by Mary Balogh
“But the winning of wagers is more important to you than almost anything else,” she said, speaking at last. “This is one you have lost. I have won. I knew I had a better chance to seduce you as Viola Thornhill than as Lilian Talbot. But I could have done it as either one tonight, could I not? You did not stand a chance. It was a foolish wager to agree to.”
He felt a lurching of doubt. But dammit, he had hurt her. He had said the wrong thing. They had been making love, for God’s sake. The wager had been the farthest thing from his mind. And from hers too, he was quite sure.
“I was not thinking of the wager when I came out here after you, Viola,” he said.
“Then the more fool you.” She disengaged herself from him as she spoke and pushed up onto her knees to lift herself off him. She gathered up her clothes, stood up, and began to dress. “I had a week. I did not need that long. I could have bedded you anytime during the past five days. You have lost, Lord Ferdinand. I wonder.” She looked down at him, pushing her hair to one side so that her face would not be in shadow. “Do you feel cheated? Or do you feel that what you have had from me tonight more than compensates you for the loss of Pinewood?”
The devil! Dammit! It was Lilian Talbot who was looking down at him as she straightened her dress at the shoulder. That ghastly half smile was playing about her lips. And her voice had become a velvet caress.
“I believe,” he said curtly, “we were making love.”
She laughed softly. “Poor Lord Ferdinand,” she said. “It was the illusion of love. What it was in reality was very good lust. Very good for you, that is. Men always like to believe that their prowess in bed can crumble the defenses of even the most hardened whore. It is necessary for their pride’s sake to give the impression that one has received as much pleasure as one has given. Did I do well?”
“Viola—” he said sharply.
“I am a very hardened whore,” she said. “You were foolish to tangle with me.”
It had been an act? The whole of it? And in his foolish inexperience he had thought they were making love? Was it possible? Or was she merely covering up for the hurt of being told that she had won their wager? He had intended to follow up by telling her that it had been his intention all day simply to give her Pinewood.
He watched her go without even attempting to call after her or follow her. He had already stuffed one of his shoes into his mouth. He would doubtless ram the other one in too if he tried to rectify the situation. He had so little experience in dealing with the sensibilities of women. He had expected her to be amused at the reminder of their stupid wager. He had expected her to laugh.
Dammit, was he mad?
He was going to have some major humble pie to eat in the morning, he thought ruefully. He had better sit up for what remained of the night composing some speech that would mollify her and keep his footwear out of his mouth. Not that her good opinion should matter a great deal to him. It would not take long, after all, to hand over the deed and the note he would sign and have his valet witness even before he went down to breakfast. He would leave right after breakfast. He might even eat at the Boar’s Head. It would not really matter what she thought of him.
Except that it mattered one devil of a lot.
And the prospect of leaving tomorrow and never seeing her again caused his stomach to clench into knots of panic.
Dammit!
He had never expected to fall in love. He had never wanted to. By what joke of fate, then, had he fallen in love with a notorious ex-courtesan?
And fallen hard too.
Goddammit all to hell!
15
IOLA HAD LEFT HER CLOAK AND THE BLANKET behind. But she did not feel the chill of the night air as she hurried along the river path, scrambled up through the trees and over the lawn, and half ran along the terrace.
You have won our wager in fine fashion, have you not?
And she had won it. Except that the wager had been that she would seduce him. That had not been seduction.
But to him it had. To him what had happened had been nothing but sex. What had she expected?
My love, he had said against her ear.
So what? That was just the sort of nonsense many men babbled in sexual climax. Oh, Sally Duke had been quite right. One must never, never equate sex with love. No matter what passionate declarations a man might utter while in bed, sex was simply physical gratification to him, the woman only the instrument of his pleasure.
Viola made her way to the servants’ quarters as soon as she had entered the house.
He was going to give her the deed to Pinewood in the morning. Her winnings, her pay for the services she had rendered twice down by the river. She would no longer owe her home to the dead Earl of Bamber, but to Lord Ferdinand Dudley, satisfied client.
No!
She tapped on Hannah’s door and eased it open, hoping not to startle her maid into screaming.
“Don’t be alarmed,” she whispered. “It’s just me.” Exactly the words he had used a few hours ago, she remembered, wincing.
“Miss Vi?” Hannah shot up in bed. “What is it? What has he done to you?”
“Hannah,” she said, still whispering, “we are leaving. You will need to get dressed and pack your things. If you finish before I do, you may come and help me, if you please. But come quietly.”
“Leaving?” Hannah said. “When? What time is it?”
“I have no idea,” Viola admitted. “One o’clock? Two? The stagecoach passes above the village very early, and it does not stop unless there are passengers waiting by the side of the road. We must be there.”
“What happened?” Hannah peered at her in the darkness. “Did he hurt you? Did he—”
“He did not hurt me,” Viola said. “There is no time for talk, Hannah. We must catch the stage. I cannot stay here another day. We will take only what we can carry. I do not want anyone to know we are leaving.”
