And then, just as quickly, those memories vanished as the corners of his mouth twisted cynically. His eyes never left Mallory’s as he said, “You’ll excuse us, won’t you, Sarah? My—” He hesitated slightly as if to savor the next word, “wife and I want to be alone.”
Mallory panicked.
When had his voice turned so deep, so resonant, so authoritative? And he must have grown a foot in height, even from a moment ago, when her anger had propelled her forward.
He moved closer to her now, too close, almost as if he were challenging her. Mallory stood her ground but discovered she was reluctant to meet those too-perceptive eyes. Instead, she stared at the fine weave of his jacket, the crisp, snowy folds of his neck cloth. She could even smell the starch in the fine lawn of his shirt and a warm, spicy, masculine scent that was like a breath of fresh air in the smoky room.
This was something she definitely remembered from her wedding day—this intense awareness of him.
He placed his hand on her shoulder…a stranger’s hand, she realized with a start—large, well-formed, capable. Mallory felt as if she’d swallowed a bubble and couldn’t breathe. She remembered so much, suddenly, in that touch—
Her senses screamed a warning.
And then her feet left the ground! Before she knew what he was about, John Barron swung her easily up into his arms amid a flurry of skirts and petticoats.
The crowd roared its approval.
“Hadley,” John said to a dark-haired man standing close to Lady Ramsgate, “lend me your carriage.”
“Of course, Craige. I’d be honored,” Hadley answered, and with a click of his fingers, signaled a servant to hurry from the parlor to fetch the conveyance.
“What do you think you are doing?” Mallory demanded, the very second she could catch her breath long enough to speak.
John looked down at her with laughing eyes. “Did you not say you wanted us to be alone?”
“I didn’t tell you to pick me up. Put me down this second!” She pushed against him, but he only tightened his hold.
“Perhaps you’d better do as she says, Craige,” Hadley warned with a laugh. “I want my coach back in one piece!”
“I’ll have it returned tomorrow morning—polished, shined, and completely intact,” John promised, and started toward the door. Mallory arched her back, trying to roll out of his arms.
“I lay five-to-one odds Craige doesn’t make it to Mayfair without getting his eyes scratched out!” a voice shouted, and then, to Mallory’s mortification, the man’s bet was met with many laughing offers—some even from women!
She struggled harder, wanting to put her feet securely on the ground, but her actions led to further indignity when he easily shifted her up and onto his shoulder, as if she weighed little more than a sack of wool. Flabbergasted, Mallory pushed herself upright, her fingers still clutching her reticule. The pins fell from her neat chignon, and she realized that she’d lost her best bonnet in the mélée. From this vantage point, she had a clear view of all the drunken faces looking up at her and laughing.
“Let me down,” she commanded through clenched teeth, loud enough for only the two of them to hear.
“In a moment, my dear,” he responded perfunctorily.
Furious, Mallory was about to let her breeding be damned and box his ears when a woman’s screech interrupted them. “John!”
He turned to face the speaker. Looking over her shoulder, Mallory could see that the crowd, in delicious anticipation, had cleared a path for the lovely Lady Ramsgate to confront her lover.
The woman smiled a practiced look of enticement before asking softly, “You’ll be coming back, won’t you, John?”
Everyone in the room, including Mallory, looked to John for his reply.
Raising his eyebrows in an expression of complete indifference, he drawled, “Don’t wait up, Sarah.”
The crowd howled even as Lady Ramsgate shrieked with outrage, grabbed a vase from a side table, and hurled it at John and Mallory. The vase flew wide of its mark and hit Applegate without breaking, although it did knock him back into the arms of the half-dressed woman. The two of them fell to the floor while the crowd shouted catcalls.
“Duck,” John said.
“What?” Mallory asked, still caught up in the sight of the plump Applegate rolling around on the floor with the woman. Fortunately, Mallory had looked down, or else she would have whacked her head a good one on the door frame. The next time he said “Duck” she ducked, and he carried her through the front door and out into the summer night.
