Practically Wicked (Haverston Family Trilogy #3)

by Alissa Johnson

  Only, it wouldn’t have been the same. It would have been someone else’s hands on her, someone else’s lips moving over hers. Perhaps that was why she wanted to stay exactly where she was, as she was—because she was with Max Dane.

  But not only was it impossible for her to stay, it was highly unlikely she would ever return. There was no reason to hope she would ever have another opportunity to indulge in a stolen kiss. And so she memorized every second of sliding lips and heated breath, cataloged every leap of her heart, every spark of desire, every flitting sensation. She didn’t want a single instant of the experience to slip from her memory.

  But all too soon, the memory ended. Max gently separated them, and one twinkling hazel eye slowly opened.

  “Am I asleep?” he said softly, and it took her a minute to realize he was recalling her question from earlier. A small, wicked smile formed. “No.”

  “I . . .” Words failed her. She was leaning over the man, panting like a common doxy and had nothing to say for herself.

  He caught her gaze and held it. “Well, that was a pleasant surprise.”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know what possessed me,” she managed at last. She touched shaky fingers to her lips, saw his eyes darken as they followed the movement, and dropped her hand. “I beg your pardon.”

  “I believe that’s my duty. To beg for pardon.”

  “Is it? . . . Well . . . I see.” She remained as she was a moment more before coming back to herself with a small start. Good Lord, what was she doing? She straightened quickly and nodded once. “Pardon granted, then. Do excuse me.”

  “What? . . . Wait.” He caught her arm when she would have stood and made the dash for the door that she ought to have made some time ago. “Don’t go.”

  “Lord Dane, please—”

  “Mr. Dane.” He shook his head impatiently. “Never mind, call me Max. Then we needn’t worry over misters and lords.”

  “No, I can’t—”

  “Why not?” He gave her a teasing smile. “You’ve already kissed me. Seems a minor breach of etiquette in comparison.”

  “I should not have done so.” She really, really should not have done so. “I typically do not give such free rein to my curiosity, but it would seem that tonight was an exception—”

  “Curiosity?” He let go of her arm. “That’s why you kissed me?”

  That, and a thousand other reasons a man like him would misinterpret or simply not understand. “Yes. Why else?”

  His lips twitched. “Why else, indeed. Well, did I at least satisfy?”

  “My curiosity? Yes, quite, thank you.”

  “You’re entirely welcome,” he replied with a dry tone that set her nerves on edge.

  She felt a fool. Why, why had she thought this was a good idea? What had made her think she could get away with such outrageous behavior? Of course he would wake up. Of course he’d not really been asleep. And now here she was, without the foggiest notion of how to handle the situation. Without the foggiest notion of how to handle him.

  She cast a longing glance at the door. “I’ve offended you. I’m sorry. I’ll go—”

  “No, no,” Max cut in with an impatience that seemed mostly self-directed. “You’ve not offended me. I’m unaccustomed to honesty, that’s all. Sit down, love.”

  She knew she’d somehow pricked his pride, and she suspected he might be mocking her a little, but there was a gentleness to the teasing, an invitation to play along, as if the entire experience was but a harmless bit of silliness. It did more to temper her embarrassment and desire to flee than a hundred polite assurances might have accomplished.

  Perhaps she shouldn’t have kissed him, but there was no reason the memory of it needed to end with her running out of the room in mortification.

  “You . . . You should make new friends,” she said carefully. “One shouldn’t grow used to hearing lies.” She thought of her own life and felt something of a hypocrite. “One should not approve of them, at any rate.”

  “Oh, I approve. I prefer my friends dishonest. That way, I’m never left guessing when it’s wise to trust them and when it’s not.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better that they always be honest?”

  “No one is honest all the time. Not even my sainted brother. Devil take him.”

  “You don’t mean that,” she argued gently, resuming her seat. “He was your brother.”

  “He’s a ridiculous bastard.”

  She noticed his use of the present tense and a pang of sympathy settled in her chest. How hard it would be to remember to speak of a family member in the past tense. How painful.

  “But you loved him.”

