Simply Unforgettable

by Mary Balogh

  “It never did feel like nothing,” she said bitterly, pulling away from him and retreating to her corner again. “My father’s debts were larger than I thought, I had signed a contract I could never get out of, and Lady Lyle became less pleasant when I started to complain.”

  “A contract,” Lucius said. “How old were you, Frances?”

  “Nineteen,” she said. “Does that fact make a difference?”

  “Of course it does,” he said. “It is not worth the paper it is written on. You were a minor.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I did not realize that mattered.” She pressed both hands to her face for a moment and shook her head. “Things kept going from bad to worse. And then the worst thing of all happened. After I had quarreled with Charles, the Countess of Fontbridge came to see me. She had not heard of the quarrel, but she was determined to separate us. She offered me money—a large sum—if I would agree to leave London without another word to Charles and never come back again.”

  “And you took the money?” He looked at her incredulously—and also with something of a grin.

  “I did,” she said. “I was so angry. But I also had no choice but to promise—at least, I thought I had no choice. And then I thought—why not? Why not take her money even though I had no intention of marrying her son anyway? So I did. I needed money to set myself free, and so I rationalized my decision. I gave it all to Lady Lyle, and then I packed a valise and left the house while she was at an evening party. I had no plans, but the next day I saw the advertisement for the teaching job at Miss Martin’s, and the day after that her London agent agreed to send me down to Bath for an interview. I needed to leave, Lucius, and I did leave. There was nothing for me in London. I thought I was tied to a contract that I found quite abhorrent, scandal was about to break around me, and either Lady Lyle or Lady Fontbridge could have unleashed it in a moment. I left, hoping almost against hope that I would have a chance to start again, to build a better life for myself. And incredibly it worked. I have been happy ever since. Until I met you.”

  “Ah, my love.” He took her hand again, but this time she succeeded in pulling it away.

  “No, you do not understand,” she said just as the carriage made a sharp turn into the cobbled stable yard of a small country inn, where Peters was already standing beside the curricle. “You do not understand why I had to give my promise to the Countess of Fontbridge. She knew something that Lady Lyle had told her, something I did not even know myself. Lady Lyle wanted to make sure that I did not marry Charles, I suppose, and stop singing and paying her large sums of money for debts she had quite possibly fabricated. But my only thought was that my great-aunts must never discover the truth. It would have hurt them unbearably, I believed.”

  She seemed not to have noticed that the carriage had stopped. With one raised hand Lucius stopped Peters from opening the door.

  “I am not who you think I am,” she said.

  “Neither Françoise Halard nor Frances Allard?” he asked softly.

  “I am not French at all or English either,” she said. “My mother was Italian, and so was my father as far as I know. I do not, in fact, know who he was—or is.”

  He stared at her profile as she spread her hands across her lap and looked down at them.

  “She was a singer,” she told him. “My father fell in love with her and married her even though she was already with child by someone else. After she died, a year after my birth, he brought me back to England with him and brought me up as his daughter. He never breathed a word of the truth to me—I heard it for the first time just over three years ago.”

  “Are you sure, then,” he asked, “that it is true?”

  She smiled at her hands. “I suppose part of me always wondered if perhaps it was a malicious invention,” she said. “But my great-aunts confirmed it just today. I told them the truth before I left, only to discover that my father had done so when he first arrived in England with me. They have always known.”

  She was weeping, he realized when a spot of moisture fell onto her lap and darkened the fabric of her dress. He handed her a handkerchief, and she took it and pressed it to her eyes.

  “So you see,” she said, “I cannot marry anyone of high rank. I cannot marry you. And before you rush in to contradict me, Lucius, stop and think. You have made a promise to your grandfather and indeed to your whole family. I have met them, and I have seen you with them. I know you are fond of them. More than that, I know you love them. And I know that your impetuosity is more often than not motivated by love. You are a far more precious person than I think you realize. For your family’s sake you cannot marry me.”

  And then—absurdly—he wanted to weep. Was it true? Was he perhaps not quite the wastrel he sometimes believed himself to be?

  I know that your impetuosity is more often than not motivated by love.

  “It is almost dark,” he said, “and if this inn does not offer a decent beef pie for dinner I am going to be mightily out of sorts. I suppose you are ready for a cup of tea?”

  She blew her nose then and looked about her as if realizing for the first time that they were not still rattling along the highway.

  “Oh, Lucius.” She laughed shakily. “Two cups would be better.”

  “Just one thing,” he said before giving Peters the signal to open the door and let down the steps. “For tonight we are Mr. and Mrs. Marshall. We will not scandalize our host by arriving in the same carriage and announcing ourselves as Viscount Sinclair and Miss Allard.”

  He did not give her a chance to reply. He jumped out of the carriage and turned to hand her down.

  “I was beginning to think, guv,” Peters said, “that I was going to be up until the wee hours of the morning waiting to attract old Thomas’s attention so that he would turn in here rather than crawling on past.”

  Lucius ignored the witticism.