Lady Ramsgate’s butler handed John his top hat before closing the door behind them. John lowered her feet to the porch step with an undignified thud. Two large oil lamps illuminated the step.
It took Mallory a second to find her balance before she came back spitting with suppressed fury. “How dare you!”
“It’s good to see you again, too,” he replied pleasantly. He pushed a stray lock of straight dark hair back from his brow, set his hat on his head, and started to take her arm.
Mallory jerked away and backed to the other side of the small stoop. Her whole body shook with outrage. “Don’t you touch me. Don’t ever touch me.”
He frowned as if he found her anger unjustified. “Mallory—”
The pent-up emotion, the frustration and lost hopes, exploded inside her. “I want a divorce!” Through the red haze of anger, she felt the words more keenly than a knife’s point. “Before I came here and was so thoroughly abused and humiliated, I was afraid to say those words. But now I’m not! In fact, I’m glad to say them. I’m proud to say them! Do you hear me? I want a divorce!”
There were only a few feet between them, but Mallory and John might just as well have been in separate countries. While her emotions roiled inside her, he faced her, perfectly calm and at ease.
For the first time, Mallory knew her decision was the right one. This man didn’t care for her. He hadn’t even batted an eye at her outburst. Scandal be damned; she’d divorce John Barron and build a new life with a good, stable man like Hal Thomas, a man she’d known from childhood, a man who wouldn’t abandon, betray, or humiliate her.
Only the sound of her breathing stretched between them, and slowly Mallory was able to gather up the tattered remnants of her dignity. Her hair was a tangled mess. Self-consciously, she pulled the unruly mass to the nape of her neck.
The masklike calm never left her husband’s face.
“You have no response?” She let her hand drop to her side and straightened her shoulders. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”
“Yes, I did,” he drawled. “And so did everyone else.”
Everyone else? Surprised, Mallory turned and her eyes opened wide in horror when she saw all the party guests leaning out the windows along the front of Lady Ramsgate’s townhouse, enthusiastically watching the scene being played out on the stoop. As Mallory’s mouth dropped open in dumbfounded shock, they burst into hoots of laughter.
Mallory chose the only course open to her. She walked down the steps and to the curb, praying she’d never see any of these people again. A team and ornate closed coach with windows on all four sides stood in front of the townhouse. A liveried footman held open the door. Assuming the coach was for them, and not truly caring one way or the other, Mallory climbed in. “Drive,” she announced grandly to the coachman.
The driver waited until John removed his top hat and climbed beside her. The chaise shifted with his weight. When her body started to slide across the velvet squabs toward him, Mallory scooted quickly toward the opposite door to avoid contact with him. “I don’t want you here,” she said.
“I didn’t ask,” he replied, before giving the coachman his Mayfair address.
Mallory opened her mouth to protest, but with a snap of the whip they were off. The coach lurched around the other coaches lined up for the party and started down the street. John’s friends shouted and called encouragement from the windows. Mallory, happily, couldn’t make out ex
actly what they said. From the corner of her eye, she noticed that John good-naturedly waved goodbye. She clung closer to the opposite door and stared out into the night.
John leaned back in the seat. Mallory felt him staring at her, the hairs at the nape of her neck tingling, but when she slid a look in his direction, he was checking his fob watch for the time. He closed the timepiece with a soft click and she looked away quickly, not wanting to be caught staring.
In fact, she could hardly wait to rid herself of him. She should tell him so, and also that she had no intention of returning to his house, that she wanted to be delivered to the Red Horse Inn, where her mother waited. In fact, if she had to spend another second in the company of this man—
“No,” he said.
“No what?” She looked over her shoulder. All she could see of his face, hidden in the shadows, was the grim set of his mouth.
“No divorce,” he answered.
