She didn’t look at him. Instead, she started to leave, but she saw the heavy crate blocking the door, and she once again faced him, but she looked decidedly uneasy.
“He doesn’t love you,” Christian said, pushing his advantage. “And what’s more, you know it.”
“Bernard,” she said primly, “is very fond of me.”
“Fond?” He laughed low in his throat. “Well, that’s sure to make him treat you with respect.”
Pain shimmered across her face, and too late, he remembered the deep need she had for respect. She took a step back and hit the wall behind her, but even hurt, even cornered, she wasn’t the sort to admit defeat. “I don’t need any mockery from you.”
“I’ll accept for the sake of argument that he is fond of you,” Christian said, gentling his voice. “But it won’t stop him from spending your money any way he likes. He can pay for his mistresses and his bastards. He can drink, gamble, and travel the world without you. And he will.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Men are men,” he said with a shrug. “Call it another rule.”
She glared at him as if he was the one who’d invented all these rules in the first place. “Not all men would disrespect their wives the way you describe!”
“I hate to destroy any romantic illusions you may have about my sex, but for the most part, we do what we want as long as there are no unpleasant consequences to consider.”
“Did you?”
Startled by the question, he blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“You were married to an heiress. Did you spend her money on other women?”
He looked away, an image of Evie flashing across his mind—of an angelic, heart-shaped face and golden hair, and blue eyes that gazed at him with far more adoration than he could ever deserve.
He took a deep breath. “No,” he admitted, grateful for that one grain of truth in a marriage based on a slew of lies. “I spent it on a lot of other things, but never on other women. Hard to believe, I know,” he added with a laugh, looking at her again, driving the image of Evie back into the past. “I am such a scoundrel. But then, my wife died only three years after we were married, so I didn’t have much of a chance to be unfaithful. Eventually, I probably would have been,” he added, striving to make himself out as callous a brute as possible. “I did all the rest. Why shouldn’t I? I’m a gentleman of the aristocracy, with an enormous income at my disposal, access to a vast array of distractions, and a moral code that is, I regret to say, woefully inadequate to resisting temptation. What was there to stop me? Love? Hell, my wife and I weren’t in love. At least—” He stopped, and then for no reason at all, he blurted out the rest, a truth he’d had no intention to reveal. “I wasn’t.”
“I see.” Her animosity seemed to have gone, for she was studying him with a thoughtful, assessing gaze, and he had the sick feeling she did indeed see, that her gaze had penetrated the glib, devil-may-care show he put on and seen the real truth: how much he loathed himself.
“Good Lord,” he drawled, forcing out light, careless words to cover the sudden, terrible silence. “How do we keep veering off the subject? We were discussing your future matrimonial success, not my matrimonial failure. Now—”
“Was it a failure?”
There was something in that question—something doubtful. Something reluctant, as if she didn’t believe him.
This girl wasn’t like Evie. She was strong willed and hard-boiled, without any trace of Evie’s soft romanticism, and yet in both of them was the same fatal flaw. Vulnerability.
It was in every line of her upturned face. It was in those big, caramel-brown eyes and that vividly expressive mouth, in the little crinkle of doubt between her auburn brows and in the determination of her delicately molded jaw. Once a chap got past the heart-stopping beauty of it, Annabel Wheaton’s face was as easy to read as a book. She cared too much what people thought of her. She believed too strongly that she could make life into what she wanted it to be. She felt too sure that people were intrinsically good and would do what was right. But most important, she believed, in her heart of hearts, that a rake could change. Girls like her were a fortune hunter’s dream.
Christian took a deep breath. “Yes,” he said at last. “My marriage was a failure. I didn’t love my wife. I married her for her money.” He paused to let that ugly truth sink in, then he added with calculated brutality, “And that’s why Rumsford is marrying you.”
He expected her to hurl a spate of furious denial at his head, but she did not. “I know that’s partly true,” she admitted. “He wouldn’t have married me if I’d been poor, that’s for sure.”
