The Sweetest Sin

by Kelly Boyce

  Patience swatted at Sir Arran’s arm as they went on ahead of Hen and Charlie. “Oh heavens, Uncle. You would have me married to some enterprising and genteel farmer if it were left up to you.”

  “Not a bad idea, niece. Not a bad idea at all.”

  “She would die of boredom and drive the man mad,” Charlie whispered, leaning down to so Hen could hear.

  Hen smiled, but the words resonated deep inside of her. Is that what would happen with her and Lord Walkerton? Would his strict adherence to propriety send her to the edge of tedium? Or would her inability to live up to such correctness drive him mad?

  Oh, bother but she had painted herself into a corner with her rash penning of her proposal and she could find no bridge to help her out of it. She had chosen Lord Walkerton because he was kind, and her judgment on this aspect of his personality had not changed. But she had also discovered she wanted more than kindness. She wanted excitement. She wanted to experience that intoxicating sensation when every inch of her body came alive at the sight of her husband. At the kiss he would deliver. At the way he would hold her in his arms as if she were a precious commodity he would protect with his last breath.

  She did not feel any of those things for Lord Walkerton. Nor did he toward her, of this she was certain. Perhaps he did not think such things important in choosing a wife. But she did, a discovery made too late and in a sweetly sinful way. Unfortunately, this newfound knowledge put her in a rather awkward position, her proposal leading Lord Walkerton to believe she shared his sentiment that marriage was a contract between two people, not a meeting of hearts and minds.

  She sighed long and low as she took her position in the foursome and as the music began to play, she let the steps distract her from her worries. Though the music was not enough to keep her gaze from wandering over her partner’s shoulder to find the man responsible for resurrecting such doubts within her.

  The man her brother had forbade her to have anything to do with.

  A future duke with a daughter not his own.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Alex pushed his way through the crowd, winding around the lords and ladies looking to curry his favor by stopping him for a word. Should he tell them that each word they spoke prevented him from being where he wished to be and therefore held the complete opposite effect they wished to achieve?

  Gads, how did people do this Season after Season? It made the remoteness of Breckenridge look like a little piece of heaven. At least there, he would not have to navigate the matchmaking mamas practically hurling their daughters at him with such zeal it bordered on rabid. The only marriageable lady he had any interest in at the moment was on the far side of the ballroom looking bored senseless by whatever polite drivel Lord Walkerton was spouting about.

  What did men like Walkerton who couched their conversations with so many barriers of propriety and politeness speak of? Politics? No, too volatile and never in front of a lady. Family matters? Again, no, at least not given Walkerton’s family. The weather then. Good Lord, no wonder Henrietta looked ready to drop to the floor in utter boredom.

  Which left him no other option but to save her from such a fate. Perhaps playing the white knight in this instance would smooth the way to allow him to apologize for making such a colossal muck of things by blurting out to her brother the fact he’d kissed her. He had meant to offer his apology when she paid a visit the other day, but things got away from him at the tea party. His emotions and the confusion surrounding them became overwhelming and he’d made a rather fast retreat. Like a coward. No wonder she gave him little more than a polite smile. It seemed he disappointed her at every turn. Did he honestly believe a simple apology would be enough to change all that?

  Likely not. But it was at least a start.

  Something flashed out of the corner of his eye, disrupting his steady gait. He blinked, his brain insisting he pay attention. He shook it off, his focus far too busy with saving Henrietta from Lord Walkerton’s nattering. But then he saw it again, and his brain prodded harder until he released Henrietta from his gaze and swept the area where the distraction had come from.

  What was it he had seen? It had been white. Low to the ground. One of Laura’s cats? Had it found its way into the ballroom? The duchess would likely not care to end the evening to find one of her pets had been trampled beneath the feet of the guests.

  Bloody hell. He looked up. Henrietta had not moved from where she was, though Lord Huntsleigh and his lovely countess had joined them. That bought him a few moments. He changed direction and headed toward the large palm frond in the corner where he last saw the flash of white. Perhaps the cat had sought refuge there. Should be easy enough to catch, hand off to the nearest footman and then return to his mission before the waltz Henrietta had promised him began.

