by Mary Balogh
It had taken all of Duncan’s self-control to stop himself from stalking out of the room and out of the house. It could not be done. He had made Miss Huxtable an offer of sorts last evening, the morning paper had made much of it this morning, and honor dictated that the offer be made official today. If she refused him, so be it. He would resume the hunt with thirteen days to spare.
He had taken a huge bouquet of flowers, he remembered, when he had called to propose marriage to Caroline Turner. A footman had whisked it away at the door and he had not seen it again. He had been welcomed with smiles and bows and a hearty handshake by her father. He had gone down on one knee when alone with Caroline and delivered a rehearsed speech that was more floral than the vanished bouquet. He had covered the back of her hand with kisses when she had said yes and called himself the happiest of men. He had assured her that he loved her and would until he drew his final breath—and beyond that through all eternity. And he had meant every word, God help him.
He had come empty-handed today, and there was no rehearsed speech rattling around in his brain. And no ardor accelerating his heartbeat.
The door opened behind him and closed again even as he turned. He was relieved to recognize her, though she looked somewhat different. She was dressed in dark blue today. Her hair was styled more simply and looked thicker and glossier. Candlelight had not unduly flattered her. She must be one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. Not to mention voluptuous—he had not exaggerated that fact in his memory.
She also looked calm and self-possessed. And … intelligent. Her eyes looked him over steadily and unhurriedly. Perhaps, like him, she had been afraid that she might not even recognize him today.
He bowed formally. She did not curtsy in return. She inclined her head instead.
“Miss Huxtable,” he said.
“Lord Sheringford.”
“I do apologize,” he said, “for the very public reaction to our encounter last evening.”
“On the contrary,” she said, “it is I who must apologize to you, my lord. If I had been looking where I was going, I would not have run into you. And if I had not told Major Dew in the park the day before yesterday that I was betrothed and then been embarrassed last evening to discover that the Marquess of Allingham was already engaged to marry someone else, I would not have presented you as my betrothed. It was all very foolish and very out of character for me. But that latter fact is beside the point. I have caused you embarrassment and I am sorry.”
He had been surprised last evening by her candor. He was surprised again today. He had expected that she would heap blame upon him.
“There will be no further embarrassment for either of us,” he said, “when a formal announcement of our engagement appears in tomorrow’s papers.”
She moved farther into the room and seated herself on a chair by the fireplace. She indicated one on the other side.
“Do sit down,” she said. “You are under no moral obligation whatsoever to offer for me today, you know. It would be absurd for either of us to feel forced into marrying by a little idle gossip. We have done nothing wrong or even indiscreet. We danced and talked in a crowded ballroom, as did everyone else who was there. Both activities are the very point of a ball. There really has been nothing resembling scandal, has there? Gossip is simply that—empty talk that is quickly replaced by some other. Everyone will forget within a week.”
“But Miss Huxtable—”
She held up a hand to stop him from continuing.
“However,” she said, “I do remember your telling me that your need to marry without delay is a rather desperate one. It is this fact, I suppose, that has brought you here this afternoon.”
“I hope,” he said, “I would have come anyway.”
“I would have had Stephen assure you that your gallantry was appreciated but quite unnecessary,” she said. “I would have had him send you on your way to freedom with my thanks. But freedom is not what you will face if I send you away, is it?”
“There is always freedom,” he said, “unless, I suppose, one is actually incarcerated. I could seek employment.”
“But you would prefer to marry,” she said. “Why is that?”
She was actually interviewing him. This encounter was not proceeding at all as he had expected.
“I suppose,” he said, “because I would prefer to live the life of a landed gentleman to which I am accustomed.”
“Poverty is not a pleasant thing,” she said. “We were always poor until Stephen inherited the earldom. We were not unhappy. Indeed, we were often very happy indeed. But we had never known wealth or the security of a large home and farms and a sizable income. Now that we do know it, I do not doubt we would find it extremely difficult to go back. You have never known poverty, I suppose. Are you afraid of it?”
He leaned back in his chair and cocked one eyebrow.
“I am not really afraid of anything, Miss Huxtable,” he said.
There was indeed very little left to fear. The worst had happened to him already. And somehow he would manage no matter what happened—or did not happen—during the next two weeks. All sorts of little boys, after all, were raised quite adequately by men who had to work for a living.
“You would be a foolish man if that were the truth,” she said. “But I do not believe it is. I believe you are simply a liar. You are in good company, however. Men will admit to almost any shortcoming before they will admit to feeling fear. It is considered weak and unmanly.”
“Miss Huxtable,” he said, “I have Woodbine Park in Warwickshire to offer you if you marry me. It is a sizable home in spacious, well-kept grounds. And its income, though no vast fortune, is more than comfortable. I have future prospects of far greater splendor. I am the Marquess of Claverbrook’s heir, and he has properties dotted all over England. He is vastly wealthy.”
