Never Trust a Rake

by Annie Burrows

  ‘I am so glad you are taking heed,’ said Lady Carelyon, completely misinterpreting Henrietta’s words. ‘Because I have no doubt that if you continue to resist him, eventually he will turn on you. He will put it about that he has tired of the chase, perhaps. Start to tell people that you are not worth it. That it all began as a bet, or something. He will drag your name through the mud, my dear, and when that begins, you will need an ally. I am in the best position to defend your reputation. So—’ she flashed a smile that was a parody of what one friend might give to another ‘—we ought to begin to establish our friendship at once. To that end, I have come to bring your invitation to my dress ball next week, rather than just sending it. And do you know what the most humorous aspect of the situation is? He has actually asked me himself if I would take you up!’

  She laughed—and Henrietta immediately revised her opinion that Miss Waverley’s laugh was the most unpleasant sound she had ever heard. It had not a tenth of the malice in it.

  ‘He says that I must include your aunt.’ She sighed, looking around the drawing room with disdain. ‘And that pretty little cousin of yours—’ she darted her a rather envious look ‘—from whom apparently you are inseparable. So sweet.’ She grimaced as though she’d just consumed about a pound of fudge in one go and was feeling faintly nauseous.

  ‘Well, so far I have heard they have behaved themselves prettily enough elsewhere and so I have told Carelyon. You need not worry you will meet with a snub in my house.’

  Henrietta wasn’t having any trouble breathing now. She was drawing in such huge, great indignant breaths that they were making her entire body quiver. What she was having trouble doing, however, was holding back the words she only wished she was at liberty to say to this patronising, spiteful, malicious, disloyal … cat!

  Oh, if only she were not in her aunt’s drawing room, she would …

  She was pulled up short by a vision of Lord Deben, his sensuous mouth twitching with amusement at her quandary: to speak her mind or to mind her manners. To cause a scene in her aunt’s drawing room or to allow his sister to get away with maligning him.

  He would pretend he didn’t care that his own sister was determined to think the worst of him. He would just shrug if he heard that she had been making such conjectures about him, in public.

  But she could not pretend not to care.

  ‘Thank you for doing me the honour of condescending to invite me to your home,’ she said with frigid politeness. ‘I shall, of course, have to consult with my aunt to see what events we are already committed to.’

  Lady Carelyon’s eyes flashed with annoyance, though she kept a smile pinned firmly to her lips as she replied, ‘How terribly correct of you. Not that I imagine you will have anything on that evening that could possibly prevent her from wishing to gain the entrée into my set.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ Henrietta rather thought that if the dress ball clashed with an event being thrown by a real friend of her aunt’s, or a useful business contact of her uncle’s, then they would be sending their apologies. They had no need of the patronage of such as Lord and Lady Carelyon. And she would rather walk a mile barefoot than to appear on friendly terms with anyone who so obviously hated her own brother.

  And now, bother it, she wished she had not already spoken to Lord Deben about ending their involvement. If they weren’t careful, this spiteful cat would think it was her doing. She would gloat. She couldn’t bear the thought of doing anything to cause somebody to be able to gloat over Lord Deben’s discomfort.

  Even before Lady Carelyon left, Henrietta could feel the beginnings of a headache nagging at the base of her skull. Why, oh, why had she ever embarked on this ridiculous charade? She was getting more deeply entangled day by day. Even trying to end it was fraught with problems.

  But she was bound to see Lord Deben tonight. They must find an opportunity to talk and come up with a way to break free of each other that left him with his pride intact. For he was the one who would be staying in town and would have to deal with any gossip that might ensue. Eventually, she would return to Much Wakering, where people would only marvel that she had captured the attention of such a notorious rake at all.

  Which was something that still frankly puzzled her. He need not have had anything further to do with her, after he’d thanked her for attempting to rescue him from Miss Waverley’s machinations.

