Immediately he regretted the jibe, for, clearly embarrassed, Maddie paled and slammed her fork back down onto the table. “You big, arrogant—”
“Quin!” his mother snapped, even as he sought an apology. “Whatever feelings were involved, if you insist on reminding Miss Willits of her indiscretion, she will have no chance of redeeming her character.”
“My indiscretion,” Maddie repeated. “His lips, but my indiscretion.” She looked at Quin. “I see now why you prize your nobility so highly. Apparently it automatically absolves you from any hint of wrongdoing, at the expense of the nearest social inferior.” She stood. “Excuse me. I’ve lost my appetite.”
“Maddie,” Quin muttered, scowling.
Lady Highbarrow caught her hand before she could escape. “Miss Willits, at the risk of being blunt, Quin is the future Duke of Highbarrow. In comparison, you are a social inferior.”
“My lady, I have never been more proud to be called so.”
The duchess’s patronizing smile froze in place.
Quin realized his jaw had dropped, and he snapped it shut before the surprised chuckle that began deep in his chest could make itself heard. He cleared his throat and shot to his feet.
“Mother, if you’ll excuse me for just a moment,” he said hurriedly, striding around the table to grab Maddie’s hand away. “Apparently there are several things I did not make clear to our guest.” He yanked Maddie toward the door. “Miss Willits, if you please,” he continued sternly.
As soon as they were out of earshot, Maddie pulled her hand free from his. “I will not be dragged about like a mewling infant,” she hissed, her gray eyes snapping with fury. “Next you’ll be trying to take me over your knee!”
The image her words instantly conjured likely had little in common with what she was describing. This woman had just soundly insulted his mother, and he had no business daydreaming about having her seated naked on his lap, her long auburn hair tumbling down her shoulders past her bare breasts—
“Lord Warefield!” Maddie was growling, “I said, I am leaving!”
Quin grabbed hold of her arm again and spun her back around to face him. “No, you’re not!” The sudden anger blazing through his veins surprised him—not because she hadn’t said enough to make him angry, but because he absolutely did not want her to go.
“No one but you wants me here!” she snapped, coiling her delicate hand into a fist. “You pompous ass!”
He ducked backward as she swung at him. “Don’t think I’m so refined that I wouldn’t set you on your pretty ass if you hit me,” he snarled, shaking her by the arm. “You’re not making me break my word to Uncle Malcolm, and you are keeping your promise as well. Is that clear?”
For a long moment she glared at him, her bosom heaving with her fast, furious breathing. “I hate you, you bully,” she muttered, wrenching her arm free again.
“Is that clear?” he repeated.
“Yes. Very clear.”
Quin watched her stomp upstairs to her bedchamber. When her door finally slammed, he let out the breath he’d been holding and leaned back against the wall. Whatever it was he felt toward Madeleine Willits, it damned well wasn’t hatred. And that scared him more than the blackest fit of anger ever could.
By the time Quin declared their absurd little group ready for London, Maddie possessed more gowns in more fabrics and colors than she’d ever owned in her life. She’d learned every waltz, country dance, and quadrille invented over the past five years, and been tested on all the ones in style before that time and since the beginning of history. Most painful of all, she’d been forced to read back issues of the London Times to re-familiarize herself with who had been married, buried, and welcomed into society’s highest circles.
After her argument with the marquis, she had made every possible attempt to avoid him, and except for the annoying lessons and instructions, he had seemed to do the same. In a house as huge as Highbarrow Castle, it wasn’t all that difficult. From time to time she actually felt bad about saying she hated him, but he’d deserved it, shaking her and ordering her about like that when she’d begun to think of him as an ally—and as a friend, if one could call a man one thought about kissing and touching and holding all the time as merely a friend.
She desperately wanted to avoid going to London, but she didn’t want to prolong her stay at Highbarrow, either. She hadn’t felt so trapped since her parents had locked her in her bedchamber five years ago, and she endured it only because she would be able to leave it all behind her again after Almack’s.
