by Carrie Lomax
Richard approved of this reticence. It struck him as very English to be so circumspect. He decided to like Miss Walsh. It was the first time he could recall ever feeling that way about an American. In two years of exile he had found much to admire, respect, and appreciate about them, but he had not yet met one for whom he felt the slightest bit of kinship.
This included Lizzie, who had been uncharacteristically quiet for the past several minutes.
“Tomorrow we are going sea bathing in the morning. My aunt is holding an oyster bake in the afternoon for luncheon. Will you join us, Lord Northcote?”
Again, Richard stared hard at his lover. “I am not Lord Northcote. Not here. I am only Richard or Mr. Northcote if you must be formal.”
“Don’t be silly. Miriam, Lord Northcote is related to royalty. Can you imagine?” Lizzie giggled.
Richard sighed. What the devil was she plotting?
Most likely, Lizzie was trying to in some roundabout way to get him to propose. Lizzie had a habit of ignoring boring practical matters, such as preexisting vows that legally bound her to another man. Richard had no intention of becoming the man she ignored, much less cuckolded.
“Of course, I shall be delighted to join you.” Richard finally replied, since she wanted it, and Richard disliked fighting with her. Lizzie winked. Richard shook his head ever so slightly. What was she after? He returned his attention to Miss Walsh, who had glanced out over the sea, clearly embarrassed at the revelation of her condition. Unnecessarily so. Richard tried to forget about the fact, for Miss Walsh’s sake. It hardly mattered, not to him.
“Wonderful. We will meet you at the beach at eleven.”
Richard shrugged. He would do as he was told, up to a point.
The two friends had separated and were standing a few feet apart. Catching Lizzie’s elbow Richard pulled her aside.
“What are you up to?”
“Whatever do you mean?” Lizzie asked innocently.
“Don’t play coy. Whatever you’re plotting, leave me out of it.” He jerked his head. “Her, too.”
Lizzie tossed her head. “You’ve a suspicious mind tonight, Richard. I’ll find you later. We’ll talk then.”
Richard let her go. His eyes followed Miss Walsh as she and her companions made their way slowly up the dusky shoreline until they became mere specks upon the horizon.
Chapter 4
The knock came when he was halfway finished with the bottle of wine which he had brought to accompany his lonely, rather tasteless supper. The dry chicken made Richard long for the fine cuisine he had taken for granted as earl’s son and, for fifteen years, his heir. The wine had a sourness to it that spoke of long journeys and poor temperature control.
His shirt hung loosely over his body when he opened the door. Lizzie placed her small hands on his chest and pushed him backward into the room. Richard always found himself surprised by Lizzie’s small stature, given her outsized personality. The top of her head barely came to his shoulder, yet he yielded when she gave him a final shove, so he sprawled backward onto the counterpane.
“If anyone catches us, our plans are ruined,” Lizzie scolded.
“Our plans? Were you planning to appraise me of what those plans are?”
Lizzie huffed a sigh. “You must have figured it out by now. Isn’t it obvious? Miriam likes you. She is wealthy, overprotected, and sickly. She might die at any moment, and then all of her lovely money goes into a trust for her cousins. Trust me, her cousins are the worst sort of people. Completely undeserving.”
“That is Miss Walsh and her family’s affair.” He was taken aback by the pure avarice animating Lizzie. Discussions about money were rare amongst English gentlemen. Americans were frank about the topic, but Lizzie had tilted into outright vulgarity.
“Don’t you think we should have her money? she whispered against his skin.
Richard pushed her away. A shocked silence stretched between them. “No, Lizzie, I don’t.”
“Think of the freedom it would buy us, Richard. I would no longer be under my husband’s thumb. If we were independently wealthy, I could pay Arthur to break our marriage. You could return to England with your head held high. Your nasty title-thieving brother wouldn’t be able to say a thing against you as a self-made man returning from America.”
“A self-made man doesn’t make his fortune by marrying an invalid under false pretenses and waiting for her to die,” Richard replied flatly. He had pride, plenty of it, more than was healthy.
