Courting Scandal

by Donna Lea Simpson

  At that, she tried to pull away again, but he would not let her go. He looked down into her drowned green eyes in the pale light from the music room. The crashing chords of the piano coincided with heavier rain that poured down outside of the overhang, looking like a silvery curtain. The pain and fear in her eyes were too much, and he lowered his face and gently kissed her mouth, tentatively at first. Any hesitation and he would have released her instantly.

  But there was no hesitation; her bare hands stole up around his neck and she pressed herself to him, her unexpectedly passionate response rocking him until he was unsteady on his feet. Her lips were velvety soft and sweet, and he had to fiercely tamp down the rush of desire that raced through his blood. He wanted to pick her up and carry her away, steal into the night with her in his arms. Instead, he would have to be satisfied with this moment, this unbearably perfect moment of bliss.

  • • •

  Arabella was shaken to the core by the abrupt rise from bitter sadness to glorious joy, the sweet fulfillment that his lips seemed to promise. It was like being swept into an inferno, all white-hot fire and brightness, consuming her with a passion she had never experienced before. If it never ended, then she never had to face the truth, never had to admit reality, never had to awaken from a dream of hunger sated and need satisfied.

  But he broke the contact, just to take a huge, gasping breath, before he tried to capture her lips in another kiss. Too late! The magic moment had been shattered, and she came to the abrupt realization that if anyone saw, they would delight in retailing the shocking story of Miss Swinley alone on the terrace, kissing that unruly Mr. Westhaven. She would be ruined. And after all, lovemaking with a poor man would not pay their bills, nor save her home, nor rescue her mother from the trouble she was in.

  She twisted away from Westhaven. Wiping the tears that remained on her cheeks, she said, “You are a cad, Westhaven, for taking advantage of my . . . my weak moment.” Her voice sounded thick and strange in her own ears, but steady enough, she was glad to note.

  He tried to take her in his arms again, saying, “Weak moment? Arabella, if you are sad—”

  “Who gave you permission to call me by my given name, sir?”

  “Arabella,” he said, pulling her into his arms and kissing her cheek.

  She wrenched herself away from him and slapped him, looking fearfully over his shoulder into the music room. People were starting to come back for the soprano’s performance.

  “What is wrong with you?” he asked, rubbing his cheek. A red mark was going to show. “Why do you respond one minute, then push me away the next?”

  “Have you never heard of flirtation?” she asked coldly. It hurt to do this, but she must, she must! He must leave her alone so she could go to her fate, and this was an opportunity to sink herself irrevocably in his eyes. “You are far too sure of your attractions, sir. Can a girl not have a little fun? Gain a little experience? It is harmless enough; people do it all the time.”

  She was rewarded by a blaze of anger in his stormy gray eyes. “Heartless flirt, jade!” He turned away and retreated to the door, but then glanced back with a troubled, puzzled look in his eyes. He shook his head and strode away, through the music room and beyond.

  Success, and yet all she was left feeling was a great, yawning chasm of emptiness in her heart.

  Chapter Seven

  There was no reason to stay after rejecting Marcus Westhaven, and so Arabella pled a headache that was very nearly real and fled the musicale while the soprano, not so very wonderful after all, screeched and dipped through an aria. She had come alone, accompanied only by Annie, whom she tore away from the party atmosphere of the O’Lachlans’ kitchen to leave.

  She would never ever forget the look of disgust and contempt on Marcus’s face when she coldly suggested she was just using him for practice flirtation. But no matter how it hurt to know what he must think of her now, no matter how painful it was to tear apart the fragile, sweet connection they had woven between them, she could not help but feel that she had done the right thing. There was no future for them, and it seemed he would plague her until she put him in his place once and for all time. She had done that now; she doubted if he would bother her again. But in her bed alone, after Annie had left her and she had blown out her candle, it was cold comfort.

