Slightly Sinful

by Mary Balogh

  And so the conversation proceeded for the next ten minutes or so to the accompaniment of much laughter while Rachel tried to compose herself and rehearse what she would say when she was finally alone with him, as she inevitably would be sooner or later.

  It was sooner rather than later.

  “In my bobbing progress about the house,” Mr. Smith said, “I have seen that you have a pretty garden at the back, ladies, and that someone has even been considerate enough to place a wooden seat beneath the willow tree overhanging the lily pond. If you will excuse me, I am going to convey myself out there and take a turn about the paved paths before sitting for a while, breathing in the air of the outdoors.”

  “Just be careful not to overdo the exercise,” Bridget warned him. “Remember that this is the first day you have been up.”

  “We would hate to have to carry you back to your bed,” Phyllis told him.

  “No, we wouldn’t, Phyll,” Geraldine said.

  “I’ll be careful,” he promised. “Miss York, would you care to accompany me?”

  Bridget smiled and nodded her consent in Rachel’s direction just as if she were still her nurse. Rachel set down her empty cup and saucer and got to her feet. She would have given a great deal to be able to avoid this encounter, she thought. She was not ready for it yet. But would she ever be? And since she could not now go back and change last night, she could only go forward and deal with the embarrassment of being alone with him. She opened the sitting room door and held it back while Mr. Smith moved past her on his crutches.

  He made slow but quite steady progress on them, she noticed as they proceeded outside. She fell into step beside him after closing the back door. She clasped her hands behind her.

  “Well, Miss York,” he said, the amused, flirtatious tone he had used in the sitting room gone from his voice, “we need to talk.”

  “Do we?” she asked, concentrating her attention on the flagstones over which they walked. Like a child, she avoided stepping on the cracks. “I would really rather not. What is done is done. It was not of any great significance, was it?”

  “What a blow to my masculine pride!” he exclaimed. “Of no great significance, indeed. I am well aware that under normal circumstances I should now be making you an offer of marriage.”

  She felt more mortified than ever.

  “I would not accept it,” she said. “What a foolish idea!”

  “I am glad you think so,” he said. “I cannot, of course, make any such offer—not yet, at least. I would have no legal name to write on the license or marriage register. And I may already be married to someone else.”

  She had forgotten that possibility. She felt a slight churning in her stomach.

  “Not ever,” she said firmly. “Not even if you discover after you know your identity that you are still unwed. I have been involved in one unconsidered betrothal this year, Mr. Smith. I have no intention of engaging in another anytime soon.”

  “What are you planning to do?” he asked her.

  She felt at a disadvantage now that he was on his feet. She was accustomed to looking down at him. Even last night while they were . . . But really, she preferred not to think about that.

  “I have not decided,” she told him. “I will take employment again, I suppose.”

  “And I daresay,” he said, “you would need a character reference from Lady Flatley. Would she give you one?”

  Rachel grimaced.

  “The ladies here want to go in search of Mr. Crawley as soon as they return to England,” she said, “if they can raise enough money to cover their traveling expenses, that is. I have thought of going with them. I do not suppose he will be easy to find, and there is very little chance that any of their money can be recovered, but I feel the need to help them as much as I can.”

  “Those ladies,” he said, “do not need your help, Miss York. They are hardened women of the world. They will survive.”

  “Yes,” she said, stopping on the path and turning to face him, anger sparking from her eyes, “of course they will. They will survive. It does not matter that they will do nothing more than that, that they can never expect freedom or happiness or bounty. They are only whores, after all.”

  He sighed out loud. “My meaning was only,” he said, “that you are not responsible for them any more than you are responsible for me—or than I am responsible for you. Sometimes one simply has to allow others to live their own lives even if it is painful to watch.”

  She frowned at him. She had been in the mood for a good quarrel. But he had refused to take up his cue.

  “Perhaps,” he suggested, “we ought to sit down before we continue this conversation. I would hate to totter and fall at your feet and perhaps give the wrong impression.”

  She went ahead of him, but she waited until he had seated himself with slow care and propped his crutches against the wrought iron arm of the seat before perching on the other end. She wished it were a little longer.

  “Tell me about your uncle,” he said.

  “He is Baron Weston of Chesbury Park in Wiltshire,” she said. “There is not much else to tell. He was my mother’s brother, but he disowned her after she eloped at the age of seventeen to marry my father. The only time I saw him was after her death, when he came to London for her funeral and stayed for a few days.”

  “He is your only living relative?” he asked her.

  “As far as I know, yes,” she said.

  “Perhaps,” he said, “you ought to go to him. He would hardly turn you away, would he?”

  She turned her head to look at him incredulously.

  “I have heard from him twice since I was six years old,” she said, “once when he refused my request for my jewels when I was eighteen and once when I asked for them again last year after my father died. On that occasion he wrote that I might not have them but that if I was destitute I could come to live with him and he would find me a husband.”

  “And so it is possible for you to go there,” he said.

