The garden was magnificent, of course. Larger than most country gardens, it even had a little wilderness at its back. Audrianna had learned about garden fashions since living with Daphne, and the meandering paths and informal design of this one said a master planner had laid it out not so long ago.
“What did you think of the house?” Summerhays asked while he paced beside her.
He had given her a tour of the vast library and even larger ballroom. The most interesting chamber had been the circular music room that held an exquisite pianoforte.
“It is most impressive. A more sophisticated woman might not be in awe, but I confess that I am.”
“You do yourself an injustice. You acquit yourself well enough when you choose. My brother is already fond of you, and you did not allow my mother to frighten you.”
So he had noticed that his mother had tried. “She was not pleased by my presence in her impressive house. I think that she was surprised to find me there. I think that your brother was too, and did not ask to meet me at all.”
“Why would you think that? He delighted in your company.” >
“I think that because I asked him and he told me the truth.”
“How like him.” He cast a frown over his shoulder at the face at the high window. “You have found me out. However, he did express sympathy for your plight. It was good for you to meet him, and my mother, and see the house. You should see the life you will have when we marry. The good and the bad.”
When we marry.
“I did not accept your proposal.”
“You were in shock.”
“It was unexpected, but I was not in shock.”
“You did not comprehend what you were turning down.”
“I did, most clearly. You.”
Only she had not truly comprehended. He was correct about that. In showing her this house, this comfort, he had dangled a lure.
He had revealed much more than luxury too, although she did not think he realized it. Seeing him with his mother, his brother—a whole history suddenly existed, and he became more real and human. The way he had lifted his brother, the care he had shown as he fussed with those blankets—it was very hard to think such a man was by nature cruel.
“Miss Kelmsleigh, I want you to reconsider my proposal.”
And she wanted to reject it again, with the same strength and certainty as the last time. Only she could not. His little strategy had worked too well.
“Lord Sebastian, my mother would never countenance such a match, after what happened to my father.”
He glanced over his shoulder, to that window. Then he took her hand and firmly led her down another path that veered around a thick planting of blackthorn. A bench waited there, and he handed her down so she would sit.
“If you tell your mother about my proposal, I think that she will countenance it just fine. She will want the connections, and the financial security, and the position for all of you. It is a rare mother who demands her daughter turn down the brother of a marquess, for any reason.”
“My father—”
“She will convince herself it is your due, and hers, because of that sorrow. She blames me for an injustice, and this helps to rectify some of it. You know that she will find her way to that view. It is why the notion of her being invited here caused you alarm.”
“And my own view?”
“Adopt your mother’s. It is practical at least. There will be no better way, no other way, to make me pay.”
“I will blame you no less after we are wed, even if I think you are paying. Do you not care that this will be poison to what you propose.”
“As you saw, it is a very big house, Miss Kelmsleigh. All of the others are at least as large. You can live your life tolerating my company no more than ten hours a week if you choose. Trust me when I promise that it will be very easy to be married and mostly separate. I have seen it done.”
She could not deny that he made a compelling argument. There would be a type of justice if the man who so hurt her family became the agent of its rise and revival. Marriage would also dull the scandal and provide more security than she had ever hoped to know.
As for the luxury—she tried to resist its lure, but she was human. Images invaded her mind, of gowns she had never worn and balls she had never seen. He had his own boxes at the theaters, certainly, and there would be long, exquisite dinners amid flickering candles and silk and the very best company.
As for those ten hours a week—
Fingers touched her chin and guided her face to the left. No gloves this time, but the unmistakable sensation of masculine skin on hers. The contact startled her out of her reverie.
He sat beside her. His eyes said he knew where her mind had been, and where it was now turning.
“It will be more than tolerable, I promise.”
His lips touched hers, making his reference clear. Under the circumstances, she assessed this kiss in ways she had not the others. After all, she needed to be very sure of what she would be getting in this marriage.
Yes, more than tolerable. Much more. She did not remain objective very long. Still, she noted that his kiss was rather firm and dry, and that the way his hands cradled her head was both sweet and controlling. She vaguely acknowledged that he then embarked on a gentle ravishment of her mouth, but a ravishment all the same. As pleasure started to cascade through her body, she dully considered that it had probably taken him a lot of practice to learn to kiss like this, and admitted that she had been primed for this by his mere presence, which still affected her too much.
Then she thought about nothing at all, except the building cravings that demanded all her attention.
Sinful cravings. Shocking ones. Her body had become more practiced in these things, and offered little resistance. Devilish titillations teased her as if invisible feathers flicked and stroked her body. Her breasts grew heavy, and impatient with the garments binding them.
Floating now, as if her body had lost its grounding. His hard arm encircled her and kept her from blowing away. The embrace brought her to earth too well.
“Your brother—”
“It is well past a half hour since we left him. Fenwood has removed him from the window.”
