‘And even that horrible image won’t convince me you’re as rackety as you think. You cling to a method of measuring the world out in grudging parcels, Mr FitzDevelin. Luckily I don’t think so little of myself or the rest of the world, so why must you?’
‘Because that man made me this way,’ he said as if she’d driven the truth out of him and ought to be ashamed of herself. ‘I’m a nameless fool with nothing but my pen between me and the devil. I have my mother, three half-sisters and Magnus to keep and can’t afford the luxury of a Miss Alstone in my bed. Your noble brothers-in-law would kill me and quite right, too; then where would my family be?’
Now he’d said it he stood and glared at her with such furious longing in his eyes she wished she could laugh and dismiss his scruples as petty and unimportant. All she had could be his as well, if that was the only thing keeping them apart. Wealth and grand houses would feel less than nothing without him. She wanted to rage and stamp her feet and demand he put her and the life they could have together before this stubborn folly, but she knew him too well by now to batter her poor heart against his stony pride again tonight. Tomorrow or the next day maybe, but tonight he’d worn her down and her head was aching again.
‘I might be worth it,’ she joked rather lamely, the hardness of tears threatening at the back of her throat as she acknowledged a harsh truth and felt infinitely weary at long last. If he didn’t love her enough to grasp what they could be together, there wasn’t much point in humiliating herself again.
‘I’ll never risk making a bastard with you, Isabella.’
‘Then marry me instead,’ she offered rashly, feeling the rightness of it slide into her mind as if it had always been waiting to be recognised as the glowing piece of good sense it truly was. ‘Your family would be safe and with Kit and the rest of my family behind us you wouldn’t need to worry about them again.’
‘I would be a kept man. A tame fool dressed up to impress your friends. Dragged to fashionable parties and soirées to be pointed out as a rich woman’s folly. No, thank you, Miss Alstone; I’d rather be laughed at as an example of my mother’s idiocy than mocked as my wife’s.’
So this was how it felt when the tears you were struggling with faded away because your sorrow was too big to cry away. No wonder Edmund left London for three years when Kate turned his love down again and again as if it was of no importance. Suddenly she longed for her brother-in-law’s wise counsel, wanted the comfort of Kate’s loyal and loving arms around her and for both of them to tell her they loved her, even if Wulfric FitzDevelin couldn’t, or wouldn’t. He’d never admit he felt more than simple lust for her even if he longed for her every hour of life God allotted him. He’d got it so firmly lodged in his silly head he could only do her harm there was no point in him even considering loving her.
‘Good evening to you, then, sir. I can’t make small talk with you here in the middle of the night any longer, so I suggest you truly scurry off home and forget you ever saw me out here.’
‘How can I do that when I’ve hurt you again?’
‘Have you, Mr FitzDevelin? Ah well, such things will happen to reckless ladies of fortune who take risks with the likes of you. I wish you goodnight,’ she said lightly and dodged past him and marched back to the house as if she really did.
Chapter Thirteen
‘How can you wish me anything of the sort, Belle?’ Wulf murmured. ‘How can you be that kind and how do you think I’ll ever sleep softly again without you in my bed?’
He thrust a distracted hand through his hair and briefly thought he must look as if he’d been out in a gale with sooty locks all awry and neckcloth disarrayed by her exploring hands. He touched the mess she’d made of careful grooming and his body turned against him as he ran over places she’d been, as if some of her must linger there to be savoured and treasured. He’d said no and made her walk away when she felt as if she could be his whole world; everything that would make his life feel so rich and generous it would never matter who was born in what bed when they were together. Except it did. He would always feel ashamed of being dependent on his wife and hadn’t he once taken a long hard look at his mother’s marriage and sworn never to make such ball-and-chain promises himself? Marriage had trapped the last Earl and Countess of Carrowe in a lifelong cycle of jealousy, frustration and contempt on one side and fear and a weary sort of pity for a man who turned out so much less than he could have been on the other.
