The Last Bachelor

by Betina Krahn

  The shock of that news froze the lot of them in place for a moment. They gaped at each other, jaws slack and eyes widening. Then Sir Albert roared to life:

  “Good God—he’s wi’ th’ Dragon, right now!”

  In the warm, luxurious cocoon of Remington’s bed, Antonia lay in his arms, savoring the feeling of release that permeated her warm and glowing body. Her senses seemed cleansed and awakened, so that every color, every sound, every stroke of his hand seemed heightened. She had never felt so right, so at peace, in her life.

  He raised onto one elbow beside her, looking down at her flushed breasts and tousled hair. Running his hand through her thick tresses, he smiled. “I can’t imagine that I ever thought of you as a fire-breathing dragon.”

  “Ummm.” She reacted with a shiver, as if he’d stroked her physically, and responded by tightening her arms around him. “Is that why you waited so long to kiss me?”

  He chuckled. “Undoubtedly. Every time I came near you, I could feel heat. I think I was afraid of getting burned.”

  She laughed and pulled his head down to tease his lips, then joined their mouths, with her hunger rising in an open and possessive way she had never experienced before.

  He read in her demanding kiss that the time had come, and he shifted his weight, settling the swollen ridge of his desire against her liquid heat. They moved together, exploring the rhythm of their bodies, the natural resonance of their movements. She scarcely felt it when he slipped a hand between them to unbutton his trousers and push them aside.

  The first sound from outside went unnoticed. It was his house, his bed; nothing would disturb them here. But even as he fitted his body against hers and began the first, tentative motions of loving, the sound grew and soon was recognizable as voices. Neither Remington nor Antonia wanted to hear it. Neither wanted to return to reason and responsibility in order to deal with the world outside the circle of their arms.

  When the door to the sitting room slammed open, Remington’s head snapped up, and he glanced toward the bedroom door in confusion. It was men’s voices, and as he listened, he realized that he recognized some of them. In one horrible instant he knew what was happening and met Antonia’s widened eyes with a look of compressed longing, dread, and searing regret.

  He rolled from her and from the bed, fumbling with the buttons of his trousers. But before he reached the door, it burst open, and in a flash he was grappling with two men. Desperately, he fought to shove them back toward others who filled the doorway.

  “What in bloody hell are you doing here?” he shouted furiously.

  “Who’s that in yer bed, yer lordship?” one of the invaders snarled, craning his neck to get a look at her. “Look—he’s bedded down wi’ the Dragon, all right!”

  “So that’s why you were so eager to be off—s-so you could be on, you traitor!”

  “Get your stinking carcasses out of my bedchamber—out of my house!” Remington roared, wrestling them back, trying to get them away from her.

  Antonia lurched up, clutching a sheet to her half-naked breasts, watching in horror as Remington battled several men back through the doorway. Beyond his straining form she glimpsed leering male faces that were drink-reddened and ugly.

  “It’s her all right!” came a high, reedy voice that was terrifyingly familiar. “So—Lady Matrimonia—where’s your high an’ mighty airs now, eh?”

  “Look at ’er—caught with her drawers down, in a man’s bed!” came another voice that she recalled but in her panicky state could not quite put a name to.

  “Vicious bit of skirt—paradin’ around all holy and righteous, forcin’ men into marriage while she spreads her knees whenever she likes!”

  “How does it feel, bein’ on the receivin’ end for a change, eh, milady?”

  “You did a fine job of helpin’ us get our revenge, after all, Landon!”

  Remington sent a fist plowing straight into the closest face, and the man fell back with a shocked cry of pain.

  “You can’t do that!” another of them howled, and a scuffle broke out as he battered them back into the hall. Their drunken reactions were no match for his anger-fueled assault. He shoved one and gut-punched another, and with the belated help of Phipps and his valet Manley, sent the pack of rum-hounds reeling back along the gallery and down the main stairs.