How careless of the marquess, to leave her unprotected. “Your mother.” Did she even say it? Kisses on her neck had her gasping so she did not know for sure.
“She will be receiving callers now, and we cannot be seen from the drawing room’s windows.”
She tried to remember what she saw when she looked out that window.
His fingertips touched her lips, as if to silence her. Except that was not his intention at all. He coaxed her lips apart. “Yes. Like that.”
That other kind of kiss this time, invasive and intimate. The excitement and pleasure immediately intensified and she lost herself again, and entered a dark place of primal desire.
She did not care when his embrace pulled her closer. She wickedly reveled in the signs of his own passion. She did not object at all when he caressed her breast. She wanted him to. She almost begged him to.
It felt too good. Unearthly. Amazing. Somehow he found a way to touch her so she almost cried out. The pleasure turned sharper and raised a madness in her. A warm throb teased her horribly where she sat, causing a compelling discomfort that fed the frenzy filling her mind.
“Tolerable enough?” His dark voice spoke lowly in her ear while he teased her breasts mercilessly.
She was too preoccupied to even care he had asked some question or other.
Suddenly he was gone from her side, leaving her flushed and vulnerable in the breeze. Its cool flow made her open her eyes and blink.
He had not gone far. He knelt right in front of her. Her head cleared enough to realize he was going to propose again, on bended knee. That was too charming to bear.
Only he did not propose, and nothing in his expression suggested such honorable intentions. The way he looked, and looked at her, sent a thrilling alarm straig
ht through her.
He lifted her left foot, slid off her slipper, and placed its arch on the front of his knee. Before she collected herself enough to object, he began raising her skirt.
Shocked, she reached to push it down again. “What are you doing?”
“What you want me to do, or at least what our circumstances permit right now.”
“You misunderstand what I want.” Except he really did not. As he pushed up her skirt, he also caressed her leg, and his palm’s movements soon became of more interest than her skirt’s.
“You are being too wicked.” She tried again to push the skirt even as it inched up, but pleasure was making her the worst fool.
“Yes.” He managed to get the hem over her knee so her stocking leg was bare to her thigh. He ignored her attempts to cover herself. He bent and kissed her knee, then the inner flesh right above her garter.
She almost jumped off the bench. The shock to her body left her breathless. She stared at him while he did it again, fearful of how everything had transformed suddenly, and turned most serious, and very dangerous. She suddenly found herself in deep water and she did not even care if she drowned.
His hand replaced his mouth. His caresses made wanton moans and pleas sound in her head. It was all she could do to hold them in.
He watched her helplessness while he caressed higher. Her body throbbed in response. She could feel distinct pulses down there, wanting and waiting and hot.
His fingers pushed up the bottom edge of her drawers until they bunched at the top of her thigh. She closed her eyes and tried to gather some self-control.
“You should not,” she whispered.
“No, but I am not so good as to stop. Nor am I being really bad. After all, the world has already given you to me, and there really is no choice for you except to submit to what fate has decreed.” His hand teased along that edge of fabric. “You should know how it will be when you do.”
His fingers slid beneath the fabric of her drawers. He touched that pulse. Her breath caught as the sensation obliterated every other awareness.
He caressed and her mind split from the intensity. She closed her eyes and the pleasure overwhelmed her. He said something and she did not hear him, or could not remember if she did.
She lost the fight to contain it. She leaned back against the bench, boneless and weightless. She shifted her hips so she might feel more and succumbed completely to the pleasure.
Soon she could not bear it. The pleasure took on an angry, frustrated center. Shrieks of need began streaking through her abandon. One escaped, she was sure, sounding through the garden.
Those wicked touches stopped, replaced by soothing caresses on her thigh. A cry of frustration escaped and she heard herself this time. She pressed her hand to her mouth lest one more slip out. She let his soothing strokes do what they could, but she wanted to hit him for stopping and leaving this hungry edge of desire in her.
She rode the tide down until something like sanity returned. She still felt the breeze on her leg. She opened her eyes and straightened, embarrassed now, and at a bigger disadvantage with this man than she had ever been.
He no longer caressed her thigh. Instead he fastened a chain around it.
A gold chain, with dangling green stones. Her thigh now wore an emerald necklace.
She stared at it. “Payment?”
“No, a bribe.”
She touched the green stones and they beat gently against her flesh. He was going to a lot of trouble. “Why?”
He rose and sat beside her. She worked the clasp and removed the necklace, admiring it in the sunlight.
“Because you deserve more than scandal and infamy, and because I no longer can afford to be known as a rake and a scoundrel.”
“Did you ever really stop being one?”
“I would like to think that I was never a scoundrel.”
That begged the question about the rake part. It was fair warning that outside those obligatory hours together, he would be going his separate way too.
She pushed down her dress and slipped on her shoe. “I am sure that Daphne has been waiting. I must go.”