Wulf was less than Isabella Alstone. Less hopeful, less joyous and a lot less of a gentleman than she deserved him to be. Even without his own shortcomings his lack of a real name would drag her down if she shared it with him. Imagining how their children would be teased for his own lack of a father, he shuddered at the memory of pinches, name-calling and spite when he was included in some childhood party he’d done his best to forget for Magnus’s sake. They had never talked about his brother’s clutch of schoolboy friends who met up to create havoc together in the holidays again after that hellish day. Poor Gus felt guilty for not turning his back on his friends and being recklessly loyal to his half-brother ever since and that was what torn loyalties and being a bastard really meant. Isabella had no idea how it felt or how she would feel if he was stupid enough to expose her to it, so he wasn’t going to let her find out, especially if he loved her. He wasn’t quite ready to admit that disaster just yet, but he was afraid he might if he looked harder.
An argumentative inner voice whispered he could refuse to take a penny of her fortune, spend the odd holiday on one of her grand estates at his own expense and go on working hard at his chosen profession to prove the gossips wrong when they said he married her for money. And were they all blind? What fool would marry Isabella Alstone for her money? She was everything a man could fantasise about in a woman and a lot more he’d never dared to dream about before he met her. To own the everyday privilege of making love to her exclusively for the rest of their natural lives was something a man might sell his very soul for, if he had one. The Countess of Carrowe’s natural son could only bring her conflict and unhappiness; her world would reject and revile them as a pair of fools who’d regret what they did when the novelty of playing against the rules wore off.
So where was he with his catalogue of reasons why not? If only he lived another life, then he could pride himself on being an independent man and just about manage to ignore the differences in birth and fortune between them. In this one he would have to take from her and he’d rather risk the sheer terror of his family having nothing much to live on if Gresley refused to honour his commitments. The so-called polite world would mock Isabella if she married him when she could have wed Magnus and taken Wulf as a lover once she was done with securing the Haile succession. Not that they had much left to succeed to; the old Earl had spent everything he could and Gresley was the only one with a penny to his name.
The very thought of Isabella in Magnus’s bed made his fists clench so hard his knuckles went white even now. He’d had to put the width of the Atlantic between him and this terrible image of her and Gus wed and busily securing that succession together. He’d been tortured there and back by the idea he’d got far too close to something exceptional with his brother’s wife-to-be that night at Haile Carr. Now he felt a blinding, unreasoning rage threaten to suck him under at the very thought of any other man laying a finger on Isabella with more than the most innocent reverence in his mind and he loved his brother. He was a mess, he decided, and cursed viciously under his breath.
Even that finger would probably be too much for him. The burn and thunder of blind fury running through him at the very thought made him clench his fists and he had to remind himself where he was and that he wasn’t supposed to be here. His inner fool wanted Isabella to be a coolly reserved and faintly amused great lady with every man she ever came across for the rest of her life except him. He wanted her so desperately and in every way there was that it hurt. Temptation roared at h
im to forget scruples and burgle every bedchamber in that innocently sleeping house yonder until he found hers. Then he’d stop and adore every last inch of her until Ben came and pounded him into a pulp. They’d snatch satisfaction for however brief a time they were allowed before some busybody realised nobody could get through Miss Isabella’s locked door to find the intruder. They could love gloriously at least once. Given his size and temper, Ben would roar and rage at the sight of any man taking advantage of Isabella, even if she’d asked him to do it, and Wulf would not be able to defend himself or his actions, because he still wouldn’t marry her.
Yet the need to feel her under him, around him, with him as they made love soared so wildly he smashed his fist into the nearest tree trunk. He tried to bless the agony he’d inflicted on himself as it jagged through him like hot metal so sickness bloomed in his belly instead of lust. Once he’d stopped being sick and sorry for himself, he had to get out of here as stealthily as he got in and then forget why he came. Isabella had looked so alone and lonely in the darkness out here when he’d glanced up from flirting with another woman to show the world Wulf FitzDevelin was on the prowl again, snapping up bored wives their husbands were foolish enough to leave untended. He was as bad as ever, so no need to speculate about the odd wolfish glance he cast at the unattainable Miss Alstone he couldn’t quite suppress. Now all he had to do was walk a few miles across dark and dangerous London to try to sleep in his own home, since he couldn’t endure Carrowe House tonight and pretend nothing was amiss. Maybe he could honour his overdue appointment with the brandy bottle to take away the taste of using one disappointed woman to hide his interest in another.
