“I know, I understand,” Bailey had told her, hoping she’d stop talking, as they were in the hallway outside the breakfast room when she caught up to him, and someone could come along and overhear them.
“Now you have to show her you can’t exist without her, that she is the sun and the moon and the stars and all of that nonsense to you. That’s probably been the problem all along, you know, Bailey. You’ve been treating Alana as if she’s made of crystal. She would never have questioned your love for her if you’d—well, you know what I mean. At least I dearly hope so, or we’re all lost.”
He’d been lectured by a woman, a young, unmarried woman at that, nearly five years his junior. And the bleeding pity of it had been that she was right.
How many nights had he left Alana at the Redgrave mansion and then walked the streets of Mayfair, unable to sleep for wanting her? How many times had he longed to pull her into his arms, kiss her the way a man kisses the woman he loves. Touch her. Teach her. Take her.
Now he wasn’t simply being encouraged to do all of those things—he’d been ordered to.
“And yet you’ve been sitting here running your mind in circles, instead of hunting up Alana,” he told himself as he left the others and went off in search of his betrothed. “Maybe you are a looby.”
* * *
ALANA HAD BEEN WALKING the lower gardens for what seemed like hours, pretending an interest in the flowers and topiaries that was shallow at best, wondering how long it would take for Bailey to find her. Kate had promised to position herself in the drawing room and then steer him in the correct direction if he should ask where she was. But perhaps he hadn’t asked.
She wouldn’t blame him. She’d conducted herself abominably and then avoided him whenever possible. She’d known then that she’d behaved badly, but it had taken Kate to truly open her eyes to what she had done.
Of course Bailey hadn’t wanted to answer her. How could he have tossed his family aside—three dowries to be found, not to mention fixing the leaking roofs on the estate, paying off all his father’s duns and other creditors—all for love? That would have been selfish of him in the extreme.
Worse, or so Kate had explained the thing, he would at the same time be asking the woman he loved to share his penury, and that he would never do. He was a man, and therefore too proud to ask such a sacrifice of her. Men could be so unreasonably starchy and honorable that way. Kate had told her.
She never should have asked the question. She never should have thought it. The question had been romantic and silly and unworthy of a person who longed to call herself woman, wife.
And she’d thought of one thing more, the question Bailey had not asked of her and most certainly would have been justified in putting to her: If I were not heir to an earldom, but only a poor man with no prospects, would you have married me?
In her mind, she’d said vehemently, Of course I would have! But then she’d thought about Gideon’s sure protests to such a union, and what her mother’s reaction would have been were she still alive, as Bailey’s mother was. Yes, she would still have said that she would marry him. But it would not have been easy, and she would have hesitated before answering, just as Bailey had done.
She may even have protested that there was no reason to answer, because that was not the case for them.
Love wasn’t grand. It was stupid. And it made a person say things a person should not say. Climb this mountain for me. Slay this dragon if you love me.
Maybe she didn’t really know what love was. Maybe she didn’t deserve someone as wonderful as Bailey.
Oh, but when he looked at her… When he touched her hand and something warm and almost hungry came to life deep inside of her… When he smiled and she could only watch his mouth, and her toes curled in her shoes as she thought about that glorious mouth closing over hers…
But there had only been that one kiss. Just that one. Sometimes she had longed to grab him by the lapels of his coat and pull him against her so that he’d stop treating her as if she might break if he did more than compliment her eyes, her gown.
He said he loved her. He said it often, and that was very nice. But if he truly, truly loved her, shouldn’t he have done more than say the words? Shouldn’t he, couldn’t he, have ever shown her?
And if he had, would she have even thought to ask him that stupid, stupid question?
“Alana?”
She turned quickly at the sound of Bailey’s voice, nearly toppling as her skirts seemed to tangle about her feet. Or so she’d let him think.
He caught her to him, rather as he’d done that first day at the book repository. It felt so good. So right.
So…frustrating.
“You nearly fell,” he said, his hands on her upper arms as he steadied her.
She looked up into his concerned eyes. Moistened her lips. Dared to say, “But you wouldn’t let me fall.”
“Alana, I—”
“Bailey, I—”
“No, you first,” he said, gently putting her away from him.
He’d let her go. He’d had the perfect opportunity to kiss her, and he’d let her go. She’d thought she’d been rather daring, even blatant. Maybe she hadn’t done it right?
“I…I just wanted to tell you that it was horribly unfair of me to ask you what I asked you. And I apologize.”
“No, it was a valid question. I should have answered you.”
“But I don’t want you to.”
“I should.”
Honestly, how could she save him from himself, if he didn’t let himself be saved? “I know you love me, and that’s enough. Please, Bailey. Miss Wise is gone—”
“And good riddance,” he interrupted with a smile. “We think she and her mother only stayed so long so that Sylvia could take a dead set at Gideon during the ride to London.”
That information served to divert Alana. “Gideon? I would imagine he dashed those expectations soon enough.”
