A Most Scandalous Proposal

by Ashlyn Macnamara

  “Benedict!”

  At the sound of his given name, his footfalls came to an abrupt halt. She felt it in the change of his energy, from movement to complete stillness. Apparently, she also possessed a captain’s tone.

  “He did not say such a thing to me, not in so many words. I took his meaning well enough. At any rate, it seems he’s decided this makes me his ideal bride.”

  “Ideal bride?” Distaste echoed through his words. “Who would want such a marriage?”

  Julia took a deep breath. She’d never imagined making this admission to a man, even if she had known him most of her life. “I do.”

  A second or two of silenced ensued. “You cannot be serious.”

  “I’m perfectly serious. I’ve watched my sister languish for years over a sentiment that is supposed to render a person happy. It’s brought her nothing but pain. Why should I open my heart to something like that?”

  An image, long suppressed, surfaced in her brain, and she shuddered. No. She squeezed her eyes shut and thrust it aside. She would not think about that day, even if it had more to do with her refusal of love than anything Sophia had ever done.

  “Don’t you believe the risk might be worth something?” Stealthily, he’d worked his way closer. His voice rumbled within inches of her ear, the captain’s tone completely gone, replaced by something low and velvet and beguiling, something that turned her insides—oh God—to liquid heat. “If your sentiments were returned—”

  “I have none to return.” She let out a little twitter of laughter.

  For a moment, his breathing, shallow, harsh, and agitated, broke the room’s silence. “You? Have none to return? I do not believe that for a moment. I recall you climbing trees to put baby birds back in their nests.”

  She ought to have laughed at that memory. Instead, a shiver passed down her spine at the utter conviction in his tone. “Believe what you will. Only I know the truth of what lies inside me.”

  “I’m not certain you do.” Trembling fingertips fluttered along her neck. Her pulse leaped in response, and she sucked in a breath, the hiss loud in the dark. “You cannot stand there and tell me you feel nothing.”

  Oh, she felt, certainly—too much and the sensation was altogether too enticing.

  “You cannot convince me you’d be willing to enter a marriage with no tender feelings at all.”

  She reached out, hoping to placate him, but immediately balled her fingers into a fist. Best not to touch him, not while he was in this mood. “I would not be the first to do so.” Mama, for one, had entered into just such an arrangement. “Nor would I be the last.”

  “Then you’d be missing the best life has to offer.”

  “And I’d save myself a great deal of pain when it all came crashing down.”

  “Some things are worth the pain. They’re most definitely worth the risk.”

  In the dark, she missed the movement, but the emotion pulsing from him had heightened the rest of her senses. The only warning she received was the whisper of fabric. Before her brain had a chance to process the meaning of that sound, he took her roughly by the shoulders and crushed his lips to hers.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE MOMENT their lips made contact, Julia stiffened, and Benedict braced himself for a slap. A slap or a knee to the groin. He deserved both the way he was assaulting her.

  Neither came.

  Instead, she whimpered into his mouth, the plaintive sound more resonant than a stinging smack. He eased her into a gentler kiss, intended to coax her into softening. He wanted her response.

  No, he needed it.

  His body screamed for her surrender the way his lungs screamed for air. Over and over, he slanted his mouth against hers, teasing, cajoling, until her breath expelled on a long sigh. He took advantage of her parted lips to sample their lush softness with his tongue.

  “Ah!”

  That whisper of surprise sent a bolt of heat coursing to his groin, and he caught the back of her head in his palm to hold her in place. He pressed his lips to hers once more and felt a tentative push back. Her hands drifted to his shoulders; her fingers burrowed into the wool of his coat.

  Clinging.

  Yes.

  He wrapped his other arm around her waist to savor the length of her body flush against his. Her lovely breasts, the cradle of her hips, her lithe thighs. She swayed into his embrace, and he pushed their kiss further. Deeper.

