“Why, thank you.”
She reached to take his arm before she remembered that they were no longer friends, hadn’t been friends in close to a dozen years. “You shouldn’t be prowling around, trying to prove your rakish credentials. You should be in bed.”
He was still smiling, but now she saw the effort it took. “I thought you’d never ask.”
“Stop it, you fool,” she snapped, shoving hesitation aside and grabbing his arm. She tugged him toward a narrow bench against the wall.
“Ah, such a fond greeting, my love.” Despite his sarcasm, he couldn’t hide his relief as he sat and rested his head against the wall behind him.
He was a ghastly color, and he was breathing unsteadily. Helena couldn’t vanquish a feeling of unreality. West was a force of nature. He always had been. Surely no mere physical weakness could sap that titanic energy. “I’ll fetch a doctor.”
As he closed his eyes, his long mouth turned down. “Don’t you dare. I’ve seen more than enough damned quacks in the last few months.”
“When did you get back from Russia?”
“Two days ago.”
“You traveled like this? You’re raving mad.”
This time sweetness tinged his smile. “Had to.”
“I know you’re Silas’s best friend.” From her earliest breath, West had been woven into her life. He’d been her first dance partner. He was the first boy she’d kissed. And when he’d introduced a handsome young man to her family as a capital fellow, nobody had bothered to check further into Lord Crewe’s background. “But he won’t thank you for killing yourself to be at his wedding.”
“Not here for Silas.” West’s answer emerged in fits and starts. “Here for…you.”
With every word he spoke, she became more concerned. He sounded like these short, staccato sentences were all he could manage. With a pang, she recalled how he’d provoked her at the picnic last spring. This was a different man.
Except apparently he was just as stubborn. And just as set on seducing her.
“I’ll still be here in a couple of weeks,” she snapped, then cursed herself for offering any shred of encouragement.
Another faint smile. His color was a little better, but he looked horridly ill. Fear coagulated in a cold lump in her stomach. Not of his powers of persuasion this time, but that she might lose him. For nearly half her life, she’d been angry with West, but that didn’t mean she was ready to accept a world without him.
“Will you?” he asked.
“Of course I will. Where the devil else would I go? Mars?”
“Paris. New York. Timbuctoo.” He snatched a shallow breath. “Lord Pascal’s bed.”
She should have expected this. West’s fuming displeasure had been apparent in those unwelcome, irritating, marvelous letters that she’d insisted she wouldn’t read.
During this last year, London’s handsomest man had occasionally escorted her in public. The admission that Pascal meant nothing to her hovered on her lips, but wisdom kept her silent. “It’s none of your business whose bed I sleep in.”
What little color West had regained leached from his skin. He looked like an effigy on a medieval tomb. When he raised his hand, she automatically took it.
“Good God, West, you’re burning up.”
“You have no idea.” He pulled her down beside him. “Tell me I’m not too late.”
“Too late for what?” Whatever was wrong with him, it was serious.
“Don’t play coy, Helena. It’s never been your style.” His words came more easily. “Are you and Pascal in love?”
She gave a dismissive snort. “I don’t believe in love.”
At last West opened his eyes. That green gaze blazed with fever, and determination. His illness hadn’t totally banished the domineering earl. “You did once.”
“When I imagined myself in love with Crewe?” she asked in an acid tone.
Her parents had been unable to prevent her headlong rush to disaster. They’d told her she was too young, and that Crewe was a wastrel and a rake, but his sins added to his dark glamour.
She’d recognized her mistake on their wedding trip to Devon when she’d caught him rogering the inn’s chambermaid. From there, things had only gone downhill.
“Once you imagined yourself in love with me.”
“It’s clear I was utterly brainless when I was young.”
“Cruel goddess,” he said without force, then his voice turned thoughtful. “Not brainless, but ardent, and eager to launch into life.”
“Brainless.”
