An Escapade and an Engagement

by Annie Burrows

  She wanted more? He would give her more. Pushing the silk aside, he bent his head and laved her nipple with his tongue. It was like having his dreams come true. Better. Tasting her for real exceeded all his fantasies. Soon he was lost to all but the feel of her under his hands and in his mouth, and the sound of her breathy little moans urging him on. So he sucked her nipple, rigid now after the attention he’d paid it, deep into his mouth. She let out a yelp—but it was of shocked pleasure, not protest.

  At that precise moment the door to his suite flew open.

  ‘Lord Ledbury!’ a woman’s voice screeched.

  ‘Damn you, Richard, what do you think you are doing?’

  He looked up to see Lady Penrose and his grandfather standing side by side, just inside his room. Lady Penrose was white-faced and trembling. His grandfather red-faced and quivering.

  He removed his mouth from Lady Jayne’s left breast, thinking it must have been quite obvious what he was doing. He was wearing nothing but a pair of breeches, while Lady Jayne was… Damn. She’d somehow managed to kick aside every one of the blankets he’d so carefully wrapped her in.

  Mindful of her dignity, he pulled the edges of his shirt together over her breasts, then grabbed the coverlet, draping it over the pale length of her legs.

  Then Lady Jayne set the seal on things by looking at them in a bewildered fashion, and asking, ‘What are you all doing in my room? And where is Milly?’ She frowned up at Richard. ‘Did you find her?’

  ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘You mean you could not stop her? Oh, no!’

  ‘Oh, I stopped her all right,’ he said grimly. ‘But I don’t think this is the time to be talking about her.’

  ‘Well, you are right about that much!’ said his grandfather, giving Lady Penrose a shove between the shoulder blades that sent her tottering farther into the room, before turning and slamming the door shut.

  ‘Put. Her. Down,’ said Lady Penrose indignantly. ‘Take your hands off her and put her down. This instant!’

  ‘Just one moment,’ said his grandfather. He strode across the room and into the bedroom. He did not stay in there long.

  Richard groaned, knowing what he would see there. Tousled sheets. A torn, bloodstained nightdress lying on the floor. More bloodstains on the sheets. Which, he had noted when he picked her up, meant he ought to have taken care of that cut on her knee and her poor little abused feet before he went out. But which his grandfather was bound to take as evidence of a night of wild debauchery.

  ‘You damned fool!’ Lord Lavenham stood framed in the bedroom doorway, his face now mottled with purple.

  ‘This is worse than mere foolishness,’ said Lady Penrose, pointing at the overturned glass on the floor.

  ‘You got her drunk?’ Lord Lavenham bellowed. ‘And then seduced her?’

  He had thought it could not get any worse, but Lady Jayne set her hand to her head.

  ‘Oh, please stop shouting,’ she moaned. ‘It goes right through my head.’

  ‘Lady Penrose,’ said Lord Lavenham, turning to her with a grim expression. ‘You have my abject apologies. I did not believe that this one of my grandsons was as much a libertine as the others.’

  ‘He is not a libertine,’ Lady Jayne protested. ‘He has not done anything that I did not ask of him…’

  ‘That is quite enough!’ Lady Penrose screeched, grabbing her hand and tugging her off Lord Ledbury’s lap.

  She stumbled on the mound of blankets strewn around the chair.

  ‘I accept your apology, my lord,’ Lady Penrose said stiffly to Lord Lavenham, whilst deftly rearranging the folds of the coverlet she’d snatched up with the expertise of one well used to ordering the demi-train of an evening gown. ‘I could not believe it at first, either, when my maid came to me with the tale which she claimed is titillating the entire servants’ hall. It was only when I discovered that my charge was not in her room that I gave it any credence. In the same way, you needed to see the evidence with your own eyes.’

  ‘What evidence?’ Lady Jayne was blinking from one of them to the other. ‘Why is everyone so cross?’

  ‘The only thing to do is announce their engagement at once,’ put in Lord Lavenham.

  ‘Engagement? Why? We were only…’

  ‘Be quiet, you foolish girl,’ snapped Lady Penrose. ‘There is no excuse for such carryings-on, even if the pair of you do wish to marry. Unheard of!’

  ‘No…’ protested Lady Jayne again. ‘You have got it all wrong….’

  She felt as though she was emerging from a lovely, vivid dream into a viciously muddled nightmare, where everyone was accusing Richard of the most vile behaviour. They seemed to think he had got her drunk and deliberately seduced her.

  ‘Richard, tell them…’ She turned to look at him. And her blood ran cold. If anything had the power to sober her up it was the sight of him, sitting on the chair, his head in his hands, his shoulders bowed.

  The picture of despair.

  As Lady Penrose seized her wrist and dragged her from the room she realized that she’d ruined his life.