“And is this all you have to offer, Lord Sheringford?” she asked after regarding him in silence for several moments.
He opened his mouth to speak and then shut it again. What else was there? She was not imagining, was she, that he had fallen violently in love with her last evening and had his heart to lay at her feet?
“I cannot offer an unsullied name,” he said. “I am afraid I earned a notoriety that will not quickly die—if it ever does.”
“That is true,” she agreed. “But the past cannot be changed. Only the future is at least partially in our control. Are you sorry for what you did?”
He felt a spurt of anger. Was she about to read him a sermon?
“No,” he said curtly.
“You would do it again, then?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Without hesitation.”
“It must be good,” she said so quietly that he almost did not hear the words, “to be loved that dearly.”
He opened his mouth to reply and closed it yet again.
“What will you do,” she asked him, “if I reject you today?”
He almost hoped she would. He did not find her … comfortable.
He shrugged.
“Resume the hunt,” he said. “I still have almost two weeks.”
“Thirteen days, to be exact,” she said. “An eternity.”
“Yes.”
“But this time,” she said, “you will carry the unpleasantness of today’s gossip with you into the courtship, as well as your notoriety. Your chosen bride and her family will believe that you have jilted me too.”
“Perhaps.” He would not glare. It would suggest that she was getting under his skin. He fixed her with a stare that many people found intimidating.
When trying to recall her face earlier, he had assumed that with her dark hair she must have brown eyes. They were actually a startling blue—and they did not waver from his.
“Why should I marry you?” she asked him. “Give me reasons, Lord Sheringford. Not the financial details. I knew of those even before stepping in here. I am not swayed by such considerations. I no longer have to fear poverty even if I never
marry and live to be a hundred. Why should I marry you? With what persuasions did you arm yourself before you came here?”
If he had arrived in that ballroom two minutes before or after he actually had, he thought, there would have been no collision and no dance and no conversation in an alcove. He would have picked out some pathetic-looking girl who would have been only too delighted to marry him. Indeed, he had already picked out such a girl a moment before the collision, had he not? He would not be sitting here now being interrogated by a woman he suspected he might easily come to dislike quite intensely.
He stopped himself from drumming his fingertips on the arm of his chair.
“You are not a young woman,” he said. “How old are you?”
“Thirty,” she said. “You think I am desperate for a husband, then? You did not expect that any great persuasion would be necessary?”
He stared at her for a few moments.
“You would have to be blind to be desperate,” he said. “Since you are not, you must know how beautiful you are. You must also realize how sexually appealing you are, though I do not suppose you use just those words in your genteel mind. We both know that I do not represent your last chance, Miss Huxtable. But you have been shaken during the past few days by the reappearance of a former lover. Was he a lover, by the way? Or was he merely a man you loved?”
For the first time she flushed. She did not look away from him, though.
“He was—” she said before stopping abruptly. “You are impertinent.”
Ah—interesting!
“You went to last evening’s ball,” he said, “expecting that Allingham would offer you marriage. You were ready to accept him even though you do not love him.”
“How do you know I do not?” she asked him.
“You were not distraught,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows.
“I was not? Yet I collided with you when attempting to dash from the ballroom in ungainly haste,” she reminded him.
“Because you were chagrined, even humiliated,” he said, “and because you had spotted your faithless lover and remembered that you would not after all have a fiancé to dangle before him. When Allingham came to claim his dance with you, you showed no symptoms of a woman whose heart he had just shattered.”
“I am relieved to hear that,” she said. “Major Dew came here this morning to beg me not to marry you. He offered to marry me instead.”
“And?” He raised his eyebrows.
“And I said no,” she told him.
“And yet,” he said, “you still love him.”
She looked consideringly at him.
“Do I?” she said. “You seem to know me better than I know myself, Lord Sheringford. But you would marry a woman you believe to be in love with someone else?”
“You would not be happy with him,” he said.
“Because he has a weak chin?” She raised her eyebrows again.
“Because he loves himself more than he loves anyone else,” he said. “Such men do not make good husbands.”
“But you would?” she asked him.
“I am not in love with myself,” he said. “Or with you.”
The corners of her mouth lifted in a slight smile.
“Are you always so honest?” she asked him.
“We lie,” he told her, “in order to persuade the world and ourselves that we are something we are not—usually something far better and more flattering than what we really are. I have no wish to deceive myself, and others already believe they know me very well indeed.”
“And do they?” she asked him. “Are you defined by what you did five years ago?”
“You must confess,” he said, “that there is nothing much worse a man can do than abandon his bride on her wedding day—except perhaps to run off with her married sister-in-law instead.”
“Why did you do it?” she asked him.
“I suppose,” he said, “because I liked the one woman better than the other and was willing to take what I wanted and be damned to the consequences.”