  She snuggled under the covers in the chilly darkness of a room with no coal fire to heat it—the last of the coal was being conserved for cooking and for heating the main rooms—and contemplated her life. She had often thought about marriage, especially over the three Seasons she had spent in London ostensibly looking for a husband. She had had many offers, but there was always something wrong that kept her from accepting a man, and she never felt too pressing an urge to marry until this Season, until her belated knowledge of their financial predicament. She had come close once last Season with a young man whom she genuinely liked and respected, but her mother had refused to countenance the match. Arabella had sent him away after a nasty scene that had made her believe she had had a lucky escape from matrimony with Lord Sweetan.

  And then the previous fall she and her mother had gone to stay at the country home of the Countess and Earl of Leathorne, longtime friends of her mother’s. It was expected that she and the son and heir, Lord Drake, would make a match of it. He was rich, and she was in need of a husband, so what was the impediment?

  The impediment from her aspect was that she could not love him. They just never seemed to find a common ground on which to build even a friendship, much less the kind of intimacy necessary, she thought, between a man and a woman who intended to wed.

  Why? He was rich, he was handsome, he was generally good-natured, despite the problems brought on by his military service. As well, he was a genuinely good man, and had treated her kindly enough—at least he had when he even remembered her existence. She had even, to her everlasting shame, employed devious means to rid herself of competition for his hand in the form of her cousin, True, although she could see that the two were falling in love with each other.

  But in the end love had triumphed. True had married the viscount and Arabella was pleased. True was her anchor in the world in a way her mother had never become, and to see her happy was a secret delight that she hugged to herself, for her mother was so very bitter about the marriage that she could not even speak about it openly without inspiring Lady Swinley to streams of vituperation. Arabella might envy her cousin’s good fortune in material matters, for Drake was wealthy, but those two were meant to be together, and even when she tried she could not work up any animosity toward either of them, nor their marriage. It was as it was meant to be.

  She turned over on her side and stared off into the darkness. What was wrong with her? Was she incapable of love that she could not even feel it for so good a man as her cousin’s husband, Lord Drake? As her eyes got used to the darkness, she saw, glowing in the dark like a beacon, the little white bark basket on her bedside table. She stretched out one hand and traced the rough texture of the surface. The question drifted through her mind again: was she incapable of love? She had begun to think so, until Marcus Westhaven entered her life. He was everything she had always pictured in the perfect beau; tall, handsome, bold, adventurous, and with an air of wildness that she found enticing and enthralling.

  But were those not all surface attributes? Surely there was more to love than a handsome face or a pretty figure. This was an unaccustomed train of thought. She had begun to wonder, after watching her cousin and Lord Drake together, if there was not something more to love, something she had never experienced, a bond between two people that welded them into one.

  When did that miracle happen: before marriage, when the couple fell in love, or as they wed, or after the marriage? She had attended three weddings over the course of the winter and spring; True had married her wealthy viscount, True’s younger sister Faith had married the brother of her best friend, and the girls’ father, an elderly vicar Arabella had always loved as if he
were her father too, had married the plump, motherly widow, Mrs. Saunders.

  Each wedding had had moments of emotion, scenes that lived on in her memory. But of the three, the one that stayed with her was the vicar’s. He was in his late sixties and the widow in her fifties, but the love that shone from their eyes as they were joined in wedlock was a stunning surprise to Arabella. Love, at their age? But yes, it was love, as fervent and real as any pair of mooning twenty-year-olds, and perhaps more fast and steady for their age.

  So what was love? She rolled over on her back and stared at the ceiling, pulling the soft covers up under her chin and drawing her feet up out of the chilly regions of the bed.

  The feelings that had coursed through her the moment Marcus had taken her in his arms had been powerful and new. But they were physical: thrumming blood, a thrill down her spine and tingling in her toes. Was that love, then? Is that what the vicar and the widow felt that made them want to marry? It seemed ludicrous, but was it?

  Restlessly she rolled over on her side again, eyes wide open in the dark, the blackness like a velvet blanket around her, except for a faint brightening of the window through the heavy drapes, and the white blur on her side table that was the basket Marcus Westhaven had given her. Love had to be something more than just tingling and thrumming and thrilling. It had to be! So what she felt for Marcus Westhaven was just a passing fancy and it would not, as her darkest fears would have her believe, plague her for the rest of her life with regrets and fearsome longings.