“Yes, it’s a true measure of my love for you that I didn’t escape to the wilds of America halfway through his questions regarding my intentions toward you. He’s not an easy man. Shall we walk?”
Now it was she who had a perfect opportunity—in her case, to tell him what she’d done, how she’d all but cornered Sylvia Wise in the music room, and what the woman had said to her. But was that really necessary? It was much too pleasant a day to speak of the woman. In fact, it could be sleeting and freezingly cold, and it still would be too pleasant a day to speak of the woman. No, not everything had to be said, shared. And the past was the past—it was the future she was interested in now. The very near future.
So she only nodded, and he held out his arm so that she could take it, and they turned down the path Alana had been haunting this past quarter hour…the one leading to that lovely, vine-covered gazebo and the comfortable, softly cushioned chaise tucked inside it.
The path looked different now. The flowers had more color, the neatly trimmed greenery seemed more whimsical.
She curled her arm about his more securely, allowed her body to brush up against his as they navigated the uneven stone path. She lifted her other hand and placed it on his forearm as well, and smiled up into his face as he told her that his mother and sisters would be arriving the morning of the wedding, having made arrangements to stay with one of his mother’s friends at an estate not five miles from Redgrave Manor.
“Will they like me?” Alana asked, as she’d yet to meet any of the Armstrong family other than Bailey.
“How could they not?” he said at once, and then rather winced at his own words. “That was too glib, wasn’t it?”
“Perhaps,” she admitted, wondering how he knew.
“My sisters are too excited about the idea of each of them having a well-financed Season,” he t
old her then, “and my mother is only anxious that the marriage take place before you can realize you’ve been cold-bloodedly wooed for your fortune.”
“And now perhaps too honest,” Alana told him. “But thank you. Shall we make a pact to never speak about any of this again?”
“Or think about it?” he asked her as a turning in the path revealed the gazebo in all its isolated glory, surrounded by tall yew trees, completely invisible from the house.
She decided to be daring. At least she hoped he would consider her daring and teasing, and not quarrelsome. “As long as you don’t believe I said yes to your proposal in order to one day be a countess.”
Bailey stopped on the path, so that she had to as well. “That never occurred to me,” he said in some shock. “I never thought of our marriage as some sort of trade. I should have, shouldn’t I? I certainly thought about it almost constantly when I was wooing Sylvia’s fortune. But not with you. Never with you. Perhaps that’s why your question took me so by surprise.”
He turned her toward him and put his hands on her waist. “When I think of you, and I always think of you, I think of how wonderful you are, how good, how sweet and gentle and—”
“I’m not sweet and gentle!” Alana burst out, actually stamping one small foot on the cobblestone path. She lowered her voice, shocked at her own outburst. “I’m not, Bailey. Really. I may not have realized that until that awful woman showed up here, but it’s true. I’m not nice.”
He tipped up her chin with his fingertip and smiled down into her face. “Of course you are. Why else do you think I fell in love with you? I couldn’t help myself. You’re everything precious I could ever hope for. Your goodness all but beams from you.”
“Well, I don’t want it to,” Alana said mulishly, knowing she was fairly close to making an utter fool of herself, yet unable to stem her words. “Most of all, I’m heartily sick of being good. I want to be bad, Bailey. I want to be adventuresome, and…and dangerous…and…and shocking. Yes, that’s it, shocking. I want to shock you.”
“Me?” Bailey couldn’t have looked more surprised if she’d just reached into her pocket and pulled out a fat white rabbit. “You want to shock me? How? Why?”
Her burst of bravado, or hysterics, faded as quickly as it had bloomed. “I don’t know,” she admitted in a quiet voice. “I…I have these thoughts…these feelings. About…things…about you. And when I saw Sylvia Wise in the drawing room, leering up at you that way, I wanted to go over to her and tear her hair straight off her head. I did, Bailey, I really did. But…but that wouldn’t have been sweet, or gentle, or ladylike. Or good. You would have been appalled!”
“Once I got done applauding, yes, probably. Alana, I don’t mean to be dense, but what are you trying to say to me?”
“I don’t know! Can’t you understand that, Bailey? I don’t know exactly what I’m saying. Everybody thinks I do, or at least Kate does. But I don’t. Nobody ever really told me how to go about what I’m desperately trying to go about—and, yes, I know I’m making no sense at all. I just know that I’m not what everybody thinks I am. I’m not what you think I am, and if I am, then I’m heartily sick of being who you think I am, but you should know that now because then maybe I won’t be the person you thought I was and you won’t love me because I’m really not this…this paragon you keep rattling on about as if it was wonderful to be so sickeningly nice. I just…I just—oh, here!”
She grabbed at his wrists and pressed his hands against her breasts.
Alana had once read somewhere—probably in one of those marble-backed novels Kate scoffed at—that there are moments when time stands still. It stops, just stops for several moments. And then it moves on… .
Bailey cupped his palms around her softness. Slowly. Gently.
She watched his chest rise and fall, her own breaths equally shallow, her heart—part of the world that had stopped—beginning to beat at an alarmingly rapid rate.