They strolled back to the house. She should feel more embarrassed than she did. That alone had her thinking over the various implications of both his proposal and this powerful sensuality.
She had quite forgotten for a while, within that pleasure, her resentments toward him. The anger had been obscured within that daze. That momentary timelessness, more than the sensations, might indeed make this marriage tolerable.
Would it be a betrayal of Papa to accept? Even if it gave Mama security, and Sarah a chance for a better life? She did not believe Papa would hold it against her. The question was whether she would hold it against herself.
On the other hand, she might more easily find a way to vindicate him if she had this new, higher station being offered.
“If we were to do this, I assume it would be a sophisticated union, such as one hears about among the haut ton,” she said. “That you would have lovers and that, after a time, after a son is born, I could too.” It was, she discovered, fairly easy to speak frankly with a man with whom one had shared scandalous intimacies.
He paced on a bit before answering. “Of course.”
When they reached the house, she still held the necklace. “I cannot take this.”
He removed it from her hand, then also took her reticule. He dropped the necklace inside and handed the reticule back. “If you reject me again, it will be the only compensation you will have. If you do not, it is an appropriate engagement gift.”
Daphne indeed had arrived back from her errands. She had refused the offer to wait inside, and still sat in Lord Sebastian’s carriage.
Lord Sebastian handed Audrianna to a footman at the house’s door. She bid him adieu, stepped away, then thought better of it and turned for a last word. “I suppose those few hours a week might be tolerable enough.”
“Today was the least of what waits in that part of our union, Miss Kelmsleigh. Perhaps you will let me know your decision about the other parts by week’s end.”
“Yes, I will do that.”
She climbed into the carriage. Daphne appeared serene, and not at all annoyed that she had to wait.
“Did you meet the marquess?” she asked as the carriage rolled away.
“Yes, and he is very amiable.”
Daphne resettled herself on her bench. “And was the marchioness home?”
“As promised. I met her too.” Audrianna wrinkled her nose in distaste.
Daphne laughed. She adjusted the curtain. She eyed the carriage’s fine interior appointments.
She looked out the window a few minutes, then turned a very direct gaze on Audrianna.
“So, dear cousin, when is the wedding?”
Chapter Eleven
Sebastian received Audrianna’s letter accepting his proposal two days after her visit. Mrs. Kelmsleigh’s letter arrived the next day, expressing restrained joy and inviting him to call on her. He did so at once and met her younger daughter, Sarah, and drank punch in her tidy drawing room near Russell Square while they passed a half hour pretending she did not hate him.
Then she got down to business. She demanded a discreet, small wedding since it would be less than a year from her husband’s passing. She also asked for permission to put Audrianna’s new wardrobe on his accounts, along with wedding garments for her and her daughter.
No specific amount was requested. It would be indelicate to actually talk sums. In agreeing to cover these feminine costs, he accepted that he had just given them carte blanche. Between the impulse for revenge and the opportunity for indulgence, the Kelmsleigh women would probably put him in dun territory.
Morgan expressed satisfaction at the news that Sebastion was “doing the right thing” by Miss Kelmsleigh, but then Morgan possessed uncomplicated views of right and wrong, of honor and decency. Sebastian was pleased that his brother was pleased because, when that letter from Audrianna c
ame, he had found himself pleased as well.
She was proving to be lively, smart, and sensual, and he could do worse. And if he later decided that he had been trapped into a temporal hell, he could follow his father’s example in this as in so much else. She even expected him to.
Their mother said absolutely nothing the evening that Sebastian sought her out to inform her. She did not even look at him during the announcement. A statue would display more reaction, but even an actor could not be more eloquent.
Finally, as he was leaving, she flatly said that she would see to the wedding preparations and the breakfast, so the family was not totally humiliated in every possible way. Since he had braced himself for a long, tedious row, he kissed her in gratitude before retreating from her icy presence.
The announcement of the engagement raised eyebrows and caused another gust of gossip, but the wind soon went out of the scandal’s sails. There would be little breezes for years, of course, but a week after sealing the deal, a letter came from Castleford, accepting the mutually beneficial trade of favors that he had dismissed before. That signaled the return to normal in Sebastian’s political influence.
One colleague in the Commons, Nathan Proctor, tried to make amends for a few reckless cuts by approaching him one afternoon as they both left Brook’s.
“That boy from my county is finally coming home,” he said in passing.
Sebastian’s mind was on other things, and he could do nothing except smile blankly at the reference.
“That one with the third regiment that I told you about last year. All blown up, he was. On death’s door and being cared for in a convent over there up until last autumn. He is finally fit to travel, and is coming home to his family. He will be staying here in London with a sister for a while.”
The third included the company that had been left defenseless by the bad gunpowder. Sebastian had spent two years seeking out the few who survived, to discover what light they might shed on the business. Other than stories of death and helplessness, of cannon that misfired and muskets made useless, he had learned nothing.
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