quickly, to get it over with:
Such a swain might seem a suitor most appealing
If one did not know the secrets he’s concealing.
A reputation for virtue, calm, and gravity
Belies an inclination for depravity.
Princess Cosima must, out of duty, here announce:
His lordship belongs to a SECRET WHIPPING HOUSE
Where he’s been espied by London’s knowing sages—
“Enjoying acts not fit for decent pages,” Apthorp cut in, slowly, and with the excellent elocution he was known for in the Lords.
She stopped, but he gestured for her to read on. As she did so, haltingly, he closed his eyes and recited with her from memory.
“A rogue in disguise as a paragon of virtue,” they said together,
Is the kind of rogue most liable to hurt you.
Or, better still, to be the source of rue
On that day he comes to you
And beseeches—oh, wicked farce—
That his wife deliver pain unto his arse.
Eyes still firmly shut, he gave a long, slow clap at her performance. “Inspired work. Though you might have tidied up the meter.”
She felt like her heart might burst from shame. She rushed forward and perched on the arm of the sofa on which he was rather imperiously reclined. “You must let me explain. You see—”
“I see,” he said, “that there is nothing further to discuss. Follow your own advice, Lady Constance. Stay away from me.”
He rose and stalked across the room to a decanter of brandy.
Her pulse beat wildly. She had not anticipated he might be so unmanageable. She had to fix this now before it spiraled out of her control.
As it was, there was time enough to correct the worst of the damage. But only if Apthorp agreed to her plan. And he had to, because if her brother found out she was the author of this poem before she’d fixed the situation, well. That would be it.
She’d lose him.
She knew better than anyone that one was not entitled to one’s family’s affection. One was not even entitled to one’s home, or one’s country. One had to win one’s place through character and merit. And if one’s character was susceptible to occasional lapses in judgment, one had to draw on the more reliable powers of beguilement, ingenuity, and wiles.
She clasped her hands before her. “Apthorp, please listen. This has all gotten out of hand. Letters from Princess Cosima is a private little note I send out to a tiny handful of ladies to share pertinent information about potential suitors—the kinds of things that men discuss at their clubs but ladies never learn until it’s far too late. I had no idea the poem would find its way to Saints & Satyrs, or be turned into a song, or that the Spences would see it and drop your bill. I only meant to apprise Miss Bastian of your”—she winced, for this was delicate—“eccentricities … before she married you.”
Oh, it was so dreadful she wanted to disappear.
“Marry Miss Bastian?” he repeated. He wrinkled his face, as though she was at once very tiring and very confusing. “But I don’t even like Miss Bastian.”
Chapter 3
Constance narrowed her eyes at him like she thought he was playing a trick on her.
“Now is not the time to be coy, Apthorp,” she drawled. “You all but told me you intended to propose to her. You asked me what kind of betrothal gift she would like.”
Was she joking? Was she daft? He had not asked her about betrothal gifts because he wanted to marry Miss Bastian. He had asked her about betrothal gifts because he wanted to marry Constance.
Because he’d been in love with her so long that it felt as unremarkable as breathing. Because he’d dreamt of the day when he could finally tell her he adored her. Because he’d spent the past eight years trying to shape himself into the kind of man who had more to offer her than a pair of bankrupt salt mines, a crumbling earldom, and more debts than he was comfortable tallying in his own mind.
For years, he’d struggled not to make a fool of himself in front of her, not to let his longing seep out at every family supper and ballroom soiree and chance passing in the corridor of his cousin’s town house.
Evidently he’d been better at it than he’d thought.
He counted to ten before speaking. “You mistook my meaning. I had no intention of offering for Miss Bastian.”
She wrinkled her nose in a manner he’d always, until today, found very charming. “You gave every evidence of being very fond of her,” she said flatly. “You’ve followed her around for months.”
Only, he refrained from pointing out, because she was always, always with Constance.
He didn’t answer. He turned around and busied himself retrieving his discarded clothing from the floor, because it made him ache to look at her.
She had always had an affinity for gossip. She’d always been cleverer with her words than she was careful. And she’d always been provocative—determined to bend the world to her very vivid vision of it.
Before, he had found these qualities poignant. They—along with her light, her charm, her mordant wit, her laughter—made her who she was. Irrepressibly, endearingly herself.
Now she just seemed reckless.
Cruel.
He did not want to hear more about her supposed reasons for exposing him. He did not want to imagine how little she must think of him to do so publicly.
In rhyming goddamned verse.
He just wanted her out of his house.
“I think it’s time you took your leave.”
She drew up beside him and put her fingers to his arm.
He froze. His body had yet to unlearn the wanting of her touch, and pricked in excitement at it even as his mind recoiled.
“Apthorp, I’m truly sorry. Please, listen. You haven’t let me finish my proposal.”
