by Brenda Hiatt
Sevaric found his watch and brought it over to the lamplight. “Nearly four.”
It was early December, that time of long grim nights. Dawn was at least three hours away. The room was cold, with ghostly shadows thrown off by the single lamp on the desk. And Sevaric was standing arms crossed, looking like some vengeful dark god. She couldn’t bear it.
She walked around the room, her hand trailing along the wall. There had to be another hidden door somewhere, one that led to a withdrawing room where she could be alone, away from this man who had so coldly deprived her of her home and future. But the walls were bare white plaster, without even a wainscoting to arouse her hopes.
“You might as well take a seat.” Sevaric gestured toward the only chair.
Dorie regarded the hard wooden chair balefully for a moment, then its alternative—an even harder wooden floor—and finally did as he suggested, tucking her skirt under her legs and her hands in her lap. With a pang, she recalled the cloak she had so thoughtlessly left in front of the library hearth.
There was a hearth here, too, of course, but the granite fireplace was bare, without even a stick of kindling to burn. If she had to sit in this frigid room till morning, she would die of exposure. That would solve all her problems, she supposed, but she couldn’t help but wish for a warmer fate.
Lord Sevaric was keeping warm by prowling around the room, tapping the walls, searching for some second exit. He was fortunate to be a man, thus dressed comfortably enough in his severely cut evening coat and breeches. As he reached to test the plaster cornice, Dorie’s gaze lingered on that coat, spread so taut across his shoulders and tight on his powerful arms. He turned and caught her staring, and she quickly bent her head to hide her flush.
But then he was next to her, stripping off his coat. “Here. Wear this.”
It was almost unthinkable, accepting this gift from her enemy. And improper, too, although it was too late to pay much mind to propriety. “Oh, no, I couldn’t—”
“Wear it.” He dropped the coat on her lap and strode to the hearth.
The coat was still warm from his body, and she was so cold.
So she pulled it on, rolling up one sleeve and then the other above her hands. Her fingers caught on a slash in one sleeve, and she considered it with abstract interest. It must have happened this evening, for his valet would never have let him leave the house with his coat torn like that. Perhaps he had caught it on a nail as he was hurling himself against the door to the study.
He had tried, at least, to free them from this prison. And so, huddling there, breathing in the scent of sandalwood from the lapels, she forced herself to say, “Thank you,” for the effort as well as the coat.
In his shirtsleeves and white satin waistcoat, Sevaric picked up a heap of old newspapers and transferred them to the hearth. “I don’t know why you young ladies always wear such inappropriate garments. Muslin in December. It’s a wonder you don’t all catch lung fever.”
It must be beyond him to be gracious, and she had never been a saint of forbearance. “I can’t afford a winter wardrobe. Woolens are expensive, not that you need take any note of that!”
He must not have had an answer for this, for he got very busy balling up newspapers and tossing them into the fireplace. The resulting pile would, Dorie thought, burn for a moment or two. But she reckoned without Sevaric’s ruthlessness.
“Get up.”
She was too stunned to react, and after a moment he shook his head. “I mean, would you mind giving me the chair?”
It wasn’t very gentlemanly of him to demand her seat, but she supposed it was only fair to let him sit for a time. So she rose and stepped away in silent dignity.
Her hauteur dissolved as he seized the chair and dragged it to the hearth. “What are you doing?” she asked, but it was plain enough. He took hold of one chair leg and, with adroit pressure from his knee, split it off. Then he tossed it into the fireplace and repeated the butchery with the other legs. Very soon the Queen Anne chair was a crosspatch of splinters surrounded by newspaper balls.
“I’ll need the lamp,” he said.
Glad for a role to play in their survival, Dorie picked up the lamp and, shielding its flame with her hand, brought it to him. After removing the glass, he held a screw of newspaper to the light and transferred the flame to the paper balls in the hearth.
She pulled his coat tighter against her. As the flame licked and then ignited the broken wood, she said with an attempt at brightness, “Well done! And with such meager materials!”