“Incautious. Headstrong. Passionate.” His grip on her hand tightened, and like an idiot, she didn’t pull free. If he’d been his usual king of the universe self, she’d find no difficulty sending him away with a flea in his ear. But his illness made him cursed vulnerable, and she hated to kick a man when he was down.
“Brainless.”
“Adorable.”
She gave a snort of sour amusement. “I can’t have been too adorable. You forgot me easily enough.”
“I never forgot you.”
She shot him a disbelieving glance. “Fever must affect your memory. You toddled off to Oxford after that summer, and decided I was of no interest whatsoever.”
“Good God, Helena,” he protested. “Don’t tell me you’re holding that against me. I was a stripling of eighteen who suddenly had the whole world before him.”
“No.” She shook her head. “You know why I can’t forgive you.”
“Well, it’s time you did.” He regarded her with exasperation. “It’s not my fault you made such a fool of yourself over Crewe.”
“You brought him into our lives.”
“Damn it, half a dozen fellows stayed with me at Shelton Abbey that summer. You’re the one who settled her fancy on the only ne’er-do-well. Every one of the other five turned out to be pillars of society. I know hating me helped you weather the miseries of your marriage, but Crewe has been dead for two years. It’s time you placed blame where it belongs. With an unworldly girl’s romantic longings and a blackguard’s wiles.”
She leaped up and stared at West in hurt rage. Right now, if he fainted in front of her, she’d let him lie where he fell. “You’ve grown spiteful in Russia.” She turned away in a swirl of vermillion skirts. “I’ll send a servant to help you back to your bed.”
He surged to his feet and caught her arm before she marched out. “Wait, Hel. I don’t want to fight.”
She struggled to ignore how white he’d gone. “Yet you set yourself to anger me.”
“Just tell me I’m not too late.”
“You were too late eleven years ago. I won’t be your mistress.”
He released her and slumped back on the bench in a quaking heap. “It’s worse than that, my cranky Lady Crewe.”
“Nothing could be worse than that.” She hardly heard what he said. “Let me take you back to the house. You should be in bed.”
“You’re still offering to join me?” But his question lacked the usual spark.
“It wouldn’t do me much good, by the look of you. You don’t need excitement. You need a warm brick wrapped in flannel and a dose of laudanum.”
He leaned back and shut his eyes. “Don’t fuss, Hel.”
Her gaze narrowed. She might care about his wellbeing—purely as one human to another—but she hadn’t forgotten she was annoyed. “As far as I’m concerned, sir, you can curl up in the straw and shrivel away to nothing. But I doubt if Silas wants his best friend giving his last gasp a week before his wedding. It would cast a pall over the celebrations.”
West’s lips twitched. “So sharp tongued.”
“Now aren’t you glad that I refused you?”
“Your nagging doesn’t scare me.”
“It should. No man wants a harridan for a mistress.”
He opened his eyes. The green was glassy, and his shivering was worse. Dear heaven, this malady was nasty. “I don’t want a harridan for a mistress.”
&
nbsp; She frowned. He must be delirious. “So what’s all that nonsense about missing me?”
He sighed. “Oh, all that is as true as I live.”
“Stop teasing, West. It’s not funny.”
“I’m deadly serious. More serious than I’ve ever been.” His voice was deep and slow, and terrifyingly sincere. “Our timing has always been out of joint, Hel. We were too young when we played at sweethearts. By the time I realized that I was a blockhead to let you go, you’d married Crewe. I waited through your year of mourning to make my move, then damned Liverpool sent me two thousand miles away. But now I’m brooking no more delay. You’re here, and I’m here, and no man will say me nay.”
She scowled to hide her alarm. For someone on the verge of collapse, he sounded remarkably self-assured. “No man, perhaps. But this woman will never be your mistress.”
“I told you I don’t want you to be my mistress.” That burning gaze didn’t waver. “I want you to be my wife.”
Before she could respond to that astounding statement, his eyes fluttered shut, and he slid to the ground as if he didn’t have a bone in his body.
