The Taste of Temptation

by Julia Kelly

  “That was not a planned encounter,” she said.

  “And did he . . .” But Michael either didn’t want to know the answer to that question or already understood.

  “You’re ruined,” he said flatly. “It would’ve been a struggle before when you were twenty-seven and notorious, but no one will want to marry you now.”

  “She’s had so many callers,” said Elsie.

  “And how many of them have come asking for permission to ask for her hand?” asked Michael.

  His wife fell silent.

  “I’ll marry her,” said Trevlan after a slight pause.

  “What?” Caroline asked in disbelief.

  “You must have known that this was coming,” said Trevlan with a laugh that didn’t sound the least bit mirth-filled. “I’ve been courting you since almost the day you arrived.”

  “We’ve gone for several drives and danced, but . . .”

  “I’m in need of an heir,” said Trevlan. “It’s time I turn my attention to my familial duties. You need a husband. It’ll be a clear, simple transaction.”

  No. No, no, no, no, no. It all felt wrong, and yet here Trevlan was offering her the one thing she’d thought she wanted more than anything else. That was, until Moray had come and ruined everything. He’d made her want more than the security and protection of a man’s name. He’d challenged her and teased her, awakening a passion and fight in her she’d suppressed for too long in the name of pleasing everyone else. But worse, he’d made her believe that she could love again.

  She looked at Moray. “Could you please give us the room?”

  “You and Moray? Absolutely not,” said Michael.

  “He might try something,” said Trevlan.

  “I’m asking you to please respect my wishes,” said Caroline.

  “Michael, give them just a little time. We’ll only be in the hall,” said Elsie.

  “If you think for one moment that I’m going to leave you, my sister, in there with that man—”

  “Give us the room,” she ordered, her voice all steel, and—amazingly—Trevlan, Michael, and Elsie looked at each other and all filed out.

  “Don’t marry him,” Moray said as soon as the door was closed, his voice almost imploring.

  “Why not?” she asked. “You know as well as anyone that I want to marry. I’m surprised your editors haven’t thought to place a lonely hearts ad for me. ‘Jilted Spinster Seeks Gentlemanly Companionship.’ ”

  Argue with me. Open your big, overbearing mouth and tell me what you think I should do, even if you’re wrong. Do anything but stand there and stare at me.

  “Marry anyone else, but not him,” he said.

  “Who else?” she asked, her hands spread in front of her. “Who else wants to marry me in this city or London or any other place? No one knows what to do with me. I’m not ruined but I’m not entirely respectable either. I have a black mark against my name in every social register.”

  “You’ve been invited everywhere in Edinburgh,” he argued.

  She laughed. “Half the people think I’m a novelty to be stared at, and the other half are terrified of slighting any woman Mrs. Sullivan has put forward as her friend. But Mrs. Sullivan can’t always be there to protect me. I need a life of my own.”

  “And so you’d marry him to live your own life?” He was nearly shouting. “That doesn’t make a lick of sense. And how could you agree to marry that man when you know what he did to that woman? He ruined her and then left her.”

  “I won’t defend him for a moment, but neither will I pretend that our actions haven’t landed me in a difficult situation. If you imagine that Trevlan will keep quiet about what he’s learned here today if I say no, you’re a fool. He will tell a friend, who will then tell two of his own friends, and suddenly I’ll find myself in an even worse situation. All it takes is one rumor that my virtue has been compromised—one—and I’m unmarriageable. Not even Mrs. Sullivan can work her magic to piece back together my reputation if it becomes known that I conducted an affair with you. Marrying him is the easiest answer.”

  “That doesn’t make it the right one.”

  “Then marry me yourself!”

  The words flew out of her mouth before she could stop them. Moray paled, clearly stunned that she would suggest such a thing.

  “I can’t marry you,” he said.

  Her cheeks burned with the humiliation she’d brought on herself. Ever since the ball and that evening when he’d climbed into her room, a niggling little voice in the back of her mind had kept at her, asking why not? Why couldn’t it be Moray?