Mallory turned to face him fully. Conscious of the listening ears of the coachman and the footman, she leaned close and whispered, “Why not? Certainly from what I’ve seen tonight, I have plenty of justification!”
“What are you talking about?” he whispered back, as if they were playing a game.
“Your mistress,” she hissed.
He waved a dismissive hand and sat back before answering in a normal voice, heedless of the servants, “If having a mistress were grounds for divorce, then half of Parliament would be unattached.”
“Adultery certainly is grounds for a divorce!” Mallory whispered back, sending a pointed look at the coachman.
John ignored her. “For a wife, but not for a husband.” He studied her in the darkness for a moment before asking, “I don’t have a fear on that count, do I?”
Surprised that he would even voice such a concern, hot indignation and guilt flashed through her. What if the rumors about the many duels he’d fought were true and he decided to call Hal Thomas out? “I am as you left me,” she hurried to assure him.
John pursed his lips, the coach lights illuminating his even features. Mallory held her breath. Could he read her mind? Did he sense she was hiding something? At last he said dryly, “Well, that’s comforting.”
She bristled at his sarcasm. “Of course, I don’t run in the same circles you do. We country folk—” she laced these words with disdain—“take our wedding vows seriously.”
“You have a very attractive lower lip when you pout.”
She immediately pressed her lips together, angered by her reaction to his off-hand compliment. “Haven’t you heard a word I’ve been saying?”
“Of course, I’ve heard every word. How else would I notice the shape of your lower lip?” He moved closer to her, his arm coming around the seat back. “In fact, perhaps having a wife isn’t such a bad idea.” His rough voice sounded very intimate in such close quarters. His finger lightly touched her cheek, and Mallory couldn’t suppress a shiver of awareness. He smiled, as if her reaction were exactly what he’d hoped.
He removed his arm and sat back. “Fine. I’ll give up my mistress. No more adultery. No more discussion about divorce.”
Mallory opened her eyes wide in feigned surprise. “I have farm animals I speak of with more attachment than you do of a woman whose bed you share.” Her cheeks burned. Such plain speaking embarrassed her.
“You’re blushing, aren’t you?” He stretched out his long legs and shoved his hands in his pocket. “I can’t remember a time when anything embarrassed me—least of all words.” He shot her a smile, one that had charmed women from duchesses to dairy maids, if her friend Louise Haddon’s gossipy letters from London could be believed. “Would it make you feel better if I professed an undying love for her?”
“No,” she said firmly.
“Then there’s no sense in pretending, is there? Mallory, there is no attachment. Sarah and I had an affair. I’ve tired of it and it’s over. There’s no need for excess emotion. I’ll contact my uncle Louis Barron tomorrow and have him finish it with her.”
Mallory stared at him as his words sank in. He really believed what he said. He believed that the beautiful, elegant woman who served as his mistress considered him little more than a past-time—in spite of the fact that Lady Ramsgate had just made a fool of herself before society by begging John to come back to her. Her mother was right—men and women had completely different views of the world. She gave a short, humorless laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“You. Us.” Mallory pressed a pleat into the material of her dress with two fingers before admitting, “Imagine, we’ve been married for over seven years, yet we’re strangers. You’re nothing like what I remember.” And she suddenly realized that in spite of Hal and with all evidence to the contrary, a part of her had naively believed they might still have managed to make something out of this soulless union.
“Or how I remember you.” He paused before adding, “You’ve grown up, Mallory.”
For a second her heart stopped. What could he mean? And why did his words and the deep, appreciative timbre of his voice start a dizzy little humming deep inside her?
Mallory clutched her hands together in fists, questioning her sanity. John had had his chance. She’d waited over six years, playing the role of dutiful wife to her roving soldier husband. She’d expected a note, a visit, something when he’d returned from the war. Being ignored with such finality hurt. Trusting him in spite of all evidence to the contrary and losing her home had made her incensed with fury.