It wasn’t just partly true. It was the whole truth. “That doesn’t bother you?”
He watched her jaw set. “Not particularly.”
That surprised him. Didn’t a girl always want true love and happy endings? It went with the castle and the earl like peas went with carrots. “Every marriage ought to be based on love, Annabel. At least at the start. Don’t you want love?”
She made a sound of impatience. “You seem to think I’m some naive little fool with stars in her eyes, but I’m not. As I said, I know Bernard doesn’t love me, but he’s fond of me—”
“What about you?” he interrupted. “Do you love him?”
She paused, a pause that was a fraction of a second too long. “Of course.”
“How much?”
She met his inquiring gaze head-on. “Enough to be faithful.”
“Which means not at all.” He leaned toward her, close enough that his breath stirred the delicate corkscrew curl that grazed her cheek, close enough to catch the elusive scent of her French perfume. Almost close enough for his lips to touch hers. Desire began thrumming through his body again, even as he sensed her hardening resolve and felt his chance to change her mind slipping away. Hanging on to his control, he tried one more time to make her see how wrong it would be to marry Rumsford. “You don’t really want to marry him, do you?”
“Of course I do,” she whispered, and her tongue touched her lips. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“You might be making a mistake.”
“Why?” She tilted her head back, her full pink lips curved in a knowing little smile. “Because I ought to marry you instead and give you all my money?”
“I told you, I’m not a marrying man.” He strove to think, but lust was quickly overtaking him, coursing through his body, almost impossible to resist, making it difficult to think. “But I’m one of the many men you could enslave if you chose to.”
“Really?” Her lips parted. Her lashes drifted down until those dark eyes were half closed. Her voice, when she spoke, was a soft, honeyed hush. “Somehow, I don’t get the feeling that’s a proposal.”
“There are different kinds of proposals.” He moved, not even realizing his own intent until she jerked as if coming out of a daze and he felt her palm flatten against his chest, stopping him before he could kiss her.
“What in Sam Hill am I doin’?” she muttered, staring at him in horror.
He smiled. “I think you were about to let me kiss you.”
She didn’t deny it. “I must be the biggest fool in the entire U.S. of A. Get back,” she added, her palm pushing against his chest.
He should. Safest thing all around, and yet, he didn’t. His gaze slid to her mouth, but before he could even move, her hand slid upward between them, her fingers pressing against his mouth.
“Listen here, sugar,” she said, and despite the fact that his body was on fire, he almost wanted to smile. She was striving to seem confident, as if she had the situation well in hand, but the breathless rush in which she said those words gave her away. “I appreciate the information you’ve given me, I really do. I’m sure I’ll find it very useful. But . . .” She paused, her warm fingertips sliding away from his mouth. “Information’s all you’ll be giving me, and I hope that’s understood.”
She ducked past him. “Now,” she said as he turned aro
und to find her standing by the door, “kindly move this crate out of my way.”
Christian complied, and the moment he’d done so, she was out the door and racing down the corridor toward the stairs.
He didn’t follow. He couldn’t, not just yet. He was a bit dazed still from her abrupt withdrawal, and he was also fully aroused. A man couldn’t go walking around the corridors of a ship in that sort of condition.
He sat down on the crate and leaned his back against the wall, rubbing a hand over his face. How the devil had it happened? he wondered. One minute, he’d been telling her the rules, and the next minute, he was breaking one of his own.
He never made love to unmarried women. Never. The risk a man took for that particular privilege was enormous, the possible consequences far too costly.
He shifted on the crate with a grimace, painfully aware that despite his cardinal rule, if Annabel had stayed one moment longer, he would have willingly taken the risks, and any possible consequences be damned.
Annabel raced up three flights of stairs, her boots pounding on each steel step in time with the thudding beat of her heart. Scarborough’s voice, sleepy and aroused, echoed through her head as she ran down the long corridor of A-deck to her stateroom. Once inside, she shut the door behind her, but she couldn’t shut out his words.