They’d even hired a maid for her, and Maddie watched, her arms crossed, as poor Mary finished stuffing another portmanteau full of ballgowns. “We could always leave one behind by accident,” she suggested with a smile.
Mary wiped her hand across her forehead. “It would be the one that Her Grace was especially counting on your wearing, Miss Maddie.”
“No doubt. Are you certain you don’t want my help?” At least Mary had a sense of humor, and she wondered fleetingly whether Quin had hired her, or whether he or the duchess had assigned the task of finding a maid to the head housekeeper.
“Oh, no, ma’am. It wouldn’t be seemly, you know.”
Maddie sighed. “Yes, I know.”
A throat cleared from the open doorway. Immediately recognizing the sound, Maddie stiffened and turned around. “My lord,” she acknowledged, echoing Mary’s curtsey.
“Nearly packed?” Quin asked smoothly.
“Yes, thank you,” she answered politely. He’d avoided speaking to her for almost a fortnight, so his seeking her out now couldn’t bode well.
“Splendid. We’re all set to leave in the morning, then.”
“Splendid,” she echoed unenthusiastically. He stayed in the doorway, and after a moment Maddie looked over at him again. “Was there something else, my lord?”
“Yes. Do you have a minute?”
Immediately Mary ducked her head and scurried for the doorway. Maddie put out a hand to stop the maid’s retreat. “It’s quite all right, Mary. My legs work as well as yours.”
“Yes, Miss Maddie.”
Quin straightened and opened his mouth. “Miss Wil—”
“My lord, shall we?” Maddie interrupted, and stepped past him into the hallway.
He followed her. “Why do you insist on the servants calling you Miss Maddie?”
She lifted her chin. “I don’t. I ask them to call me Maddie, and then we compromise.”
“It’s not your proper address. You’re a viscount’s eldest daughter. Once we get to London, you will be addressed as Miss Willits.”
Talking about her family still had the ability to upset Maddie. She shook her head and started back to her bedchamber. “You may wish to consult with my parents about that. I believe I may have been disowned.”
He stood behind her, silent, for a long moment. “Maddie?”
She whirled back around. “Oh, my apologies, my lord. I’m supposed to face you when I speak to you. I’d forgotten.” The words sounded brittle to her, but she tucked her arms behind her back defiantly, daring him to comment.
“Why didn’t you tell me about your parents?” he asked instead.
“Does this change your mind? Should I leave now?”
He frowned. “No, of course not. It would have been helpful to know, though. I might have written Lord Halverston and—”
“No!” She strode back to him, dismay and dread tightening her throat. “You will not write my family about anything!”
“What do you suggest I do, then? We can’t very well pretend you’re someone else. You will be recognized, you know.” He stepped closer, his jade eyes serious. “And it’s you I promised to restore to society—not some mystery lady with no past.”
Maddie turned away. “As I’ve told you all along, my lord, none of this is necessary. Nor is it going to be as simple and easy as you seem to think.”
“Do you have any idea what I think, Maddie?”
She had
no intention of being intimidated by his supreme kindness, or whatever it was he thought he’d bestowed upon her, and she looked up at him again. “I think that you kissed me to see what I would do, and once you discovered I wasn’t a whore and wouldn’t be your mistress, you were so embarrassed that you trapped yourself into going to ridiculous lengths to ease your own mind. Or do I err, my lord?”
Eyes glinting, he glared at her for a long moment. Slowly, though, and to her growing consternation, his expression eased. “Don’t let your anger at a few idiots color the way you see the rest of the world, Miss Willits.” He reached out and softly ran his ringer along her cheek. “Perhaps I kissed you because I was attracted to you. And perhaps you kissed me back because you were attracted to me.”
Her pulse skittering at his caress, Maddie pulled away before he could realize he’d scored a hit. Only a conceited buffoon would throw her own unfortunate weakness back in her face. “You are in error, my lord,” she said stiffly. “The only thing I’ve enjoyed where you are concerned was seeing you face down in the mud.” Before he could reply, she hurried back to her bedchamber and slammed the door.