  Except it was not one of Laura’s cats he found lurking behind the palm. And what he did find could not, with any subtly, be handed off to any footman.

  Alex pinched the bridge of his nose. Bloody, bloody hell.

  He crouched down and spoke sternly. “Lady Margaret, what is the meaning of this?”

  She leaned toward him and gave a brilliant smile so reminiscent of Ruth’s in the early days it set him back on his heels. He had forgotten those days. Buried them deep inside. Thinking of them caused him too much guilt, too much regret. His wife had been happy once, filled with hope. Both of which he had destroyed by failing to live up to her expectations.

  “I came to see the pretty dresses,” Margaret said, her voice couched in a giggle that she smothered with a small hand. She had no sense of misbehaving that Alex could find. If anything, he would have sworn she thought her sojourn from the nursery to the ballroom was nothing short of a grand adventure. “I’m going to hide here and watch. Look—” She pointed toward a group of ladies twenty feet away who, if they turned his way, would likely discover them.

  “Lady Margaret, you simply cannot—”

  “They sparkle like faeries.”

  He looked again. Several of the ladies had jewels sewn into their gowns and, as they caught the candlelight, did indeed look as if they sparkled. Like faeries. Alex sighed and ran a hand down his face before returning his attention to Margaret.

  “Where is Mrs. Creighton?” Laura had hired the older woman as Margaret’s nanny and though she came with solid references, Alex had doubted she would have the stamina to keep up with Margaret.

  “Sleeping.” Margaret leaned toward him and placed her hand on his on his bent knee. It was rare he allowed himself to be close enough to experience any kind of affection from her and the small touch surprised him with its sweetness, awaking something long dormant in his heart and nudging it awake. “She snores. I think she may be a dragon.”

  “A dragon—” Margaret nodded with the earnestness of a child convinced the world did indeed hold a certain amount of magic where faeries came out at night and dragons slept hidden beneath the guise of a nanny. “I’m sure she’s not a dragon.”

  Margaret gave him a look, lifting one eyebrow skyward, a clear indication he didn’t know what he was talking about. Not that he was surprised. When it came to this little girl he’d been left in charge of, he often felt as if he did not know what he was talking about. Or doing. Her expression came eerily close to one he’d seen Hawksmoor give him weeks earlier when he’d confronted him.

  “We must get you back to bed.” The waltz he had promised Henrietta would begin at any moment and he did not wish to miss it. It had been the one thing that had kept him from hiding away in the billiards room to avoid the matchmaking mamas dogging his heels. Good lord, if he had to listen to one more mother extol the virtues of their daughter’s needlepoint abilities, he’d scream bloody blue murder.

  Margaret’s smile swiftly inverted itself and he recognized the storm building in her eyes. “But I want to watch the faeries dance! I never get to do anything fun here!”

  Alex wasn’t sure he wanted to know exactly what constituted fun to Margaret. She had been cursed wit
h an adventurous soul and he’d lost count of the antics she had gotten up to in the name of fun.

  “Lady Margaret,” he began, reaching for her, but she backed away and pressed more tightly against the wall behind her. He lifted an eyebrow. When would her need to defy his every order relent? How was he to get her out of the ballroom and back to her room without notice if she pitched a fit?

  When Henrietta had come upon them in the library, with Margaret hidden behind her fortress of books, she had done nothing and yet, when he had stormed out of the room he left secure in the knowledge that Henrietta would have no difficulty in getting the girl to come out from behind the stacks. How did she do this? His brain worked furiously, reviewing that meeting with a different perspective and it dawned on him, far too slowly for his liking, but there it was.

  She had given Lady Margaret the option. She had allowed her to stay behind the walls of her self-made fortress and leave when she chose to. In doing so, Henrietta had somehow known Margaret would choose the latter.