  He leaned back in his chair once more and closed his eyes as he had before, but he no longer seemed a cavalier man to her, just a heartbroken boy.

  “Yes,” he admitted softly. “God, yes. I loved him.”

  She sought for a way to comfort but didn’t know where to begin. She’d no experience in such matters. She had already said sorry. What came after that?

  Max lifted a shoulder, let it drop. “We cannot always help who we love, I suppose.”

  “Or like who it is we love,” she added, simply because she felt she ought to say something.

  “True.” He tilted his head at her. “Do you like your mother?”

  Not in the least, she thought, but what she said was, “We get on well enough.”

  Which was true, provided she kept as much distance from her as the confines of Anover House, and her mother’s desperate need to be the center of everyone’s attention, allowed.

  “Most people find her quite likable,” Max commented.

  “Most people are not required to live with her.”

  “Family,” he said and bobbed his head with his eyes still closed. “They can be the hardest to love . . . or not love . . . Whichever was our original point.” A furrow appeared across his brow. “I seem to have lost track.”

  Anna hadn’t, but the talk of her highly likable mother prompted a sudden, terrible, sickening notion.

  She licked lips suddenly gone dry. “Mr. Dane—”

  “Max,” he corrected.

  “Right. Max. You’ve not . . . with Madame?”

  One bleary eye opened. “I’ve not what with who, now?”

  “My mother. You’ve not . . . ? Er . . .” She couldn’t say it. She just couldn’t. She hated even thinking it. “. . . Courted her? Or—”

  “Oh. Oh.” Both eyes snapped wide. “Good God, no.” He made a clumsy effort to straighten in his chair. “Lovely woman, your mother. Beautiful, clever, all that, but. . . No. Absolutely not.” He gave he a smile designed to charm. “I prefer a woman who’s a bit . . . warmer. Such as yourself.”

  A wash of pleasure heated her skin. “That was very kind.”

  “No. It wasn’t,” he countered, slumping in his chair once more. “Kind would have been to remake your furniture. Who is Lord Hiccup? He must be quite fond of you.”

  “Lord Highsup,” she corrected, amused. “I don’t remember him well. He passed not long after gifting me this table set. Mrs. Culpepper says he was a friend of Captain Wrayburn’s.” Of whom she could recall very little and could learn nothing from her mother other than that he’d left an inconveniently meager inheritance upon his equally inconvenient death. Anna liked to assume the best of the man, as it wasn’t every gentleman who was willing to wed a fallen woman with a bastard child on her hip.

  “Captain Wrayburn,” he repeated on another yawn. “Not your father. That would be Mr. Rees.”

  “Rees was the name of my maternal grandmother,” she mumbled and looked for a quick way to change the subject. She didn’t wish to have a conversation on her illegitimacy. “Mr. Dane, you are but a hairbreadth from falling out of that chair. May I ring for help now?”

  “No.”

  She opened her mouth to speak but was cut short by the sound of creaking floorboards as someone walked past the nursery door.

  Another lost guest, or a maid or
footman on an errand.

  Or perhaps Mrs. Culpepper had come looking for her, Anna thought with a pang of guilt. The woman would be in a state if she discovered her charge missing at this time of night.

  “I must go, Mr. Dane.”

  “Max.”

  “I must go, Max. My absence will be noted eventually.” And should his role in her adventure be discovered, there was a very real possibility Mrs. Wrayburn would ban him from the house.

  He sighed heavily and closed his eyes. “Yes, all right. Call on you tomorrow.”

  “Next week,” she reminded him softly.

  His eyes remained closed but his lips curved. “Next week.”

  She was silent a moment, debating. He was drunk. He was part of a world she despised and sought to escape. He was everything her mother and, more convincingly, Mrs. Culpepper had ever warned her about.

  In that moment, he was all she wanted.

  She took a deep breath, and then the second biggest chance of her life.

  “Do you promise?” she asked on a whisper.

  “Promise,” he mumbled. “Next week.”

  A moment later, a soft snore issued forth from his lips.

