Lord Ravenscar's Inconvenient Betrothal

by Lara Temple

  ‘I assure you...’

  ‘Oh, please don’t. I shouldn’t have said anything that might send you running.’

  ‘Yes, well, to our business. I find when I make a mistake in negotiations it sometimes helps to make a tactical withdrawal. If you accept his terms outright, don’t be surprised if they don’t answer your needs. Make him come to you, on your terms.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Penny is leaving this morning to go to her aunt in Bath for a few weeks to acquire some polish before I take her to London in the spring. I would be glad if you accompanied her there. She would be happy for the company on the drive and my sister is a very pleasant and easy-going woman and would be happy for another guest, especially one as charming as you.’

  ‘This morning?’

  ‘Yes. I gather Ravenscar is in Bristol to sign the papers with the mayor, so his absence is fortuitous. Could you be ready in an hour or so?’

  She pressed her hand again to her stomach. She knew running away was no solution, but she needed to think and she couldn’t think around Alan. Well, not very rationally. He would just do precisely what he had done the night of the concert—seduce her and push the decision further and further away from her. And she—she would fold like the frailest of fans because for the first time in her life she felt utterly at home with someone.

  But wasn’t this precisely what had eventually driven her mother into illness and melancholy and on to her refuge on the island? Why should she trust this conviction that she was as right for him as he was for her and if he only gave her a chance...if she only tried hard enough, he would learn to love her and be content with what they could build together? Was she doomed to relive her mother’s fate or was there merit to this feeling deep insider her, this blind belief that Alan was not like her father and much more than he himself believed he was? Because if he wasn’t, she would have to be strong enough to walk away, whatever the price.

  He would follow her, of course he would, he was nothing if not stubborn, but he could hardly manoeuvre her as easily in a stranger’s home in Bath as he had at the Hall. She would recover some measure of distance even if she could never recover her heart.

  She raised her chin and answered, ‘I could, but... If he hears you were here before my departure, he will come asking questions. I don’t want to cause you trouble.’

  ‘I will ignore the slight to my manhood. He might come asking questions, but I am not obliged to answer, am I? I must be quite mad. You are a bad influence on me, Lily.’

  ‘I know. Aren’t you glad you discovered that now rather than after we wed? Thank you, Philip. I really do wish you happy.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Alan stopped at the sight of his grandmother all but bursting from the door of the Rose Room.

  ‘Alan. Oh, thank goodness you are back.’

  He frowned, following her into the room, where she sank into her armchair. She pressed one veined hand to her cheek while her other clutched a piece of paper in her lap.

  ‘What is wrong, Grandmother?’

  ‘Lily. She’s gone.’

  ‘What do you mean, she is gone?’

  ‘Gone as in gone. Partridge said a carriage pulled up out front and she hurried out to it with a portmanteau before he could say a word or summon me. She left this.’

  Alan took the letter from his grandmother and turned away to read it.

  It wasn’t long, or informative.

  A few weeks...

  ‘It doesn’t say where she went. It doesn’t say if she will return. What did you do to frighten her away, Alan?’

  Given her a promise he had never imagined he would give. Taken away her choice. At least he thought he had, but obviously not. Did she think she would escape him? He would find her if it was the last thing he did and then he would...

  He pressed the letter down on the table, smoothing out the edges until the snarl of fury and fear and pain worked its way through him. What more did she want from him? He had risked his heart and soul to give her what she wanted last night only to have her run.

  ‘Could she have gone to Hollywell once more? Or to that Marston fellow? Partridge said he was here this morning to see her.’

  Alan turned. ‘Was he?’

  Her eyes widened further. ‘Don’t do anything foolish, Alan. A duel with Marston would be ruinous.’

  ‘A duel? With Mr Marston? What are you talking about?’ Catherine asked from the doorway.

  ‘Lily has left. We don’t know where.’

  ‘But...she couldn’t have gone with Mr Marston!’

  ‘And why not? He was here this morning and now she is gone with nothing more than this faradiddle about going away for a few weeks with some friends and she wrote that we are not to worry. Not to worry!’

  ‘I don’t believe she would have left with Mr Marston. She doesn’t even want him.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to want him. She wants what he can give her,’ Alan snarled.

  ‘No. I don’t believe it. I always knew she wouldn’t do it in the end and she wouldn’t.’

  ‘Well, she’s done something, gone somewhere, and I’m going to find out where. Since you are so convinced she didn’t go to Marston, perhaps you have some ideas where she did go.’

  Catherine shook her head, her blue eyes damp with tears.

  ‘No, none. I mean...she couldn’t have returned to Jamaica or to her island, could she?’

  ‘Literally or figuratively? It doesn’t matter. I’m going to find her.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I don’t know. Hollywell, Bristol, Brazil, wherever I need to.’

  ‘What can we do to help, Alan?’ Lady Ravenscar’s question was so practical, there was no reason why it should have brought down his defences. He paused in the doorway and looked back at his grandmother. Belle and Ray.

  ‘There is something you can do. The Hall. I want you to change your will and leave me the Hall. I don’t want or need your money, but I must have something to offer her beyond money... I need to offer her a home.’