“You have your warehouse money, too,” Lizzie pointed out.
As though that amounted to anything.
Lizzie advanced upon him. Richard felt helpless as she finished unbuttoning his shirt and pushed it off his shoulders. He froze, stoic, as she licked one nipple. When she pressed his hand to her breast, he felt the small cushion with total detachment. Lizzie was a succubus, an enchantress out of a fairy tale. Richard did not love her, did not even like her. As numb as dead wood, he stood there while she undressed him.
For once, his body betrayed him. Relief flooded through Richard’s frame as he failed to respond to her touch. Lizzie’s eyes narrowed as he brushed her away and closed his trousers.
She chose that moment to say, “I’m pregnant.”
Richard’s heart stilled at Lizzie’s word.
“With child,” he repeated as his blood turned to ice.
“Yes,” she replied. “So, you see, we are in dire need of money. Arthur will cut me off the instant he finds out. He knows it isn’t his. My parents aren’t about to help. I cannot secure a divorce without funds.”
Richard lay flat on his back and pondered the life he had led to brought him to these circumstances. He was in no position to provide Lizzie with the life she believed she was due. The only thing of value Richard owned was his name, and even that was a fraud waiting to be discovered.
But the worst part, the part that made him rage with cold fury at his past self, was that he’d now impregnated another man’s legal wife. The series of unfortunate events and pure bad luck that plagued him had acquired the stink of self-destruction. There was no hope of passing the child off as her husband’s legitimate issue. He wondered which the most moral choice was—abandoning his child to a lifetime of poverty and stigma or going along with Lizzie’s coldly calculated plan to deprive a sickly friend out of her fortune.
“Does Arthur know?” Richard clapped his hands over his eyes. He could not afford morality. The choice was between his child and the lovely woman he had met for a few minutes on a beach. The decision had been made the day Lizzie had flung herself into his arms for a kiss, and Richard hadn’t bothered to resist.
“No. If I told him, he might use it as an excuse to keep me as his wife. I want the annulment as badly as he does.” Lizzie replied softly.
“What do you have in mind, Lizzie?” Richard asked.
Lizzie propped herself onto one arm and smiled at him, tracing the whorls of hair on his chest with one finger. “It’s simple, really. I will arrange for you to meet with Miriam a few more times. You focus on charming her and her nurse, Mrs. Kent. Sweep her off her feet, the way you did me. Miriam, not Mrs. Kent, of course. Then propose marriage and wait for her next asthma attack. When it comes, pretend to be helpless. Miriam passes tragically but not unexpectedly. You play the bereaved widower for a few months. Then, we marry.”
“That’s murder,” he said flatly, rolling away.
“No, it’s letting nature take its course. Like when you set the fire and your father died, surely you don’t blame yourself for that?” Lizzie asked with false sympathy.
“You know damned well I do.” Richard cursed himself for telling Lizzie about the reason for his banishment from England. There was an amoral logic to it. He would never go along with Lizzie’s plan, but she’d clearly latched onto this as her ideal solution and would push as far and as hard as she could to make it happen.
Lizzie’s words ricocheted around his mind as Richard tried to process what she
wanted and how he could get out of this. He had not swept her off her feet. Hell, he’d hardly glanced in her direction when they first met. Hot fury sliced through him. Lizzie was a liar. Was she so desperate for romance that a simple hello my name is Richard passed for romance, or had Lizzie been plotting this all along?
“What about Arthur? He wants you back.” God only knew why. Richard would have given anything to get Lizzie out of his life before this trip. It had been sheer laziness and fear of her prodigious temper that he let her stay in it for so long. A spark of an idea burst into Richard’s brain like the flare of a match.
“I will find out his price.” Lizzie sat up beside him in the bed, unashamedly naked. Richard found himself examining her body for any sign of pregnancy.
“Lizzie.”
“Yes, darling?”
