The Scandals Of An Innocent

by Nicola Cornick

  “Put me down!” she squeaked.

  “No.” He was not even prepared to discuss it. He strode out into the corridor, where a cold breeze blew, setting the lamp guttering on the guard’s table.

  “Put me down!” Alice’s voice rose as close to hysteria as she had ever been. “You think it is acceptable to…to make love to me and then to have me locked up in jail and then to come marching in here and carry me off as though nothing has happened!” She caught the fascinated expression on the guard’s face and snapped, “Oh, do not look so surprised! I know the entire village has already heard that Lord Vickery ravished me in the spa baths before having me arrested!”

  “Yes, miss,” the guard said. “I had heard that.”

  “You see?” Alice said to Miles. “Everyone knows.”

  “They certainly will do if you keep shouting like that,” Miles said. “Thank you, Compton.”

  “My lord,” the guard said, shutting the door behind them with a bang. Alice heard the bolts shoot home.

  “Put me down!” she said for a third time, and this time Miles complied.

  Out in the street the air cut like a knife and little flakes of snow whirled past on the wind. Alice ignored Miles completely and set off along the lane toward Spring House. When Miles lengthened his stride to keep up with her she broke into a run, and he grabbed her arm to slow her down.

  “Wait!” he said.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” Alice said. She swung around so fast that he had to tighten his grip to steady her. Her throat felt dry as cardboard and she knew she was about to cry, and the very last thing she wanted to do was burst into tears in front of him. That she simply could not bear.

  “I don’t want your company,” she snapped. “Leave me alone!”

  “I cannot,” Miles said. He sounded regretful. “I cannot allow you to walk home alone in the middle of the night. I am sworn to protect you.”

  “Which you did by having me thrown into jail,” Alice said. “Excellent work, Lord Vickery.”

  Miles spread his hands wide. “What would you have me do?” he asked. “Lie to save you?”

  “Yes!” Alice said. Her temper soared. “Yes!” she said again. “That is exactly what I wanted you to do, Lord Vickery. You were the one who told me that there were good social reasons for lying. Well, this was the best reason ever.” She stopped in the middle of the road and planted her hands on her hips, glaring at him. “You did not even have the requirement of honesty placed on you anymore!” she shouted. “You had said yourself that you had broken the terms of our betrothal, so you were no longer even required to be truthful, and yet you suddenly decided that you are going to be excruciatingly honest and have me thrown in jail!”

  “I had to do it, Alice,” Miles said. He faced her down. “You didn’t want me to be truthful just to win your hand in marriage,” he said. “You didn’t want me to be honest for three months and then return to my old ways. At the very beginning, when we made our bargain, you wanted me to reform.” His tone roughened. “Well, you have reformed me, against my will and against my nature and tonight against my wishes. Do you think it was easy for me?”

  “Yes!” Alice said. The fury was trailing little sparks of fire through her blood and it felt good. She so seldom lost her temper. “It was a damned sight easier for you than it was for me!” she said. “You suddenly feel you have to reform, and as a result I have been cold and hungry and tired and dirty and have had to relieve myself in a bucket! Oh, and I have been branded a criminal and a whore and my reputation is ruined. I hope you are pleased with the results of your honesty!” She tried to pull away from him but he grabbed her and held her tightly.

  “Tonight I wanted more than anything to protect you,” Miles said. His voice was shaking. “I am an officer of the government and I wanted to lie to a magistrate to save you but I could not. I wanted to be worthy, not because I had to fulfill the conditions of our betrothal but to please you-”

  “Well, it did not please me for you to tell the truth,” Alice snapped. “I might have known that you would discover your deeply buried honesty at this particularly inconvenient moment. Leave me alone,” she added, struggling against his grip. “I am going home and I never want to see you again.”

  “You will be seeing me again,” Miles said. “In fact, you will be marrying me as soon as I can fetch a special license.”

  He spun her around and into his arms. They closed like steel bands about her, holding her fast. “I have just spent the last four hours arranging your release from jail, Alice,” he said, holding her still as she struggled frantically against him, “and trying to discover whom it was who informed against you in the first place. I have worked damned hard to secure your freedom.”

  “But you had me locked up in the first place!” Alice said, panting. “Do you expect me to be grateful?”

  “If not to me then to Gaines,” Miles said. “He did a sterling job for you. He argued that as you were outside the shop rather than inside there was no proof you had ever been inside.”

  “And the wedding gown?” Alice objected.

  “He said that you had probably found it in the street, where the true thief had dropped it, and that you picked it up out of curiosity.” Miles laughed. “He was very plausible.”

  “He’s a good man in a crisis,” Alice said. She sighed. “I suppose he was even able to come up with a reason as to why I was in the street at midnight in the first place?”

  “Of course,” Miles said. “You were there to meet me.”

  “I suppose you denied it?”

  “No,” Miles said. “No one asked me if it was true.”

  “So now I am supposed to have been trysting with you before we were betrothed!” Alice said wrathfully. “So much for my good reputation!”

  “You have no reputation left,” Miles said. “You are scandalous, Alice. Ruined.”