  Even after those vile, bloated faces were gone from the door, they remained in Antonia’s mind, scored deeply into her passion-stripped and vulnerable senses. She trembled as her recovering wits matched identities to the faces. Sir Albert Everstone. Margaret’s husband. Then she recognized Lord Richard Searle, whom she had matched with Daphne Elderston. And that thin, annoying voice—that was Alice Butterfield’s Mr. Trueblood. And the one Remington punched—Lord Carter Woolworth—was the husband of Elizabeth Audley, one of her more recent protégées.

  They were all men she had caught—How does it feel to be on the receivin’ end?—in the very same situation she was in now! She swayed from the force of the impact. They had each sat where she now did: in a bed, half-naked, burning with shame—Caught with your drawers down in a man’s bed—facing the same humiliation, feeling the same sickness inside. And it was she who had stood over their cowering forms and demanded that they pay for their pleasures for the rest of their lives. Now, craving vengeance, they had burst in on her and—You did a fine job of helping us get our revenge, Landon—

  Her heart stopped. She couldn’t draw breath.

  Revenge. It was as if she had just fallen down a well; every part of her felt numbed and broken, crushed by the mounting realization that Remington had had a part in it. He had pursued, tempted, and seduced her … beguiled her into his house and into his bed. And then he had betrayed her into their hands. In the name of revenge.

  Dearest God, it couldn’t be! She gasped at the pain that crushed through her chest, and clasped her heart with trembling hands. But it was. Every teasing look, every provocative remark, every sweet, incidental touch had been luring her to her ruin. Every smile, every caress, every kiss had been bait for his trap. And she had walked straight into it, knowing his contempt for women, knowing that he was trying to seduce her, and even knowing that he considered her the enemy.

  He had betrayed her, but it was her own fault: for believing him … for trusting him.

  For wanting him.

  Remington raced back upstairs to find her sitting in the middle of his bed, holding her heart, her face desolate, her blue eyes filled with prisms of tears. As he stood there with his chest heaving, his first impulse was to murder half-a-dozen utterly spoiled and worthless excuses of British manhood. But his second, and more powerful, one was to pull her into his arms and comfort her, to take her shame onto his shoulders, to somehow right the wrong they—and he—had done her.

  “Toni?” When her face turned to him, the impact of her misery took his breath. “God, Toni, I’m sorry—” He rounded the bedpost and climbed onto the bed, reaching for her.

  She jolted to life and skittered back out of his reach, dislodging the tears. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Antonia—” He climbed across the single imprint their joined bodies had left in the feather mattress, and she jerked back and slid from the bed.

  “No!” Snatching up her petticoats, she fumbled blindly to step into them. “S-stay away from me.” All she could think was that she had to get away from this house and away from him. Her whole body trembled as she managed to blink away enough of the tears to see where to put her feet. She jerked up one layer, then another, scarcely able to manage the simple ties and buttons.

  “Antonia, please, it’s not what you think, I swear—”

  “How would you know what I think?” she choked out, trying to right her skirt while searching frantically for her slippers. He tried to take her arm to make her look at him, but she gave his hands a panicky shove—“No!”—and grabbed her bodice from the floor, uncovering her slippers.

  “You have every right to be angry, but at least let me
try to explain. I had no idea they would come here tonight.”

  She halted and looked at him with all the pain she was feeling compressed into one devastating word.

  “Liar.”

  Humiliating tears burned down her cheeks, and she bit her lip hard, concentrating on the pain to keep from breaking down. Shoving her feet into her shoes, she groped for the opening of her bodice with icy, unresponsive hands, then thrust her arms blindly into the bodice.

  “Antonia—Toni—”

  Something in his voice caused her to halt and look at him with all the devastation in her heart visible in her face.

  “They thanked you.” It was part statement, part question … so full of pain and disbelief that it came out a hoarse whisper. “How could you?”

  He bounded from the bed and she shrank back as if she expected him to strike her. That telling movement stopped him in his tracks. His hands curled into impotent fists and his face darkened as he stared at her anguished eyes.

  “I never want to see you again … as long as I live,” she said, feeling the words turning like a knife in her own heart.

