by Lenora Bell
“I gambled you away.”
“So you’ve said.”
“Oh.” His father was silent for a moment. “Well, marriage might do you good.” He yawned and rubbed his eyes. “You need someone . . . to love. But find someone strong. Not delicate, nor easily crushed.”
“Go to sleep now.” Nick tucked the covers tighter around his father.
As soon as the duke’s breathing grew slow and steady, he left to go find Stubbs. The man had many questions to answer.
You need someone to love.
He tried to shake his father’s words away but they stuck like a splinter in his mind.
It wasn’t that Nick didn’t believe in love. He just didn’t believe in tomorrow—or in any kind of permanence.
He kept his amatory liaisons on a surface level, protecting his heart as stringently as he protected against unwanted progeny.
He had no intention of marrying or passing on the suffering of the curse that lurked in his direct line. His sanctimonious curate of a cousin would be delighted to inherit the dukedom and restore the family’s reputation when Nick’s dark days were done.
“Bargained away like a harem girl,” he muttered as he descended the stairs. “I’ll never live this down.”
It must be one of his father’s outlandish imaginings, but the rumor would spread across London like an outbreak of plague and slosh its way across the channel to his mother in her extravagantly expensive apartments in Switzerland.
He’d unravel the tangle in the morning. Right now he had to find Stubbs, before returning to the ballroom and attempting to control the damage.
Give the gentlemen he’d invited enough brandy and actresses and they might forget the duke’s announcement.
And even if it did turn out to be true, there was no chance Nick would allow anyone to coerce him into marriage, least of all a grasping merchant and his pretty but decidedly odd daughter.
Nick gripped the smooth wooden staircase balustrade.
They had no idea whom they were dealing with.
Obviously, the Earl of White had no idea whom he was dealing with.
He clearly thought Alice should be overwhelmed with gratitude at the honor he was bestowing by wooing her this fine late spring morning in the small inner courtyard of her father’s town house.
They were sitting on a bench next to a flowering hawthorn shrub and Lord White was gazing at her devotedly.
“Miss Tombs, you are a goddess sent from heaven above.” He flung a hand heavenward, to make his point. “I adore you most ardently. Your dimples are divine.”
Any other young lady of the ton would be thrilled. They pined for his pale yellow hair and pale blue eyes, and his languishing, poetic pronouncements.
Silly things.
Fortunately, Alice had always had an uncanny ability for languages. Along with Latin, Greek, French, and the three other foreign tongues she’d mastered, Alice was fluent in Impoverished Rake.
She knew precisely what White’s words translated to: Miss Tombs, my ancestral coffers are running precariously low. Marry me so I may squander your father’s vast fortune on gold-embroidered waistcoats and costly courtesans.
Gracious, how Alice loathed the idle nobility.
Take away their titles and they’d have not one skill with which to earn a living. And if she were poor they would never pay the slightest attention to her dimples.
“Dimples, Lord White, are naught but muscular deformities,” Alice said briskly. “Occurring in approximately twenty percent of the population, from my observations.”
The earl trailed an elegant, unlined hand through the air. “Pray, do not belittle yourself, Miss Tombs. You are hardly deformed. Your features are fetching beyond compare.”
And will fetch forgiveness of my tailor bills, Alice translated.
Lord White must have outrageous tailor bills.
She stared with morbid fascination at his waistcoat. She’d never seen such a shade of chartreuse. And what was embroidered upon the garment? Could those be hounds and . . . rodents? The plump creatures had red, beady eyes but the ears were rather long . . .
“I see you are admiring my fox and hare waistcoat.” The earl smiled indulgently. “I hope you may have the pleasure of watching me ride to hounds someday at Whitehaven. I’m a crack shot.”
Hares? Alice squinted at the waistcoat. The shapes could be construed as rabbitlike, she supposed. Appropriate, really. She felt rather like a hapless woodland creature trapped in the sight of the earl’s rifle.