  Triumph poured through him as her tongue rose to twine with his. A growl surged into his throat, and he pressed his advantage. Her unschooled response, fueled by her awakening passion, aroused him more than a courtesan’s practiced caress.

  Because this was Julia, his Julia, and he could no longer deny what he felt for her. He pulled her closer, urged even more of a response. He needed more, her taste, her jasmine perfume surrounding them both. Her fingers tangled in his hair, her mouth responsive against his.

  Then without warning, she tore her lips from his, planted her palms against his chest and shoved. Benedict froze, and for a long moment, only the sound of their ragged breathing filled the room.

  “That cannot happen again.” Her words rung with such finality, she might have screamed them.

  For an instant, shock held him in an icy grip. Then he stepped forward, intending to capture her once more to put the lie to those words. Now that he’d kissed her once, he couldn’t fathom it being a singular occurrence. He quite imagined she’d just ruined every other woman for him.

  Somehow in the dark, she eluded his arms, so he settled for a verbal reply. “Why can’t it? You’ll never have me believe you did not enjoy that.”

  “It cannot happen again, ever.” Her voice quavered oddly on the final syllable. She sounded dangerously near tears, and he wanted nothing more than to pull her back into his embrace and comfort her.

  “If I hurt you in the beginning, I apologize.”

  “You did not hurt me, not in the beginning and not the way you think.”

  He bit back a curse against the room’s darkness. If only he could see her expression, he’d have a better idea how to respond. “But I have hurt you.”

  “More like you betrayed me.” Something muffled her words. He imagined her, head lowered, speaking around a hand placed along the side of her jaw.

  “Betrayed you? Don’t you think you’re taking matters a bit too far?”

  “No, not at all. You’re supposed to be my friend.” On every successive syllable, her voice strengthened until it reached the crisp chill of accusation. “You’re supposed to be the one man I can count on to ask me to dance, and I do not have to concern myself that you’ll do anything untoward. I could always depend on you for that, and now you’ve ruined it.”

  She turned, and her slippers thudded dully on the carpet as she crossed to the door.

  Anger seethed inside him, and he gritted his teeth as if that would hold back the imminent eruption. “I’ve only ruined your illusions.”

  She froze on the threshold, her rigid silhouette outlined in the faint light coming from the corridor.

  He reached the door in two strides. “You prefer to pretend you have no feeling inside you, that you have nothing to offer a man. And now that I’ve proven you wrong, you cannot stand to face the truth.”

  “I have never seen happiness result from such sentiment. Goodnight, Lord Benedict.”

  He slammed his palm against the door, and it closed with a loud bang.

  “What have you done?” She pitched her voice low but could not mask its shaking. She tugged at the door in vain. “Do you want us to be caught?”

  “Hang it all if we’re caught. I want an explanation from you.” He leaned his full weight against the oak panel. “Neither of us is leaving this room until I have it.”

  “What is it you want to know?” The words emerged clipped, as if she’d pronounced them through clenched jaws.

  “It’s quite simple. I would like to know why you’re willing to settle for … for such a sterile idea of a marr
iage.”

  “I prefer to think of it as sensible.” Since he’d closed the door, he’d cast the room in total darkness and once more masked her expression, but he could well picture her chin raised. Defiant, as always, just as she’d been as a child when, that day at the pond, her governess berated her over her soaked and muddied gown. Then, the sensible had preoccupied her far less.

  “Then why would you say you’ve never seen happiness come of love?”

  “Have you ever looked at the couples that surround us?” She let out a huff. “My sister, for one. All she’s done is suffer for her feelings.”

  He crossed his arms. “So you’ve said. I cannot believe that’s all there is to it.”

  “Do not forget my mother. She meant to marry the Earl of Cheltenham, only he abandoned her and she had to settle for my father.” For all the good the other match would have done her. Cheltenham had married, produced a daughter, and popped his clogs in short order, leaving the earldom to pass to another branch of the family.

  He held in a shout of laughter. “Shouldn’t the state of your parents’ marriage argue against such a sensible arrangement?”