  She located her cloak in the sitting room and managed to pull it around her shoulders. Fearing that he might come after her, she cast a glance over her shoulder and caught a glimpse of him standing near the bed, glowering. Her battered heart felt as if it were collapsing inside her. It was all she could do to hold herself together as she rushed down the stairs.

  Focusing frantically on what she had to do to get home, she didn’t hear him coming after her until it was too late. As she pulled open the heavy front door, he grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around.

  “Antonia, you can’t go out there,” he ordered thickly. “You’re in no state to be out in the streets alone.”

  “Take your hands off me.” Anger finally billowed into the emptiness in her savaged heart, giving her the strength she needed to jerk free. “I couldn’t possibly meet with more harm out there than I just did in here.”

  Remington stood on the landing, watching the outline of her dark cloak fading into the shadows of the street as she fled him. His chest was heaving, but he couldn’t seem to get enough air. And for a long, harrowing moment afterward, all he saw was the anguish in her face.

  When he finally turned back to the house, he did manage to see one more thing: Rupert Fitch, standing at the bottom of the steps with an obscene grin, scribbling on a pad that glowed a vile yellow in the dim light. The little wretch tugged the brim of his bowler mockingly, then turned to swagger down the carriage turn to the street.

  It was the final calamity. It took every bit of his self-control to keep from going after the nasty little cockroach and pounding him into the cracks between the paving bricks. After a moment he stormed back into the house and through the drawing room, past the liquor cabinet and then on to his study, with his hand wrapped around a bottle.

  He poured a drink and looked up to find Phipps and Manley in the doorway, looking distraught. “If you would be so good as to close the door,” he said with quiet ferocity. “This won’t be a pretty sight.”

  They closed the door, and Remington poured and downed a large, fiery draught of brandy. He intended to get roaring, furniture-smashing drunk and make himself forget everything that had happened that night. But as he gulped a second shot of liquor, he found he couldn’t get it past a sudden constriction in his throat. He tried again and again to swallow, but finally had to spit it out. Bloody hell—he couldn’t even drown his guilt and misery in liquor!

  Antonia rose in his mind as she had looked sitting in his bed: warmed and stripped of her defenses by his loving—then devoured like a lamb by a pack of wolves. She was hurting, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

  Antonia. Fiery, spirited Antonia. Vulnerable, girlish Antonia, whose exploratory touch made him feel a kind of bone-deep pleasure he hadn’t known existed. It had felt so right to hold her, so perfect to be with her, that he had conveniently dismissed the fact that it had all begun as a callous plan for revenge, a favor done by one gentleman for others. It was meant to be a demonstration of male solidarity and cunning, but it had become a demonstration of male cruelty.

  He saw again her blue eyes, dark with passion one moment and glazed with pain the next, and realized with sickening clarity that her anguish had only just begun. Originally, the conspirators had agreed to keep their revenge quiet, to savor it privately and use it as leverage to see that she ceased her matchmaking forever. But now, out of spite, they might spread the story from pillar to post. And the bulk of the blame, he knew, would fall on Antonia. The woman always lost more than the man in such a situation; men’s indiscretions were allowed to fade, but women’s sins were not. Antonia would be labeled and ostracized by decent society—ruined.

  His blood began to roil, his hands clenched, and his arms tensed with a violently protective impulse toward her. If only there was someone he could challenge or something he could do to see she didn’t get hurt more.

  Out of an unguarded chamber of his heart came a thought that both shocked and disturbed him: he could marry her.

  Every muscle in his body contracted in response, but he made himself face it squarely: marriage was the traditional remedy for such a moral transgression. Once a compromised couple was married and produced a child or two in acceptable order, a layer of respectability generally descended over their past, and the woman was reaccepted into society. He vibrated with tension. Marriage.

  Then he thought of Antonia’s reaction to such a solution. Right now she would probably rather wear sackcloth and lash herself all the way to Canterbury Cathedral on her knees than even talk to him again. He could just imagine how she would take a proposal of marriage.