Boldly, Lord White stroked her cheek with one knuckle. “Your skin is as soft as these lily petals.” He lifted one of the early-blooming Asiatic lilies he’d plucked from her mother’s flowerbeds.
Hadn’t even brought his own flowers. Wooing her was an afterthought. He’d assumed she would tumble easily into his arms.
I’ll outrun you yet, Alice thought. What she needed to do was turn the tables.
Hunt the hunter.
Her lady’s maid, Hodgins, was reading a book on a nearby bench. She must have been instructed to ignore small improprieties in pursuit of the larger goal.
Mama was counting on the earl’s proposal.
The wedding invitations had already been mentally composed; the trousseau ordered.
All part of her mother’s plans to scale the dizzying heights of London society.
Alice had a plan as well, and it did not include marriage to a vain and vapid nobleman. She would marry someday, but not until after she had at least one grand adventure abroad.
“Do stop waving those flowers about, Lord White.”
“Oh, that my lips were brushing yours.” The earl trailed one of the lilies across his mouth.
“I wouldn’t press my lips to that lily if I were you, Lord White. Lilium asiaticum are highly poisonous. We wouldn’t want you to begin drooling and cast your breakfast all over this blanket, would we?”
He dropped the lily. “I say, you’re not like other girls, are you,” he said peevishly, scooting farther from her on the bench in a sulk.
No, I’m not. Best do your wooing elsewhere, there’s a good earl.
Inconvenient things, suitors.
Stood in the way of one’s plans for adventurous voyages to India.
Her younger brother, Fred, who had reluctantly embarked on a Grand Tour of the Continent one year ago, would be home soon. And after he returned, Fred had promised to bring Alice with him on his upcoming voyage to visit potential sites for tea plantations in India.
Papa was a wealthy shipping merchant and wanted Fred to begin assuming responsibilities in the stewardship of his business concerns.
Alice had other plans for India.
When Papa had unexpectedly inherited the baronetcy after the tragic early deaths of his father and elder brother, the family had moved from the provincial Yorkshire town of Pudsey to her grandfather’s London town house.
There’d been no love lost between Sir Alfred and his father, who’d been a director of the East India Company, and a notorious voluptuary. Alice’s father had immediately discarded or burned most of the late baronet’s possessions.
Alice had rescued an entire box of ancient Indian manuscripts from the fire. Teaching herself to read them by studying A Grammar of the Sanskrita Language, she’d sent several short translations to Mr. Vidyasagar and Mr. Carey, Sanskrit scholars at Fort William College in Calcutta. The learned scholars had replied with great excitement to say that they believed one of the manuscripts she possessed to be the missing fragment of a larger work entitled The Kama Sutra of Vātsyāyana, an ancient Hindu text of great societal significance.
They had invited her to visit the college and bring her chapters of the Kama Sutra, along with her translation, and she had enthusiastically agreed.
There was only one slight wrinkle in her plans.
She might have signed her letters and translations as Fred Tombs.
It had seemed easier at the time to pretend to be male, to have her scholarship taken seriously.
&nb
sp; Interrupting her thoughts, the earl abruptly leaned forward and glued his lips to hers, apparently deciding that where words hadn’t produced the desired effect, his kiss would bring her to heel.
Startled by the suddenness of the move, Alice didn’t immediately draw away.
She’d never been kissed before, and she’d been thinking quite a lot about kissing lately.
The Sanskrit fragment she’d been translating had proven surprisingly naughty. The Kama Sutra described in great detail the sixty-four arts of pleasure.
Sixty-four! Alice was fairly certain she’d translated the number correctly, although it had seemed incredible at first.
The ancient text had given her quite a number of questions about the practical application of its instructions. It described the various types of kissing, all of which were supposed to produce the most rapturous and voluptuous sensations.
Apparently, Lord White had never studied the Kama Sutra.
His kiss was rather alarmingly damp. His lips moved over hers with a smacking, rhythmic motion that made her feel seasick.
He smelled of lilies and overpoweringly musky cologne, and his hands were everywhere at once—in her hair, around her waist, stroking her cheek . . . rather like an octopus.