“That arrogant, pompous….” she muttered.
“Excuse me, Miss Maddie?” Mary straightened from stuffing a mountain of undergarments into a trunk.
“Oh, nothing.” Scowling, Maddie sat at her dressing table and wrote Mr. Bancroft another very nice letter about how well everything was going and how well she and the titled Bancrofts were getting along, and how much she was looking forward to seeing London again. She wondered if he’d believe a word of it.
“Well, what does it say?”
Malcolm looked up from Maddie’s letter. Chin in one hand, Squire John Ramsey sat glaring at him from the far side of their chess game. A leaf sailed down from the garden tree they sat beneath, and Malcolm brushed it off the board.
“Lewis—my brother—fled to London after five minutes with her, and she’s apparently declared war on the rest of the family. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had to clap her in irons to get her inside the coach to London.”
“What’s so amusing about that?” John challenged. “She must be absolutely miserable.”
Malcolm couldn’t explain that he was able to judge Maddie’s spirits just from the mild tone of her letter. Langley seemed more quiet and calm than it had been for years, since the defiant beauty had first arrived and dared him to hire her. He missed her terribly, but from the moment he’d taken her up on the challenge, he’d known she wouldn’t stay forever. He shook his head at his companion.
“Maddie’s a fighter. She needs a challenge—something to push against. If my illustrious relations had greeted her with honey and cake, they’d never have been able to drag her to London, because she’d have them twisted around her little finger by now.”
“As she does every male in Somerset,” John sighed.
Malcolm looked at the letter once more, then set it aside to resume the game. “Yes, she does.” And Quinlan had better be taking proper care of her, or there would be hell to pay.
“Maddie, please come down from the carriage,” Quin pleaded soothingly, while he attempted to ignore the curious gawking of the butler and the scores of footmen needed to unload the Bancroft party’s luggage.
“No,” came her tense voice from inside the darkened coach.
“What nonsense.” The Duchess of Highbarrow rolled her eyes, snapped her fan shut, and headed up the front steps into Bancroft House amid a sea of bowing servants.
Quin leaned against the open door of the coach. He should have ridden the last few miles with her—but then his mother or her maid would have had to join them, and he’d never have been able to talk to her. Not that they’d done much talking the last few times he’d made the attempt. Whenever he saw her, he immediately became seized with the desire either to bellow at her or kiss her. It had become quite irritating.
“Maddie, Bancroft House is surrounded by a very healthy border of oak trees, with a hedge of blooming pink rhododendrums beneath. In addition to its being quite picturesque, I assure you that the drive cannot be seen from the street.”
“I want to go home,” she stated.
The loneliness in her voice made him pause. “And where would that be, precisely?” he prompted quietly.
Given her keen sense of the practical, he thought that would get her attention. And indeed, a moment later her hand emerged from the dark. Swiftly he clasped it in his own. She was shaking, and he realized how unnerved she must be by the whole experience. Even before they’d entered the suburbs of London, she’d pulled the curtains shut in the carriage’s small windows. From Aristotle’s back he’d tried repeatedly to lure her to peek outside, but she wouldn’t even answer him.
Slowly he drew her out of the coach. Her eyes were shut tight, and she stopped when her feet touched the drive. “Eventually you will run into something that way,” he murmured, amused and sympathetic at the same time.
“I know,” she said through clenched teeth. “Just give me a moment.”
“Take several.”
She continued to clasp his fingers tightly. Apparently she detested the rest of London more than she disliked him. Quin hadn’t anticipated being elevated from enemy to ally, but the circumstance wasn’t unwelcome. He gazed at her wan face. Good God, she was beautiful.
Finally, with a slow, deep breath, she opened her vulnerable gray eyes. She took in the huge house, the drive, the scattering of curious servants, and then Quin. “It’s lovely,” she said woodenly.
“Hm. I’ll consider that high praise, coming from you. Shall we?” He gestured toward the open front door.