Chapter Two
West cursed this damned inconvenient fever as he sat beside the fire in Silas’s unpretentious drawing room. It was two days since he’d crumpled into a humiliating heap after announcing his intentions to the woman he’d decided to marry. This was his first full evening downstairs.
For nearly a day after blacking out, he hadn’t returned to full awareness. When he did, he’d found himself lying in the bedroom he always used at Woodley Park, going back to his earliest boyhood. He’d grown up with the Nash children, and now he hoped to bring that relationship closer, one of family instead of friendship.
At least his dead faint had saved him from hearing Hel’s answer. He wasn’t optimistic enough to imagine she appreciated his offer. Had ever man set himself to win such a reluctant bride?
The sight of his lady where she sat across the room talking to Fenella Deerham would deter a weaker man. He must have Helena to thank for getting him off the stable floor, but she hadn’t come near him since. Caroline and Fenella had called to see him. Even Fenella’s hulking lover Anthony Townsend—what a dashed disparate couple that was—had stumped his way up to West’s bedroom to wish him a brusque northern-accented recovery.
But Helena’s absence had been eloquent. As was the way she kept well out of his way tonight, and avoided addressing him directly.
She did her best to make her rejection clear. Unfortunately for her, he knew her well enough to read beneath the discouraging manner.
Nobody who saw the striking black-haired woman in an emerald gown that set off her olive skin and flashing dark eyes to perfection would discern her abject terror. Nobody but the man who had been first to kiss her, and knew her better than anyone else on earth.
He and Helena had always understood each other. Their long estrangement hadn’t changed that.
But that didn’t mean he underestimated the obstacles ahead. Crewe, that selfish bastard, had hurt and humiliated her. West had loved the young Helena’s generous heart, but that generosity had left her dangerously vulnerable to a rake’s lures. Now like a half-broken horse, she shied from another rider.
“They make a right bonny pair, don’t they? Sunlight and shadow,” a rumbling voice murmured behind him.
West had been so busy staring at Helena, he’d missed Townsend’s approach, which was a joke when the fellow was the size of a house.
“Heaven and hell,” he said, before he had a chance to censor himself. He’d only met Townsend in the last day or so, and the big, dark man remained something of a mystery.
Townsend gave a grunt of laughter. “If you’re calling my Fenella hell, I’ll have to shoot you.”
West regarded him curiously. Until now, his principal impression of Fenella’s unlikely intended was a monumental form and a slight roughness of manner. Now he saw the intelligence gleaming in those deep-set eyes. He recalled that this man had built a huge fortune from nothing.
“You know damn well that’s not what I mean.”
“Aye, I do. Which is a good thing. I reckon yon Silas won’t appreciate a duel on the eve of his wedding.”
“Probably not.”
Silas and Caro shared a couch, staring at each other as though they couldn’t believe their luck. After their rocky courtship, West couldn’t blame them for their starry eyes.
Their closeness threw his difficulties with Helena into stark contrast. He didn’t begrudge his friends’ happiness, but he was painfully envious. When he looked at Silas and Caro, he wanted what they had.
And he wanted it with Helena.
“The lass is making every effort to pretend you don’t exist.”
“Yes,” West said shortly. If a stranger noticed Helena’s hostility, that meant old friends like Caro and Silas would, too. Unless they were so wrapped up in each other that the rest of the world could go hang.
“Which I’d take as an encouraging sign.”
West’s eyebrows rose. “What the devil?”
Townsend released another soft huff of amusement. “She’s powerfully interested if she has to try so hard to ignore you.”
“She’s been furious with me for years,” West found himself saying with unexpected honesty. He wasn’t a man given to confidences, but something about Anthony Townsend cut through social niceties. It must. In the five years since her husband’s death at Waterloo, Fenella had never looked at another man. Yet within mere weeks, Townsend had persuaded her to marry him. The couple planned a quiet ceremony in London before Silas and Caro left for China.
“Aye, I see you’re not in her good books.”