  Arabella closed her eyes against the darkness, but try as she might she could not rid herself of the sensation of lips firmly pressed to her own and hands that trailed down her back, leaving alternately icy and burning traces on her skin under her gown. It was not love!

  But whatever it was, it kept her awake until the early morning sun brightened the eastern sky.

  • • •

  Reading was not far from London, not even a full day’s ride for a young man on a horse. So when the message came that the old man was conscious, it had not taken long to respond. Marcus sat at the bedside trying not to inhale the scent of bed linens in need of washing and a lingering smell of imminent death. He gazed down at the man on the bed and examined the blue veins that traced a path across the temple and into the sparse hairline. It had been so many years. He didn’t recognize this frail body, this figure that barely made an impression in the bed, as the man he remembered from his childhood, the old man who smelled of tobacco and horehound and stable, and whose voice boomed out in a commanding bass. Suddenly the man’s eyes fluttered open.

  “It’s you, eh? Don’t know why you bothered comin’ to see me. Lawyer says you’re the one, all right. Gonna get it all; don’t have to make up to an old man after all, y’know.”

  Smiling, Marcus relaxed at the familiar tone of brusque impatience and said, “I hope I am as cussedly ornery as you when I reach your age, uncle.”

  “Won’t reach my age; nobody does!” The crabbed hands plucked at the covers irritably. He eyed Marcus with something like resentment. “Wouldn’t have recognized you myself, you know. Last time I saw you, you was just a little lad—a little bugger if I recall—always askin’ questions and wantin’ to ride the horses.”

  “I haven’t changed that much. I’m still always asking questions and wanting to ride the horses. As for the other part—I suppose I’m not so little, but I might still be a bugger!”

  The old man cackled and then yelped, “Call m’man and tell him I want to go downstairs today. Hate being in bed all the time! Nothing to do, nothing to look at. If I’m gonna die, might as well see somethin’ besides this room. So, you been gallivanting around enjoying the Season? Making up to all the pretty gels? They do still make pretty gels, don’t they?”

  “They do, at that. One in particular is very pretty, like some kind of a . . . an angel. But a calculating wench. Kissed me, then told me it was just for practice! She’s planning on marrying a man of sixty and some odd years!” Marcus sat back in his chair, stretched his legs out in front of him and said, “Disgusting, I say.”

  “Good for him, I say,” the old man retorted. “If I was ten years younger I’d be giving him a run for his money, if she’s as pretty as you say. What’s she look like?”

  Marcus closed his eyes. “Blonde hair, bright, like spun gold. Eyes the color of oriental jade, the finest kind. Lips like rubies, only soft as velvet and honey-mead sweet.”

  The man cackled again, and then coughed, his thin shoulders hunching as he hacked and wheezed. Marcus sat up straight, alarmed, but his uncle’s valet came running and lifted the old man to a sitting position, patting him gently on the back.

  As the cough subsided and he caught his breath, the old man rested back against the pillows propped up on the massive headboard for him. “Realize you described the gel in terms of gold, jade and rubies?” the old man said, as his valet fussed around him, straightening the bed linens. “No wonder she’s a fortune hunter! Got to keep up with her looks!”

  Marcus laughed. “I hadn’t looked at it that way.”

  “So is it just her looks that keep ya comin’ back to her?”

  “I didn’t say I kept coming back to her,” Marcus said, examining his uncle’s surprisingly shrewd eyes. But it was true. He had followed Miss Arabella Swinley for a number of days before the embrace on the terrace. He knew he was fouling up her plans for tempting Lord Pelimore into a proposal, and took a strangely savage delight in disconcerting her. Ruthless little wench. “It’s just—I don’t want to see her throw her life away.”

  “Liar. There is something else there that you’re not tellin’ me.”

