by Anne Stuart
Until today.
“Where’s Binnie?” Ellen asked as he climbed up into the carriage late that morning.
He schooled his features in a look of deep concern. “Gone,” he said succinctly, thinking of the woman he’d left locked upstairs, pounding on the door of the bedchamber and shrieking like a harpy.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Tony,” Ellen said in a comfortable voice. “I just saw her.”
“I told her I’d tell you the dreadful news.” He kept his voice solemn, wondering at his sudden acting ability. “She’s had word that her sister is deathly ill.”
“Sister? Binnie’s never mentioned a sister. I thought she was an only child.”
“Half-sister,” Tony said promptly.
“But she never mentioned—”
“On the wrong side of the blanket,” he continued, the tale growing more colorful. “They’ve been estranged, due to her mother’s moral outrage over the entire affair, but now her sister may be on her deathbed, and Binnie has no choice but to rush to her side. I left her the wherewithal for a private coach, and Higgins will accompany her.”
“This is unbelievable!” Ellen said.
“Tragic,” Tony said.
“And you left your valet behind as well?”
“Higgins insisted. It grieved Binnie terribly to abandon you in your hour of need, but blood is thicker than water and all that. And it was a matter of life and death.” He managed to look suitably solemn.
Ellen shook her head. “Unbelievable,” she murmured again. “At least she decided she could trust you.”
Tony wasn’t sure how to take that, but since the coachman had already started on the final leg of the journey toward Scotland, he was prepared to investigate. “Was there ever any question?”
“Not in my mind, of course,” Ellen said with artless candor. She was wearing a gown of a not-too-flattering shade of yellow, and Binnie had contrived to dress her hair in a severe knot before Higgins had waylaid her. She still managed to look undeniably luscious. “I know as well as you do that my reputation stands in no danger from you,” she continued, unaware of the lustful direction his thoughts were taking.
“What do you mean?” He wondered how tightly she was laced under that too-fussy dress. He wondered what she’d look like in something simpler, with flowing lines to complement her wonderfully rounded figure. He wondered what she’d look like in absolutely nothing at all.
“All of society knows that Sir Antony Wilton-Greening is above reproach. No one would ever think you might do something dishonorable. Why, you’re like an uncle to me.”
He simply stared at her, outrage rendering him momentarily silent. “An uncle?” he said finally, his voice coming out in an undignified squeak.
She smiled. “Well, an older brother,” she temporized. “I don’t think it in your nature even to contemplate doing something less than honorable. You simply don’t have it in you to be a rake.”
Every man secretly considered himself something of a rake. At hearing his pretensions dashed so rudely by his intended, Tony felt a surge of quite dishonorable intent burgeon within him. “I’m not Nicholas Blackthorne, that’s for certain,” he said in a silken voice, fuming.
Ellen laughed. “You certainly aren’t! That’s one thing I like about you, Tony, you’re so comfortable. We don’t need to stand on ceremony with each other. Whereas Nicholas is decidedly… unsettling. Even to a lowly distant cousin.”
Tony ground his teeth. He wanted to be the one to unsettle her. As she was unsettling him. “Maybe I should cultivate some of Blackthorne’s eccentricities. I wouldn’t want to be considered impossibly staid and predictable.” He waited for her to protest.
“Comfortably staid and predictable,” Ellen said with a soft laugh that grated on his nerves. “I confess, I’m not sorry Binnie had to go to her sister, though of course I regret the reason.”
This was sounding slightly more promising. “Why aren’t you sorry?”
“She’d grown ridiculously overprotective. On the one hand, I sympathize. She knows that to ensure her future she needs to keep me properly dependent on her. She kept warning me about you. I suppose she was afraid you were male enough to let your base nature overcome you and offer me an insult. Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard?”
“Ridiculous,” Tony growled.
“She’s not been around men much, of course, and she assumes they’re all ravening beasts who only need to look at a female to be consumed by animal intent. I tried to explain to her that you were perfectly harmless, but she wouldn’t listen.”