There was another way out of this mess, one far more palatable than leaving his child to Lizzie’s not-so-tender mercies. He could beat Lizzie at her own game. Courting Miriam Walsh could prove entertaining if she was half as intelligent as she was pretty. He’d give her every warning, every opportunity to run. In the meantime, Richard could try and convince Lizzie to return to her husband. Her friend would be safe from her machinations.
If Miss Walsh didn’t heed his warnings, well, there was no reason he had to go along with the second part of Lizzie’s plan. Richard was selfish enough to pursue her without intending to kill her. Everyone said he looked after his own interests at the expense of everyone else, although Richard knew it more that he looked after no one’s interests at all, not even his own.
Having found his way out from his entanglement with Lizzie, Richard vowed to keep the Miriam safe from harm if the girl was foolish enough to marry him.
“We can’t see each other this way if you want your scheme to work.” Richard said slowly. Outside, crickets sang. An owl hooted in the distance.
Lizzie looked as befuddled as a lost puppy. The kind of puppy that looked adorable, then bit a chunk out of your flesh at the first opportunity. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I won’t stand a chance of seducing Miss Walsh if you cling to me like a vine.”
Lizzie gave him a full-lipped pout. “Of course, I would give you the space you need during the day. But why would you not want to see me at night, discreetly?”
Because you disgust me. But Richard could hardly say that to the mother of his child. “Because coming to my rooms is the antithesis of discretion. How well do you think it would go with Miss Walsh if she heard of a woman visiting my rooms at night whilst I am pursuing her affections?”
Lizzie pouted. “Truly, I don’t see why it matters.”
Good lord. What a child Lizzie was.
“A gentleman doesn’t woo one woman while carrying on a public liaison with another, Lizzie. I must focus on Miss Walsh if you want me to truly sweep her off her feet.” Richard deliberately chose the words Lizzie herself had used. She eyed him as if he was a worm trying to wriggle off a fishing hook.
“Fine. But I want to be informed at every step as you court Miriam.” She brightened. “Seduce her quickly, so she has to marry you. We could have her fortune even before the baby arrives. Once you’re married, you can use her money in any way you want.”
Richard grimaced. “Yes. But you cannot.”
Lizzie narrowed her eyes at him.
“You must let me do this my way, or it won’t work.”
“All right then. For the baby.” She reached for the bottle of wine and clinked it against his glass before taking a deep swig. A trail of crimson dropped from the corner of her mouth like a drop of blood. Richard suppressed a shudder.
“Best put that away now, don’t you think?” he asked with deceptive softness.
Lizzie wiped away the stray drop. “Oh, be like that, then.”
She snatched up her dress, clearly expecting him to rush after her and soothe her ruffled feelings. But Richard simply watched from the bed until she opened the door, cast him a glare of affront, and slammed it hard behind her.
Richard almost hoped that someone had heard Lizzie’s noisy exit. Anything that might foil this vile plan to steal Miss Walsh’s fortune was worth the risk. He snatched up the wine bottle and downed the remnants. Self-loathing curdled in his stomach, hot and hard and hollow.
Chapter 5
Miriam glanced quickly up the beach for the hundredth time in as many minutes. Perched on a rickety chair in the sand beneath a sort of tent rigged from a length of striped linen and scavenged pieces of driftwood, she let the wind flap the pages of her book like a bird’s wings. Every few minutes, Mrs. Kent leapt up to secure a flap that had been tugged loose by the breeze. Miriam hoped the effect was charming, for she expected the entire contraption to collapse and suffocate her at any moment.
She dug her toes into the sand as though she could bury her impatience. It had been an hour since they had arrived for sea bathing. In another hour their little party would depart for a lavish midday meal taken in the shaded glen a short drive from their boarding house. There was no sign of Lizzie.
There was no sign of Lord Northcote, either.
Miriam saw in her mind’s eye the way his dark hair ruffled in the breeze. She imagined the soft texture were she to run her fingers through the length of it and swallowed. His cheekbones were as sharp as oyster shells that cut her feet on the rocky beach. Behind his lashes the man’s eyes were pools of dark promise, as rich and as tempting as chocolate.
