Slightly Dangerous

by Mary Balogh

  Basil cleared his throat. “Lady Elrick and I do not condone such vulgar behavior, I do assure you, Bewcastle,” he said.

  “It is simply our misfortune that my brother-in-law became enamored of a schoolmaster’s daughter and actually married her,” Hermione added. “Throughout the house party so far she has done nothing but flirt with every gentleman guest and humiliate us with displays such as this.” With one hand she indicated Christine’s wet hem. “But that she should involve you and flirt with you is unpardonable.”

  Christine could not quite believe the evidence of her own ears as she listened to this outpouring. It was like being catapulted right back into the past. They both spoke with such anger and bitterness—and such injustice. She was too distressed to say anything—or simply to hurry away from there.

  The Duke of Bewcastle raised his quizzing glass halfway to his eye. If he used it on her hem or any other part of her person, Christine decided, she would snatch it away from him and break it across his nose—or break his nose with it. But he directed his attention instead on Hermione.

  “I beg you not to distress yourself, ma’am,” he said, his voice stiff and quite, quite arctic. “Or you, Elrick. Daughters of gentlemen with an academic turn of mind are frequently better educated and therefore more interesting conversationalists than the average young lady of ton. Was it a whole hour I spent in Mrs. Derrick’s company after inviting her to stroll in the laburnum alley with me? I confess it seemed less than half that time. And did I flirt with her by discussing the afternoon ride and the letter from her sister that she was reading when I came upon her? If so, I will beg her pardon and promise to be more circumspect in future.”

  His glass fell on its black ribbon as he released his hold on it.

  He looked, Christine thought, very, very dangerous indeed, and the silence with which his words were greeted suggested that she was not the only one feeling it. He had dealt them a chilling setdown. She might have enjoyed it if she had not been so wretchedly hurt.

  “Hermione!” she said softly. She merely looked at Basil, who had so adored Oscar and yet could treat Oscar’s widow so shabbily. But he would not meet her eyes.

  She would probably have moved in the next moment and dashed blindly away from there if the Duke of Bewcastle had not turned his attention on her.

  “Allow me to escort you back to the house, ma’am,” he said. “And you may tell me if I do indeed owe you an apology.”

  She doubted she had ever heard his voice more cold.

  He offered his arm, and since Christine could not think of an excuse not to take it, she did so. His eyes, she noticed, were like two chips of ice. Their normal charming selves, in fact. She would have far preferred to run off in the other direction, to lose herself among the trees, to nurse her wounds in private. She had not realized that there were still wounds to nurse. She had thought them long healed.

  Hermione and Basil made no move to return with them.

  “Do I owe you an apology, Mrs. Derrick?” the duke asked her when they were out of earshot.

  “For making the offer you did?” she said. “You have already apologized for that.”

  “As I thought,” he said, “though my offer must have been a rather shocking conclusion to your successful ruse to draw me off alone for a whole hour. The maze was a clever delaying touch. I trust you enjoyed claiming your prize, ma’am, and that it was worth your efforts—and perhaps even the insult you were forced to endure.”

  She drew a deep breath and released it slowly. Her private wounds were going to have to wait awhile yet.

  “Actually,” she said, “I did not claim the prize at all. Someone put in the money for me and thus wagered on me. I relinquished all claim on the prize to her. But, yes, I did enjoy my moment of triumph for its own sake. I won on the very first day, of course, when I lured you into walking about this lake with me, but it would have seemed unsporting to end the game so soon. And so I decided to repeat the feat two days ago.” She sighed aloud and lifted her face to the sky.

  “It was, however,” he said, “I who invited you to walk with me on that second occasion.”

  “But, of course.” She looked at him with wide-eyed surprise. “A lady ought not to invite a gentleman, ought she, especially twice within a week? But that does not deter me. There are ways of inviting a gentleman to invite me—like sitting on a wall with a month-old letter, for example, looking pensive, while a whole grassy alley looms invitingly ahead, and then pretending that she is merely reading the letter.”

  Perhaps wisely he held his peace. She felt a nasty satisfaction in the realization that he was maybe angry and maybe—dared she hope?—a little humiliated too.

  They were among the trees. She might easily have slipped her arm free of his and would have done so if it had not occurred to her that it was precisely what he must wish her to do.

  “The original wager, you know,” she said, “was to entice you into making a marriage proposal. But since it was concluded that there was no fun in wagering on an impossibility, the terms were changed to luring you into an hour of conversation tête-à-tête. I might almost have won the first wager as well as the second, except that you offered me carte blanche instead of matrimony. That was extremely lowering, you know, though I daresay it had something to do with my being a schoolmaster’s daughter and far too vulgar for the position of duchess. However, no lasting harm was done since I did not have to confess it to my fellow contestants.”

  He continued to hold his peace.

  It really was quite provoking. She had never been one for quarreling and fighting with others. But she thought there would be something intensely satisfying about having a raging row with the Duke of Bewcastle. However, if her guess was correct, it would be harder to draw him into any uncontrolled, unseemly display of emotion than it would to lure him into matrimony. And that was because there was no emotion, no passion in the man. She quelled the memory of a certain embrace in the maze two days previous. That had not been passion—that had been lust.