  Snatches of things that had happened flashed through her mind as she stumbled along the corridors in her chaperone’s outraged wake. The look of shock on his face when he’d found her naked in his bed. The harshness of his voice as he’d ordered her to cover herself up. It had all been a bit hazy, but the next thing she knew he’d been grimly wrestling her into one of his shirts. And then he’d picked her up and forcibly carried her from his bedroom. Her cheeks flamed red as she recalled her wanton behaviour over the next few minutes. Having all that naked chest within reach had been more temptation than she could resist. She had rubbed herself up against it like a cat. Almost purring with pleasure.

  And then she’d begged him to kiss her.

  Well, he need not have complied quite so enthusiastically, the voice of reason reminded her. But then her love for him surged back with the excuse that any red-blooded male, propositioned by a naked woman who was running her greedy little hands all over his naked torso, might have succumbed to a momentary lapse of judgement.

  But, oh, how badly he was regretting that lapse now! She only had to think of the way she had left him, sitting with his head in his hands, after learning that he was going to have to pay for what he’d said at the time was madness with a lifetime of wedlock to her!

  The moment they reached her rooms she whirled round and said, ‘Oh, please, you must not think Richard could possibly have done what his grandfather accused him of. None of what happened was his fault. It was all mine!’

  Lady Penrose sat down upon a chair by the window that overlooked the porte-cochère, her back to the window.

  ‘Indeed? Would you care to tell me what really happened?’

  Lady Jayne sank onto the sofa and, pausing only once or twice to take sips of water to ease her parched throat, haltingly recounted the events of the previous night.

  When she had finished, Lady Penrose made a gesture of annoyance.

  ‘What on earth possessed you to drink so much brandy?’

  ‘It—it was only the two glasses,’ replied Lady Jayne, slightly mystified. She had done so many dreadful things during the course of the night that it seemed very odd that her duenna should take her to task for her consumption of alcohol. ‘I have often seen gentlemen drink far more without it affecting them in the slightest.’

  ‘They are well used to it, though. And before last night, to my knowledge, you
have never been allowed to taste more than just a few sips of champagne.’

  ‘That is so, but…’

  ‘And it was Lord Ledbury who gave you that first glass. Did he make you drink it all?’

  ‘No! No…’ She frowned, trying to recall the exact sequence of events. ‘In fact he did not give me a drink at all! I helped myself while he was getting dressed to go after Milly.’

  ‘And I suppose you filled the glass to the top and drank it down as though it were a nice cup of tea? Now I can quite see how you came to think it was perfectly logical to remove every stitch of your clothing and get into Lord Ledbury’s bed,’ said Lady Penrose acidly.

  Put like that, it did sound terribly wicked. Shamefaced, she nodded her head.

  ‘Where you promptly fell asleep. And spent the rest of the night. Alone.’

  She nodded again.

  ‘And you still maintain that the bloodstains on the sheets must have come from the cut you sustained to your knee sliding down the roof.’

  ‘Yes.’ She drew aside the coverlet to reveal her grubby grazed knees.

  ‘I have to say that your explanation is the only one that makes complete sense. The others completely failed to account for the rope, and the fact that your room was locked from the outside.’

  ‘The rope? It is still there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  For some reason the knowledge that the rope had not disintegrated completely was strangely comforting. Even if it was only in that one tiny detail, she had not made a complete mull of the whole affair.

  ‘Your Josie came to my room in a dreadful state first thing, before I had even had my chocolate, with some wild tale about you eloping with a mysterious lover by knotting the curtain ties together to form a rope. Well, naturally I discounted that story straight off. If you had eloped you would have locked the door from the inside, to prevent your disappearance from being discovered as long as possible.’

  ‘Wait a minute… How did Josie get into my room? I tried to return last night and the key was not in the door.’

  ‘No, it was lying on top of the dresser next to it.’

  ‘Of course! Why did I not think to look there?’

  ‘Because you had already had one large glass of brandy,’ snapped Lady Penrose. ‘It was enough to dull your intellect to the point where all the subsequent choices you made were the wrong ones. Though for the life of me I cannot see what possessed you to climb out of your window by means of a makeshift rope in the first place. Why on earth did you not simply ring the bell for Josie to come and let you out?’

  ‘I was trying to be discreet.’

  Lady Penrose winced and closed her eyes. ‘God help us all if one day you actually try to cause a scandal.’

  Lady Jayne felt about two inches tall.

  Lady Penrose’s eyes flicked open and bored into her as she said, ‘And then, of course, my own maid came in with my chocolate, full of the gossip that was raging below stairs about how you had been found, dead drunk, in Lord Ledbury’s bed, following a night of torrid passion. Which was another story I could not credit, knowing the pair of you as I do. Besides there being no reason for it.’

  A maid had seen her? ‘Oh, no…’ she moaned, burying her face in her hands. Gone was any hope of trying to persuade Lord Lavenham and Lady Penrose to keep the whole incident between themselves. ‘I have been such a fool. And Lord Ledbury is going to have to pay the price….’

  ‘Do not for one moment succumb to any sympathy for that young man! His behaviour has been disgraceful!’