Don’t you want love?
Breathing hard, Annabel leaned back against the door, wondering what on earth was happening to her brains. Wasn’t Billy John enough stupidity for one lifetime? Wasn’t one man who could undress a woman with his eyes enough to make her see the truth? Her family always said she was stubborn, and she had to agree, because she just couldn’t seem to get one particular lesson through her thick skull.
Men like Scarborough were heartbreak in the making.
Annabel tapped the back of her head against the door three times, wishing she could knock some sense into herself.
Don’t you want love?
Love? She made a sound of derision. That man didn’t know a thing about love. Lovemaking, for sure, but that wasn’t the same thing.
Too bad she seemed to have such a hard time remembering the difference.
But, oh Lordy, when he’d talked about what would keep her warm on cold nights, just his words had been enough to heat her up. Yessiree, she’d started melting into a puddle right then and there. By the time he’d got to the kissing part, she was all achy like she had a fever, and her knees were so weak she could barely stand up. How she’d managed to come to her senses long enough to get out of there without being kissed, she still didn’t know.
When it came to sweet-talking a girl, the Duke of Scarborough even put Billy John Harding to shame, and that was saying something, for Billy John was the sweetest-talking scoundrel in the entire state of Mississippi.
She ground her teeth and hit the door again with the back of her head. She knew, none better, what it was like to fall hook, line, and sinker for a pair of blue eyes, a charming smile, and a line of sweet words. She also knew what it was like to be literally on your knees, sobbing, when a man who’d just taken your body walked out on you, and you were left with your pride stripped, your virtue gone, and your heart in pieces. She knew how it felt to be used and thrown away.
Annabel caught back a sob of frustration, pressing her fingers to her still-tingling lips, knowing just how close she’d come to betraying Bernard and their future together.
Enough to be faithful.
Her own words came back as if to mock her, words that she’d made sound so confident, but what she’d felt when Scarborough had tried to kiss her showed her words to be nothing more than bravado.
She took deep breaths, working to slow her pounding heart and regain her wits. She hadn’t kissed him, she reminded herself. She hadn’t done anything wrong. Yet.
She was getting married in four days, and the last thing she needed in the meantime was to test her resolve by being anywhere near the Duke of Scarborough. Annabel wondered dismally if she could just lock herself in her room until the wedding.
Chapter Six
Locking herself in her room was, unfortunately, not possible. She had engagements during the next few days that prevented such a course. The few hours she did manage to steal for herself only served to give her thoughts free rein, and those thoughts dwelled far too much on the man she wanted to avoid. She tried to spend as much time as possible with Bernard, but it seemed as if whenever she was with her fiancé, she found herself reassessing everything about him—his feelings for her, his opinions, even his chin. She began to notice how he avoided answering her more inconvenient questions and how he tended to make decisions for her without consulting her preferences, and these traits began to grate on her already raw nerves. Instead of being reassured by time spent with him, she found that being in his company only caused the whispers of doubt Scarborough had planted in her head to grow louder.
In looking for reassurance that she was doing the right thing, she found that being with her sister served her best, for Dinah was one of the main reasons she was doing all this, but despite that, and despite all Annabel’s other efforts to quell her doubts, they persisted. By the time she was twenty-four hours from the ceremony, those doubts had mushroomed into a serious case of cold feet. She could only hope that the prewedding tea would provide the reassurance she so desperately needed.
The wedding gifts had been brought out for the event and placed on velvet-swathed tables in a private dining room, and as she walked with Bernard amid the silver plate, china, and crystal they had been given, she tried to see herself using them. She sipped tea and ate cucumber sandwiches with the ladies of Knickerbocker society, expressing her appreciation to Virginia Vanderbilt for the lovely silver teapot and to Maimie Paget for the unusual screen of Chinese silk with what she hoped was countesslike dignity. As she listened to Bernard and his sisters talk of Rumsford Castle and the beautiful countryside of Northumberland, she strove to regard it as her home, too. As the afternoon progressed, she began to feel as if her efforts were succeeding and she was regaining her equilibrium. But then Maude mentioned the king’s visit to Rumsford Castle in the autumn.