He shrugged. “On the Peninsula, we learned to make do. One night, on an Andalusian plateau—not a tree or shrub for miles—we had to burn our saddles to stay warm. Either that or our boots.” He crossed to the oak table and brought a couple of ledgers to her. “Here,” he said, laying them down on the floor. “Not much of a chair, but it’s all I can offer you at the moment.”
He hauled over another ledger and sat a discreet couple of feet away. They waited in silence, watching the flames eat away at the old chair. It was warmer now, but Dorie knew that soon the wood would be consumed and the room would gradually chill again.
She thought longingly of the hot tea Mr. Vayle had gone to make. If only he had arrived with it before they came into this room. But of course, if he had been about, they would never have been trapped in here.
Once the chair legs and back were mere ashes, Sevaric silently attacked the ledgers, ripping the pages and adding them to the fire. She thought of helping him, but held back. It seemed too private somehow, as, his face intent, he tore up the records of his father’s obsession and burned them.
Eventually he ran out of ledgers, and they had nothing to fuel the fire, and nothing but the leather bindings to sit on. The flames were dying to coals when Sevaric finally spoke. “I won’t put you out of your home. You needn’t worry about that.”
She had been drifting, almost asleep in the wisps of warmth, but this recalled her to the painful new reality. “It isn’t just my home. There are two families who till the farm that adjoins it.”
“They may stay, too, if they like. The rent will be favorable, I assure you.”
His offhandedness left her confused. This was Sevaric. He had ruined her brother, and he had no reason to spare her. There must be a trick in this somewhere, she reminded herself. “We haven’t much money to pay rent. We haven’t had to, so long as my brother owned the lodge.”
Bitterness crept into her voice as she realized Sevaric had every right to demand rent in exchange for her tenancy in her own home. “I do make a bit of income from my millinery work, and perhaps I can stretch that to—”
“Millinery work?”
The lamp had long since gutted out, and the fire was almost extinguished, so she couldn’t see the expression on his face. But his horror was clear in his tone. A viscount’s sister making hats! That must violate one of Lord Sevaric’s rules of proper conduct.
She tilted her chin proudly. “We make straw hats and bonnets and sell them to a Bond Street shop. The proprietor pays us a pound and sells each for ten pounds.” Staring down at her palms, scratched and callused from weaving the bristles of straw, she added, “I can’t afford to purchase my own bonnets. That is some measure of success, I suppose.”
“You don’t truly make the bonnets yourself?”
“I and the wives of my—your—tenants. We all weave them, and then I trim them with ribbons and such. I was always grievously fond of bonnets when I was a London debutante, so I have put my weakness to good use.”
He said nothing more as the glow of the last coals faded and the shadows deepened into darkness. Finally, gruffly, he said, “You need not worry about losing your home. I assure you, I have no use for the place.”
She was tired and cold and wished he would disappear so that she could give way to tears. “Then soon you will tire of paying the maintenance on it and sell it to someone who will have some use for it. And the tenants and I will have to make do.”
Sevaric said, “Yo
u are wrong to consider me an enemy. I have no quarrel with you.”
“But I,” she replied softly, “have a quarrel with you, Lord Sevaric. I did not seek it out. You forced it on me. I cannot avoid it any longer.”
He swore under his breath. She couldn’t quite distinguish it, as it was in another language—Spanish, she thought. But his meaning was clear enough, especially when he abruptly stood and strode back to the door.
Dorie was glad of the darkness then, so that she didn’t have to see him once again futilely smashing his shoulder against the solid oak. She heard it, though, heard his harsh breathing, and was glad when he finally gave up.
“Come here, Miss Caine.”
She responded with automatic defiance to his command. “Why?”
He sighed, a long, weary sigh. “Forgive me. I am cold, and I suspect you are even colder. And because there’s no warmth coming from that pile of ash, you might as well join me here. This wall faces my study, and there’s a little heat leaking through.”
Reluctant and a bit repentant, she followed his voice across the room. She reached her hands out, feeling blindly, fending off the corner of the desk. Then Sevaric seized her hand and drew her safely to the wall.