  She sighed aloud again. “I am glad I have won the wager—twice,” she said. “Now I no longer have to cultivate your company.”

  “And that is my cue, I suppose,” he asked her, “to assure you that I am delighted to hear it?”

  “Are you?” she asked him. “Delighted, I mean?”

  “I have no opinion on the matter,” he said.

  “Do you never quarrel?” she asked him.

  “Quarreling,” he said, “is quite unnecessary.”

  “Of course it is.” She sawed the air with her free hand. “You can command obedience with the mere lifting of an eyebrow.”

  “Except,” he said, “when someone decides to ignore the threat of either the eyebrow or my quizzing glass.”

  She laughed, though she was not, truth to tell, feeling vastly amused. She had been horribly humiliated, first in the maze and now on the hill, and she could not wait to crawl into her little box of a room and curl up into a ball on the bed.

  “Your brother- and sister-in-law do not like you, Mrs. Derrick,” the Duke of Bewcastle said crisply and abruptly.

  Well, they had just made that perfectly obvious. There was no point in being upset anew at this bald statement of fact.

  “They are probably terrified that I will lure you into marriage as I lured Oscar,” she said as they stepped out into the clearing by the lake, where she had collided with him that first afternoon of the party. “And that later you will blame them for not warning you.”

  “Warning me that you are a schoolmaster’s daughter?” he said. “That you are conniving?”

  “And vulgar,” she said. “You must not forget that. It was one of my chief sins, you know. I was forever doing things that drew attention to myself and embarrassing them. Try as I would, I could never be perfect as Hermione was. Now that you have had time to reflect on the matter, you must be very thankful that I refused to be your mistress.”

  “Must I?” he said. “Because you are not a perfe
ct lady?”

  They were among the trees leading to the lawn before the house.

  “And because I am a flirt,” she said.

  “Are you?” he asked her.

  “And because I might kill you as I killed Oscar,” she said.

  There was a short silence, during which she realized that all the defenses she did not know she had erected about herself were down and all her good humor was gone and if they did not reach the house soon she was going to quarrel with him whether he wished to quarrel with her or not. She had mental images of herself pummeling his chest with both fists, stamping on his boots with both feet, and twisting his quizzing glass into a corkscrew while screeching at him like a demented night owl. But the trouble was that they were not amusing images.

  She was going to start crying if she was not careful. She never cried. There was never any point, was there?

  “It would seem, then,” he said, “that Elrick and his lady have some justification for their dislike.”

  What had she expected? That he would ask if it was true? That he would drag the whole story out of her as no one else had ever done and exonerate her of all blame? And then apologize abjectly for the offer he had made in the maze and sweep her off on his trusty steed—every knight worthy of the name possessed one of those—to be his duchess?

  She could conceive of no worse fate. She really could not. Because he was not a knight in shining armor. He was a cold, disagreeable, haughty aristocrat.

  “Absolutely,” she said. “Oh, absolutely. It did not matter that I was nowhere near him when he died, did it? That was just another example of my cunning. I killed him anyway. And I am not in a good humor, your grace, as you have perhaps perceived. I am going to break into a run as soon as I have finished speaking and arrive back at the house all hot and panting. I do not expect you to come dashing gallantly after me.”

  But before she could suit action to words, his right hand caught her upper arm in a viselike grip and she found her heaving bosom being hauled within an inch of his chest. His silver eyes blazed with cold light into her own.

  She thought for one startled moment that he was going to kiss her again.

  Perhaps he thought so too. Certainly his eyes dipped to her mouth and his nostrils flared. His left hand came somewhat more gently to her other arm.

  If a lightning bolt had crashed to earth between them the air could not have crackled with greater tension.

  But he did not kiss her—for which fact she was mortally thankful later when she could think straight again. She would probably have kissed him back and clung to him and begged him to carry her off deep into the woods and ravish her. And the trouble was, she thought then, that she probably would really have done it too—gone with him, that was, lain with him. Maybe she would even have begged him to repeat the offer he had made in the maze.

  But he did not kiss her.

  “More and more,” he said instead, more to himself than to her, it seemed, “I regret that I came here. And before you contrive to have the last word, Mrs. Derrick, I daresay you regret it too—that I came, that you came.”

  He released his hold on her, and she caught up her wet hem and fled, feeling more wretched than she had felt in two years. She really ought not to have come to this party—and that was surely the understatement of the decade. She had known Hermione and Basil were coming. And now she had exposed herself to the ridicule and censure of the Duke of Bewcastle, who would think that she had killed Oscar, for heaven’s sake.

  And yet if he had kissed her just now, she would have kissed him back. Yet all he had been able to say when he did not kiss her was that he regretted more than ever coming to this house party.

  She hated him with a passion. It was an alarming thought. She would have far preferred to be indifferent to him.

