Helen Dickson

by When Marrying a Duke. . .

  ‘I imagine they do. So tell me, why the long face?’

  ‘I wasn’t aware that I had one.’

  ‘Take it from me, you have. Has someone upset you?’

  ‘No—at least...’ She sighed. Nothing seemed to escape those penetrating silver-grey eyes of his.

  ‘I hope I’m not the cause and that you’re not bearing a grudge over our little altercation when I forcibly made you leave the native quarter.’

  ‘No. I don’t bear grudges—even if you do think I’m a flighty, fluff-headed socialite who only cares about enjoying herself,’ she said with a puckish smile curving her lips. ‘I said I was sorry and I meant it. I hope you will accept my thanks for not telling my father. I’m grateful to you for that. And I was quite obnoxious on our encounter in Happy Valley, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, you were, but I don’t bear grudges either.’ He grinned, his eyes dancing with humour. ‘It’s not every day a pretty young lady throws herself at my feet,’ he teased lightly.

  ‘Not intentionally. I’m glad I didn’t land on you or your wife. I should hate to have hurt her, or you for that matter.’

  ‘Thank you. I appreciate your concern. But you might have hurt yourself. So—why the long face?’

  ‘Oliver and Julian are going to Europe to further their education. I’ve only just found out.’

  ‘I see. And you’ll miss them, naturally.’

  ‘Yes, of course I will. Emma, my closest friend, is also leaving the island. Her parents are sending her to be finished off somewhere in Europe.’

  ‘And that bothers you?’

  ‘It felt like having a bucket of cold water poured over my head. If it weren’t for you telling Oliver’s father about his visit to China Town, he wouldn’t be leaving. Do you make a habit of interfering in other people’s lives, Lord Trevellyan?’

  ‘Only when I deem it necessary,’ he replied coolly. ‘I’d like to think I’ve done young Schofield a favour.’

  ‘But his father is sending him to England.’

  ‘It’s the best thing for him, if you ask me.’

  ‘I wasn’t, and that is your opinion.’

  ‘Which I trust.’

  ‘But to see my three best friends leave the island! We’ve been together for a long time. I can’t bear to think of the group being broken up. Nothing will be the same any more. Life will be so boring.’

  ‘Oh, I think you’re still young enough to change all that.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ she admitted bluntly. ‘To be honest, I don’t know if I would want to.’

  ‘So a betrothal to the opium-smoking young man I found you with in the native quarter the other day is not to be considered?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she replied. A frown marred her smooth forehead at the idea that she and Oliver might be linked together. ‘Even though my father is unaware of Oliver’s partiality for a particular narcotic, he would not encourage a match between us.’

  ‘He doesn’t like Mr Schofield?’

  ‘Oh, no, that isn’t the reason. In fact, Father would have no reservations about Oliver making me an excellent husband. It’s just that he would have serious reservations about my life with my prospective mother-in-law.’

  Max chuckled softly. ‘Having encountered Mrs Schofield on several occasions, I can see his point. She’s a tiresome busybody and worse than a washerwoman for the pleasure she takes in idle gossip and malicious talk.’

  ‘Exactly. Besides, I believe she thinks I have a disruptive influence on her precious Oliver.’

  He arched a brow. ‘And have you?’

  ‘I don’t think so, but perhaps the fact that I love having fun and don’t always listen to the dictates of my father has crystallised all my sins in her mind.’

  At the tragic note in her voice, humour softened Max’s features and his firm, sensual lips quirked in a smile. ‘Poor you. What a truly miserable time you are having, Miss Westwood. Still, I applaud your honesty. It’s a rare virtue in one so young.’

  ‘My father says I’m unconventional and I suppose I am, which is why all the old tabbies on the island are always complaining to him about me and giving him advice on the best way to deal with a wayward daughter. But he likes me the way I am and wouldn’t like it if I were to change.’

  ‘Your father is quite right. You are what you are. You can’t please everybody. One’s true character springs from the heart and dwells in the eyes. Unconventionality is an invitation to disaster in the world we inhabit.’