“And yet,” she said, “you told me last evening that you were head over ears in love with your bride. Are your feelings so fickle? And do you always take what you want?”
He ignored the first question and thought about his answer to the second.
“What I want is not always available for the taking,” he said.
“Do you want me?” she asked.
But she held up a hand again before he could answer.
“You claim always to tell the truth,” she said. “Tell it now, Lord Sheringford. As you said a short while ago, there is still time for you to find a different bride. Despite everything, there is bound to be someone out there who will be only too happy to marry an earl and future marquess. Do you want me?”
He scorned to look away from her, and she would not look away from him, it seemed.
Would he prefer someone younger, someone quietly biddable, someone who would be pathetically grateful to him for marrying her, someone who would be content to be bedded and impregnated and otherwise ignored? Someone too timid to protest the presence of an illegitimate child in her home—and one her husband doted upon?
With such a woman he could be almost free.
Except that he would always suspect that he had broken her spirit—about the worst thing any man could do to any woman.
Margaret Huxtable, he suspected, would be a constant challenge. A woman of unquenchable spirit. A constant thorn in the flesh. A constant …
“Yes,” he said abruptly, “I do.”
“I am going to ask a difficult thing of you, then,” she said. “You must feel free to refuse my request. You owe me nothing, you see, since what happened last evening was entirely my fault. I cannot marry a stranger. I know that we must marry—if we do marry—within the next thirteen days. However, a marriage by special license can be performed at a moment’s notice, can it not? It does not call for a great deal of planning. I will marry you on the last possible day, Lord Sheringford, provided we both wish to marry when the time comes. The difficult thing for you, of course, is that if you agree with this demand, you will be wagering everything upon my ultimately saying yes. And I may well not do so. I certainly will not marry you only to rescue you from having to earn your own living until your grandfather passes away.”
“And in the meantime?” he said. “In the next twelve days?”
“Privately, we will get to know each other,” she said, “as well as any two people can become acquainted in such a short time. And publicly you will court me. If you walk away today after refusing to agree to this condition, I shall not feel a moment’s embarrassment. I shall live down the gossip with the greatest ease. But if I were to rush into a marriage with you during the next day or two, then I would be more than embarrassed. I would be humiliated. The ton would dream up a dozen reasons for my ungainly haste, none of them flattering. If you wish to marry me, Lord Sheringford, then you will pay determined, even ardent, court to me, and you will risk everything for me—including your beloved home and income.”
He pursed his lips. He might very well grow to dislike this woman, he thought again—indeed, he was almost sure he already did—but he could not stop himself from respecting her.
She was a power to be reckoned with.
It was indeed a great risk—far more than she realized. She might reject him at the last moment. It was even possible that she was deliberately leading him into a trap on behalf of all abandoned women. She looked as if she might well be the crusading sort.
“I must warn you,” she said, “that everyone who knows me—and even someone who does not—is horrified to find that I would even consider marrying you. They will keep on trying to persuade me against you—and they will be barely civil to you.”
“Who is the someone who does not know you?” he asked.
“Mrs. Pennethorne,” she said. “The lady you abandoned.”
Ah.
“She came here this morning,” she s
aid, “and begged me not to court misery by marrying you. She is very lovely. I am not surprised that you once loved her—though not more than her brother’s wife as it turned out. You are fickle.”
“So it would seem,” he said. “Do you still wish me to court you now that I have admitted that damning fact?”
“Yes,” she said, “since you have not made the mistake of pretending to have fallen in love with me. I believe it would be an interesting experience to be wooed by London’s most notorious villain. And I have little to lose. If I decide at the end of it all that I cannot marry you, I will be hailed as something of a heroine.”
Her lips curved slightly at the corners again, and he could not decide if she was a woman with a sense of humor or a woman whose heart was as cold as steel. He rather suspected the latter.
“I shall woo you, then, with persistence and ardor,” he said, “on the assumption that you are giving serious consideration to marrying me in thirteen days’ time.”
“I will be attending the theater this evening,” she said. “I will be sitting in the Duke of Moreland’s box with the members of my family. Shall I inform them that you will be joining us there, my lord?”
Daniel into the lions’ den. Or into the fiery furnace.
She stood, and he got to his feet too. Presumably he was dismissed. He bowed to her.
“I shall see you this evening, then,” he said. “It is a pleasure to which I shall look forward with some eagerness … Maggie.”
This time that suggestion of a smile lurked in her eyes as well as at the corners of her mouth.
Perhaps she did have a sense of humor.
8
MARGARET did not invite the Earl of Sheringford to stay for tea even though all her family was assembled in the drawing room above, anxiously awaiting the outcome of her meeting with him.
She was far more breathless than she ought to have been by the time she had climbed the stairs. Even so, she would gladly have climbed another flight to take refuge in her room. It could not be done, however. She squared her shoulders and opened the door.