She left before Hannah had a chance to ask any more questions, and hurried in the direction of her own room. There was no sign of him as she went. Perhaps he had remained down by the river. Perhaps he was sleeping again. Perhaps she had serviced him that well, she thought bitterly.
She would not cry. There was nothing on this earth worth shedding a tear over, least of all her own foolish heart.
* * *
IT WAS SURPRISING HOW quickly one could become attached to a place, Ferdinand thought. He was standing at the window of his bedchamber, looking out over the box garden and the lawns and trees beyond. Over the tops of the trees he could just see the spire of the church at Trellick.
He did not want to leave.
But his bags were packed, and he was dressed in his riding clothes. Bentley had just shaved him. While he was having breakfast—though he was not at all hungry—his carriage would be loaded up and would set off for London with Bentley. His groom would accompany it on Ferdinand’s horse. He himself would drive his curricle.
He should perhaps have left earlier. She probably would not want to see him again, and it would be just as well if he did not see her. But he owed it to her to place the deed of the manor in her hand and also the letter he had written, assuring the world in case of his sudden death within the next few days that he had given her Pinewood Manor. He needed to explain that even if last night had not happened he would still be giving it to her and would still be leaving, never to bother her again.
He did not want to leave.
It pained him to think that he would see her only once more. It was just that she had been his first sex partner, he tried to tell himself, and that he could not imagine bringing himself to do it with anyone else after her. But he was not sure he was being truthful.
He moved resolutely from the window and went down for breakfast. It was early, but she was usually an early riser. He was disappointed not to find her in the dining room. He had steeled himself for meeting her there. He had planned exactly how he would look at her and exactly what he would say.
He for
ced himself to eat two slices of toast and drink a cup of coffee. He dawdled over a second cup, but she still did not come down. Perhaps she was avoiding him, he thought. Undoubtedly she was, in fact. Perhaps he should simply leave. Even so, he paced the hall, his boots ringing on the tiled floor, for half an hour or so after leaving the dining room. His carriage and servants and baggage had left long before.
She had had a late night. It had been after two o’clock when he came back to the house not long after her. She was sleeping late. Or more likely, she was deliberately keeping to her room until he left. He had told her last night, had he not, that he would be going away today? He had offended her with his foolish notion of a joke, and she was not going to forgive him.
Well, he would wait no longer, he thought eventually. The morning was already well advanced. He was wasting precious traveling time. He strode into the library. He would leave the deed and the letter on the desk. He knew she looked there every morning for incoming mail. He would tell Jarvey to make sure she checked there.
There was a letter already lying on the otherwise bare surface of the desk. Had this morning’s post already come, then? It was addressed to him, he saw as he picked it up—and recognized the small, neat hand that kept the estate books. What the devil? She could not face him this morning and so had written to him instead? He unfolded the letter.
“We each conceded victory to the other in the drawing room last evening,” she had written. “It was a stalemate. Our wager was void. What happened afterward had nothing to do with any wager. Pinewood is yours. I am leaving.” There was no signature.
Ferdinand strode to the door.
“Jarvey!” he bellowed. For once the butler was not hovering in the hall. He came soon enough, though. Probably everyone in the house had heard the summons. “Go fetch Miss Thornhill now.”
The butler retreated in the direction of the stairs, but Ferdinand knew it was hopeless. She would not have put that letter there before going to bed. She would have put it there, as he had been going to put his, as she was leaving the house.
“Stop!” he called, and the butler turned on the bottom stair. “Never mind. Find her maid. And fetch Hardinge from the stables. No, forget it, I’ll go there and talk to him myself.” He did not wait to see Jarvey’s reaction to such confused and conflicting orders. He hurried from the house to the stables.
There was no carriage missing but his own. No horse either. And the groom looked as blank as Jarvey had when Viola Thornhill’s name was mentioned. So did young Eli. Damn the woman. Goddamn her! Unless he had missed something in her letter—but how could he have, when it was as terse a letter as any he had ever seen—she had given no clue to her destination. She had simply gone. Probably to London.
“Is there a stagecoach that stops in Trellick?” he asked.
“It used to come right down to the Boar’s Head, m’lord,” Hardinge explained, “but there were too few passengers getting on and off there, so now it passes on by and just stops to drop off the odd passenger on the main road.”
“Or pick up the odd passenger who happens to be standing there?”
“Yes, m’lord.”
Goddammit!
She had escaped. She had slipped through his fingers. She had punished him in the worst possible way for what he had said last night—as a joke, for God’s sake. He had made light of what had happened between them by telling her she had won their wager. She had punished him by disappearing without a trace, leaving him in possession of an estate he no longer wanted. Neither did she, it seemed.
Did anyone in this godforsaken place know where she might have gone? How the deuce was he going to find her so that he could stuff the deed down her throat? Before he throttled her, that is.