  “She is simply trying to get your attention and her bad behavior has proven to be the most efficient way for her to do so.”

  Was she right? Had his authoritarian tactics been his downfall?

  “Lady Margaret,” he began again, offering a smile. “If you wish to see the ladies flit about like faeries, then you will have a far better vantage point from the special hiding place upstairs.”

  She gave him a skeptical look.

  Alex checked over his shoulder. No one had yet noticed him crouched in the corner; the palm frond and shadows offering a modicum of protection. But soon someone would stroll too close and possibly trip over him. He turned and sat next to Margaret, but instead of shifting away from him, she surprised him by looping her arm through his and holding tightly.

  “Look, see—” He pointed through the palm leaves to the floor above, just over where the band played. “Do you see that door above the harpist?”

  “Is it a secret door?”

  “Yes. Indeed it is,” he said. If secret meant only the servants used it. And errant children. He recalled a time when he was a little younger than Margaret when he, too, would sneak from the nursery and watch the parties his parents threw. Funny, he had not recalled that until now. “Shall we sneak away and go take a look?”

  She looked up at him, expectation brightening her pretty face. He had not noticed that before, how truly lovely she was. How much like her mother in the way her cheeks blossomed pink and her eyes sparkled. She had such spirit in her, something neither Ruth nor her dead lover had possessed. Where did it come from? “Together?”

  He calculated the time it would take to get there—not long. Could he leave her there alone and still make his way back to Henrietta in time for their dance? Disappointment flooded through him. Unlikely. And leaving Lady Margaret unsupervised did not seem the best course of action.

  “Yes, of course. Together.” He stood and reached out a hand that she took without hesitation. He lifted her into his arms, her lightness surprising him. He had never held her, not really. Perhaps he had handed her down from a carriage once or twice, but usually he kept his distance. Almost as if holding her was a betrayal to the son he could no longer cradle in his arms. But the guilt over this did not come this night, nor did the twinge of guilt when her arms wrapped around his neck and he could feel her soft breath against his skin.

  He held her a little tighter and slipped from the ballroom out into the hallway beyond.

  “Papa?”

  The moniker cut into his heart with unexpected speed. She had all but abandoned referring to him as sir or my lord. And with every repeated use, Papa came easier off her tongue, becoming more familiar to her. To him. And each time the word wrapped around his heart and squeezed, but with the pain also came a certain amount of sweetness that pulled him toward the word, the name, until he realized he liked the sound of it. Wished to hear it again.

  “Yes, sweeting?”

  Did she just smile against his neck?

  “Do you really think there are faeries in the ballroom?”

  Henrietta came immediately to mind. She had been the one to insist Margaret call him Papa, of that he was certain. A strange bit of magic wrapped up in one little word, as if Hen had known the power it held and was determined to make him understand its importance.

  “Perhaps there are one or two,” he told her.

  “Good,” she whispered as she snuggled into him. By the time they reached the second flight of stairs to the nursery, Margaret had grown limp in his arms, sleep coming upon her with a speed and ease he envied.

  “Alexander? What are you doing up here?”

  Alex turned at the sound of his father’s voice behind him. Was it weaker than usual or was that just his imagination? He kept his own voice low so as not to wake the bundle in his arms.

  “I might ask you the same thing?”

  “Oh…” His father hesitated, looked up and down the shadowy hallway where candlelight flickered in every second sconce. “I, uh, wished to change my cravat. The one I had on was not to my liking. Too loose. Cannot countenance a loosely tied cravat.”

  Alex hadn’t realized his father held such strong opinions on his neckwear. “I see. I wondered if I might enlist your assistance.”

  “Would you like me to take her?” His father reached out his arms toward Margaret, but Alex shook his head. There was a frailty about the man, something that prickled the back of Alex’s neck and made him fearful. Something was wrong and they were keeping it from him. Why?

  “No, I shall see her to bed. But I have promised the next waltz to Lady Henrietta and I have not had time to tell her I’ve become suddenly indisposed. Might you deliver the message for me, with my sincerest apologies?”