* * *
‘Wulf, Wulf! Don’t just lie there; wake up,’ Magnus demanded, but what right did he have to interfere?
Wulf had to grope his way up from a very peculiar dream and felt a hard jag of pain in his misused right hand when Magnus shook his shoulder. He cursed and kept his eyes closed as he tried to come to terms with life in a newly tarnished world he was going to have to get used to. He didn’t want to emerge from his coward’s cocoon of drunken sleep and even inside his chilly stupor it didn’t feel much like morning. Gus wouldn’t be shaking him as if he ought to be wide awake if it wasn’t time to face the world, though, so it must be, mustn’t it?
He groaned, remembered Isabella marching away from him last night and refusing to shed a single tear although he’d seen the shine of them in her eyes. Perhaps he preferred the nightmare he’d just emerged from of Mrs Fonthill pursuing him around the Shaws’ drawing room like Diana the Huntress with hounds in full cry as her husband obliviously built some sort of shiny machine and laughed very loudly. Odd, but at least the memory of it distracted him. If he’d ever felt the need to chase animals about the countryside on horseback, he’d give it up here and now. ‘Dratted woman,’ he murmured and felt his brother’s attention waver from whatever he’d woken him up to talk about.
‘Never mind her, whoever she is. You need to read this or, given the state you’re in, perhaps I’ll read it to you as you’re probably seeing double.’
‘You woke me up to read to me?’ Wulf asked and opened bleary eyes to stare at Gus, too shocked he’d run mad to be furious with him.
‘You’ll understand when you hear, or perhaps you’d like to wake up to find half of London on the doorstep and you with no idea why they’re here?’
‘Half of London don’t know I’ve got one, let alone where it is,’ Wulf argued grumpily, but he yawned and tried to find enough attention for whatever Gus thought he should know.
‘They will find it now,’ his brother said grimly.
‘Why? What have I done?’
‘Not you; him.’
‘Oh, him,’ Wulf replied hollowly, knowing Gus must mean the Earl, since that was the ‘him’ who had blighted both their childhoods. ‘You’d have thought we’d be safe now he’s on the other side of the grave. Still, at least he’s no kin of mine.’
‘I shouldn’t be so sure,’ he thought he heard his brother mutter under his breath, but his ears were too drunk and sleep-shot to listen properly.
‘What does he want?’ Wulf said grumpily as he heard the first stirrings of the dawn chorus begin outside his bedroom window and knew he’d only just slept and any moment all that brandy would sour his head and stomach. ‘I’m awake as I’ll ever be at this hour.’
‘You’d best get up and dress first,’ Magnus warned, eyeing the wild spectacle Wulf knew he presented.
‘Come on, Gus, tell me what he said or did and get it over with,’ he said and felt a suspicious shiver ice its way down his spine, as if the old snake had managed to slither into his room somehow, but that was impossible now.
‘Just read it, Wulf,’ his brother said wearily and he might as well.
* * *
Charlotte had the Morning Post in her hands and was staring at the wall opposite as if it had suddenly become fascinating.
‘What is it, Charlotte? Not bad news about someone close to us, I hope,’ Isabella asked.
‘No, nothing like that. I thought it was an advertisement slipped inside when they delivered the papers when I first saw it, but it’s worse than that.’
‘Then what is it,’ Isabella demanded.
This morning her head hurt and her eyes ached and she was surprised her friends hadn’t noticed how out of sorts she was when she made herself join them at the breakfast table as if nothing much had happened last night. She ached when she thought about that interlude in the garden, yet hugged it to her like a miser. Wulf parcelled out their time together in such meagre little portions she might have to make a few minutes last a lifetime if she couldn’t convince him what an idiot he was being.