  24

  “It does matter,” she said. “It really does, Lucius.”

  “It most certainly does not.” He looked at her in obvious exasperation. “Good Lord, Frances, if only you had told me all this when we were in Sydney Gardens, marooned by the rain, we could have been married by now and proceeding to live happily ever after.”

  “We could not.” But all was pain about her heart. “You never stop to think, Lucius.”

  They could not immediately continue the discussion. They were in the public dining room, there being no private parlors at the inn. There was only one other group there, and they were at the far side of the room, deep in conversation. But the landlord had arrived with their food—roast beef and vegetables. Frances wished she had ordered only bread and butter and tea.

  Lucius was looking handsome and elegant. He had changed for dinner, and he was freshly shaved. That latter activity had been performed in her full view while she sat on the large bed in their shared room, her arms clasped about her knees. He had been shirtless.

  The scene had felt almost suffocatingly domestic. And she had been able to see all the rippling muscles of his arms and shoulders and back. He really did have a splendid physique. Not that her perusal of him had been entirely scientific. She had been terribly aware of him sexually.

  She had been very aware too of the fact that they would be spending the night together in that room—and in that bed. It had not occurred to her to be in any way horrified.

  “It matters to you,” Lucius asked, picking up his knife and fork and cutting into his beef, “that Allard—or Halard, I suppose—was not your real father?”

  “It mattered very much at first,” she said, “and I was inclined not to believe it. But it did not seem to me the sort of thing Lady Lyle would have invented. She was greedy and occasionally spiteful, but I did not believe her to be wicked. Eventually, once I had recovered from the first shock, I realized that the love he had always lavished upon me was even more precious than I had always thought it since I was not even his flesh and blood. But it mattered in other ways. I was an imposter in society. I could not ha
ve married Charles even if I had still loved him. And this is not even all in the past tense. I cannot marry you.”

  She put a forkful of food into her mouth and then found the effort of chewing it almost beyond her powers.

  “Are you really so naive, Frances?” he asked. “Numerous members of the ton do not have the parents they profess to have. Have you not heard it said that once a woman has presented her husband with an heir and a spare she can proceed to enjoy life in any manner she chooses provided she is discreet? There are many women of good ton who do so with great enthusiasm and present their husbands with an array of hopeful offspring that he did nothing to beget. What did your great-aunts have to say on the matter?”

  “They told me,” she said, “that I was a tiny, big-eyed child when they first saw me and they fell in love with me on sight. They told me that when my father told them the truth about me, it simply made no difference to them. My father was their beloved nephew, and he acknowledged me as his own. And so it never occurred to them not to acknowledge me as their great-niece. They told me I was the apple of their eye.”

  “When I called there this afternoon,” he said, “they also told me that you are their heir.”

  “Oh,” she said, setting down her knife and fork with something of a clatter and giving up even the pretense of eating.

  “You are not going to weep again, are you, Frances?” he asked her. “If I had known, I would have brought a dozen clean handkerchiefs with me, but I did not know. Don’t cry, my love.”

  “Oh, I am not,” she said. “But three years ago when the Countess of Fontbridge came to me with her threats, it was of them I thought. I could not bear to have them know how they had been deceived all those years. And I suppose I could not bear the thought of losing their love. But when I went out to the summer house today to tell them the truth, they looked at me in dismay because I knew. And then they hugged me and kissed me and called me a goose for having doubted them for one moment.”

  “You see?” he said, his plate already almost empty. “They agree with me, Frances—about your being a goose. It never pays to give in to threats and blackmail. I’ll go and find Lady Fontbridge and plant her a facer, if you wish—or I would if it were not ungentlemanly to do such violence to a lady.”

  “Oh, Lucius.” She laughed. “I called on her this morning and told her that though I was leaving for Bath I would no longer consider myself bound by the promise I made more than three years ago—except the one not to marry Charles because I had not intended to marry him anyway. And I called on Lady Lyle and told her that I no longer considered myself in her debt or under obligation to George Ralston. When she threatened to pursue me to Bath with her vicious gossip, I told her the name of the school and where to find it.”

  His fork remained suspended halfway to his mouth. He grinned at her and made her heart turn right over in her bosom, she was sure.

  “Bravo, my love!” he said.

  She sighed. “Lucius,” she said, “that is the third or fourth time you have called me that in the last hour or so. You must stop. You really must. You need to set your mind to fulfilling the promise you made your grandfather. If Miss Hunt is no longer a candidate, you will need to find someone else.”

  “I have found her,” he said.

  She sighed again. “Your bride must be someone acceptable to your family,” she said. “You know she must. You made the promise as soon as you knew the Earl of Edgecombe was failing in health. Do you know why you made that promise? Because it was the dutiful thing to? Yes. I believe duty means much to you. Because you love him, and your mother and your sisters too? Yes. You bound yourself to marrying and settling down and having a family of your own, Lucius, because you love the family that nurtured you and felt that you owed them that stability in your life.”