  She stared at him. ‘My word, how very profound.’

  Gazing into his unfathomable eyes, she saw cynicism lurking in their depths. There was something primitive and dangerous about Lord Trevellyan. She had the uneasy feeling that his elegant attire and indolent stance were nothing but disguises meant to lull the unwary into believing he was civilised, when he wasn’t civilised at all. He looked like the sort of man who had seen and done all sorts of things, terrible and forbidden things, things that had hardened him and made him cold. A chill crept up her spine as she wondered what dark secrets lay hidden in his past. Surely there must be many to have made him so cynical and unapproachable.

  ‘I don’t mean to pry, but are you happy, Lord Trevellyan? What I mean is, do you get the very best out of your life?’

  He looked irritated by her question, but he answered it. ‘I don’t suppose so, but then, who does?’

  ‘There you are, you see.’ She lifted her face up to the star-strewn sky, her entire being radiant with optimism, innocence and hope. ‘I love life, even when things happen to me and my friends are deserting me. I can’t stop loving life.’

  Transfixed, Max stared at her. Marietta Westwood was unspoiled, without artifice or pretence, young and naïve and realistic. Her irresistible smile doused his momentary irritation and brought an answering smile to his lips. ‘Long may you continue to do so.’

  Marietta turned and looked at him. In his late twenties, Lord Trevellyan’s potent attraction to women was a topic of much scintillating feminine gossip among the ladies, young and old, in the colony, and as Marietta gazed into those cynical grey eyes, she suddenly felt herself drawn to him as if by some overwhelming magnetic force. Understanding was in his eyes, along with a touch of humour. It was these things, as well as his dark good looks and blatant virility, that impelled women towards him, even though their attentions went unrewarded, for he ignored them all. He was so worldly, so experienced, that he clearly understood them. He understood her, and although it was obvious he didn’t approve of her, he accepted her for what she was, with all her faults.

  ‘Are you going to return to your wife?’ she asked. ‘She might want you to dance with her.’ A strange expression crossed his face, as if he were struggling to master some emotion—anger, she thought.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because, Miss Inquisitive Westwood, she’s dancing with someone else.’

  ‘I know—Teddy—my father’s business partner.’

  His smile disappeared and his face darkened. ‘I am aware of that.’

  Marietta tilted her head to one side and considered him quizzically. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Should I mind?’

  ‘Since it’s the custom to dance with different partners when one attends a ball, then I don’t think you should.’

  ‘Then I don’t.’

  Unaware of his sudden change in attitude, Marietta proceeded to delight Lord Trevellyan with a wickedly humorous description of some of the events she’d attended on the island and some funny stories acquainted with the people she knew. She told him of how, on one of her trips to Kowloon on one of her father’s boats, Teddy, who was leaning comfortably against the side of the boat and made soporific by the warmth of the sun and the lulling of the waves, had fallen into a doze and slipped overboard.

  ‘You managed to pull him back aboard, I see,’ Lord Trevellyan remarked somewhat drily.

  ‘But of course. He was most indignant about it and was sure someone must have pushe
d him in.’

  Inexperienced and unsophisticated as she was, Max was fascinated by her clever tongue, by her sharp mind and the fount of knowledge she stored about others as she went on to relate other tales, her olive-green eyes shining into his.

  Marietta smiled at him impudently, surprising him with her next question. ‘Why don’t you want to dance with your wife?’

  He drew back. ‘Because I’m not in the mood.’

  They both turned to look at the dancers twirling around the polished dance floor. As if on cue and within three yards of the darkening veranda, his wife and Teddy waltzed by. Lady Trevellyan’s eyes were raised to his, as though answering some question he had asked, and he was gazing at her intently. She wore a white gardenia in her hair and from where they stood Max and Marietta could almost smell its perfume. Her every movement was feline, containing the same elastic mixture of confidence and sophistication that masked an underlying interest in her partner. They saw the rise and fall of her bosom and the languor in her eyes, her parted lips and a look on her face Marietta thought quite strange, for it was a look a woman usually bestowed on her husband.