  ‘I have no intention of altering my will, any of it.’

  She met his gaze with defiance and he tightened his hand on the doorknob.

  ‘So be it.’

  ‘Catherine and your cousins will receive bequests, of course, but you are and have always been my prime beneficiary, Alan. I know we parted in anger after Catherine’s wedding, but if you imagine I would follow your grandfather’s example and write you out of my will, then you never knew me. Your grandfather was a...a horrid man and I hated him with every fibre of my being, though I could never fully admit that to myself until well after his death. I was glad you turned your back on us and I envied you the day you left. Thank goodness you did, because if you had stayed, it would have meant he had already broken you as well. It is true I hoped one day you might return, might even ask me for the only thing of value I had to offer you, but I was proud that you never did. The Hall is and has always been yours, as well as every acre of land and the income from it. I hope you and that impossible young woman will finally make it a home worthy of the name. It is about time a Rothwell made up for all the misery of those before him. I think I shall remove to Bath. I am tired of seeing to the Hall and now that my sister is widowed as well we should rub along quite well. Oh, do stop staring at me as if I have grown a second head and kindly refrain from making any comment, either mocking or mawkish. Reserve your energies for dealing with your concerns. Now go.’

  * * *

  ‘I was expecting you earlier.’ Marston rose from his desk as his butler showed Alan into the study. Alan strode forward until only the bulk of the dark mahogany desk stood between them.

  ‘I apologise for keeping you waiting. Where is she?’

  ‘Not here.’

  ‘You’re a lucky man, then, Marston. Where is she?’

&
nbsp; ‘Perfectly safe.’

  ‘That isn’t what I asked you. If I ask you again, it will be with my hands around your throat.’

  ‘I don’t want to brawl with you, Ravenscar. Believe it or not, my objective is not to punish either of you. Lily and I understand each other tolerably well now and have decided we will not suit. She and Penny have probably reached Bath by now. They will be staying with my sister in Laura Place. She is perfectly safe and will be well chaperoned. I have the direction here.’ He pointed to a sheet of paper on his desk.

  Alan shook his head, trying to rearrange his thoughts, but they kept stumbling over the emotions exploding in his head like a bombardment of French cannon.

  ‘Why Bath?’ he finally managed.

  ‘Because Penny was going there and the opportunity presented itself. I believe Lily needed some time to decide whether to accept your offer without you constantly tipping the scales. She isn’t as ruthless as you, Ravenscar.’

  ‘I think this is pretty damn ruthless. I don’t need you defending Lily, Marston; that is my role. From now on find someone else to fulfil your procreative ambitions and stay out of our business.’

  Marston laughed softly. ‘It’s a pity you never met her father. I asked him once why he was allowing her to remain unmarried for so long—she was already twenty-one then and had just sent another fellow to the roundabout. He said it was his fault she had built a tower to keep herself safe, so he owed her some leeway and that he hoped one day one of them would actually have the bollocks to storm her castle.’

  Alan strode towards the door.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Marston called after him.

  ‘Storm a castle,’ he answered before slamming the door.

  Chapter Twenty

  Lily looked down at the grave. Four years old. He would have been full of energy, already a boy with opinions and a sense of himself. A person. So much of what he might have become would have been there already. She wondered if he had been shy or talkative. A cautious boy or someone who threw his heart ahead of him. She wondered what Alan had been like as a boy before life had forced him to erect walls about himself. She wished she could reach into the past and shift fate to relieve him of that horrible burden, but she couldn’t. All she could do was stand by him now.

  ‘I saw you from the drive.’

  She turned as Alan let the willow branches fall back into place, so filled with love she couldn’t speak.

  ‘At least this saves me a drive to Bath. Did the carriage break down?’

  He spoke lightly, but she knew him well enough by now to hear the grinding mix of emotions beneath the carefully suave question. She pressed her hands together and laid her cards on the table, all of them.

  ‘No. I decided not to go. I didn’t want to leave and I don’t really wish to negotiate. I want to be with you. I can’t force you to love me or to want to have a family, but I do want you to try to make more of this than just a marriage of convenience. I love you, Alan. I don’t think I will be able to be with you and keep that inside me. It will be like trying not to breathe. Can you understand that?’

  He looked up at the arch of the willows above them, the tendons in his neck sharp with tension, like the painting of a fallen angel supplicating the heavens. Then he moved towards her.

  ‘Don’t ever run away from me again.’

  ‘I won’t. I...’

  He closed the distance between them, pinioning her face in his hand, his fingers hard against her bones. There was anger there, and more; she knew that roiling storm of feelings.

  ‘Don’t you ever dare run away from me again. You want something? You stay and fight for it and tell me I’m being a bloody fool. But you don’t run. Do you understand?’

  She nodded as best she could in his steel grip, the first buds of joy forcing their way through her fear as she began to absorb the truth revealed in his eyes, in the agony etched on his lean face. She stroked her fingers lightly down his cheek and something else appeared through the anger, and when he spoke again, his voice was muted, defeated.

  ‘How could you do that to me? Do you know what I thought? I thought you had gone to him. I couldn’t bear it...’