“I want a divorce, John. I do not want to go to your home, especially in light of what happened at—” she discovered she didn’t want to say Lady Ramsgate’s name, “—back there. Please convey me to the Red Horse Inn. My mother is waiting for me there, and since I’ve been gone several hours, she will be anxious.” There. She’d said it—and very well, too, she thought. This was as she’d pictured the meeting between them, a moment of dignity and grace, in spite of the somewhat scandalous circumstances.
He made an impatient sound. “There will be no divorce.”
Mutinously, Mallory refused to answer. There most certainly would be a divorce…or a separation. She’d sue for private separation in the ecclesiastical courts. It was what Hal had encouraged her to do from that start.
John frowned. “You’re upset over what happened this evening. I’m sorry I embarrassed you, but after you stormed into my mistress’s house, publicly announced yourself, and slapped me, I felt that removing us in the most expedient manner was the best solution—and no, I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks.”
All her outrage welled up again. “I’ve never been manhandled in such a manner….” Her voice trailed off as words failed her. Unfortunately, she also felt an annoying sense that he was right in some measure.
Her mother had begged her to stay at the inn and wait for John to respond to one of the many notes Mallory had sent him that day. However, when she hadn’t heard from him after hours of waiting, Mallory’s temper had got the better of her. She’d marched over to John’s house and badgered the one-legged brute named Richards, her husband’s butler, for John’s whereabouts. The real insult had been that Richards hadn’t believed his lord was married.
“Couldn’t we just have walked out the door?” she asked. “Or do you make it a practice to pick up any woman you see and carry her off whenever you are bored?”
John answered her with a smile that was so wickedly tempting it had the power to charm even her, a woman who believed herself impervious to the fatal appeal of scamps and bounders.
And that was what she’d married, she reminded herself—a rake. An infamous rake.
“We can’t divorce,” he said, almost apologetically. “First, there’s the scandal a divorce would create. A stigma on both our family names.”
She gave an unladylike snort. “Since when have you worried about our family names?”
“Do you mean, when have I worried how my actions affect the family name or about propagating the family
name?” His grin turned wolfish.
“Your actions!” Mallory snapped. “I’ll not let you close enough to think of the other.”
“Oh, I’m thinking of the other already,” he assured her, and there was something in the warmth of his voice that turned her stomach to jelly. But his voice was businesslike. “Besides, I can’t see you leaving your precious Craige Castle. After all, you are the last of the true Craiges.”
His words washed all good humor out of Mallory. “Craige Castle is gone. Your creditors evicted my mother and me last week.”
“You’re joking!” He sat up.
“Do you believe I would joke about such a thing? I’ve been told there is already a new owner. And when did you ever give a care to scandal or Craige Castle and its tenants? I admit you were fine in the beginning, albeit somewhat stingy, but the last several years we’ve been lucky to see a shilling for anything in the way of improvements to the castle itself!”
He leaned forward. “Lucky to see a shilling? Mallory, how can you call an allowance of ten thousand a year a pittance?”
“What ten thousand a year?”
He looked squarely at her, his expression completely serious for the first time since she’d met him this evening. “The money I’ve been putting into your accounts ever since we parted company seven years ago. It was the living I inherited from my mother’s side of the family. I lived off my pay as an officer and gave the rest completely over to you. Are you telling me you’ve never received the money?”
“John, we’ve been fortunate if we’ve had a thousand pounds from you in a year, and that stopped coming two years ago while you claimed half the harvest to support your grand way of life and your women.” She spat the last word out.
“This is astounding,” he said. “You’ve had nothing from me at all for two years?”
“Well, there was the brick walkway you insisted on building. I was forced to let go of servants who had been with my family for years and you were sending workmen to build walkways! Oh, yes, and I mustn’t forget your occasional letters.” She couldn’t resist making that jab. “Especially the one that read, ‘Dear Wife, I hope all is well with you. I am well. Sincerely, John Barron.’” She paused a moment before asking, “Had you really forgotten my name, John?”
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