Maddie didn’t budge, or loosen her grip on his hand. “Will you be staying here?”
Quin hadn’t intended to. During the Season he typically stayed at Whiting House on Grosvenor Street, which had at one time belonged to his grandmother’s family. Spending the entire summer at Bancroft House—with his parents—was a torture he hadn’t had to endure since he turned eighteen and was admitted to Oxford. “Of course I’m staying here. Until you’re settled, anyway.”
The poisonous look Maddie shot at him was easy to read—she would never be settled in London.
“I am to be married sometime this summer, you know,” he said in answer. “I can’t very well have Eloise living here as well.”
“Then perhaps you shouldn’t have found me attractive,” she said smoothly, a hint of color returning to her cheeks. “Though I suppose it’s not uncommon for someone of your rank to promise yourself to someone and then throw yourself at someone else.”
Apparently she’d recovered from her fit of nerves. “I did not throw myself at you. I believe it was a mutual collision.”
A swiftly stifled grin touched her lips. “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said haughtily, as she freed her fingers from his and flounced past Beeks, the butler, and into the house.
“How can I possibly flatter myself, with you about?” Quin muttered at her back, before he followed her inside.
Chapter 9
On her first and only stay in London, Maddie had been ecstatic. She had finally been able to see the famous places like Hyde Park, Bond Street, and the dark Tower of London—places she’d only heard about. Fabulous balls had been full of exciting, famous people who had treated her as an equal and claimed to be pleased to meet her.
And she had no desire to see any of those places or any of those people ever again.
“Miss Maddie, do you wish to change for luncheon?”
Maddie let the bedchamber curtains slide shut through her fingers, closing her off from the quiet view of elegant King Street. “I suppose I should.”
She was still unused to having someone to help her dress and do her hair, but neither did she want to refuse Mary’s help and cause the poor girl to be let go—no doubt exactly what Lord Warefield had anticipated. When she’d donned her new green and yellow silk gown, she glanced at the mantel clock and then reluctantly emerged from her bedchamber. Ha
lf a dozen servants nodded politely at her as she made her way downstairs to the dining room—where she stopped short.
The Duke of Highbarrow looked up from slicing a peach. “You’re still about?” he asked gruffly, and returned to his luncheon.
“Good afternoon, Your Grace.”
A footman hurried forward to pull out a chair, and rather than have the duke think her a coward, Maddie sat. His Grace rudely continued to ignore her, and she glanced about the room impatiently. Quin had said repeatedly that while in town the Bancrofts sat for luncheon precisely at one. So here she was, precisely at five minutes after one, when everyone else should have been there.
Another footman offered her a platter of fresh fruit, and with a grateful smile she selected a peach. Like everything else she’d seen in the house, it was perfect, round and golden. Maddie narrowed her eyes, imagining Quin’s perfect smile and his handsome and very late backside, and sliced the fruit in two.
She glanced sideways at Lewis Bancroft again. Now that he wasn’t bellowing at her and insulting her, she noticed that he was more heavyset than Malcolm, and that his dark brown hair was more generously tinged with silver about the temples. His complexion was ruddier, though Mr. Bancroft had been so pale over the past few weeks she’d been at Langley that she tended to think of that pallor as his natural coloring. And though she admitted that she might be prejudiced, she thought the duke’s expression much less kind than Malcolm’s.
“What are you staring at, girl?”
Maddie blinked. “I was looking for the resemblance between you and your brother, Your Grace.”
“Bah. Malcolm’s fortunate I still claim him as kin.”
“Perhaps, Your Grace, it is you who is fortun—”
Quin skidded into the doorway. “Good afternoon, Father, Miss Willits,” he said hurriedly, straightening his cravat and taking the seat opposite Maddie. “Apologies. I was catching up on some correspondence and lost track of the time.”
The duke pinned him with annoyed brown eyes. “You’re staying here now, as well? What in damnation’s wrong with Whiting House?”
By Love Undone Page 14