  “But Mama always claimed to love her earl.” The words slipped out on a note of desperation. If Mrs. St. Claire had loved anything about her earl, it was his title.

  One side of his mouth twisted upward. At least, in the dark, he had no need to mask his expression. “Let’s suppose I believe that. Your sister’s pain and your mother’s—it comes of their sentiments not being returned. While you …”

  He let himself trail off. Words tangled with the emotions churning inside him, but he wasn’t yet ready to lend them voice, any more than she was ready to listen.

  “Benedict, I—Please don’t ask too much of me.”

  “This is about more than Sophia and your mother, isn’t it?”

  But for the whisper of her breath, silence reigned in the room while he awaited her reply, a silence that became weightier with each passing moment, until it shut out the sounds of the rest of the house.

  At last, no longer able to stand it, he groped for her. His hand met hers, their fingers knotted, but she did not pull away. “Tell me who hurt you.”

  “No one hurt me. Not in the way you think.” She paused, and her fingers curled about his. “Do you recall our governess?”

  He did, vaguely, as a comic figure, someone they played pranks on, someone they delighted in fooling. “Miss Misery?”

  “Miss Mallory,” she corrected him with surprising vehemence.

  “What’s she got to do with any of this?”

  “She let herself fall in love.” Her voice rang hollow. “Sophia and I weren’t supposed to know, but we caught her. She’d always blush and get flustered around Smithers.”

  “Smithers?”

  “One of the footmen,” she clarified. “Sophia saw them kissing.”

  “Was she dismissed over that?”

  “No.” Julia sighed. “We never told Mama. Even then we knew she’d never understand. Miss Mallory was of good family. A footman was far beneath her.”

  “Surely she did not marry the fellow.”

  Julia shook her head, a motion he felt more than saw through the connection of their hands. “I do not think, in the end, Smithers felt as strongly. He left us that summer to marry some village girl, and Miss Mallory … Miss Mallory … she …”

  “She what?”

  “She took too much laudanum.”

  He slipped a hand to her shoulder, slid it along the nape of her neck, and pulled her head against his chest. Thank God she didn’t push away this time. There was worse to come—he sensed as much. He pressed his lips to the top of her head, and breathed in jasmine. “You were so young. How could you have known?”

  “I was the one who found her. I went to her rooms. I cannot even recall why now. I thought she was asleep at first, only she didn’t”—she shuddered in his arms—“move.”

  His heart turned over. So young, and he must have been away at school, blithely unaware at the time, barely noticing the replacement when he returned on holiday. He might have lent comfort had he known, the same way her presence had lightened his heart after his parents’ demise. Had she even understood the concept of death before the day she was forced to confront it?

  He shifted his weight and pulled her closer. “Did … Does Sophia know?”

  “Mama forbade me from telling her.”

  Odd that she’d heeded that directive at a time when obedience went against her nature. Even as a child, she must have suspected Sophia was more fragile when it came to matters of the heart. Only that meant Julia bore the burden of her discovery alone.

  She’d never been able to share what she’d learned—that love might drive a person to such an extreme, that the pain might become so unbearable it pushed one to take one’s own life.

  “Have you ever told anyone of this?”

  “Mama would not let me speak of it, not even to her. How would it appear if word got out that she’d hired such an unstable sort to look after her daughters? How would that upbringing have affected our ability to catch suitable husbands?”

  “To hell with suitable husbands. You needed to tell somebody and not keep that locked inside you.” With his fingertips, he traced along her ear to the line of her jaw. “No one ought to bear such burdens alone.”

  “But don’t you see what Miss Mallory’s feelings for Smithers drove her to?”

  “Her unreturned feelings,” he insisted. “It’s not the same thing.”

  She pushed herself away from his embrace, away from him. “Don’t ask of me more than I can give. I have never seen love lead to anything like happiness. The so-called love matches of society turn cold after a few years. You’ve seen it. What of our Prince Regent, forced into marriage with a woman he cannot bear, when by all accounts, he was in love with Mrs. Fitzherbert? And even that passion did not last.”