“I introduced her to Lord Crewe,” West said gloomily. “A mistake I sometimes fear I’ll pay for until Judgment Day.”
“He was a bad ‘un, all right. I had the dubious pleasure of making his acquaintance before he broke his neck on that drunken gallop and did the world a favor.”
West wasn’t quick enough to hide his surprise at the elevated circles Townsend moved in, and the man shrugged without resentment. “The sprigs of the nobility will stomach my unrefined manners when they want to take advantage of my money.”
“Silas always spoke highly of you,” West said. “And the rumor is after you saved the government’s bacon last year, there’s a peerage on the cards.”
Townsend’s gaze settled on the two women across the room. Lovely, blond-haired Fenella glanced up as if sensing his attention, and the smile she sent him was unmistakably sensual. With a shock that he had no right to feel, West realized that pure, delicate, proper Fenella Deerham was utterly in thrall to her fiancé. They’d share a bed tonight, or he was a Dutchman.
West felt even lonelier. Especially as Helena’s current coldness put her bed more out of reach than ever.
“I’d like to give Fenella every honor.”
It was West’s turn to laugh. “I doubt she gives a fig whether you’ve got a title or not. She’s always been beautiful, but now—”
“She burns like a flame.” The burly magnate blushed, and West liked him better for the awkwardness. “Pardon me. I’m not usually given to poetry.”
“Congratulations on your good fortune, old man. She’s a treasure. In my absence, London’s become Cupid’s realm.”
“Thank you. Now Helena is the last of our widows left to find a husband.”
“If I have any say, she won’t be a free woman for long.”
“So you mean marriage?”
“Of course. She’ll make the perfect wife, if I can convince her that I’m not another dissolute rake like Crewe.”
“You might have work to do there. Even I’ve heard the stories about your many conquests.”
West shrugged, his attention unwavering on the seemingly oblivious Helena. He didn’t feel guilty about his exploits. The women had been willing, the liaisons pleasurable, the partings mostly cordial. He hadn’t owed anyone his allegiance—until now.
&nb
sp; “I had my moments, but it’s time to settle down and set up my nursery.” The horror in Townsend’s expression made him pause. “What?”
“I hope you didn’t say that to Helena. Or it’s no wonder your suit doesn’t prosper.”
Had he wooed her in the stables? He’d been burning up with fever and hardly remembered what he’d said. “Helena knows me too well to fall for sentimental twaddle. And too clever as well.”
All the Nashes were dauntingly intelligent. Silas was a famous botanist. Helena devoted her leisure time to higher mathematics, and funding charity schools for bright, but indigent children. Robert put his navigational and engineering gifts into service in the navy. Silas’s youngest sister Amy wrote papers on the new agricultural practices.
“No lass is too clever to object to sweet talk from a lad she fancies. I shouldn’t have to tell you that. You’re the one they call a devil with the ladies.”
“Damn it, Hel’s different.”
Townsend’s disapproval melted into disappointment. “I wouldn’t be too sure about that. And if her late husband was half the lout I thought him, she’s in dire need of tender handling. Kindness might even make her believe you’ve turned over a new leaf.”
West frowned at this man who promised to become a friend. “You don’t mince your words.”
“I’m no milksop aristocrat, you mean.”
West’s lips twitched. “I think I meant more than that.”
“You can’t punch me in the nose with the ladies present,” Townsend said placidly. “And you’re no fool either. Think about what I said. You’ll see I’m right.”
***
“He looks terribly ill,” Fenella said, her embroidery lying forgotten on her lap. Helena who wielded a needle with the finesse of a drunken axman, cast an envious glance at the tracery of violets and ivy on cream silk. “It’s so romantic that he risked his health to rush to your side.”
All thoughts of feminine accomplishments fled Helena’s mind, and she stared appalled her friend. “What on earth did you say?”
Four pairs of curious eyes leveled on them. “Helena, are you all right? What’s happened?” Silas asked from across the room.
Winning Lord West Page 3