  “Can’t or won’t? Because as far as I know you are an unmarried man of sound mind. Nothing would preclude you from taking a bride if you wished,” she said.

  The silence stretched out between them, pulsing with tension. Finally he said, “Won’t.”

  He didn’t want her. Oh, he’d wanted her in that way. His lust for her had been plain enough, but now that things had become complicated and their affair was out in the open he was going to walk away from her.

  Coward. Or maybe that was just what she was.

  “Perhaps it’s for the best.” She tried to laugh and play it off as though it hardly mattered to her. “You showed me today what little regard you have for my confidence.”

  He flinched and dipped his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not forgiven. I’m still angry.”

  “You have every right to be. Caroline, please try to understand, I am not the man for you,” he said.

  No one was. Not Julian, not Moray. No one wanted her except, it would seem, for Trevlan.

  “I’m not a gentleman,” he said.

  Her head snapped up, and her ire flared again. “I’m sorry about what happened to you. I’m sorry your father left you, but you’ve created something so much larger than that. You should have pride in that.”

  “You hate my newspapers.”

  “I hate that one of your papers trades in gossip and the lies that it perpetuates and everything that makes it nasty and cruel, but that doesn’t stop me from admiring what you built. You did something incredible without the help of a family name or wealth or anything, and yet you’ve spent your entire life pushing people away, obsessed with this idea that if someone gets too close they might see who you really are. Who you really are is the man I see in front of me.”

  “You make too much of me,” he said.

  “You make far too little.”

  “The newspapers are all I have and all I’ll ever have.”

  Her fight went out of her like a deflated balloon. She was tired of arguing, tired of hoping. He couldn’t see past himself far enough to understand that what had happened between them meant more to her than the indulgence of passion. Or maybe he just didn’t care. Either way, she wasn’t about to wait to have her heart crushed all over again. She was done.

  “I cared for you.” She swallowed around the lump of emotion lodged in her throat. “I cared for you more than I should say, because it will only inflate that maddeningly large head of yours, but I can see now that all of that was misguided.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked as she made for the door.

  She paused but refused to look back at him. He hadn’t earned the privilege of seeing her tears. “To think without you or my brother or anyone else trying to influence me.”

  “I still want you.” He said it like a confession he didn’t want to admit to. As though it was something torturous.

  “Yes,” she said, “but I don’t want you any longer.”

  Outside, rain stung Moray’s face as the wind whipped across Cumberland Street. It was fitting really. The weather matched his mood perfectly. Raw, violent, angry.

  The hurt on Caroline’s face when he told her he wouldn’t marry her would haunt him for the rest of his years, but he couldn’t. He was never going to be good enough for her, and that day only served as confirmation of that fact.

  He’d stood stunned for a moment in t
he middle of her brother’s drawing room before letting himself out. In the hallway, Mrs. Burkett waited for him. With a delicate hand, she guided him out to the entryway and bid him good-bye, showing him to the door herself. The message was clear. Everything was over.

  He needed to find a cab to take him to the office. Work. It was the one thing he could always rely upon. The news would never stop. Would never leave him.

  He walked down the steps of the Burkett house and out the little black garden gate. It was only when he was out on the sidewalk that he realized Trevlan must have left before him. He pulled his hat lower on his head. He would’ve been happy to walk away from the man and never see him again, but then Trevlan shouted his name.

  “That was quite the article.”

  Moray half turned, the leather soles of his shoes scraping against the wet grit of the pavement. “It was a hatchet job.”

  Trevlan snorted as he tugged one of his gloves higher on his wrist. “Not from what I’ve heard.”

  Moray’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “Maids have a funny way about them. They’ve such long memories for even the littlest thing. At least, that’s what Ross told me when I asked him to look into your past the way your people looked into mine.”