‘It’s described as a special notice,’ Charlotte said. ‘I suppose they didn’t know what else to call it, since the man is already dead.’
‘Do tell us who you’re talking about, my love, before Isabella throws her breakfast at you,’’ Ben said.
‘You don’t want to know what it says, then?’
‘If you would like to tell me, then I promise to listen,’ he told his wife with a grin he knew perfectly well was infuriating.
‘Harrumph,’ Isabella coughed as politely as she could. ‘The special notice?’ she said airily when they both looked at her as if arguing was far more interesting than anything the outside world could offer them.
‘Oh, yes, you would be interested, wouldn’t you?’
‘I don’t know, since you haven’t told me what it says yet,’ Isabella replied with what she considered exemplary patience.
‘It begins with a list of the late Earl of Carrowe’s names and titles.’
‘Lord Carrowe?’ Isabella gasped.
‘I shall not read them out. He should have had his mind on higher things when he wrote this and not listed all the reasons he could find to feel self-important. Oh, my! Oh, my goodness. This is quite dreadful and horribly unseemly. The printers should have refused to put it into print and I should have read all the way through before I teased you.’
Isabella began to dread what the late Earl of Carrowe’s last twist of the knife would turn out to be. ‘Go on,’ she said hoarsely.
‘He goes on: “I, the most noble Earl of Carrowe et cetera, aver and attest that my wife, Gwenllian Augusta Develin-Haile, Countess of Carrowe, has borne me three legitimate sons during her lifetime, despite her treasonous infidelity with another man between the birth of my second and third sons. Sealed proof of Wulfric Develin-Haile’s true birth as my son, as well as a record of the death of his mother’s lover a twelvemonth before his advent, is lodged with my lawyer and the relevant authorities at the House of Lords, lest it should prove necessary to assert his rightful place among my heirs and their successors. My wife is a weak, sinful and easily led woman, but Wulfric Develin-Haile is truly and legally my son. I commend my soul to God as a wronged and much i
njured husband. No doubt He will judge my wife both before and after she follows me to the grave and at least there she must lie beside me for all eternity and truly repent her sins of adultery and betrayal.”’
Isabella sat silent and horrified as the echo of Charlotte’s recital of those cold and unrepentant words died and the world changed around her. At last she shook her head, because she couldn’t find the right words to say how furious and sad and stunned she was on Wulf’s behalf. The old Earl’s self-serving wickedness was now public knowledge and she hated to think how the Haile family felt this morning, but what about Wulf? He was an innocent victim of his father’s cruelty. When Lord Carrowe set out to punish and vilify his wife all those years ago, he did it by rejecting and abusing his own son and her heart bled for the bewildered little boy he once was. For the first time in her life she felt as if that cliché was true as she rubbed a hand over it to make the ache seem smaller. The selfish, brutal and wilfully cruel waste of it was breathtaking.
‘Oh, how could he do such a monstrous thing?’ she whispered numbly.
‘Poor Lady Carrowe, this will hit her so hard. I can hardly bear to think how she must be feeling this morning,’ Charlotte said after a shocked silence.
‘And poor Dev,’ Ben added.
‘Around every breakfast table in every house this is delivered to of a morning people will read this wickedness,’ Isabella said, pointing at the printed sheet she so badly wanted to burn, except to do any good it would have to be the original, wouldn’t it? And it was far too late. ‘They will read it to anyone willing to listen in their turn and his life and all his father’s shameless spite will be a sensation over the teacups for the world to wonder at for their amusement.’
‘He will hate the Earl even more now,’ Charlotte said.
‘How can he not? That evil old man was a stone-hearted basilisk and I pity Wulf’s eldest brother for having to wear the title in turn,’ Isabella said in a flinty voice and met Charlotte’s eyes even knowing there was bitter fury in her own and she was giving far too much away. All she wanted was to be with Wulf, to make him realise it didn’t matter; none of it made a ha’penny worth of difference. He could have anyone he liked as his father, even the one he was cursed with at birth, and she would still love him and he still couldn’t stop her doing it.
A Wedding for the Scandalous Heiress Page 16