  “Mr. Smith,” she said, her anger returning, “if you were in my place, would you go? To someone who had cut your mother’s acquaintance when she married and who had ignored you all your life except for a few days when you were six? And someone who was so eager to see you again that he informed you that you could come if you were destitute and threatened to marry you off to someone of his choosing if you did so. Would you go?”

  His nearness was disconcerting. Even more so was that she still had to look up at him. He seemed to loom over her, far larger and more imposing than he had appeared to be when lying in bed.

  “I suppose not,” he said. “No, that is an inadequate answer. I would probably tell the bastard to go and boil his head in oil.”

  She was so surprised and so shocked that she burst into laughter. He smiled slowly, and she could see that his eyes had focused upon her dimple, which she always thought such a childish feature.

  “Tell me about the jewels,” he said.

  “I have never even seen them,” she told him, gazing into the lily pond, “though I do know that they are really quite valuable. My grandmother left them to my mother under the condition that they remain in my uncle’s care until she married with his approval or reached the age of twenty-five. She married without his approval, and she died when she was twenty-four. But she must have had some communication with my uncle before she died. She left the jewels to me under exactly the same conditions.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, “she thought they would be safer with him than with your father.”

  She had thought of that humiliating possibility. Poor Papa—he would have gambled the whole fortune away and then wept with remorse and gone back to the tables in an attempt to win it all back.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “he thinks they are safer with him than with me. My father was dead when I asked for them last year. Yet they are mine. If I were a man, there would be no question of withholding my inheritance when I am already of age. I wish it were already mine. I
would give everything back to these ladies that they lost and restore their dream. How happy they would be. How happy I would be.”

  She bit her lower lip as she felt tears well into her eyes.

  “There is a way you can get your hands on your inheritance early, though, is there not?” he said.

  She laughed scornfully and turned her head to look at him again. He was gazing back with an arrested look in his eyes.

  “I would have to be married,” she said.

  He lifted one eyebrow.

  “And win his approval,” she added.

  The other eyebrow went up and his eyes filled with the sort of laughter he usually reserved for his bantering exchanges with her friends.

  “Mr. Smith,” she said curtly, “I cannot marry you. You have said so yourself, and besides, I would not marry anyone just for the sake of getting my hands on my jewels.”

  “Admirable,” he murmured, and grinned.

  “And how could you possibly win his approval anyway?” she asked him. “You do not even know your name.”

  He waggled his eyebrows at her and suddenly looked boyish and roguish—and really rather irresistible.

  “Have you never heard, Miss York—or dare I call you Rachel,” he said, “of a masquerade?”

  “What?” She stared at him wide-eyed.

  “I will pretend to be your husband,” he said, “and go to Chesbury Park with you to wrest your fortune from the clutches of this tight-fisted, hard-hearted rogue of an uncle of yours. Then you can do whatever you wish with it, though I would warn you that you may find it extremely difficult to persuade these ladies to take so much as a penny from you.”

  “But you are eager to be on your way from here,” she said. “You want to find your people and your home.”

  He grimaced and some of the laughter faded from his eyes.

  “Yes, I am and I do,” he agreed, “but you cannot know how much I dread doing so at the same time. What if I get out there and find no clues to my identity? Worse, what if I find a large family and a whole host of friends and discover that they are total strangers to me? Can you understand the terror inherent in such a thought? Perhaps if I postpone my journey of self-discovery for a while, my memory will come back on its own.”

  “But,” she said, thoughts tumbling so chaotically through her brain that she could not think straight at all, “I cannot ask you to do this for me.”

  “You did not ask me.” He grinned at her again, and suddenly she wanted to reach out to touch his warmth and vitality. “I offered. Save me from the terror of having nothing to do but step out into the vast unknown, Miss York. Let’s do this.”

  There must be a million arguments against it—at least a million. But all she could see in her mind was the image of herself handing over to Flossie the exact sum of money she had seen Flossie hand to Nigel Crawley while she had stood by, smiling happily. She would be able to do it in reality. And she need not feel guilty about the masquerade, need she? It was her money, and Uncle Richard had always been quite horrid to her. She owed him nothing.

  “Very well,” she said, and smiled.

  He rested one forearm over the back of the seat and continued to grin at her like a mischievous schoolboy—except that he looked disconcertingly gorgeous in the process.

  “I just hope you do not now expect me to go down on one knee to propose to you,” he said. “I fear I might never get up again.”

  CHAPTER IX

  ALLEYNE LAY ON HIS BED FOR LONGER THAN an hour after coming in from the garden, though he did not sleep. He ached in every bone and joint, and he suspected that his left leg was slightly swollen. It dismayed him to discover just how weak he was, but at the same time it was satisfying to know that he could now move about and begin to build up his strength and stamina again.

  He was a dreadful coward, though. He wondered if he always had been. For almost two weeks he had been chafing at the bit, longing to be on his feet again so that he could get out of this house and begin discovering who the devil he was. But when it had come to the point today, when that moment had seemed imminent, he had found himself consumed by terror. He had spoken the truth to Rachel York.

  And, good Lord, what sort of a scrape had he found himself in instead?