  Goddammit, Caroline had been right. There were other people and they had talked, pushed by Ross who in turn had been motivated by Trevlan. And Moray, idiot that he was, had turned around and blamed it all on Caroline.

  “I suppose I should thank you for pushing Miss Burkett toward me,” Trevlan continued.

  “She hasn’t said yes yet,” Moray shot back.

  “She will,” said Trevlan. “And when she does, I’ll have myself a grateful wife. It’ll take some doing to break her more high-spirited side, but I’ll see to that. It’s easier to bend them to your will when they know that one wrong move could leave them abandoned.”

  Moray’s stomach churned and every instinct pulled at him to warn her, but she wouldn’t listen to him. Not now that he’d gone and ruined her trust in him.

  “I’ve been wanting to ask you something,” Trevlan continued, a lecherous glint lighting his eye. “Did she squeal?”

  “What?” growled Moray, his hands balled into fists even as water streamed off his hat.

  “When you fucked her. Did she squeal? I like to know these things before I bed a lass, and it would seem that you’re the authority.”

  With a single leap, Moray tackled Trevlan to the ground. His fists came up, slamming into the man’s nose. All of the raw instincts of his childhood that he’d thought he’d schooled out of himself roared to the surface. He was a shop boy again, fighting with the local lads who taunted him when he raced back and forth on errands.

  His rage pulsed as red as the blood streaming from Trevlan’s nose as he pummeled the man.

  “Say it again,” he roared. “Say it again, you fucking churl.”

  “Moray!” a distant voice shouted somewhere behind him, but he kept on punching. He didn’t want to stop.

  Trevlan tried to throw his hands up in front of his face, and a few of Moray’s blows glanced off the hard bones of the man’s forearm. One of his knuckles split open from the impact, but he hardly felt the pain. Instead all he felt was the rush of triumph at beating the man who’d insulted Caroline. All he could think of was her.

  “Jonathan!” A set of hands grabbed his upper arm, pulling him out of his rage. He looked down at them, dazed by the adrenaline rushing through him, and realized they were Caroline’s.

  He blinked through the rain. Caroline. Out on the street. Breaking up the brawl he was fighting for her.

  Oh God. Sickness roiled through his stomach at the realization of what he’d done in full view of the neighbors—some of whom had stuck their heads out of their windows or gathered on their front steps. He’d made a spectacle out of all of them, but she’d be the one who suffered the brunt of it all because of his doing when he’d decided to make her notorious once again.

  “What were you thinking?” she asked, backing away from him.

  “The things he said—”

  She began shaking her head, muttering, “No, no, no.”

  He hauled himself to his feet and reached for her, but she jumped back, nearly slipping on the wet ground. “Caroline.”

  “This stops now.”

  “Don’t send me away.” His voice cracked with emotion, but he didn’t care what the rest of the people in the road thought. All that mattered was convincing this woman not to turn her back on him. Not to reject him as surely as his own father had rejected him.

  When she looked up at him, her eyes were haunted. She was slipping back into her past. He wanted to shout that he wasn’t Weatherly. She could trust him.

  She drew back and dealt him the final blow. “Stay away from me.”

  “No.” His voice broke.

  “I’m marrying Mr. Trevlan, and I don’t want to see you again.”

  Chapter Twenty

  A most exciting sight was to be seen on Cumberland Street when two gentlemen were spotted fighting in front of the house of one of the most intriguing ladies of Edinburgh society. Miss B— is no stranger to the pages of this publication, but what preceded the brawl between two gentlemen is still unknown. However, it is clear from accounts that neither gentleman was the lady’s brother. Was this a fight over her honor or something more disgraceful? Those with information should write to No. 51 Drummond Street.

  —EDINBURGH SOCIAL STANDARD

  It is with great pleasure that Mr. Michael Burkett announces the engagement of his sister, Miss Caroline Burkett, to Mr. Robert Trevlan. The couple shall be married June 2 at St. Mary’s Cathedral. A wedding breakfast hosted by the bride’s family is to follow.