  ‘I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I just wanted to get away to think. This morning I realised you might have forgotten to...well, to be careful and that I might even now be with child. I knew I would have to fight you for the kind of life I thought was right. For us, not just for me. I wanted to show you I would not let you dictate all the terms, but then as we were just coming into Keynsham I realised I didn’t want it to be like that. So I told them to put me down and I went to Mr Prosper and asked him to bring me home in his gig. I don’t want to run away from this, from you.’

  He stared at her, his eyes narrowed and unrevealing.

  ‘Forgotten? What kind of fool do you think I am? What the devil do you think I was doing when I came to your room last night? Do you think I forgot to use precautions like some green fool? That after a dozen years of being cautious it just slipped my mind? For someone so intelligent you are as foolish as a newborn lamb sometimes, Lily. I knew precisely what I was doing, and if you had used half the brain God gave you, you would know what that meant. I couldn’t have signalled my surrender more clearly than if I walked in there with a white flag.’

  She stared at him. She had been so caught in her own drama she had lost all sight of his. Marston had told her once Alan was cautious. The wildest of the wild hunters was as cautious as a mother hen when it came to things that mattered. He had seduced her knowing full well he might walk out of that night a prospective father and had known precisely what that meant and she had been as blind as a bat and fluttered away just as blindly in her confusion and fear.

  He reached out and tucked her against him as if sheltering her from a storm. She clung to him, trying not to cry with the joy that was careening around in her like foolish old Grim had careened around Hollywell.

  ‘You’re more than I can bear sometimes, Lily, but I can’t live without you. If you leave me again, you will discover just how terrifying the Wild Hunt can be. I’ll build a damn tower if need be and lock you in and hide the bloody key.’

  She laughed with joy, pressing herself against him. ‘You don’t scare me, Alan Piers Cavendish Rothwell. Besides, ferrets are good at finding things. Will you marry me, Alan?’

  ‘Damn you, Lily.’

  ‘I think I am by now, damned that is. I probably was the day you walked into Hollywell and teased me into giving you Marcus Aurelius. See the lengths I will go to get my property back?’

  ‘Oh, God, anything I can give you, I will.’

  ‘There’s only one thing. Will you marry me and let me love you?’

  Her shoulders and ribs protested at the fierceness of his embrace, but she revelled in it, and when it gentled, she raised her head to touch her lips to the tense muscles of his neck.

  ‘That’s two things,’ he murmured against her hair, his hand sliding down her back, softening, bringing her against him. His other hand slid the pins and comb from her hair, and when it tumbled free, he breathed in, raising a fistful to his mouth before moving his attention to her mouth, his lips stroking hers, gentle and rhythmic, like a warm breeze.

  ‘Will you?’ she prompted.

  ‘Yes. God, yes...’

  This was the wild hunt she had been waiting for. She could well give credence to dark powers when she found herself stripped of her garments and spread out on the shaded grass in nothing more than her stockings, a dark devil poised above her, his eyes narrowed shards of ice as they scraped over her body before her own shivered shut when he bent to kiss her, drawing her soul into his, his mouth torturing her with a trail of kisses that lingered on her breasts, before descending, making her squirm against him as they skimmed and delved the sensitive skin of her abdomen, coming closer to her aching centre. Too close. She half-raised hersel
f on her elbow to see his night-black hair glistening against the pale moon luminescence of her skin. She was already shaking, half in anticipation, half in fear. Her hands caught in his hair and he drew back and she wished she hadn’t stopped him, but she didn’t know what to do with all these feelings.

  ‘Alan. Touch me.’

  ‘Oh, I will. Believe me. Down to your soul. Just like you’ve touched me, my lovely Lily. You’re mine.’

  His fingers playing gently with the soft skin of her thighs above her garters, sliding his fingers under them, transforming their unravelling into exquisite torture, following their descent with his mouth, whispering his love and precisely how he was going to touch her, love her, make her his. His voice was a subterranean river of lava, hot, destructive, consuming her as it coursed over her. She answered him but had no idea what she said, maybe just his name over and over, a plea and a command, but he understood, his fingers finally returning to her centre again, filling her with a luminescence that radiated through every nerve in her body, his mouth capturing her breasts again as his fingers massaged and coaxed and tortured her arousal, and when his tongue laved her nipple into an unbearable peak, she stopped thinking, obeying his command to forget everything but him and what he was doing to her, what his body was doing to her.

  When he shifted her legs apart, she took him in with a gasp of need, her body arching to envelop him. There was no confusion, and if there was pain, she felt none of it in the throes of her storm. She went wild, her fingers biting deep into his shoulders, her mouth capturing his groans of pleasure as she wrapped her body around his erection, laying claim.

  She moved with him, utterly open, taking him deeper and deeper with each thrust, uncaring of the hard ground beneath her, of the cold air on her bare flesh. All she felt was his body against hers, hard and soft, inside her, his muscles shaking under her hands, his mouth on hers, his hand caressing her breast, telling her how much he needed her. Loved her.

  She hadn’t thought the pleasure could come so swiftly. It caught her like a beast from the dark, sudden and inescapable. She shuddered around him, her fingers pressing into his buttocks, and the shudder spread to him.