  He had wanted to help her. Annoyed as he had been with her last night for not warning him of what he was about to do and not therefore giving him a chance to leave her virtue intact, he had also wanted to do something positive for her. She had, after all, saved his life. There was no doubt in his mind that he would have died in the Forest of Soignés if she had not come along and found help for him. And she had nursed him for well over a week since then. He had grown fond of her. Correction—he had been besotted with her from the first moment his eyes had alit on her.

  He had wanted to do something for her. He had invited her into the garden so that he could find out something about her uncle and see if it was possible for her to go to live with him. He had been planning to offer to escort her there. It would not have been much in comparison with what she had done for him, but it would have been something.

  Something sane, sensible, and honorable.

  And if he did discover that he was a single man, he had decided, then he would be able to go back to her there and make her the marriage offer that honor dictated he make.

  But look what he had done instead!

  The thing was, though, that the terror that had been hovering over him all day had fallen away as soon as he had made his suggestion, and all he had been able to feel was the exhilaration of a mad challenge.

  What did that say about his character? Did he usually behave like this? Like a twenty-five-year-old boy who was up to any madcap scheme? If he was twenty-five, that was. He might be thirty.

  He grimaced.

  But it was too late now to change his mind about this particular madcap venture even if he wanted to—and he was not sure he did. He was to assume a whole new identity, and he was to acquire a new wife in the process—presumably in a love match. Yes, definitely a love match. He was to convince Baron Weston of his eminent respectability and steadiness of character.

  He chuckled softly. A challenge was just what he needed, and this was a colossal one. He felt . . . surely he felt like his old self again.

  But that thought threatened to bring on a fit of melancholy again. He closed his eyes and set the back of one hand over them.

  He expected to spend the rest of the day in bed, or at least in his room, but Sergeant Strickland appeared in the doorway late in the afternoon to inform him that this was the ladies’ night off and that he had been sent to invite Mr. Smith to join them for dinner if he felt up to it.

  “I would warn you, though, sir,” he added, “that they have invited me too.”

  “And I may not think it proper to dine with a sergeant?” Alleyne asked him, his eyebrows raised. “I do not know how high in the instep my usual self is, Strickland, but this self will be delighted to dine with one—and with four ladies of the night too.”

  He would be glad of the company, he decided, as Strickland helped him back into his coat and brushed his hair for him while Alleyne tweaked his cravat back to some semblance of smartness. And then his hands fell suddenly still as it occurred to him on a wave of amusement that someone would be horrified indeed to see him now.

  Except that the thought, vivid as it was, failed to provide either a face or a name.

  Who would be horrified?

  For a moment he thought he was going to be able to pull a name out of the depths of his memory. It was as if a curtain fluttered before the blankness of his mind, threatening at any moment to be blown aside by a gust of wind to reveal everything that was behind it.

  But the curtain remained stubbornly in place.

  He tried to salvage at least something. Was it a man or a woman? Who the deuce was it who had flashed into his mind when he had not even been trying to remember anything?

  But it was no use.

  “More pain, sir
?” the sergeant asked.

  “No, nothing,” Alleyne said.

  At first when he entered the dining room, he thought that Sergeant Strickland must have been mistaken about its not being a working night. The ladies were dressed in full regalia, including brightly colored silks and satins, bosoms dangerously close to spilling out of bodices above tightly laced stays, elaborately curled coiffures, towering hair plumes, strong floral perfumes, and facial paint. He was reminded of his very first sight of them and made them as deep and courtly a bow as his crutches would allow.

  “I am still convinced,” he said, “that I have died and gone to heaven.”

  He noticed that the small heart-shaped black patch that Geraldine sometimes wore close to her mouth had been placed to the left side of her cleavage tonight.

  They had dressed up for him, he thought—because he was dining with them. He could have chuckled at the realization, but he would not risk giving offense. He really did like them all immensely.

  Rachel York was dressed as she had been last night except that her hair had been styled more simply tonight and shone like pure gold in the light from the candelabrum in the middle of the table. He shook his head mentally at the sight of her. He really must have lost his wits as well as his memory to have believed that she belonged in this brothel and was a working member of it. Now that his eyes had been opened, it was blindingly clear to him that she was a refined, elegant lady.

  He still felt somewhat out of charity with her—or perhaps with himself for his stupidity.

  It was a strange meal. They had no servants, as he had realized before. Apparently it was Phyllis who did most of the cooking. Fortunately, she seemed to have a considerable talent for it. But all the ladies—all five of them—helped serve the food, carrying hot dishes into the dining room and empty dishes out. And the conversation was intelligent and lively. They talked about Brussels, about the contrast between the city as it had been just a few weeks ago when it had been bustling with all the glittering entertainments of the visiting ton and the city as it was now when almost all foreigners had left. They talked about the war and its aftermath, about the prospects for a peaceful and prosperous Europe now that Napoléon Bonaparte had been taken captive again. They asked Sergeant Strickland for his observations on the battle strategy that had been used. They talked about London and its theaters and art galleries.