  “Then he could not have truly loved her.”

  “I do not have it in me to return that sort of sentiment,” she insisted. “You have had your explanation, and now I beg you to let me go.”

  “This isn’t over,” he growled.

  “Yes, I’m afraid it is.” She grasped the door handle and pulled. “Goodnight, my lord.”

  She marched off, closing the door behind her. The click of the latch echoed loudly in his ears along with her dismissal, each cold and perfunctory word a nail driven into his heart.

  JULIA kept her composure until she reached the bedchamber she shared with her sister. Once surrounded by the familiar—the safe—she let herself go limp, her back pressed to the wall as she slid to the thick padding of the carpet. She touched her fingertips to her lips.

  Still swollen, still tingling. And the feel of his arms about her, his chest solid against her breasts …

  She raised cold hands to clutch her cheeks. What was she going to do now? One touch of Benedict’s mouth to hers, and the entire world had tilted on its axis. His lips had slipped so sensually over hers. So compelling. And the smooth glide of his tongue—

  The paneled door rattled open, and Julia scrambled to her feet. Too late.

  “My goodness, the spectacle in the drawing room.” Sophia sailed into the bedchamber. “I was certain Mama and Lady Wexford would come to blows.”

  “I thought you claimed a headache.”

  “Highgate convinced me it was prudent to put in an appearance.” Sophia looked her over. “But you weren’t in the drawing room. What were you doing on the floor? And in your dinner dress?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why is your face so pale? Something’s happened.”

  Julia eyed her sister. Roses bloomed in her cheeks. Suspicious roses. “I might ask you the same. Where did you disappear to after dinner?”

  “Only the library. That can hardly come as a shock to you.” The tips of her ears, just visible through the mass of golden ringlets, turned the same color as her cheeks.

  Julia arched a brow. “The librar
y, is it? And what is it about the library that is making you blush?”

  “Well.” Hands folded primly in front of her, Sophia cast her eyes to the floor. “Highgate might have managed to track me down.”

  Of course he had, and further convinced her to rejoin the company.

  “Haven’t you learned anything from the Posselthwaite ball?” As if she had any right to criticize her sister after what had just happened in Papa’s study.

  “What more could possibly happen? We’re already betrothed.”

  “If you’re not extremely careful, you will not be able to cry off.”

  Sophia reached up in a habitual gesture to toy with the pendant she wore round her neck. A slight tremor in her fingers made her hand flutter like a bird’s wing. “It isn’t as if anyone saw us.”

  “It will not matter whether anyone saw you or not, the way you’re behaving.”

  Her hand came to an abrupt halt. “How am I behaving?”

  “Flustered. Why, I haven’t seen you this out of sorts since—” Julia clamped her mouth shut. She’d nearly blurted out Ludlowe’s name, and Sophia hardly needed the reminder.

  Sophia moved to the dressing room and plucked at her curls. Hairpins showered to the floor. “What could I possibly have to be flustered about? We simply had a conversation, and I lent him one of my novels.”

  “He reads novels?”

  “He expressed a liking for Sense and Sensibility. I found it rather refreshing that he did not immediately sneer at it as feminine foolishness.”

  “Oh, indeed.”

  Sophia whirled, the muscles about her eyelids tight. “Don’t think I don’t know exactly what you’re doing.”

  “What am I doing?”

  “Evading the question by distracting me.”

  “Oh? What was the question?”

  “What were you doing on the floor when I came in?”

  Julia focused on the miniature that sat on a rosewood table next to the bed. Out of an ornate gold frame, two young girls, one a golden blonde and the other darker in coloring, gazed serenely on the world. She recalled sitting perfectly still while the artist worked at his sketch pad. Hours and hours she’d sat with Sophia, an arduous task for an eleven-year-old who’d much rather romp through the woods with Benedict. But that was before she’d had her innocence stolen.