  Lady Trevellyan peered over Teddy’s shoulder before they disappeared from view. There was a sudden glint in her eyes now as she fixed them on her husband, a glint in which there was no sympathy at all, but only pleasure sharpened with a trace of something very much like spite. There was no perceptible movement of muscle or vein, no change in colour, but it was impossible to mistake that Lord Trevellyan had moved straight from condescension into cold rage.

  ‘Teddy is always a popular figure at dances,’ Marietta told Lord Trevellyan quietly, wondering why she felt a sudden need to defend her father’s business partner. ‘He dances so well that all the ladies are eager to have his name on their dance card.’

  ‘So it would seem,’ Max murmured drily, turning his back on his wife.

  Marietta saw the cynical curl to his lips and observed the way his shoulders tensed, but she didn’t comment on it. Perhaps matters weren’t as they should be between Lord Trevellyan and his wife, but he was far too English and private a person to talk openly about it, and it was not for her to ask.

  ‘If you’re not in the mood to dance with your wife, then dance with someone else.’

  One dark brow lifted over an amused silver-grey eye. ‘Are you asking, Miss Westwood?’

  Her answering laughter tinkled like bells, filling the air around them with its gaiety. ‘Heavens, no! My friends wouldn’t let me live it down—dancing with a man much older than myself.’

  He leaned back and gave her a look of mock offence. ‘I’m not so long in the tooth. How old do you think I am?’

  After giving his question a moment’s thought, she said, ‘About thirty?’

  ‘Wrong. Nowhere near.’

  ‘Then how old are you?’

  ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out, Miss Westwood.’

  Tilting her head to one side, she gazed up into his mesmerising grey eyes. Standing so close to him, she was unable to think clearly. She wasn’t certain anything mattered at that moment except the sound of his deep, compelling voice. The piercing sweetness of the music drifting through the open doors wrapped itself round her. How she wished the man beside her would smile and take her in his arms and dance with her, despite what she had just said, that he would place his lips against her cheek and... She checked herself. She wished so many impossible things.

  ‘I hope you weren’t offended when I said I wouldn’t dance with you. Of course,’ she said, lowering her eyes, her cheeks suddenly warm with embarrassment and anticipation, ‘if you were to ask me, I wouldn’t dream of refusing your offer. I would be happy to dance with you.’

  Slowly she raised her eyes to his and Max noted the unconcealed admiration lighting her lovely young face. She didn’t know how explicit her expression was—like an open book, exposing what was in her heart. Max saw it and was immediately wary. He had schooled his face over the years to show nothing that he did not want it to show. He was therefore perfectly able to disguise his exasperation with himself for having misjudged things. He should have realised she was of an age to have a schoolgirl crush.

  The lines of his face were angular and hard, and behind the cold glitter of his grey eyes lay a fathomless stillness. Marietta watched his firmly moulded lips for his answer.

  ‘That won’t happen,’ he said flatly, gentling his voice, while knowing he was being deliberately cruel, but it was necessary.

  Marietta was mortified and shocked by his refusal, but she was more shocked by her nerve for having the audacity to ask him. ‘No, of course not,’ she said in a shaky, breathless voice. ‘I should have known better than to suggest such a thing.’

  Max didn’t like having to wound her sensibilities, but it couldn’t be helped. His voice was condescendingly amused as he tried not to look too deeply into her hurt eyes, eloquent in their hurt, which remained fixed on his face. ‘Think nothing of it. And I wasn’t offended.’

  ‘Oh—well, that’s all right then. You don’t have a very high opinion of women, do you, Lord Trevellyan?’ she said, unable to stop herself from asking.

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘Yes, when you have such a beautiful wife.’

  ‘You’ve noticed,’ he remarked drily.

  ‘I would have to be wearing blinkers not to.’

  ‘Do you have a beau, Miss Westwood?’

  ‘No, not as such.’