  In spite of his nobler impulses, his whole body wilted with relief.

  Calmer now, he stared off into the shadows of his darkened study, thinking of her and feeling a return of the emptiness he had felt as he watched her run away from him. If she had her way, he would probably never see her again. He lifted his glass and took a small sip, realizing that no amount of brandy could deaden the pain that caused him.

  Gaflinger’s hottest correspondent rushed back to his newspaper office to file a story on the scandal of the month—perhaps the year—and convince the editor to give it space on the front page of the next day’s edition.

  Fitch had seen and heard it all: the men crashing through Remington Carr’s front door, their drunken taunts, and the way they charged up to the earl’s bedchamber. He had made it halfway up the center-hall stairs himself, before the butler and footman found him there and tossed him out on his ear. But he had heard enough, and shortly he saw the drunken crowd retreating—nursing bloodied noses and aching eyes and ribs—before an enraged earl. And if that wasn’t enough to get him a frontpage headline, he had the good fortune to see Lady Antonia fleeing the house in tears and dishabille … pursued by the earl, clad only in a pair of trousers.

  It didn’t take much to put two and two together, even for Rupert Fitch. The Ladies’ Man and Lady Antonia … caught in a love nest by a bunch of drunken aristocrats. It was a steamy scandal punctuated by flying fists and seasoned with womanly tears of disgrace. Fitch rubbed his hands together in anticipation. It all sounded like a fat raise in pay to him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The sun came up at the usual time that next morning. The tea was hot, the scones were buttery, and the marmalade was sweet and golden, as always. But the ladies of Paxton House glanced up at the sky in confusion and stared forlornly at each other around the breakfast table, knowing that all was far from normal in their world.

  Last night Antonia had come rushing through the front doors just before midnight and had gone straight to her rooms and slammed the door. She wouldn’t admit anyone or talk to anyone, not even Hermione. And as they collected in the hall outside her rooms, they heard her weeping as if her heart was breaking. It had been a long night indeed, and they knew without being told that it had to do with R
emington Carr.

  Then a copy of Gaflinger’s had been delivered to the doorstep, proving their conjectures and confirming their deepest fears. A front-page header proclaimed:

  WIDOW AND NOBLEMAN CAUGHT IN LOVE NEST!

  The writer of the piece, Rupert Fitch, declined to supply the names of the unhappy couple, but provided enough details about their adversarial relationship, including the mention that the lady and gentleman were prone to “public wagering,” that it took little effort to deduce the identities of the lovers. The pair had been discovered in a compromising situation by a number of “leading gentlemen” paying a late call on the nobleman. And the details of the encounter were recounted with prurient accuracy: bare chest, unpinned hair, and all.

  With heavy hearts the ladies realized that Antonia and his lordship had finally succumbed to the attraction growing between them. And instead of the start of a deep and enduring love, it had proved to be the disaster of a lifetime!

  It was well on toward noon when Antonia emerged from her bedroom with puffy eyes and a pale, drawn face. She was dressed in unrelieved black, buttoned all the way from chin to waist, and her manner was every bit as grave as her retreat into full mourning colors suggested. Hermione and Eleanor hurried to her side the moment she set foot in the hushed drawing room.

  “Are you all right, my dear?” Hermione asked, putting an arm through hers and directing her into their midst. The others gathered around, and she looked at their concerned faces and felt the dread that gripped her stomach loosen.

  “You probably already know that … that for days now … that last night …” She paused and lowered her eyes, feeling her courage wane.

  “We know all about it, Toni dear.” When she looked up, Aunt Hermione was holding a newspaper. “And by this evening I’m afraid the rest of London will, too,” she said gently, placing the paper in Antonia’s hands.

  Antonia glimpsed the headline, swayed, and stumbled to the closest chair. In deepening shock she read the article that recounted in ghastly detail the humiliation she had suffered only hours before. The links to her and Remington Carr were unmistakable; what other nobleman and widow were involved in an ongoing and notorious wager? There was her humiliation, in pitiless black and white, for all to read.