  “You are very ready to assign all sorts of sentimental motives to me today,” he said. His plate was empty. He set down his knife and fork and picked up his glass of wine. “But if there is some truth in what you say, Frances, there is truth in this too. I will marry for love. I have decided that, and that puts you in an awkward position. For I love you. And so I cannot settle for anyone else. And yet I have a certain promise to keep before the summer is out.”

  The landlord arrived to clear away their plates. A maid behind him carried in two dishes of steaming pudding. Frances waved hers away and asked for tea.

  “Your father acknowledged you from the moment of your birth, did he not?” Lucius asked as soon as they were alone again. “He was married to your mother? He gave you his name?”

  “Yes,” she said, “of course.”

  “Then you are legitimate,” he said. “In the eyes of the church and the law you are Frances Allard—or perhaps Françoise Halard.”

  “But no high stickler, knowing the truth, would want to marry me,” she said.

  “Good Lord, Frances,” he said, “why would you want to marry a high stickler? It sounds like a dreadfully dreary fate. Marry me instead.”

  “We are arguing in circles,” she said.

  He looked up from his pudding to smile at her.

  “It has only now struck me,” he said, “that you never did make suet pudding and custard to follow the beef pie, Frances. But I will say this. That pie was so satisfying that the pudding would surely have gone to waste if you had made it.”

  She loved him so very, very much, she thought, gazing across the table at him. She must have fallen in love with him—

  “I believe,” he said, “I fell in love with you after tasting the first mouthful of that pie, Frances. Or perhaps it was when I walked into the kitchen and found you rolling out the pastry and you slapped at my hand when I stole a piece. Or perhaps it was when I lifted you out of your carriage and deposited you on the road and you gave it as your opinion that I ought to be boiled in oil. Yes, I think it must have been then. No woman had ever spoken such endearing words to me before.”

  She continued to gaze at him.

  “I must know something, Frances,” he said. “Please, I must know. Do you love me?”

  “That has nothing to do with anything,” she said, shaking her head slowly.

  “On the contrary,” he said, “it has everything to do with everything.”

  “Of course I love you,” she said. “Of course I do. But I cannot marry you.”

  He sat back in his chair, his pudding only half eaten, and beamed at her in that intense-eyed, tight-lipped, square-jawed way in which he had looked at her before. It could hardly be called a smile, and yet . . .

  “Tomorrow,” he said, “you will continue on your way to Bath in the old boat, Frances. You have teaching duties there, and I know they are important to you. I will return to London in my curricle. I have duties awaiting me there, and they are important to me. Tonight we will make love.”

  She licked dry lips and saw his eyes dip to follow the movement of her tongue.

  He had given up the argument, then.

  Her heart broke just a little more.

  But there was tonight.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He could not believe what a difference loving her made—consciously loving her, not just bedding an attractive body for which he had conceived a strong sexual desire.

  He had, he supposed, fallen in love with her early, as he had told her at dinner. Why else would he have pleaded with her to go to London with him when he had no real plan and when there was every reason not to take her? Why else would he have found it impossible to forget her in the three months after she had rejected him even though he had convinced himself that he had? Why else would he have made her such an impulsive marriage offer in Bath? And why else would he have pursued her so relentlessly ever since?

  But somewhere along the way—and it was impossible to know exactly when or why it had happened—his feelings for her had shifted and deepened so that he was no longer just in love with her. He loved her. The beauty of her person and of her soul, the strong, sometimes misguided, almost always irrita
ting sense of duty and honor by which she lived her life, the way she had of tipping her head slightly to one side and regarding him with a look of exasperation and unconscious tenderness, the way her face had of lighting up with joy when she forgot herself, her ability to give herself up to fun and frolicking and laughter—ah, there were a hundred and one things about her that had brought him to love her, and a hundred and one other intangibles that made her into the only woman he had ever loved—or would ever love.

  When they came together, naked, in the middle of the wide bed in their inn room, he wrapped both arms about her slender, warm body and drew it against his and found that he was almost trembling. The thought that he might yet lose her threatened to overwhelm him, and he set his lips, parted, over hers and concentrated upon the moment.

  Now, at this precise moment, she was naked and eager in his arms, and now was all that mattered.

  Now they were together.

  And she had admitted that she loved him. He had known it—in his heart he had known. But she had spoken the words.

  Of course I love you. Of course I do.

  “Lucius,” she said against his mouth, “make love to me.”

  “I thought that was what I was doing.” He drew back his head to grin down at her in the faint light being cast through the window by the lamps burning in the stable yard below. “Am I not doing well enough?”

  Her whole body trembled with her laughter. He loved it when she did that.

  “Of course,” he said, turning her onto her back and looming over her, one arm beneath her head, one knee pressed between her thighs, “you are rather hot to handle, Frances. Red hot. I might burn myself with touching you. You are not coming down with some fever by any chance, are you?”

  She laughed again and reached for the back of his head. She drew his mouth down to hers once more and thrust her breasts up against his chest.