  —LOTHIAN HERALD-TIMES

  Caroline sat staring at her hands crossed in her lap, trying not to scream. The urge had been building up for days, choking her. Once, when she was alone in her bedroom, she opened her mouth but no sound came out. Around people, all it seemed she could do was nod and murmur yes or no with a chiseled-on smile. Now, in the stuffy confines of Michael and Elsie’s drawing room with four sets of eyes staring at her, she couldn’t even do that.

  “You will make Creag Aibhne your residence, of course,” Mrs. Trevlan, her fiancé’s mother, was saying, her disapproval too easy to read.

  “Caroline expressed a great interest in hunting while we were courting. We’ll make her a sporting woman yet,” said Trevlan.

  Caroline’s lips thinned. There was little she wanted to do less than learn how to run down animals at great speed, but it looked as though she would have to in order to survive as Trevlan’s wife.

  Elsie glanced at Caroline. “I had hoped that we might continue to see Caroline in town when she’s married.”

  “At the moment, that is out of the question,” said Mrs. Trevlan, casting a stern glance at Caroline. “I had thought that it would be best to allow the scandal to blow over, but Robert insists on going forward with the wedding. I can’t think why.”

  “There’s yet to be a horse that’s unseated me, no matter how wild or stubborn. I should think keeping a wife is much the same,” said Trevlan with a braying laugh.

  Since accepting his proposal in the soaking rain outside her brother’s home, Caroline had come to learn several important things about her future husband. He laughed like an ass, his disapproval of her reading material extended beyond those written in French to include all novels, and there would be no argument against his mother living with them. Her eyes had been opened to the man she was marrying—not the one who’d courted her with flowers and drives and short snatches of conversation at dinner parties. Trevlan wanted her to fall into place and force herself to be the quiet, doll-like wife she knew was expected of her. So why did it all feel so wrong?

  Caroline caught Elsie’s sympathetic eye before dropping her gaze again.

  “I was afraid the bishop would refuse to perform the ceremony given Miss Burkett’s . . . reputation,�
�� Mrs. Trevlan said, persisting in a rudeness that was matched only by her son.

  “There was hardly any chance of that given the thousand pounds I gave for a new window,” said Trevlan.

  Caroline clenched her hands until her knuckles turned white. Perhaps, if she wished very hard, the drawing room ceiling would collapse in on them and this would all be over.

  This is all your own doing.

  Her declaration that she would marry Trevlan had been out of her mouth before she could think. Standing outside, with Moray and Trevlan still breathing hard from their fight, she had just wanted it to stop. Everything was a mess, and she’d needed the world to cease its spinning for just one moment.

  Trevlan was going to give her what she wanted. He’d proposed to her. No one else had. Certainly not Moray.

  I wouldn’t have taken him even if he had. Her stubborn pride made her want to believe that was true, but her heart wasn’t sure.

  Her heart. That useless, incredible organ refused to allow her to let go of Moray. Damn the man, but he seemed to have worked his way into it, twining with his at every beat even when she could see him pulling away.

  Things had been simple before him. She’d had a plan and had been determined to execute it without involving those pesky, troublesome emotions that mucked everything up. He shouldn’t have made her fall for him, but it had almost felt inevitable. He’d been the first man to challenge and infuriate her. He’d stirred in her a passion she’d long ago buried, and she’d been unable to resist.

  She loved him—loved him—and there was no escaping it. She would’ve settled for any little scrap of affection he’d thrown her way. He’d told her that he liked her before, and that might have been enough to sustain the ember of hope that burned in her chest. Instead, when it mattered most, he’d turned away from her.

  He didn’t trust her. It wasn’t that he’d barged into her house and accused her of telling Ross his secrets. That she could’ve learned to forgive in time, for she understood what it was to harbor a part of oneself that was so vulnerable and frightening that even the slightest provocation unsettled everything. It was that he didn’t trust her to hold his happiness and cherish it.