Ugh. This was not making her feel the slightest bit enlightened or amorous.
Deciding he had nothing to teach her about the art of kissing, Alice plucked a hairpin from her coiffure and jabbed it into his cheek in a defensive motion her friend Charlene, the Duchess of Harland, had taught her.
“Ouch!” the earl yelped, pulling back. “You needn’t poke a gentleman’s eye out.”
At his exclamation, Hodgins finally lifted her head from her book and glanced their way, frowning as she watched Lord White rub his cheek and pout.
“You brought my retribution upon yourself,” Alice said in a vehement whisper. “You shouldn’t try to kiss unsuspecting ladies without their consent.”
“You’d better not have left a mark.” His cheeks were red, his eyes stormy, and his languid, poetic air had vanished.
Alice held her breath, waiting for him to signal to his manservant, who stood a discreet distance away, that he wished to pack up and leave.
To her chagrin, the earl made a visible effort and forced a smile to his lips. “Please forgive me for startling you, Miss Tombs. I was carried away by your beauty. Have you had ample opportunity to prepare yourself now?” He glanced meaningfully at her lips and bent near again.
Drat! This one was remarkably persistent. He must be truly desperate for funds.
Time to utilize the fail-safe method; proven to be effective one hundred percent of the time in dissuading amorously inclined fortune hunters.
“My father thinks very highly of you, Lord White,” she said sweetly.
He stopped halfway to his target. “Of course he does.”
“Just the other day he was speaking of you.” She pretended to have to think about what she’d supposedly overheard. “He said, ‘Don’t let the earl slip through your fingers, he has a remarkably ancient title.’”
Lord White nodded approvingly. “Sensible fellow, your father.”
“And then he said, ‘Don’t let on about the disaster, though. We mustn’t worry him with details of that storm off the Cape of Good Hope.’”
Lord White stared in consternation, his nose twitching with the scent of scandal. “What’s that you say? A storm?”
“Oh, silly me.” Alice covered her mouth with her hand. “I wasn’t supposed to mention that. I’ve really no idea what he meant. Of course, he has so many trading ships in his fleet that losing a dozen or more couldn’t mean much to him.”
The earl gulped. “A dozen, you say?”
“It was nothing, really. Only heavy cargoes of silk and porcelain. I’m sure Papa has simply boatloads more. Though he was tearing his hair out the other day when that nasty newspaper writer paid us a visit.”
The earl’s face began to match his title. He scooted back from her on the blanket, rising to his knees.
“Why, my lord, is anything the matter?” Alice asked innocently.
He glanced at his waiting servant, clearing his throat and drawing an ostentatious gold timepiece from his waistcoat pocket. “Oh lud, it completely slipped my mind. I’m late. Ever so late. I must be going. I’ve an appointment at . . . Tattersall’s . . . to see a man about a horse.”
Alice hid a smile behind her lacy parasol. “Must you go?”
“I really must. I’m ever so late.”
He couldn’t return her from the courtyard back to the parlor fast enough.
Hodgins had to run to catch them, and only arrived after Lord White had rudely left Alice without even saying good-bye to her parents, escaping out the front door and fairly leaping into his yellow phaeton.
Alice laughed softly.
Another one down.
Now her third social season was well and truly over. Lord White had been the last prospect standing.
One step closer to her journey to India and to returning her fragment of the Kama Sutra to its proper home.
“Oh! There you are.” The excitable Lady Tombs entered the parlor, her blue eyes shining and white cap ribbons floating.
“I’m sorry, Mama.” Alice tensed her shoulders in anticipation of a sound scolding. “I’ve no idea why Lord White left in such a—”
“Never mind the earl, my dear.” Mama waved the words away. “He was a frivolous fop and you’re best rid of him.”
Alice stared at her mother suspiciously. “Yesterday you said he was the quintessence of masculine perfection.”
“Oh! That was yesterday. This is today. And your father has the most wonderful news. Follow me to the study, if you please.”