  The exasperation and anger swelled in Alice. “Mostly thanks to you! You madden me! Why did you have to decide to reform now?”

  “I can’t help it,” Miles bit out. “Have you not heard a word I’ve said? Do you think I wanted to change? I was perfectly fine until I met you.”

  “You were ruthless and arrogant unreformed,” Alice said. “I have yet to see a difference in you.” The anger within her was starting to ease slightly at the sound of the irritation in Miles’s voice. Clearly his reformation was not proving a comfortable experience for him. She stopped struggling and smoothed her fingers down the material of his jacket.

  “I am not marrying you,” she added. “I don’t have to, now that you have broken the terms of our agreement.”

  “You are marrying me,” Miles corrected. “You have not a shred of reputation left and if you do not wed me you will be shunned by society and incur all the scandalous gossip that your mother fears and that you have tried so hard to avoid. You know you would hate that and your mama would be distraught.”

  “The scandal is of your making, not mine!” Alice said, incensed. “You were the one who locked us in the spa baths and made love to me!”

  “That is beside the point,” Miles said. “And anyway-” a wicked grin tilted his lips “-I did not hear you protesting. In fact I seem to remember that you connived enthusiastically in your own seduction. You begged me not to stop.”

  Alice remembered. She felt a stab of anguish. No wonder Miles looked so pleased with himself. She had pleaded with him to make love to her. And thinking about it now, through all her fury and frustration, she felt like begging him all over again because it had been so unutterably blissful and she could not deny it.

  “You are no gentleman to remind me,” she said.

  “I am as much a gentleman as you are a lady,” Miles said. He dropped his voice. “You know that what you really want now is to return home to a hot bath and a deep feather bed and to make love with me again-and again-until we are both satiated. You know it, Alice.” His lips brushed her ear, his breath warm in the cold of the night. He held her caged
in his arms. “What we did was wonderful. Sinful and decadent and so very, very wicked but so delicious-”

  “No!” Alice whispered. The low murmur of his words tormented her. Her pulse beat frantically in her throat. The heat pooled within her.

  “I don’t want to forgive you,” she said truthfully, but even as she spoke she could feel herself weakening. “Damn you, Miles.”

  “Damn me to perdition if you wish,” Miles said, “but you’ll have me just the same.”

  Alice made an infuriated sound and grabbed him and kissed him hard. He tasted cold, tasted delicious.

  “I am still very angry with you,” she said as her lips left his. “I want to punish you.”

  “I can tell,” Miles said.

  He kissed her this time, a soft brushing of his lips against hers.

  “Still angry with me?” Then as she made a tiny sound of assent he said, “You can settle the score when we get back to Spring House.”

  “I doubt it,” Alice said regretfully. “Mama will be there, and Lizzie and the servants and everyone will want to know how I am-”

  “No, they won’t,” Miles said. “Sir Montague has taken Lady Elizabeth back to Fortune Hall and your mama is staying with Laura at the Old Palace and all the servants are abed.”

  Alice looked at him. “Then…” Damnation take it, she thought. I am no lady and we both know it but I want to make love with him again and he is right, I am going to do it.

  “What are we waiting for?” she said.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  M ILES CARRIED THE FINAL pitcher of water upstairs and closed Alice’s bedroom door behind him. Alice had set up the bath behind a muslin screen. The room was warm. Sweet-scented steam rose into the air, reminding him sharply of the time they had spent together in the spa baths. He could hear Alice humming softly to herself and the muted splash of the water. He rounded the screen and put the pitcher down.

  Alice was sitting in the hip bath. Her blond hair was piled up on top of her head and tiny strands were escaping to curl in the steam. The hot water had stung her skin pink all over and she looked glowing and rosy, delicious enough to eat. She gave a little gasp when she saw him and made a grab for her petticoat but Miles whisked it out of her hands.

  “Very virginal and modest, my love,” he said, “but scarcely necessary now.”

  My love. The endearment had come easily to his lips, he realized. He felt a sudden uncertainty-a strange, hollow feeling inside-but he dismissed it from his mind. Later. He would think about it later. Right now he did not want to think about anything other than making love to Alice with a concentrated passion that would satisfy them both.

  Alice was looking at him and her eyes were shy. He realized that despite her unrestrained response to him earlier she was still feeling diffident. This was so new to her. He felt a pang of compassion. Her gaze slid away from his. She crossed her arms over her chest.

  “It’s just…” Her voice was a little husky. “I know I am very plump,” she said in a rush. “The ladies are always saying that I have a peasant build.”

  Miles felt a rush of fury. He looked at the voluptuous curves that were barely hidden. He took her wrist and gently drew her arms down. Her breasts were beautiful, lush and creamy with tight, raspberry-pink nipples. Below them the swell of her stomach and her rounded thighs looked so lavish and bountiful that he simply wanted to bury himself in her body and revel in the opulence of it.

  “Sweetheart-” his voice was rough “-they are only envious of you. There is not a man on earth who would find fault with your body.” He rested a hand on her shoulder, feeling the dampness and slick warmth of her skin beneath his hand. “Not,” he added, “that I would wish you to put that to the test. The only man who can touch you-” he slid his hand down over her breast “-is me.”