  His father smiled and straightened his stance. “I shall do so immediately. I’m certain the young lady will be most understanding.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  The great Duke of Franklyn smiled with a mixture of stateliness and warmth and reached out to touch one of Margaret’s soft, dark curls. “You’re quite welcome, son. Now see this precious cargo off to bed and once she is settled, rejoin us below.”

  Precious cargo.

  How was it everyone else had seen that but him? How long had he allowed grief and resentment to blind him from this truth? Too long. Without thinking, he turned his head and kissed her temple. She snuggled closer with a sigh, trusting in the way only an innocent could be. And that’s what she was. What she had always been. Innocent. Yet he had expected her to pay for crimes perpetrated by another. He’d been such an ass. Such a failure as a father. The thought sickened him. He had been a wonderful father to Edward right up until the moment the boy took his last breath. Had he lost this ability? Or had he simply pushed it so deep inside of himself he forgot where he’d hidden it?

  If the latter, then the excavation started now. He had claimed Lady Margaret as his daughter in name, now the time had come to step up and fill the role she believe he owned. As her father.

  He opened the door to the nursery and was immediately assaulted by the guttural sound of the nanny snoring from her perch on the chair near the hearth. Margaret had been correct in her assessment. The woman did sound like a dragon though thankfully his daughter was now so deeply asleep he doubted even several snoring dragons would awaken her.

  Alex turned up the wick of the lamp on the small side table then lowered her to her bed. Her eyelids didn’t so much as flutter as he pulled the covers up around her neck. He leaned down and kissed her forehead then took the seat by the bed and sat in the dark watching this strange creature who had inadvertently entered his life and turned it on its ear.

  Was Henrietta right in her assessment of Margaret’s behavior? Was all she needed was his affection? His time and attention? He shook his head. Of course it was. Wasn’t that what he had wanted after his own mother had died? To have his father hold him tightly and tell him everything would be fine, that his mother was in a better place, happy
and healthy, free from the sickness that had ravaged her. That she watched over him from afar and that her love remained as endless as the sky?

  But instead, like him, grief had made his father do foolish things. Such as proposing marriage to a young woman who needed saving because he had been unable to save the woman he’d loved first. And failing to offer his son the reassurance he’d needed because he did not believe such reassurance existed.

  And Alex had been no better. He’d shut out Ruth after Edward’s death because he could not take on the burden of her pain as well as his own as they buried their only child.

  He understood that now.

  “Forgive me,” he whispered, though whether to Ruth or Margaret or the number of other people he’d cut out of his life because watching them carry on with theirs as if the world was a wonderful place had been beyond what he could bear. “I will do better. From here on, I promise to do better.”

  “Papa?”

  He smiled down at Margaret, the motion rusty but quickly remembered. “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I wanted to say good night.” She smiled, but already her eyelids had grown too heavy to keep open. “Good night, Papa.”

  “Good night, sweet Maggie,” he whispered, leaning down and touching his nose to hers the way his mother had done. “Sleep well.”

  She nodded. “You smell good.”

  He smiled and lifted his eyebrows. “Do I? What do I smell like?”

  “Happy,” she whispered, snuggling deeper beneath the blankets. “You smell like happy, Papa.”

  The answer made his heart swell until it was almost painful. Is that not what a father should smell like to their child?

  And he was still a father. The thought gave him some peace.

  * * *

  Hen stood near Lady Dalridge’s chair, her fingers twisting about the ribbon of her dance card where it dangled from her wrist. She had glanced at it several times in the past few minutes and several times before that when the early strains of the waltz had begun. She had promised this dance to Alexander but despite the fact that his name was written boldly in the space next to this particular waltz, he was nowhere to be found. Not in the crowd, not on the dance floor and nowhere near her. It was as if he had vanished into thin air, leaving her feeling rather conspicuous, standing there on the edge of the dance floor while the other ladies paired up with their partners and began to dance.