Devil take it, he had been joking. They had been making love—at least that was what he had been doing. He could not speak for her—he was pathetically low on experience. But surely she would not have taken such stupid offense if she had not been making love too. If she just had a spark of humor in her body she would have been crowing all over him long before he made his stab at a joke. She would have been teasing him to death about one of the few wagers he had lost in his entire life—and to a woman. She could have made much of that.
One did not joke with a woman, he guessed, wincing inwardly as he strode back to the house, when one had just finished making love to her. It was probably wiser to whisper sweet nothings. He would remember that next time.
Next time—ha!
THE STAGECOACH GUARD RIDING up behind the coach blew his yard of tin as a signal of something—that they were approaching an inn for a change of horses or that someone was about to pass them in one direction or the other or that there were sheep or cows or some other obstruction on the road ahead or that they were approaching a tollgate. The horn had been blasting at frequent intervals throughout the long, uncomfortable day. Sleep was impossible. Whenever Viola had come close to nodding off, she had been rudely jolted awake again.
“What is it this time?” Hannah mumbled from beside her. “I’ll give that man a piece of my mind, I will, when we stop next.”
A fellow passenger agreed. Another hoped that the sound meant an inn and refreshments ahead—he was starved. They had been allowed only ten minutes at the last stop. The cup of tea and meat pasty he had ordered had not come in time. A spirited litany of complaints followed.
Viola looked out through the window beside her. There was no sign of any town or village ahead. But there was another vehicle passing them—from behind. The road was not wide at this point, and the coachman did not draw his vehicle to one side or even slacken its speed to let the other pass. This happened all too often, she thought, holding her breath and involuntarily shrinking back from the window as if to allow the curricle more room to pass. The road abounded with discourteous stagecoach drivers and reckless, impatient gentlemen with their sporting vehicles.
This particular curricle passed at high speed. It remained clear of the stagecoach by a mere few inches. The gentleman plying the ribbons drove with consummate skill and with criminal disregard for his own safety and that of the stagecoach passengers. Viola glanced up to the high seat of the curricle. Its driver glanced down into the interior of the coach at the same moment and their eyes met for the merest fraction of a second.
Then both he and his curricle were past.
Viola sat sharply back in her seat and closed her eyes.
“The fool!” someone said. “He might have killed us all.”
What on earth was he doing on the road to London? Had he not read her letter? Had he seen her? Of course he had seen her.
Viola kept her eyes firmly closed as her thoughts and emotions swirled. All day she had been remembering the night before and trying desperately not to remember. But the only other thing to think about was the future and all it would hold for her.…
The guard blew the horn again and a passenger cursed. Hannah scolded him and reminded him that there were ladies present. The coach was slackening speed. It was an inn this time. And the first thing Viola saw as the stagecoach drew into the crowded yard was the curricle that had passed them on the road ten minutes earlier. An ostler was changing the horses.
“Hannah!” Viola grabbed her maid’s wrist as the steps were set down and the passengers scrambled to get out and make the most of the short time they would be allowed. “Stay here, please. You are not desperate for anything, are you? We will wait until the next stop.”
Hannah looked surprised, but before she could question Viola’s strange request, someone had come to stand in the doorway and was extending a hand toward Viola.
“Allow me,” Lord Ferdinand Dudley said.
Hannah drew in a sharp breath.
“No,” Viola said. “Thank you. We do not need to get out.”
But he was not the smiling, good-natured gentleman she was most familiar with. He was the grim, hard-jawed, arrogant, demanding aristocrat he had been that first morning at Pinewood. His eyes looked very black.
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“Hannah,” he said, “get down, please. Go inside the coffee room and order yourself a meal. You need not hurry. There will be plenty of time to eat it. The stagecoach will be continuing on its way without the two of you.”
“It most certainly will not.” Viola bristled with indignation. “Stay where you are, Hannah.”
“If you wish to scrap with me in the inn yard with a score of people looking on, I am game,” he said grimly. “But you will not be continuing your journey on this stagecoach. I suggest we go inside to the private parlor I have reserved and scrap there. Hannah, please?”
Hannah took his hand without further argument and scrambled down from the coach. She disappeared in the direction of the inn without even looking back at Viola.
“Come.” He had reached his hand back inside.
“Our bags—” she said.
“Have already been taken down,” he assured her.
She was angry then. “You have no right,” she said, brushing aside his hand and descending to the cobbled yard without his assistance. Her bag and Hannah’s were indeed standing side by side on the ground. “This is bullying. This—” She encountered the grinning face of an interested groom and clamped her mouth shut. He was not the only one who had stopped work in the obvious hope of witnessing a fight.
“Runaway wives need firm handling,” Lord Ferdinand remarked cheerfully, obviously for their further amusement. He took her elbow in a firm grasp and propelled her toward the inn while she listened indignantly to the purely male laughter behind them.
“How dare you!” she said.
“It’s dashed fortunate I caught up to you before you reached London,” he said. “What the devil did you mean by running off like that?”
He led her down a long, low-beamed corridor to a small room at the back of the inn. There was a fire crackling in the hearth. A table in the middle of the room had been set with a white cloth and laid for two.