  She should remain outside, she thought as she arrived at the house hot and breathless and disheveled. She should confront Hermione and Basil as soon as they returned. It was high time. She had been as distraught as they during the days following Oscar’s death and quite unable to defend herself properly against their accusations. But she was feeling hardly less distraught at this particular moment. And so, like the coward she sometimes was, she hurried up to her room, thankful that she met no one on the way.

  She shut the door, threw herself across the narrow bed, and clutched fistfuls of the bedspread as she fought tears so that she would not have to appear at dinner with swollen eyelids and bloodshot eyes and blocked nasal passages. She had no one to blame but herself for all this, she knew. She should have refused to come. Even Melanie could not have forced her if she had said no and stuck with it.

  A long time passed before she calmed down and sat up on the bed to observe her appearance in the looking glass. With a smile on her face she would perhaps look no different from usual. She smiled at her image to test her theory. Tragedy’s face looked back at her with grotesquely upward curved lips. She parted her lips and added a sparkle to her eyes.

  There, she thought—she was as good as new, safe behind her defenses again. Strange—she had not known she still had them, that she still needed them. She had been free for two years and happy again. Well—almost happy.

  She would survive intact to the end of the party, she decided firmly, until she could go home and hide her heart again in the comfortable routine of her daily life. After all, she had survived Oscar’s death.

  WULFRIC FELT UNUSUALLY discomposed—again. And for the same reason—again. He had almost kissed her, for God’s sake. A more inappropriate ending to a bothersome afternoon he could not imagine.

  He had very badly miscalculated, though, he realized as he watched her run from him. In more than one way.

  She was still angry with him over the offer he had made her.

  Of course, he was more than a trifle annoyed himself. He did not believe that those two lengthy meetings between them had been wholly contrived on her part. But she had been a participant in that ridiculous contest and had doubtless prolonged their second encounter as long as possible. It had been her suggestion to go into the maze, after all. And he had followed her in like a puppet on a string. And then he had kissed her and made his impulsive offer.

  It must have been some consolation to her when she ran from the maze to be able to rush back to claim victory and the prize.

  His own ruffled feathers paled into insignificance, however, beside the fact that she had been deeply hurt by the asinine behavior of Elrick and his lady back there on the hill—as well she might. He had a previous acquaintance with those two and had never before found either of them unpleasant or indiscreet or foolishly spiteful. They had been all three today.

  They had certainly aired the family linen before him in a manner that was quite unseemly. They resented her lowly origins, her vulgarity, her flirtatiousness—that word again. It came up with tedious regularity where she was concerned. He really did not want to know any of their feelings about her. He certainly did not need to know.

  But something had obviously happened among the three of them—something concerning the death of Oscar Derrick. He did not for a moment believe that Christine Derrick had killed him, but there had been something to cause such lasting enmity. This afternoon he had been somehow caught in the middle of a sordid family squabble.

  He deeply resented the imposition.

  At the same time he had learned something interesting about Mrs. Derrick. She was made up of more than just sunshine and laughter. There was darkness in her too, deeply suppressed, though it had come bubbling to the surface while they had walked together just now. She had tried her best to provoke a quarrel with him.

  He had almost succumbed—in a manner she would not have expected.

  Her vulnerability was something he did not wish—or intend—to deal with. He had felt an attraction to her, he had kissed her, he had offered to make her his mistress, she had refused, and there was an end of the matter. Apart from what he had to confess was a lingering attraction to her person, he had
no further interest in her or the dark complexities of her life.

  And yet, annoyingly, he found his eyes drawn to her quite as much as ever during the second week of the house party.

  She was a light-bringer despite the darkness he had glimpsed in her.

  He was still unwillingly dazzled by that light.

  8

  WULFRIC WENT FISHING WITH BARON RENABLE AND some of the other gentlemen a few mornings in succession. He sat in Renable’s library on several occasions with a small group of gentlemen, talking politics and international affairs and books. He played billiards more than once with the gentlemen who were similarly inclined. In the evenings he played cards, since only the older people were really interested in doing so. He participated in as few of the merrier events of the party as possible without being ill-mannered. He spent as much time alone as he possibly could—it was precious little. He counted the days, and almost the hours, until he might leave to return home.

  There was one event he was not going to be able to escape, however, though at least it had been placed at the very end of the party as the culminating entertainment. There was to be a grand ball—or as grand as any such event could be in the country—as the official celebration of the betrothal between Miss Magnus and Sir Lewis Wiseman. A select group of neighbors had been invited, since twenty-four houseguests and two hosts could not decently fill a ballroom.

  “Most of our invited guests have only a small claim to gentility,” Lady Renable explained to Wulfric a day or two before the event. “However, they like to be invited, and one does feel duty bound to condescend to them once or twice a year. I do hope you will not find the company too insipid.”

  “I believe, ma’am,” he said, raising both his eyebrows and his quizzing glass, “your taste in guests as in all things is to be trusted.”

  Why apologize for what could not be avoided? And why apologize to him alone? Why apologize at all? One thing about Bedwyns for which he would be eternally thankful was that they were not forever apologizing to one another.