  Lady Jayne looked up, bewildered. ‘But I thought you said you believed me…’

  ‘I do believe you. And I therefore acquit Lord Ledbury of deliberately getting you drunk and seducing you. But do not forget the scene which met my eyes when I came in and found you together was very far from innocent. You were sprawled across his lap half-naked—both of you. And he was taking full advantage of your helpless condition. Had we not arrived when we did, I have no doubt he would have accomplished your seduction.’

  ‘No. Not Lord Ledbury. He wouldn’t…’

  ‘Of course he would. He’s a man. And they are all governed by the basest of urges. No matter how cunningly they conceal the fact.’

  She pulled herself up with what looked like a considerable effort.

  ‘But that is all beside the point. You were caught in his room, half-naked, having clearly been there all night. You will have to marry him. And that is that.’

  Defeat washed over her. He would have to marry her. That was what Lady Penrose meant. He was going to have to pay a terrible price for an incident that was entirely her fault.

  ‘You will get dressed now, if you please, and we shall go downstairs for breakfast, where we shall announce your betrothal. You will not behave as though you have done anything to be ashamed of. And let anyone make any conjectures about what happened last night if they dare!’

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was too much to hope that even one of Lord Lavenham’s house guests might be unaware of the gossip.

  But they were all at the breakfast table when she went down. And all looking far more alert than she felt.

  The shock of realising she had trapped Lord Ledbury into a betrothal he didn’t want had dispersed the haziness left over from the brandy. But she still had a pounding headache. And her knee and shoulders hurt like the very devil. When she lowered herself into a place beside Lady Penrose at the table she did so gingerly, trying hard not to jar any of the myriad scrapes and bruises she had sustained from her barely controlled descent from the roof.

  Lady Susan smirked and made a comment behind her hand to Miss Twining, who was sitting next to her, which made Miss Twining blush and stare very hard at her plate.

  And Lady Jayne realied that to any onlooker the stiffness of her movements as she took her place at table must have made her look exactly like a young woman who had just spent the night being thoroughly ravished.

  While she was still thinking about how close Lady Penrose considered she had come to that, the door opened and Richard walked in. There was a distinct air of expectancy around the breakfast table, rather like that in a theatre on the opening night of a new performance. Everyone was either looking at her, or at him, or from one to the other. And, in spite of Lady Penrose’s warning not to look as though she’d done anything to be ashamed of, she felt her cheeks heat. It didn’t help when Lord Lavenham stalked in, not two paces behind Richard, with a face like thunder. She couldn’t believe how angry he still was. That he could have condemned Richard’s behaviour without even giving him a fair hearing in the first place. Why, Lady Penrose, whom she had known for only a few months, had been willing to hear her side of the story—yes, and had believed her, no matter how unlikely it must all have sounded.

  But Richard behaved as though he didn’t care what anyone in the room might be thinking of him. With a breezy smile he walked straight to her, and wished her a cheery good morning.

  She could not hold his gaze for more than a split second. One look at him was all it took to remind her that not two hours since he’d had his hands all over her. That smiling mouth had suckled at her breast. How could he just saunter in, looking all cool and collected, when she was so flustered she hardly knew what to do with herself?

  When he took her hand and planted a kiss on her knuckles, like a practised lover, it struck her that this was the difference between them. He almost certainly was a practised lover. He’d like
ly had his hands all over lots of other women in his time.

  The image that conjured up didn’t help at all.

  ‘May I get you some toast?’

  ‘Toast?’ She was almost dying with mortification, and he was talking about toast?

  ‘Or eggs, perhaps?’ He summoned a footman. ‘Peters, why have you not poured Lady Jayne a cup of tea?’

  ‘I was just about to my lord,’ said the footman, hastening to fetch a teapot.

  He had not let go of her hand. And he did not look as though he was the least bit cross with her. From the ease of his manner, anyone would think that marrying her was his fondest wish.

  It was so…decent of him to shield her from public censure by putting on this show. He didn’t seem to bear her any ill will at all now that he’d recovered from the initial shock of finding himself forcibly engaged to her. But then he knew she hadn’t meant to bring all this down on his head. That she’d just been trying to help and, being the idiot she was, made a total hash of things.

  She returned the pressure of his hand, finally finding the courage to look into his eyes. He smiled, pulled up the chair next to hers and sat down.

  ‘I expect we should tell everyone our news. Though it looks as though they all suspect something anyway.’

  He gave a devil-may-care grin that sent a pang straight to her heart. Perhaps he really didn’t care. He had already accepted he was going to have to marry for duty. She could just imagine him shrugging fatalistically as he shaved and deciding that, after all, she was no worse than Lady Susan or Lucy Beresford.

  ‘I have the privilege,’ he said, looking round the table with a glint of challenge in his eyes, ‘of being able to announce that Lady Jayne and I are to be married. Is that not so?’ He gave her hand a squeeze. ‘My love?’

  It was her cue to back him up.

  She opened her mouth to agree. But the power of speech seemed to have deserted her. She had never been at such a loss. Normally she had no trouble maintaining a cool facade. Where was it now that she so desperately needed it?