Alice’s senses twitched to high alert like her pet cat’s nose twitched when she scented a mouse in the walls.
She and her mother had opposite ideas of what constituted wondrous tidings.
Maybe she had received an unexpected offer of marriage from a mystery gentleman.
Alice smoothed the peony-pink skirts of one of the ridiculously beribboned and frilled gowns her mother forced her to wear.
No impoverished rake would ruin her Eastern adventure.
She jabbed her hairpin back into place.
Whoever he was—she’d make short work of him.
They found Sir Alfred pacing up and down the length of his study, hands clasped behind his back and deep furrows lining his forehead. “Damned good-for-nothing boy,” he muttered as he walked. “Ruined. Utterly ruined.”
“What’s the matter, Papa?” Alice asked, puzzled by the tirade. Hadn’t her mother said there was good news?
“We’ve had a letter from Fred,” Mama whispered.
“Oh? What news? When will he arrive?” She was eager to set their plan in motion and obtain permission to accompany Fred to Calcutta. They’d agreed it would be best if Fred suggested the idea.
“What news? I’ll tell you what news,” Sir Alfred sputtered. “The worst news. Damned empty-pated boy.”
“Language, sir,” fluttered Lady Tombs, following after her husband with small, worried steps.
“I’ll damn him to hell and gone! I’ll damn him right out of my will and testament! Marry an opera singer, will he? Throw away everything? If I were there I could have bought her off easily enough, the greedy little trollop. But now the damage is done.”
“Oh!” Lady Tombs laid a hand to her high, lacy collar.
“What’s this?” Alice clutched the edge of the desk. “Fred is married?”
This was disaster; the end of all her dreams.
How could Fred have been so foolish? Now how would she go to India? And who would deliver the documents and her translations to the college in Calcutta? She couldn’t entrust the priceless and fragile palm leaf manuscript of the Kama Sutra to the post.
“Never should have sent that fool of a boy to the Continent,” her father grumbled. “He was an easy mark for fortune-hunting jezebels. I�
��m too old for all this traveling. I wanted Fred to assume the mantle. Instead he disgraced us.” He jabbed a finger at Alice. “Why couldn’t you have been born the heir, eh? You’d have made a damned fine boy, Alice. You’ve a sensible head on your shoulders.”
Why, indeed? Alice thought with familiar frustration. She was the one who loved learning languages and longed to travel to foreign lands. Fred wasn’t interested in studies or traveling. It truly wasn’t fair.
“Please, sir, I beg you,” pleaded Lady Tombs. “Please don’t dwell upon it so. There may still be time to have the marriage annulled.”
“Not likely,” the baronet said, his face flushed with anger. “That doxy will bear him a babe in seven months’ time.” He stabbed the air with his forefinger. “Mark my words.”
“Yet remember that today is also a happy day, my dear husband.” Her mother sidled closer. “Our Alice will be the means to restore us from disgrace.”
Oh no. No, no, no.
Now her mother would be even more desperate for Alice to find an aristocrat to wed.
“Tell her the news, dear husband,” said Mama. “Such news. Such wonderful news.”
Sir Alfred slapped a palm against the desk and Alice jumped. “After I read that idiot boy’s letter yesterday I went straight to a gaming house to clear my head.”
There was nothing new in that. Her father loved to gamble. And he always won.
He had a ruthless way of making his opponents commit errors.
She couldn’t let him do the same to her today.
She squared her shoulders. “Congratulations.” She managed a thin smile. “I’m sure you won a great sum of money.”
“No.” His graying whiskers curved as he smiled grimly. “I won you a marquess.”
Alice blinked. “A what?”
“Oh happy, happy day!” Mama clasped her hands together. “How good it was of you, sir. Only think what a household you shall have, dear Alice. I always knew such a handsome, clever girl would improve our prospects and make the most advantageous of matches.”
“I was rather proud of myself,” Papa said modestly. “Not every day one wins a marquess.”
Alice’s mind reeled with shock.
First Fred’s defection and now suddenly she had a fiancé?