He wrenched his arm out of Constance’s grip.
“No, I haven’t considered it. And I don’t intend to.”
He was on the verge of shouting. He needed to becalm himself. But for her to propose marriage—the thing he’d wanted so badly for so long—now when there was no hope of ever having it, when she’d proved there had never been hope, that he’d been insane for entertaining the idea—Christ. It was like some ghoulish fable: the greedy man granted the undeserved thing he’d always wanted, in exchange for his own destruction.
“Why not?” she asked quietly.
“Because the idea of marrying you after you’ve done such a thing is as preposterous as it is insulting, Constance,” he shouted.
Her face did something he had not seen it do in years: collapsed.
Utterly fell, like he was seeing London’s most self-contained and confident young woman transform back into the awkward girl she’d been when he first met her. Spirited and impulsive and sensitive and shockingly easy to injure.
She looked so hurt he felt unmoored.
But why should she be hurt?
And why should he care if she was?
Her mouth opened, but for once, nothing came out of it.
And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the despair vanished from her eyes and she returned to her full height, like she’d reinflated with air.
“Ah. I think you have misunderstood me,” she said with a dry smile. “I wasn’t suggesting we actually marry.”
She shuddered theatrically. “Such would be the stuff
of nightmares, would it not?”
“Just think of it!” Constance forced herself to continue drolly, tossing her hair so that Apthorp would not see the fronds of humiliation that were trying to overtake her from within. “Outrageous Constance and Lord Bore, bound together for a miserable lifetime.”
She made a show of shivering at the madness of the idea. And it was mad, so it was odd that his evident horror at such an arrangement should make her feel like she might burst into tears.
Why should she feel stung by his rejection? It wasn’t like she actually wanted to marry him. She didn’t even like him. He’d persecuted her for years.
“We needn’t actually marry,” she repeated, for if she paused, her voice might quaver and he might sense that she was acting. “We only need convince society we intend to long enough to restore your reputation and ensure your bill passes.”
He crossed his arms. “My bill is dead.”
“But that’s not true. Rosecroft said it’s only that the final reading’s been delayed.”
“A technicality. It will go back up in a month’s time, but it won’t pass without Lord Spence’s votes, and there’s no hope of getting them so long as his wife believes me to be a depraved sinner.”
She smiled, relieved to be back on the solid footing of her strategy. For he was correct. Lady Spence was a leading sponsor of a pious low-church congregation, and spent her time trying to convert the aristocracy to her evangelical sect. Left to her own devices, she would certainly do everything in her power to stand in Apthorp’s way, for there was nothing she loathed more than peers who failed to use their august standing to model Christian virtue.
But Constance did not intend to leave Lady Spence to her own devices. Constance intended to manipulate her one very obvious vulnerability:
“Lady Spence is my godmother,” she said triumphantly. “The dearest friend of my late mother.”
Apthorp appeared unmoved. “Yes. Your godmother, who has always disapproved of you nearly as much as she now disapproves of me.”
She clicked her tongue. “Oh, Apthorp. Surely you, of all people, must know what disapproving people love.”
“Urging their husbands to vote against notorious blackguard sinners?” he said darkly.
“Reforming notorious blackguard sinners. Saving their souls!”
He rolled his eyes. “You are even more ridiculous than I thought.”
She glared at him. Imagine, her thinking all day that she might actually marry this man. She’d been so overcome with guilt it had made her temporarily insane.
“Just listen. We’ll say we’ve been secretly engaged for years and were waiting for your bill to pass to marry. We’ll dismiss the rumors about you as sordid slander by enemies seeking to block the waterways. My brother’s blessing will be enough to vouch for your character with the City votes, and we’ll spend the month winning over the Spences and any others until we have the numbers. When the bill passes, you can build your canal as you planned. And in the meantime, the promise of my dowry will appease your creditors.”
She smiled at him. A fake engagement would save them decades of torturing each other. It was so tidy she wondered why she hadn’t thought of it herself.
“It won’t work, Constance.”
“Of course it will.”
He closed his eyes and took a long, slow breath. “You do realize no respectable gentleman would marry you if you did this. You’d be ruined.”
She laughed. “Apthorp. No respectable gentleman would marry me as it is.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” He said it so gruffly she looked at him in surprise. Did he really think she was capable of attracting—
“Your brother’s a duke,” he added quickly. “You have eighty thousand pounds.”
Oh. That.
“Yes, and a reputation for being as vulgar and indecent as I am rich. We both know I’m not a proper lady. You’ve made your thoughts on that subject clear enough for years.”
His mouth fell open in offense. He looked genuinely aghast. “I’ve never said you weren’t a lady.”