“Perfectly harmless,” Tony echoed.
Ellen’s beautiful forehead creased in sudden dismay. “Are you feeling all right, Tony? You sound a little… disturbed.”
Deranged, he thought, keeping his face blank. Ravening, lustful, infuriated, and frustrated. He wondered what his sweet Ellen would do if he pulled her into his arms and proceeded to demonstrate just how far from harmless he actually was.
And then his sense of humor, badly shaken, surfaced, and he gave her an ironic smile must confess, Ellen, my angel, that even the most phlegmatic of men don’t like to consider themselves staid, predictable, and perfectly harmless.”
She snuggled deeper into the seat, and the smile she shot him was absolutely enchanting. “But, Tony, surely you wouldn’t want me to harbor any romantical feelings for you? Think how inconvenient they would be.”
He thought about it. Thought about how he’d felt the same thing, a few short days ago. He’d wanted a dutiful, affectionate wife, one who came to the marriage bed with a sweet, compliant nature and no high-flown, emotional demands.
And now, perversely, he wanted demands. He wanted Ellen to sigh and blush and tremble. He wanted that single-minded adoration he’d taken for granted when she was seventeen. To hell with comfort.
He leaned back, stretching his long legs out in front of him, and managed a tight smile. “Definitely inconvenient,” he agreed. “Given our unconventional circumstances.”
“And you are the most conventional of men.”
That was almost the last straw. He was about to surge off the seat and grab her when his hapless coachman drove over one of the potholes that littered the king’s highways, tossing him off-balance, back onto his own seat. By the time he finished his muttered cursing, he had his temper back under a semblance of control. “Completely conventional,” he agreed, thinking of the waylaid Miss Binnerston. He decided to change the subject before he throttled her. “We’re drawing near the border,” he said. “If our luck holds, we should catch up with them by tonight. You’ll become each other’s chaperons, and there won’t be any hint of impropriety.”
“I’ve told you…”
“Please don’t tell me again,” he begged. “It unmans me to hear how harmless I am. Allow me some illusions. We’ll drive straight to Blackthorne’s hunting lodge, fetch your cook, and drive on to a small inn a few miles distant where I’ve already bespoken rooms. It will be a long day, but it will be worth it in the end.”
“What if he won’t let her come?” Ellen asked in a quiet voice.
“What if she doesn’t want to come?” he countered.
“I told you, she hates men.”
“Nicholas can be very persuasive. In the five days they’ve been gone he might have taught her to like them very much indeed.”
“I can’t imagine it,” she said frankly.
He smiled then, suddenly feeling more self-assured. It was amazing what Ellen’s devastating candor could do to his masculine vanity. He would take great pleasure in dispelling her notion that he was harmless. And in teaching her just how beguiling physical love could be.
“We’ll deal with that problem when it arises,” he said instead. “I’m not about to let Nicholas Blackthorne hold an unwilling female prisoner. Besides, he clearly doesn’t know that he’s being sought for killing Jason Hargrove. I imagine once he discovers that fact he’ll be a great deal more interested in reac
hing the continent than in matters of the flesh.”
“I hope so,” Ellen said doubtfully. “I don’t want you hurt, Tony.”
Tony ground his teeth. “I can acquit myself well enough in a duel, sweeting.”
“But Nicholas can be quite ruthless.”
He watched the delectable rise and fall of her breasts beneath the bright yellow dress. “So,” he said blandly, “can I.”
Lady Ellen Fitzwater was tom. Not an unusual occurrence in the tenor of her life, of course. She’d always admired Gilly’s decisiveness. She herself had a lamentable tendency to consider all sides of an issue, afraid to act for fear of making the wrong move. When she did do something impulsively, ignoring the consequences, the results were often disastrous.
For instance, when she’d accepted the most Reverend Alvin Purser’s condescending proposal, she’d done so instantly, out of sheer gratitude and the undeniable longing for children. She’d known Tony was forever beyond her touch, and she’d decided to be practical, to take whatever happiness she could find.