  He wanted to tempt her out of her anxieties, make her forget everything but the need she had for him. At his words a smile had banished the anxiety in Alice’s eyes, and Miles felt another kick of possessive tenderness. He bent his head to kiss her neck, tasting the salt on her, licking up the droplets of water that beaded the skin of her shoulders. Despite the heat in the room her nipple hardened against his palm and she sighed, leaning her head back against his shoulder to allow him greater access to her breasts. Her eyes closed slowly. As he continued to nuzzle the hot, damp skin of her neck, she gave a little moan, totally abandoned. Miles felt awed by her trust in him and more deeply, elementally possessive than he had ever felt before. Her natural sensuality delighted him. He knew and understood now the insecurity that plagued her because she had had it drummed into her so many times that she was no lady. For himself he did not care a fig about it. What mattered was that Alice was as honest in her passion as she was in everything else, and now that she had decided to give herself openly to him she held nothing back at all.

  He cupped her breasts, toying with them until she was making little needful noises and arching back against him whilst his searching fingers sought her taut, pointing nipples. He squeezed the tips gently, then more firmly as she squirmed and the sounds she made became more urgent and desperate. He was hard as a rock already, but for once-was it the first time ever he had been unselfish in his lust?-he suppressed his own urges and the demands of his body. This was for Alice, the seduction he should have given her before.

  He rested her carefully back against the edge of the bath so that he could lower his mouth to the place his fingers had been and could lick and pull on one tight nub and circle it with his tongue. His fingers ceaselessly rubbed back and forth across the other taut peak so that there was no escape for her from his seeking mouth and the exquisite torment of his touch. The sensation of her beneath his hands and his mouth was beautiful: hot, silken and trembling. He could sense she was wound so tightly that she wanted surcease. It was not enough. She had to be desperate for the release that only he could give her.

  “Please, Miles…” She had opened her eyes and was looking at him with utter appeal.

  “Do you like that?” His mouth brushed wet and hot across her breast.

  “Oh yes, but-” a little frown touched her forehead “-I need to get out of this bath.” The hot color deepened in her face. “I want to lie with you, to touch you.”

  “I want that, too,” Miles said. He scooped her up out of the bath and wrapped the bath sheet about her, trailing water across the carpet toward the bed, where he laid her down gently amongst the covers. It seemed to take him an age to strip off his clothes. His hands were shaking, clumsy. He was not normally so inept. Yet the rich, slumberous blue of Alice’s gaze as it rested on him seemed to make him even more ham-fisted. He felt a stab of alarm. He wanted this to be perfect for her. If he frightened her or gave her a disgust of him…

  But when he came to lie beside her, all his anxieties seemed to vanish. She reached for him with the same openness and eagerness that she had before, trusting him utterly, needing him as much as he needed her. It humbled him completely. They lay skin against skin, without moving, and then she smiled, a smile that dazzled him, as she ran her hands over his body, and he felt alive beneath her touch in a way he had never experienced before.

  “I had no idea,” she whispered, “no thought that it could be like this…”

  Neither had he.

  He felt her touch him, her fingers a tentative, gentle slide against the hardness of his erection, and he almost lost his mind.

  “Yes,” he said roughly. “Alice…”

  He rolled her beneath him and kissed her hard, possessive in his passion, forgetting to be gentle. Her response swept him far away.

  “I love you,” she whispered, opening her eyes. They were a deep, drenched blue and there was so much warmth and tenderness in them that he felt a shock like a blow to the stomach. Something snapped within him then and he gathered her close, wanting to lose himself in her, knowing he could never be the same again.

  She was already slick and ready for him as he slid deep inside her. He held himself still w
ith her impaled beneath him.

  “Marry me,” he said.

  She gasped. “That’s not fair.”

  He moved slightly, growing hotter and harder within her. “Since when have I been fair? Marry me. Accept me freely.”

  Her body clenched about him and she gasped again. He thrust, unable to help himself. The tightness and the heat and the slippery sweetness of her pushed him beyond control.

  Wait.

  Dimly he remembered that he had wanted to wait, to spin out the experience, to give her time. He could not. The small, helpless cries of intense pleasure that Alice gave, the way that her body rippled around his as the intensity of her climax racked her, drove him on to a place he had never been, where the world dissolved into oblivion and he was free and at peace as never before.

  “Yes,” Alice whispered, and he found himself hoping desperately, as he had never hoped before, that she meant yes she would marry him.

  He turned so that she lay in his arms, her head against his shoulder. She was already drifting into sleep, her eyes closed and a small, very self-satisfied smile on her lips. He felt her body shift and accommodate itself to the shape of his as though she had been made especially to fit there. His heart felt as though it was about to burst.

  “I love you,” he murmured, pressing his lips to the soft hollow beneath her ear, inhaling the sweet scent of her skin and feeling the warmth of her flood through him. The words felt strange on his lips. He felt afraid to say them in case they opened the gates to the old betrayals and he found that the past still had the power to hurt him. He would tell Alice about his father and all the secrets, he thought. Only that way would he finally be able to heal. She would be able to heal him. He knew it. She was so honest and so generous that she had already touched his soul.