  “Maybe,” Marcus said abruptly, moodily. “But that’s my own business.” He recovered his good humor, not wanting to upset his uncle. Who knew how long they would have to talk? The doctor said he could go anytime. This last coma that he had just emerged from had been longer and deeper than any other. He was dying, and he knew it. “But it is true as far as it goes. She is a brilliant diamond, about to be set in dullest pewter. It’s not good enough for her. I suppose I think she deserves something better.”

  “Then marry her yourself!”

  With a grin, Marcus said, “She wants a rich man, and I am very poor, in her eyes.”

  “I’m sure you could convince her. You’re a handsome devil, I’ll give you that. Women like that kind of thing, almost as much as they like money. See if you can’t tempt her into makin’ a disastrous alliance!” He cackled again, but it died to a wheezy cough, the sound a harsh rattle in his chest.

  The valet held a glass up to the old man’s lips; he drank a little of the pale liquid, but then sputtered, “I want to go downstairs, you bacon-brained idjit! Damned if I’ll spend the rest of my life in this bed. M’nephew will take me for a walk in that damned Bath chair I used to use, b’fore I got bedridden.”

  Marcus was a little alarmed at the thought of being in charge of the old man’s movements in such a way. He wondered if he was helping his uncle feel better, or hastening his demise. He hoped it was the former and not the latter. The doctor said the old man had not done so much as sit up for many months before Marcus’s arrival home. The last few weeks had been spent in a coma from which he had just emerged. “Sir, you are hardly strong enough—”

  “Don’t tell me what I am,” he said and struggled to a sitting position again. The bed was huge and it dwarfed the frail man at its center, but it could not swallow up his personality, which still dominated the room. He glared up at his patient valet and said, “Ain’t gettin’ any younger while you shilly-shally around like an old woman. I am going to get dressed and come down to lunch with my nephew like a real man, and then he shall take me for a walk in the garden in my Bath chair. And that is that.” He cast a sideways glance at his visitor then, and said in a more uncertain tone, “That is, if I am not keeping you from more exciting events?”

  Marcus stood and gazed down at his uncle. He had not seen the old man in almost thirty years. Unbekn
ownst to him, he had been presumed dead years ago when no more letters came to family members. But it had seemed pointless after the death of his mother and father to keep writing to aunts and uncles who never answered, so he had stopped. And in the interim many had died, resulting in the present turn of events. “I would be delighted to stay to lunch with you, if you will let me tell you more about the delightful, tantalizing, maddening Miss Arabella Swinley. Maybe you can give me some ideas as to how to handle her. She slapped my cheek, you know, and after inviting my kisses.”

  “Slapped you, eh?” He cackled and slapped the bedcovers. “I like her already. Feisty—no milk-and-water miss like they make nowadays. I’ll give you the benefit of my wisdom, boy. I don’t imagine women have changed all that much over the years. The devil knows men have not.”

  “I’ll wait for you downstairs, then, sir, and we shall walk in the garden.” Marcus glanced out the window at the brilliant sunny day and hoped it was not too cold out. He didn’t want to be accused of helping the old fellow get pneumonia. There would be many who would assume it was purposeful, no doubt, not that he cared what a bunch of society snobs thought. But he did care, he found, to his surprise, about his uncle, and would not hasten his demise even accidentally. “Perhaps after that we can come in and you will let me beat you at whist.”

  • • •

  “No more hesitation, my girl. You get a proposal from Lord Pelimore tonight! I have arranged with Olivia Howland to have you sit next to him at dinner, so make the most of it!”

  This was hissed in Arabella’s ear by her mother, just as they entered the Howlands’ fashionable Bruton Street residence for a dinner party. She did not need the warning. Just that morning the butcher, who had become increasingly importunate, as they had apparently not paid him a penny since they had come to town, had threatened that since they were staying at the earl and countess’s house, that perhaps they would be approached. Arabella had been appalled. She did not want their personal insolvency to be bruited about the streets, especially after that awful Conroy incident, which she was sure would come back to haunt her somehow. And it was unbearably humiliating to think of the Earl of Leathorne, her cousin’s father-in-law, being approached for the money.