  ‘Some day you’ll have to marry in order to have children.’

  She glanced at him sharply. ‘Oh, no, Lord Trevellyan. If I marry, it won’t be to have children.’

  ‘Don’t you like children?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘But you don’t want children of your own?’

  ‘No, and if I have to pledge my hand in order to produce an heir, then I might very well remain a spinster.’

  ‘That’s a very decisive statement for a seventeen-year-old girl to make.’

  ‘I’m sure you must think so, but seventeen or sixty, I won’t change my mind.’

  Marietta meant what she said. She would never forget what her mother had gone through to try to produce another living child, or the pain and the terrible grief that came afterwards. Yang Ling had told her that daughters often took after their mothers and the thought of childbearing preyed dreadfully on her nerves. She went cold every time she thought of it—what might be the sequel to making love, when past dangers and future fear might become utterly submerged.

  ‘You’re still very young, Miss Westwood, with time to change your mind. Tell me, am I really all those unflattering things you called me at Happy Valley? Arrogant, high-handed and despicable, I believe you said.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I haven’t changed my mind about that. I’m only sorry that you heard me say them.’ She was laughing and he smiled at her, his teeth flashing against his tanned skin. He looked all formal in his evening attire—a figure of authority, assured, cynical and formidable. But having spent the last few minutes with him, he suddenly seemed a hundred times more rakish and with hidden depths. Without thinking, she said, ‘You also look like a pirate—not the kind they have in the China Seas, but one of Caribbean kind—a buccaneer that carries beautiful ladies off to his lair on some island known only to him.’

  That made him laugh and, in the shimmering light from a thousand lanterns, he saw her flawless young face and the brilliance of her long-lashed eyes and generous mouth. Abruptly he stood back. He stared down at her for a long, long moment, then, quietly serious, he said, ‘Don’t change, Miss Westwood. Don’t ever grow up. Stay just exactly as you are.’

  ‘That’s impossible.’ She cocked her head to one side and gave him a quizzical look. ‘I thought you didn’t like me.’

  ‘What made you think that?’

  ‘Because of what happened at Happy Valley—and then in China Town—you were awful to me.’

  He grinned and with his finger and thumb tweaked her chin pla
yfully. ‘You deserved it.’ Momentarily distracted when the music stopped playing, he glanced into the ballroom. ‘Please excuse me. I think it’s time I returned to my wife.’

  Marietta didn’t move as she watched him go, not realising that in years to come they would both have reason to think back on this short time they had spent together on the veranda at Government House, as flower girls, fire-breathing dragons and caterpillars snaked their way through the streets below.

  * * *

  The rest of the evening passed all too quickly for Marietta. Her father retired to a card room, there to join other merchants to drink some fine brandy and to discuss the previous year’s profits and losses. Marietta returned to the dance floor where she was reunited with her friends. With her father out of the way she drank some champagne with Oliver and danced with some of the young officers in the colony, who exclaimed ingenuously about her looks and the way she danced, making her feel very grand and grown up. Would Lord Trevellyan ask her to dance? she wondered. She hoped so. Eagerly she looked for him, disappointed when she couldn’t see him. Assuming he must have left with his wife, from that point her evening declined.

  * * *

  Later, when Marietta walked past the table where Lord and Lady Trevellyan had been sitting, she looked down and spotted a fan on the floor beside a chair. She recognised it as being Lady Trevellyan’s. Retrieving it, she thought she would have one of the servants return it to her hotel, but as she was making her way to the ladies’ rest room, she saw Lord and Lady Trevellyan standing alone close to the main entrance and assumed they were on the point of leaving and awaiting their transport.

  She hurried towards them, but something she saw on Lord Trevellyan’s face made her pause. Hidden by the fronds of a large potted plant, she saw that as Lord Trevellyan looked at his wife there was revulsion on his face, and above all contempt. Having no wish to intrude or to listen to what they were saying, Marietta stepped back, but if she were to move now they would see her and she had no wish to be accused of eavesdropping.