His hand was cold but comforting as he guided her to sit on a strip of carpet with her back against the wall. Then he arranged himself next to her and without a word took her in his arms.
It happened so quickly Dorie had no time to protest, and once the moment had passed she hadn’t the will for it anyway. They would freeze, most likely, if they didn’t share body heat, and so, improper as it was, she laid her head on his chest and told herself it was no different from clutching her hot-water bottle on a chilly night at home.
His body, she thought confusedly, was warmer than his hand, probably due to the exercise he’d just had. Heat radiated through the satin waistcoat and began to melt her. She closed her eyes and thought of a bed heaped high with a satin coverlet, a bed like the one she had slept in until her uncle lost all his money, a bed with hot-water bottles and hot bricks and warm flannel sheets.
She must have dozed off, because the next thing she heard was “Listen!” What, she mused drowsily, was Lord Sevaric doing in her warm bed? Ah, yes, she recalled, he had won the bed in a dice game, and she refused to give it over, and so in stalemate they both climbed in and fell asleep.
“Listen! I think the maid must be laying the fire in my study!”
Sevaric released her and rose, and she sat there in the darkness entirely bereft, a crick in her neck, chill seeping into the warm places where he had been against her. When he started beating on the door, she remembered it all.
They weren’t in bed together, of course, but something even worse, trapped in a horrid cell of a room that reeked of obsession and failure. And now that she was awake from her dream, she realized Sevaric hadn’t won her bed in a dice game. Or perhaps he had, along with everything else in the house she called her own.
But she couldn’t give into despair, not now, when release was only a few oak inches away. She stood, aching in every joint, and added her shouts and bangs to his.
Suddenly, the door creaked, and an inch of faint light sliced across the dark. They stopped banging and stepped back to let the door swing open and let the blinding day in.
When she saw the shocked faces of Mr. Vayle, a young woman, and a dragon of a matron, she realized what they must look like. She with her coiffure coming down and his coat draped over her shoulders, he in his shirtsleeves and tousled hair and needing a shave.
It’s all right, she told herself fiercely as the society dragon took a sharp breath. The Sevarics have already ruined me, when they drove my uncle to suicide.
So without once looking at Lord Sevaric, she let his coat drop to the floor and pushed her way past his friends and relatives. I must get home, she repeated silently as he called out after her. Home.
But home, of course, was lost to her. In confusion and sorrow, she halted at the front door. The kind Mr. Vayle was right behind, running down the stairs, calling her name. “You can’t go without your cloak!”
It was true. She couldn’t face the cold in her flimsy muslin gown. But Mr. Vayle didn’t have the cloak with him, and when she asked for it, he shook his head. “No, no, we can’t let you leave until you’re warmed up and rested. What a terrible ordeal that must have been! Come have some coffee!”
His gentleness was like a balm, and she let him tug her up the stairs. But no matter how she tried, she couldn’t ignore the scandalized cries of the dragon as she entered the study. And she could not ignore Max Sevaric by the hearth, shaking his head, turning to hide a rueful smile—he had reclaimed his coat, somewhat the worse for wear—or Mr. Vayle’s sotto voce message to him, “Honor!”
Honor? At first, she was too weary and too cold to question that, and too eager to get her hands around the coffee cup held out by the silent young woman across from her. But as the warmth seeped through her, the meaning of “honor” did, too.
She heard Sevaric telling the dragon in a firm voice, “Yes, I meant only to show Miss Caine the secret room, but a draft slammed the door shut. So my fiancée and I became trapped in there.”
Fiancée? Dorie started to protest, but Mr. Vayle was immediately beside her, pushing a piece of toast into her open mouth. “Just wait,” he whispered as she bent over, coughing helplessly. “Don’t say anything yet. Just wait till Mrs. Fitzniggle is gone.”
Choking brought tears to Dorie’s eyes, but through the wavering sheen she saw Mrs. Fitzniggle nod judiciously at what Sevaric was saying. “Considering the circumstances,” the dragon matron observed, “it’s good that you are to be married. Soon, I hope.”