Even though she hadn’t liked to admit it, there was a certain comfort in the knowledge that she would be marrying beneath her. Alvin was of decent enough stock, a younger son with no expectations outside the church. A marriage to the daughter of the aristocracy was a practical move on his part, and her own unacknowledged superiority in the match helped her pride.
Only to have it dashed all the more effectively when he summarily jilted her. If she hadn’t felt silently, pathetically superior to the match, its dissolution wouldn’t have hit so hard. She wouldn’t have felt quite so shamed, that even a pedantic, unprepossessing, prosy cleric judged her and found her wanting.
The blow to her pride, the one possession she had, was almost unbearable. The pitying glances, the condescending comments, the utter degradation of it all were overwhelming, and she’d simply taken the first escape she could find.
She’d run away to Paris a few short weeks after peace had been declared, hoping to hide from everyone who knew her. For a week she’d been relatively content, almost able to convince herself that people would forget. That the appearance and disappearance of the Reverend Alvin Purser in her life was nothing more than a momentary aberration. Until she’d chanced to run into a malicious acquaintance, one of Tony’s ex-flirts, who made it more than clear that Ellen was the laughingstock of London society. And that dear Tony was horrified.
The need to put a period to her existence seemed painfully obvious in that city of doomed love and extreme emotions. Ellen hadn’t thought of herself as the melodramatic type, but the prospect of returning to London and facing the contempt of society was more than she could contemplate.
She’d abandoned the ever-loyal Miss Binnerston and walked the streets of Paris blindly, oblivious to any danger she might run, trying to work up the courage to do what she had to do. She ended alone on a bridge in one of the shabbiest parts of the city, staring down into the swift-flowing, murky waters of the Seine, and wondering how long it would take to drown herself.
She’d just begun to climb up on the stone railing when a voice came to her out of the foggy night, and for a moment she thought it was an angel. Except for the rudeness of the words.
“There is nothing more stupid,” the voice said, in precise, French-accented English, “than to kill yourself over a man.”
Ellen had paused, perched incongruously on the stone railing of the bridge, wondering if it was the voice of her conscience. And then through the swirling fog a small, cloaked figure appeared, advancing on her with a stern expression.
“Cease this foolishness at once,” she had snapped, but Ellen still didn’t move, staring down at the small woman with the innocent, piquant face and the ancient brown eyes. She was dressed plainly, in the clothes of the serving classes, but her voice, and her knowledge of English, betrayed her.
“I don’t see what business it is of yours,” Ellen managed to say in a starchy voice.
“You look ridiculous up there, halfway up, halfway down. Trust the English to botch things. If you want to die, do so where people don’t have to watch.”
“I didn’t know anyone was around.”
“The streets of Paris are never empty, even at four-thirty in the morning.”
She’d managed to startle Ellen even more. “It isn’t four-thirty in the morning, is it?” she’d asked naively.
For a moment her confronter’s face softened with a sympathy that for some reason wasn’t offensive. “Pauvre petite,” she said. “How long have you been wandering around in misery? It’s only ten o’clock. Long past your bedtime. Climb down from there, cherie, and come with me. I am Ghislaine.”
Ellen cast a last, longing look at the swift-flowing river. It smelled terrible. For some reason that decided her. She didn’t want her death to be a smelly affair. She wanted romance; her pale, tragic corpse draped in white, surrounded by roses, with everyone feeling very, very sorry they’d treated her so shabbily. The muddy promise of the Seine was far too rank.
“Much better,” the woman who called herself Ghislaine said when she climbed back down onto the cobblestone street. “No man is worth it.” She came up to her, and Ellen noticed absently that she was tiny, much shorter than her own admittedly statuesque height, and her hands were small, well-shaped, and very clean. She reached up and pulled Ellen’s fur-trimmed cape around her. “You’re lucky someone didn’t take the decision out of your hands,” she said frankly. “To walk around the streets of Paris, dressed in a cloak that would feed a family for half a year, is not a clever thing to do. When did you last eat?”