  Anna stayed just a minute more, studying his handsome face and the steady rise and fall of his chest. When she took her leave at last, it was with a secret, wicked smile, and a hope for the future she’d never known before.

  Chapter 3

  Four years later

  Mrs. Wrayburn did not ruin her life in the pursuit of honor. Rather, she temporarily marred it in pursuit of Mr. Richard Templerton, who, after one too many drinks, had suggested a game of midnight equestrian hide-and-seek through the streets of London. In between protectors, and willing to oblige the young, wealthy, and dimwitted Mr. Templerton, the equally inebriated (and arguably dimwitted) Mrs. Wrayburn had scarcely made it out of the mews before falling from her horse and breaking her leg.

  According to the physician, the injury would heal in a few months’ time. According to Mrs. Wrayburn, life as she knew it was over.

  “I am ruined, Anna. Ruined.”

  Anna shifted slightly in the seat next to her mother’s bed and calmly placed another stitch in her sampler. “So you say, Madame.”

  And so Mrs. Wrayburn had been saying—or wailing, to be precise—for the better part of forty-eight hours. Madame’s ever loyal housekeeper, butler, and lady’s maid had all found urgent matters to attend to outside the home after the first twenty-four. Anna couldn’t blame them. Had she not, shortly thereafter, convinced her mother to finally take the laudanum the physician had left, she would have followed suit.

  That convincing had been no mean feat. Her mother had a particular distaste for opiates. She rarely partook and never supplied it at her parties. She claimed it was both the expense and the danger of addiction that kept her free of the drug. But Anna suspected it was because the effects of the drug on her mother were unflattering. On the rare occasions she ingested laudanum for medicinal purposes, Madame became loud, loose of tongue, and prone to slurring for a half hour or more before suddenly dropping into a long slumber, during which she drooled rivers and snored with enough volume to wake the dead.

  Anna was most eager for the snoring to commence. She glanced at the clock at the mantel. The last dose had been given twenty minutes ago. Ten long minutes to go.

  “Weeks!” Her mother wailed. “Months! The season will be over and I have nothing to show for it but . . . this.” She waved a hand at her bound leg in disgust. “Oh, that damned Mr. Templerton.”

  “He sent roses this morning.”

  Madame scowled at her. “One cannot pay the butcher with roses.”

  “One might consider selling a diamond necklace or two,” Anna suggested, knowing full well her mother would never consent to such drastic measures. Madame did not relinquish her personal possessions for any reason. Ever. When something had outlived its usefulness it was stored away, even if that something was torn, or broken, or hopelessly out of fashion. Even if she’d never cared for the item to start, Madame kept it . . . because it was hers. Templerton’s roses would be hung to dry before the day was out.

  Madame gave her a disgusted look. “I cannot believe you would even suggest such a thing.”

  “And how else to you propose to settle your accounts?”

  “You are missing the point, girl. It isn’t about what I must do now. It is my future of which I speak.”

  Lord, the woman was dramatic. “It is a minor break, Madame. You’ll be fit to dance again before you know it. A few weeks—”

  “Weeks, she says,” Madame cut in with a disgusted and graceless wave of her arm, “as though it’s but a trifle to disappear from society for such a time. As though that grasping Mrs. Markhouse isn’t plotting to dispossess me of my hard-earned popularity as we speak, and here I am, powerless to stop her. What do you suppose will become of me when she succeeds, hmm?”

  “I suppose you will become the second most notorious woman in London.” Anna pulled her needle through fabric. “I shall try to hold my head up through the shame of it.”

  “She mocks me. My own daughter mocks me in my grief.” Madame jabbed a shaking, bejeweled finger at her. “You’ve your father’s cold heart.”

  “And his plain eyes,” Anna added for her. Madame did so despair of her only daughter’s drab eyes.

  “Nothing of the kind,” Madame slurred. “Engsly had beautiful eyes. Not so bright as my own, mind you, but a lovely blue in their own right. I don’t know where the devil you acquired that dreadful gray.”

  “Engsly now, is it?” Anna inquired with a small smile. Her mother had named her father countless times. Without, to Anna’s best recollection, having ever used the same name twice. Engsly was but one more gentleman in a long list of sires. “I am a biological wonder.”