She snorted. “No, you are far too polite to ever say anything as direct as that, Lord Bore. Instead you imply I cut my meat too indelicately, evade my chaperones too frequently, fraternize with gentlemen too indiscriminately, curtsy too abruptly, talk too loudly, and go on about plays and poetry too lengthily. One needn’t explicitly call someone unsuitable to make the point.”
He looked so horrified that for a moment she was embarrassed that she had revealed too much. And she had not even mentioned the incident with the rosebush, or the portrait gallery.
“Anyway,” she said airily, waving it off. “It scarcely matters, as I don’t wish to marry the kind of man who would covet some dull and dreary yes m’lord–ing flower of the realm.”
That the concern in his face disappeared let her know she had arrived upon the right argument. She dug in for emphasis. “Imagine me, stuck in some rotting country pile amusing myself with charity baskets and sewing. I scarcely want to be a wife, let alone a dreary country countess. I want to write plays and travel and be free from the tedious strictures one must observe if one is a proper sort of lady. Being improper is my calling.”
He maintained an even expression as he took in this speech, but she could tell by the way his eyes darkened that it stung him.
Good.
He crossed his arms. “Fine. But even if that’s true, your brother will never go along with such a scheme.”
Her smug serenity evaporated. He was right.
At the mention of her brother, Constance’s face darkened. For a moment, she seemed less certain. But then she tossed her head and rolled her eyes at him.
“He will, because he will not know about it. I will convince him we are in love.”
“In love,” Apthorp repeated.
She nodded. “Madly. For ages and ages. Ever since I caught you unawares and kissed you in a garden maze and you could not stop dreaming about me.” She smiled at him bitterly.
The words were like a stickpin to his heart. Far closer to the truth than she could know. He chose not to acknowledge them.
“Westmead will murder me if he thinks I’ve dragged you into this. He’d be right to call me out.”
“Unless he believes that my heart will snap in two without you. And he will. Because I will make it so.”
The stickpin became more like a dagger.
“And what of when we call it off? What will he think then?”
The light in her eyes went dark. Clearly, she had not thought this through. But if she wanted to pretend that such a plan had no consequences for her future, he would not.
She loved her brother and her family fiercely. Her loyalty to them was one of the things about her he admired.
“We won’t ever tell him it was fake, of course. I don’t wish for him to know that I exposed you, and it will not serve you to let anyone know we have conspired. If you will agree not to mention it, I’ll simply run away.”
“You’ll run away?” he repeated. “What about your family? All your friends in London? Your plays?”
She smiled and shrugged, as though the things he had watched her pursue with a blind intensity for the past five years meant nothing to her, and he was foolish to think that they had.
“England is so provincial. I’m bored of it. I long for Paris.”
“We’re on the cusp of war with France,” he ground out.
“Then I’ll go to Genoa or Vienna,” she snapped. “Where I go is not your concern, in any case. You needn’t be so honorable. Your honor is wasted on me. Is that not clear?”
No, it isn’t, he stopped himself from saying. He would not lower himself by conveying the appeal of intelligence and determination and a sparkling wit—not to mention cornflower-blue eyes and the kind of hair rarely found outside of poetry—to his betrayer.
She lowered her voice. “Apthorp, be sensible. If you won’t save yourself, think of your mother and sister. They have no independent me
ans and they will be destroyed by this. You have a duty to them. We both do. To fix it.”
He closed his eyes. She was manipulating him. And it was working.
He did owe it to his family to salvage what he could of this disaster. It was bad enough they would be plunged into scandal on his account. But to tell them that the meager luxuries he’d managed to sustain for them—the good tea that was so important to his mother; the one new gown each year; the annual trip to Tunbridge Wells to take the waters and be seen living as though things were as they’d always been—he couldn’t imagine telling them they would have to give them up.
How could he ask them to pay for his mistakes again, after all he’d put them through?
How could he ask that when there was a chance, however slim, that Constance’s plan could work?
She wielded a not insignificant amount of influence in London society, after all, moving fluidly between aristocratic circles and the colorful world of the artists and writers she patronized. Her balls and salons were as legendary as her family’s reputation for rebellion. Together, he and Constance would have the eyes of London on them. They would have an opportunity.
But could he stomach it?
Could he swallow down the hurt that rose in his throat like bile at what she’d done and the manner in which she’d done it? Excuse her for believing that he, or anyone, deserved to be pilloried and shamed for doing what he liked in private? Lead a woman who felt such contempt for him around ballrooms and before their families as if she made him the happiest man on earth? And do it knowing they were lying to everyone they loved?
He inhaled and caught Constance’s distinctive fragrance wafting near him, smoky and round, like frankincense and orange blossoms. A scent that suggested her formal gowns and fresh blond beauty belied secrets a certain kind of man would give anything to know.
He opened his eyes to find her perched on her knees before him in the posture of a supplicant.
Christ. The things he would have done, a day ago, to see her willingly in that position.
The Earl I Ruined Page 3