“I… I don’t know,” she stammered.
“I will take you to the inn where I work. I’m a cook, a very good cook. You won’t be able to resist my ragout. I will feed you, I will listen to your woes, and I will give you a talking-to such as your own mother should have done.”
“My mother is dead.”
Ghislaine had shrugged. “So is mine. That doesn’t mean you need to make any haste to join her. Come with me, mademoiselle, and I will put strength in you.”
And the miraculous thing was, she had. With a combination of stew, fresh bread, bullying, and sympathy, Ghislaine had helped Ellen move from paralyzing self-pity to a new determination. It was close to five in the morning when she’d sent Ellen home in a hired carriage, and she was absolutely right. Even then the streets of Paris were far from deserted.
Ellen had gone back, of course, surprising Ghislaine, surprising herself. She’d gone back for beef ragout and baguettes, for common sense and a friendship such as she’d never experienced. And when it was time for her to return to England, she’d begged and pleaded for Gilly to accompany her.
It was a joyful surprise when she’d accepted. A disappointment when she insisted on coming as a servant only. During the past year she’d tried to keep those barriers in place, but Gilly talked to her as no one else ever had; frankly, honestly forcing her to see things as they were. She owed Gilly her life. The very thought that she’d been ready to destroy herself over someone as insignificant as Alvin Purser, for something as shallow as pride, was an embarrassment. Never again would she allow her emotions to overset her.
Finally she was being given a chance to repay her monumental debt. She had no idea why Nicholas would have absconded with Gilly, but she knew full well that it was against her will. Gilly had been constant in her distrust and dislike of the male sex—even a dangerously attractive rake such as Nicholas Blackthorne wouldn’t be able to break through her defenses.
It was icing on the cake that repaying her debt included spending time with Tony. These last few days had been heaven, sheer heaven, and its own kind of torment. Sooner or later Tony would find some pretty delicate miss, fresh from the schoolroom, and marry her. And she would attend the wedding with Carmichael and Lizzie, and she would smile.
She would do it, of course, never betraying that her heart was broken. Just as she had survived the past few days with her armor intact. Not by an
y lingering glance, or sigh, or wayward thought would she betray the vastly distressing truth she’d just discovered. That she still loved him as much as she always had.
And that brought her to her present predicament. To be sure, day after day of being tossed around in her brother’s well-sprung carriage made her bones ache, her teeth rattle, and her temper become sadly disarranged. But that was more than balanced by the fact that she was with Tony. Once she left the carriage she’d be leaving him, and this brief, mad period would never come again. She was astonished that she’d gotten away with it so far. Even more astonished that God had seen fit to remove Binnie’s stultifying presence. For now, for today, Tony was all hers. And she had every intention of enjoying him to the fullest.
Odd, though, he’d looked very disgruntled when she’d reassured him about her lack of romantic notions. She would have thought he’d be glad to hear her well-crafted reassurances, which were, of course, arrant lies. Instead, he’d seemed almost offended.
He didn’t want her—surely he wasn’t arrogant enough to expect her to long for him when he didn’t reciprocate? Gilly had warned her most men would. She’d always thought Tony to be above that sort of thing. Now she wondered.
Because there was only one other explanation for his patently disgruntled reaction when she’d set out so tactfully to reassure him. And that explanation was fraught with its own emotional impact. Surely he couldn’t really want her after all, could he?
She dismissed that notion as quickly as it entered her brain. He was lounging in the seat opposite her, staring out the window as they moved as swiftly as the wretched highways allowed. Their silences, as always, were companionable, and the long time they’d spent in each other’s company since they’d first left Carmichael’s home hadn’t changed that. He was still Tony. Tall, loose-limbed, elegant, and a little proper. He could have anyone he wanted. All he had to do was smile his sleepy smile, look at a woman from his beautiful gray eyes, and she’d be lost forever. As Ellen herself had been for the past ten years.