  Especially because he had not needed her to do any such thing. He’d told her he would never have been pressured into marriage, yet he had behaved as though he believed he owed her something. Had said that was why he had taken such pains to find her and thank her.

  The puzzle occupied her thoughts almost as much as did the means of ending their strange entanglement throughout the rest of the day. Hadn’t he said something about her saving him from a fate worse than death? She’d been so cross—and without reason, too—that she had not been paying as much attention as she ought to have done. But it nagged at her now. Why should he have said anything about her saving him, if he had not intended to marry Miss Waverley at all?

  The tension at the base of her skull drew so tight that just before they went upstairs to get ready, her aunt actually asked if she was sure she was well enough to attend the Swaffhams’ ball.

  ‘You look rather pale. And you have hardly eaten anything all day. I fear you may be sickening for something.’

  ‘I had a slight headache earlier,’ she prevaricated. She could not stay at home. She had to see Lord Deben. Had to speak to him. ‘But it is nothing, truly.’

  ‘Another one? Oh dear. I suppose it is almost time for your monthlies,’ her aunt concluded.

  Face on fire, Henrietta did not attempt to deny it. Nor did she make any objections when her aunt sent her very own maid, Maudy, to rub lavender water into her temples. Although she did think it might have done her more good had the girl rubbed it into the base of her neck, where the tension was reaching screaming point. She did not know what to do. About anything. That was the problem.

  She just wanted to lay it all down at Lord Deben’s feet.

  Though there would, of course, be a great deal of evening to endure before she was able to do so. The dances with the nameless young men, the false compliments from society ladies who followed the fashion by being seen talking to the right people. And perhaps, tonight, the gleeful speculation about whether Lady Carelyon’s assumptions might have some basis, if those who’d been present when she’d made them had managed to disseminate the story.

  The night dragged as slowly as she’d foreseen, each minute seeming like an hour, each dance a major feat of endurance. She had just about given up hope of seeing him at all when he came strolling across the ballroom towards her, greeting a favoured few with an appearance of tolerance, or pretending not to see others he considered beneath his notice.

  ‘I wonder,’ he said when he eventually reached her side, ‘what sort of mood you are in tonight? Dare I ask if I may sit beside you?’

  ‘I do not know why you bother,’ she complained as he sat, without having waited for her response, ‘since you meant to sit there no matter what I might have said.’

  He inclined his upper body towards her. ‘How else am I to discover what it is that has made you appear so very unhappy tonight? Are you perchance having second thoughts about bringing our charade to an end?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ she began.

  He smiled. ‘Ah, you find that you have grown so accustomed to having me at your beck and call that you would rather not forgo the pleasure.’

  ‘It is not that …’

  ‘You have discovered, then,’ he said, his smile broadening to something that was very nearly a smirk, ‘that you have fallen so violently in love with me that you wish to cast caution to the winds and admit that you cannot live without me.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ she said, shrinking into herself. Dear lord, he couldn’t possibly have guessed how she felt about him, could he? She knew it wasn’t easy to disguise what she was thinking,
most of the time, but she’d been so careful not to gaze up at him with spaniel eyes, or simper or sigh, nor any of the things she’d seen other girls do to indicate they found the gentleman with whom they were talking utterly irresistible.

  He heaved a great sigh, as though she’d wounded him. And when she knew that having her fall in love with him must be the very last thing he’d want, it made her want to hit him.

  ‘It is your sister,’ she snapped. ‘She paid me a visit this afternoon and congratulated me, in a very loud voice, for resisting your vile attempts to seduce me. Apparently you are now such a hardened rake that committing adultery on a regular basis has grown too tame. You are now embarking on a career of seducing and abandoning innocent girls.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, isn’t it obvious? If you stop pursuing me now, after that little incident …’

  ‘Where you broke your fan over my arm and ran to your aunt as though I’d made an indecent suggestion …’

  She coloured up. ‘Yes. I admit it is all my fault that people should have started to think such vile things about you. S-so we can’t just stop now. Or people will think …’

  ‘That your maidenly reluctance has spiked my jaded palate,’ he finished for her, a curl to his lip.