Annabel stared at her future sister-in-law in horror, Scarborough’s words echoing through her brain.
The king would take one look at you, my delicious little lamb, and start licking his chops.
She felt a knot of dread forming in her stomach.
“Annabel? Annabel, are you all right?”
She gave a start, Millicent’s voice interrupting these awful contemplations. She turned to Bernard’s second sister, and though she tried to paste on a smile and act like everything was fine, she just couldn’t manage it. “I’m sorry, Millicent,” she choked out. “I was just . . . just . . .” Her voice trailed off, her mind suddenly blank.
For some reason, all three of Bernard’s sisters laughed. “Look at her, my dears,” Alice said. “She seems a bit nervous at the prospect of a visit by the king.”
I’ve no doubt he’d make Rumsford step aside.
Nervous? Annabel felt sick.
“There is no need to worry, Annabel,” Maude assured her, smiling. “A royal visit is always a bit intimidating, but you’ll do very well, I’m sure. The king adores American girls.”
Annabel set down her teacup with a clatter and jumped to her feet. She could feel all of them staring at her, including Bernard, but she couldn’t seem to make herself sit back down. “Forgive me,” she mumbled. “I’m feeling a little faint. I believe I need some fresh air.”
She raced for the door and down the corridor toward the stairs, cursing Scarborough and all his stupid talk about rules. If she had the jitters, it was his fault.
Despite her words to her future sisters-in-law about needing fresh air, she didn’t go for a walk on deck. Instead, she sought the dubious refuge of her room and spent a few minutes sitting on her balcony, breathing in the bracing sea air and keeping a sharp eye on the promenade deck below, ready to duck out of sight should she catch a glimps
e of anyone else she knew, especially Scarborough.
A short time later, feeling much more composed, she was able to return to the tea. Afterward, she strolled on deck with her mother, and though she saw Scarborough out of the corner of her eye walking with his sister, he did not attempt to engage her in conversation, and she was relieved. The last thing she needed was another hot look from that man’s blue eyes.
Knowing that, she decided not to risk having dinner in the main dining room, and she asked her mother to reserve a private one. She also asked Mama to make the appropriate excuses to Bernard and his sisters, explaining that she didn’t feel well and didn’t want them to see her when she wasn’t feeling her best. After all, she couldn’t tell any of them the truth. She couldn’t say she didn’t want to face Bernard this evening because she was having doubts about marrying him.
Henrietta complied with her requests, but as they dined that evening, Annabel could feel her mother’s thoughtful gaze on her, and Arthur’s, too. As a result, she spent the entire meal reminding herself that nothing had actually happened between her and Scarborough. There was no reason to have doubts now, yet she couldn’t shake them.
I think you were about to let me kiss you.
Every time she remembered those words, all the aching warmth she’d felt when he’d first spoken them came flooding back, and she found it impossible to sit placidly through the meal. She pushed haricots verts around on her plate with her fork, fiddled with her bread until was it was in bits, and swirled her charlotte russe into a cream and cookie mess. Though she knew her mother and Arthur were watching her, she couldn’t seem to stop wriggling in her chair. Before the meal was over, even Dinah noticed something was wrong.
“Sakes alive, Nan, what’s wrong with you?” she demanded, frowning at Annabel across the table. “You’ve been jumpy as a cat on a hot tin roof all night.”
“I’m fine, Dinah. Eat your dessert.”
“Has she been jumpy?” George, never the most observant of men, looked up in surprise from his charlotte russe. “What’s wrong, dear?”
Trouble at the Wedding Page 10