“Very soon,” Mr. Vayle put in.
Dorie was slightly heartened that Sevaric responded to this interference with a glare that matched her own. But he did not deny Mr. Vayle’s statement. In fact, he echoed grudgingly, “Very soon.”
“He’s already got the special license.” Mr. Vayle was an accomplished liar. He didn’t blink as he uttered this falsehood, beaming at her in his avuncular way. “Sevaric realizes that he must make Miss Caine his immediately, for she is too precious to let get away. Isn’t that right, Sevaric?”
Sevaric allowed himself a short nod. Dorie was frozen with humiliation and couldn’t speak. Just as well. No one seemed interested in anything she might say. No one was even looking at her any longer, except the silent young woman—Sevaric’s sister, apparently—whose gaze kept shifting from Dorie to Mr. Vayle as if she suspected a conspiracy.
Dorie wanted to blurt out the truth, but something kept her silent, the realization that an unwary step could take her over the abyss of ruin. That was what Mrs. Fitzniggle was threatening, in her steely polite way, when she suggested the wedding take place immediately, “for you already have the license prepared, and tongues haven’t started wagging yet.”
The Caine family name had been tarnished for a century, ever since Valerian Caine was killed in a duel by his mistress’s husband. Her uncle’s suicide and her brother’s dissipation only added to the stain. She had never thought that she would bring further dishonor to the Caines. Not Dorie, the good little girl, the one who always tried to do the proper thing.
But she had only herself to blame. She should never have come here last night, should never have risked her reputation for Sevaric’s charity. She should have known—
She felt his gaze then, and forced herself to meet it. He was calm enough, purposeful, but something like desperation glinted in his dark eyes. He might have been a commander ordered to lead his troops into certain slaughter. He stared hard at her, as if to infuse a bit of death-defying enthusiasm. Some remnant of discipline made her sit straighter and match his outward composure.
Then Mrs. Fitzniggle made another interfering comment, and Sevaric glanced away.
“A church?” He frowned. “It might be difficult to schedule a wedding at such short notice.”
But it turned out that Mrs. F
itzniggle had a cousin Morton, a vicar at St. Ann’s Marylebone, who would perform the wedding as a favor to her. Dorie’s hands tightened into fists in her lap, crushing the muslin of her skirt as she listened to these strangers deciding her fate.
Mrs. Fitzniggle sailed out to pen a note to her cousin, and Miss Sevaric murmured something to her brother, then went to the door. She stopped with her hand on the latch. “Perhaps you might help me, Mr. Vayle?”
Mr. Vayle was less than enthusiastic, Dorie thought, but he could hardly ignore the hint. He rose and bowed to her and whispered, “Courage, my dear!” Then he left her alone with her false fiancé.
Finally she had a chance to speak, and she did before the words could get caught in her throat. “This is absurd, of course. We did nothing wrong.”
“Nothing?” Sevaric smiled, but the light never reached his eyes. “As I recall, we spent the night alone together. We even slept together.”
“Only to keep from freezing! And that’s hardly reason to—to—” She couldn’t say that momentous word marry, and no ready substitute came to mind. “We can’t let the likes of Mrs. Fitzniggle force us into ridiculous actions.”
“I do not think we have a choice. She wasn’t very subtle in her threats to tell all to all. And the story is volatile enough, considering our families’ past encounters. It will spread like a brushfire.”
Dorie closed her eyes and waited for strength to return to her. But there wasn’t any to spare. She couldn’t even bring herself to rise and walk out. “I don’t care. I shan’t be coming to Town very often, so the bad opinions of a few Londoners won’t matter to me.”
“You think not? The word will reach Surrey before the next stagecoach. In my experience, rural residents are even more judgmental than Londoners. You must know what it would mean, to be deemed a fallen woman. Who would marry you, knowing that?”
“I—” She faltered, but took a deep breath and tried again. “I would hope that the man I married would overlook such worldly things and value me for my true worth.”
“Have you the least reason to expect that?”