  ‘I know. I’m so terribly sorry. I wouldn’t for the world have people believing such a horrid thing about you.’

  The cynical expression leached from his face. Eyes fully open, he stared at her.

  ‘All this concern, the pallor in your face, your agitation, your change of mind regarding our arrangement, it all stems from a desire to protect my reputation?’

  ‘Yes. You see …’

  He flung back his head and laughed.

  She firmed her mouth and turned her head away. The headache, which had been building all day, was now making her entire skull feel too tight. She wanted to go home.

  ‘No, now, Miss Gibson, please do not take offence,’ he said. ‘It is just that my reputation is already so blackened, that the notion of anyone trying to defend it is beyond priceless.’

  ‘Yes. I quite see,’ she said, getting unsteadily to her feet. ‘If you will excuse me, Lord Deben, I shall remove my quite-unnecessary presence from your vicinity, your life, and no doubt within a very short space of time, your memory …’

  He leapt to his feet and seized her wrist, all traces of humour vanished. ‘Your presence in my life is far from unnecessary. You may not believe it, Miss Gibson, but …’

  But how was he to finish that sentence? She’d never been further from being receptive to a declaration. He’d given her the perfect opportunity to tell him if she was softening towards him and she’d said he was being absurd. If he told her that he only wished to stop the charade because he wanted them to have a real relationship, that in fact he wanted to marry her, in the mood she was in, she’d turn him down flat.

  Well, he wasn’t going to give her the chance to humiliate him with a refusal. No woman would bring him to his knees. He had his own methods of getting what he wanted, which would be much more effective than making a formal proposal.

  ‘I find myself regretting ending things between us before I have finished your training,’ he said smoothly. ‘You were proving such an apt pupil, too.’

  ‘I was not,’ she denied hotly. ‘Anyway, there hasn’t been any training …’

  ‘Ah, yes, there has. But it has perhaps been too subtle for you to notice. You melted under my kisses like butter left out in the sun, that night,’ he said, leaning in close. ‘Since then, I have taught your body to respond merely to the feel of my breath against the places I laid my mouth. I am arousing you, right now, just by murmuring into your ear. Your breathing has gone shallow. Your nipples have gone hard.’

  ‘It isn’t true,’ she protested, her shock at the accuracy of his statement making her take such a hasty step back that she cannoned into the chair she’d just been sitting on.

  ‘Oh, but it is. You want me. You are positively aching for me to kiss you. Really kiss you. On the mouth. I would wager you want my hands on your body, too.’

  ‘S-stop it!’

  ‘Oh, there is no need to be angry. I want you, too. Have I not already told you that I want to taste you again?’

  ‘But you won’t. You cannot. We are ending this, this …’

  ‘But what better way to end it, than with a farewell kiss? The kiss we have both been waiting for? Panting for?’

  ‘I am … not. I … panting? No!’

  He smiled down at her, mockingly. ‘I did not take you for a coward. Or a liar.’

  ‘I am neither!’

  ‘Then prove it. Go out through the doors at the end of the ballroom. You will find yourself on a terrace. Should you walk to your right, you will find a series of French doors. Enter at the fourth set and you will be in a small study, which is rarely used. I shall be waiting for you there, having gone by an entirely different route.’

  She glared up at him, not sure just what it was about that outrageous statement that made her the most angry. The accusation that she was panting for him, which was true. But to say so to her face … how dare he? It made her feel so … naked. He knew her so well. The reactions she’d tried so hard to hide. He’d known all about them, all the time.

  Then there was the horrid suspicion that to know the layout of the house so well that he could tell her exactly how to reach the spot he’d designated for a secret assignation meant he must have used that room for trysts in the past.

  ‘You will have a long wait,’ she said, her chest heaving with emotion.