Lord Northcote had an air of mystery about him. What was he doing in New York? Was he truly exiled, as Lizzie had claimed?
Why did she care?
She didn’t, Miriam decided. There was no denying her fascination, but she hardly knew anything about the man other than his name and that he was what Mrs. Kent would call as handsome as the devil. Mrs. Kent held a puritanical view of pleasure. Even innocent pleasures led inevitably to hell. Miriam felt that pleasure was there to make life interesting, and that she did not partake in enough of it.
Miriam felt as though she had spent her whole life waiting for something to happen. As a child she had yearned to play with other children. She had desperately wanted to climb trees, run through the grass, and tumble like a weed through long afternoons of no responsibility. Instead, her fickle lungs demanded she remain indoors much of the time. To amuse herself, Miriam had read the classics in Latin and French when she tired of reading them in English. When possible, she had followed at her father’s side when he went to visit the lumber mills that were the source of her family’s considerable fortune. She had learned the language of business at his knee, when other children were climbing trees, playing hide-and-seek, or jackstraws.
Then, she had been sent to school. Miriam had hated girls’ boarding school. Upon her return home that summer, she’d quarreled with her father, Livingston, for the first time. The episode had provoked an asthma attack so potent that Miriam had nearly died. An unorthodox physician had pumped her body full of caffeine and belladonna extract and saved her life.
Livingston Walsh, terrified of the prospect of losing his daughter, relented and allowed her to skip the next two years of schooling. Mrs. Kent had arrived, and Miriam had a degree of freedom to pursue whatever interested her intellectually. What she’d lost in privacy with an attendant, she had gained in physical mobility. With Mrs. Kent at her side, Miriam’s father had felt more comfortable allowing her to explore the world.
School proved to be unexpectedly fun the second time around. Mrs. Kent was stationed at the school, on call but not shadowing her. In the sterile, spacious girls’ dormitory, then-sixteen-year-old Lizzie had been a beacon of fun, irreverence, and trouble. She was well-liked. Miriam felt so grateful to Lizzie’s inclusion of her in her antics that it had given Miriam only a moment’s pause whenever matters veered out of control.
Shortly after their third year, Lizzie had come out. Within weeks, she married the besotted middle son of the wealthy Van Buren family, shocking everyone. Yet only months after their h
asty, lavish wedding, Lizzie had privately split with her husband. Since then, Lizzie had danced at the edges of good society, neither good enough to be fully accepted nor badly behaved enough to warrant full condemnation—until she’d taken up with the handsome foreigner named Northcote.
Miriam scanned the beach again. There were no handsome men traversing the sand. His lordship wasn’t coming. Now that she’d met him, Miriam understood the risk Lizzie had taken. Arthur was nice. But Richard was compelling.
“Mrs. Kent, I fancy a turn sea bathing,” she said.
Her companion jerked her chin up from the book she was reading, a book of psalms, which while fine in their place seemed altogether too serious for the beach. “Are you certain that you are strong enough to resist the tide?”
“Yes, Mrs. Kent. I am certain.” Miriam rose and shook sand from her skirts. In their little cove, it ought to be perfectly safe. She removed her scarf and hat and set them aside.
“Do at least wear your bonnet,” her keeper admonished.
Miriam sighed. Dutifully, she returned the broad-brimmed straw hat to her head. A hot, ungracious thought seared through her. Why couldn’t she be more like Lizzie, thumbing her nose at the most basic conventions? Miriam sighed.
Why couldn’t Lizzie be more like her, obedient to even the most inconsequential rules? With their traits better split between them, they could have both been perfect women, instead of two utter failures of proper womanhood.
The tide sucked at her skirts. Miriam rejoiced in the ocean spray dampening her cheeks and lashes. Cool drops revitalized her spirit. Lizzie and other friends were splashing in the cool water, meeting each wave as it crested and broke at their knees. One of the lads was flirted with Lizzie. He picked her up and tossed her into deeper water. Lizzie came up sputtering.
“Miri! The water is almost bearable, don’t you think?” she giggled. Lizzie’s teeth were chattering.