  “You’re an ungrateful little monster, is what you are.”

  Accustomed to her mother’s sharp tongue and unpredictable temper, Anna registered the sting of the words and set them aside in the blink of an eye. “Yes, you ought send me packing to my father’s. Let him stomach me. Better yet, allow me the dowry you promised when I was a girl and you may be free of me—”

  “Dowry?” Madame stared round-eyed at Anna as if she’d grown a second head. “I did no such thing.”

  “Five hundred pounds,” Anna reminded her, just as she had reminded her at least once a month since the estimated age of sixteen.

  “Nonsense. What would you do with such a sum, anyway? Hide yourself away in the countryside? Good God, what would people say if Mrs. Wrayburn’s daughter was left to such a fate?”

  For a woman who had spent her entire adult life bucking convention, Madame was inordinately sensitive to the opinions of others. And for a woman so keen on acquiring the good opinion of others, she was lamentably stubborn in her ways. Anna knew she had as much chance of convincing her mother to hand over the five hundred pounds as she did convincing her to sell a piece of jewelry. Which is to say, no chance at all.

  She glanced at the clock. Five minutes. “Tell me of this Mr. Engsly. Is he a gentleman, a tradesman, a—?”

  “Oh, for . . .” Madame threw her a disgusted look. “It is not Mr. Engsly. It is Lord Engsly. Phillip Michael Haverston, the fifth Marquess of Engsly. Don’t be deliberately stupid, girl.”

  “I beg your pardon, Madame,” Anna replied calmly. “In the future, I shall endeavor to separate my stupidity from my gullibility.”

  “See that you . . . What the devil does that mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  One finely arched eyebrow winged up. “You don’t believe me, is that it?”

  Not a single word. “Of course I believe you, Madame. Why would you lie?”

  “Oh, I lie for all sorts of reasons,” Madame replied with a breezy wave of her hand. “Mostly for my own amusement.”

  “That, I believe,” Anna murmured.

  Her mother appeared not to hear her. “But Engsly . . . I lied about Engsly for your own
good.” She sniffed dramatically and adopted a tragic expression. “I’m not so terrible a mother, you know. I don’t look to hurt you.”

  “I’m certain you don’t.” That would require an expenditure of time and energy Madame had never appeared inclined to spend on her only child.

  “You’d have sought him out,” Madame explained. “I didn’t want that.”

  “And why not?” Anna inquired without even a remote interest in what answer her mother might care to offer. Lord Engsly was not her father and there was only one reason Madame wouldn’t want Anna to seek out other family . . . She didn’t want to share.

  “Coldhearted, just as I said. He would have looked for ways to hurt you.”

  Anna tugged on her thread, completing a tight French knot. “Then I am grateful for your protection.”

  Her mother made an unpleasant noise in the back of her throat that Anna hoped indicated she was nearer to sleep and snoring. “Don’t believe me. No one ever believes me.”

  Only those with sense. “That is not—”

  “I’ve proof, you know.”

  The hand holding the needle stilled.

  This was new.

  Her mother had given her plenty of names over the years, and a variety of fantastical stories attached to those names. Her father was Robert Henry, the courageous officer killed in battle whilst defending Wellington himself. He was Charlie Figg, the sweet son of a vicar who met with a tragic fate at the end of a highwayman’s pistol. He was Raphael Moore, the dashing highwayman who’d met his somewhat less tragic fate at the end of the gallows’ rope.

  Anna had taken the stories with a grain—or bucket, as need be—of salt, but never before had her mother offered proof.

  Curious but skeptical, Anna narrowed her gaze. “What sort of proof?”

  “A contract,” Madame replied with an airy smugness. “Made him sign one, same as the others.”

  “You had a contract with my father?” She’d never considered that a possibility. She’d been born before her mother had married Captain Wrayburn and, shortly after his death, become the Notorious Mrs. Wrayburn. It had never been clear (nor of particular interest) to Anna whether or not her mother had made official arrangements with men in the distant past.