  ‘Good,’ he murmured, a gleam of appreciation in his eye.

  ‘What do you mean, good?’ He did not want her after all? He had been just teasing her? Or testing her? Oh, why was the man so hard to understand?

  ‘I mean that your demeanour now has everyone convinced that the most recent rumour is true. They are all watching us—no, don’t look round. Keep your indignant little face turned towards me. Yes, that’s it. Let them think I am a satyr,’ he said, his mouth curving into a smile so wicked it was almost a leer. ‘Do you think I care?’

  Oh. He had not been lying about wanting her, then. She felt almost giddy with relief. For a moment. But then she remembered Lady Carelyon’s nasty suspicions about him.

  ‘But then your sister will have triumphed. It is not right.’

  ‘I have not been so fortunate in my siblings as you have been in yours. I have never succeeded in making any of them relinquish the resentments brought about by the injustice they suffered in their childhood, no matter what I do. So to hell with them all.’

  His features were still fixed in that satyr look, but she could see what looked like torment burning in the black depths of his eyes.

  ‘Just grant me one last request before we part,’ he grated. ‘Let me kiss you. Let me taste your innocence, your freshness, your purity. Just once. Is that too much to ask of you?’

  Her whole being strained towards him. He was so alone, so unloved. And all so unjustly. The things his siblings had suffered in his childhood were not his fault. Why should he have to pay for them?

  And, oh, how she wanted to know what it would be like to kiss him. Just once.

  ‘Leave now,’ he drawled, lasciviously. ‘Flounce out of the room and go out on to the terrace.’

  ‘I don’t think I know how to flounce.’

  ‘March out with your nose in the air and your back ramrod straight then, the picture of outraged innocence. It will serve the purpose just as well.’

  ‘You mean, to confirm that horrid story your own sister is putting about?’

  He folded his arms across his chest and smiled at her—a smile so completely without mirth that it made her want to weep.

  ‘Tears will do, I suppose,’ he said, reaching out as though to catch one that was forming on her eyelashes. ‘A woman’s last resort,’ he said with a mocking sneer.

  That was too much for Henrietta. She was almost weeping for him, yet he could still
mock her. He admitted he wanted to kiss her, yet it was only to sample her freshness, as though she was some sort of exotic fruit.

  She was almost breaking her heart over him and he was donning his suit of chainmail again. She wanted to beat her fists against his chest. Wail and tear her hair.

  But of course she did no such thing. Grappling with the strings of her reticule for a handkerchief, she stumbled away from him, half-blinded by tears of mortification, and sorrow, and confusion. How she managed to find her way out on to the terrace she had no idea.

  It was by sheer coincidence that she stumbled through the French doors where she made her way to the parapet, and leaned on it, blindly staring out over the dimly lit gravel walks below.

  Or was it? After only a very few moments she realised he’d pointed her in this direction before giving her that final taunt. The whole affair mattered so little to him that even when she was almost in tears, he remained cool enough to manipulate her. Of all the devious, conniving, overbearing men …

  Yet this was the man she loved. How could she? She pressed the handkerchief to her eyes, inhaling the calming scent of lavender with which it had been soaked.

  He was probably making his way to the little room of which he’d spoken right now. With a swagger to his walk and a smug little smile hovering over those sensual lips. So sure that she’d come to him like a … what was it her aunt had said? Like a little homing pigeon, that was it!

  Well, that smile would soon falter when he waited, and waited, and she didn’t go at all. That would show him!

  But were there not enough people in his life already who reacted to his faults by treating him as though that was all there was of him? Did she really want to join their ranks?

  Did she want to leave him with the impression she didn’t care? Or that she held her own pride more dear than his feelings? Feelings that he would deny he had, but, oh, she’d glimpsed the hurt in his eyes before he’d disguised it under the mockery.

  And how could he ever believe in the existence of love, unless somebody was prepared to show some to him?