She felt something seem to tighten between her legs, and not in an uncomfortable way. It felt rather good, actually. Not good as in how the world thought she was good, but good in a way that might be deliciously bad. Better than good ever was or could be.
“Alana,” Bailey breathed softly, not moving his hands. Except for his thumbs, which now were for some unknown reason stroking back and forth across her nipples that, for reasons of their own, she supposed, began to feel tight and hard. And quite good.
There was that word again. Good. Perhaps good wasn’t so bad.
But now they were just standing there. Like statues. With Bailey’s hands still on her.
Oh, dear. Wasn’t that awkward?
Wasn’t he going to do anything else? At the very least, say something?
“Alana…I didn’t know,” he said at last, his voice rather thick. “I’d hoped…but when you’ve got the sun and the moon, as I have in you, it would be greedy to ask for the stars as well.”
His hands left her breasts, and she had to fight back a moan of protest, but he’d only moved them so that he could draw her closer, so he could raise up her chin, so he could press his mouth against hers.
Their betrothal kiss had been nice. Good. But now he was urging her lips apart and insinuating his tongue between them, and he was probing at her, drawing sensation from her, somehow making the tightening between her legs turn to a warm tingling void that seemed to be asking for something, some sort of attention to be paid to it.
She slid her hands up the front of his coat, and then wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing her breasts against his chest. She didn’t know why she was doing any of these things; she simply let her body do what it seemed to know to do on its own.
He moaned low in his throat and then insinuated his thigh between hers, pressing up against her as if he’d known about the tingle. That was good; he seemed to know about a lot of things, things he could teach her. Dare she tell him she thought she would make a very apt pupil?
Bailey broke the kiss at last, pulling her against him, his breath rather shaky close against her ear.
“I’d slay dragons for you,” he told her, sounding quite romantic and serious, which for some strange reason caused a giggle to escape her lips. And then they were both laughing. Laughing, and holding on to each other, and probably looking very silly to Maximillian Redgrave, who, because the gods weren’t always kind, had chosen that exact moment to make use of the lower garden as a shortcut back from the stables.
“Oops—forgot I wasn’t to come this—that is, oh, good. Made it up between you I see,” he said. “Kate’s a genius, almost as brilliant as our grandmother. Just don’t tell her, please. She’s smug enough as it is. Well, I’m off! See you both at dinner…or whenever.”
He’d just about passed them by when Bailey called out, “Wait a moment, Max. What did you mean? You weren’t supposed to come this way? Was that it? And Kate’s a genius?”
Max stopped, seemed to realize he’d soon be facing his sister’s wrath. He might be six years her senior, but Kate was a force to be reckoned with, and all her brothers knew it. “What? Oh, that. She said you two love each other and you’d figure that out and make it up between you. That’s all. Wagered me five pounds it would be today, as a matter of fact. I said not until tomorrow. Sorry for thinking you such a slow-top, Bailey. Now I’m off to clean up my dirt before dinner.”
By now Alana had not only managed to step clear of Bailey, who’d seemed to have forgotten he was holding on to her, but she was wondering why he was looking so…well, so guilty.
Or maybe she thought he looked guilty because she was feeling guilty?
Because she doubted either one of them believed Max’s story about a wager. Because he had not only looked guilty, but had sounded it as well. And then there was that business about being warned not to come back to the house via the lower garden.
“Bailey?” Alana asked when her betrothed finally turned to look at her as if attempting to see into her head, discern what she was thinking. Which, by her quick reckoning, would be a disaster. “Is…is something wrong?”
“I don’t know. Alana, why were you here? In the lower garden, I mean. I’d been looking for you, to—well, in any case, when I couldn’t find you, Kate told me you were here.” He looked toward the gazebo as if it might provide some sort of answer, but then asked again, “Why were you here?”
She took refuge in a question of her own. “Why were you looking for me?”
“Why would you ask that? You weren’t hiding from me, were you?”
Oh, this wasn’t going well! If he was avoiding answering her, and she was avoiding answering him, they’d never get anywhere. Not that Alana was sure she wanted to go anywhere, not when she was beginning to think Lady Katherine Redgrave was behind whatever it was Bailey didn’t want to tell her as well as behind what she didn’t want to tell him.
But there was nothing else for it. One of them had to say something, and since she was the one who’d taken his hands and—well, she’d done what she’d done, hadn’t she? So it was up to her to answer Bailey’s question.
“I never should have asked you that horrible question,” she told him by way of preliminary…or trying to drag out the inevitable as long as possible. “I mean, it’s one thing for my inheritance to be…convenient for you. And it’s another thing for the fact that my parents had always hoped I’d marry into Society. But…but the important thing is that I love you. And you love me. Isn’t it?”
“No,” Bailey said after spending a few moments obviously trying to decipher what she’d said. “The important thing is that we know we love each other for ourselves, and not for fortune or social station. Because that really was your question, at the heart of it. Wasn’t it?”
Rules of Engagement: The Reasons for MarriageThe Wedding PartyUnlaced (Lester Family) Page 32