To do so now seemed to be tempting fate, but Mama had been adamant. Amelia must repair her reputation as much as possible. Amelia wasn’t at all certain that marriage, even after such a long period of time, would help her sisters’ plight. However, Mama insisted that to be seen on the arm of her newly betrothed would lend credence to her denial of any misconduct so long ago. She must be seen, but only with Mr. Burke, and must under no circumstances dance or flaunt herself until she was properly married.
Somehow, Amelia had not believed this scheme would work and now she was hiding from the man who was supposed to be her salvation.
Earlier in the evening, after dinner, Papa had introduced her to Mr. Burke, who had seemed rather nice on first acquaintance. A gentleman of one and thirty, not overly tall, with curly brown hair and eyes a shade darker, a full-lipped mouth, and a not-so-prominent chin, Mr. Burke could not be called unhandsome. He was, however, much different from Jonathan’s dark good looks. Mr. Burke had greeted her pleasantly, talked of generally approved topics, like the weather and boating, of which he seemed extraordinarily fond, then asked to escort her around the room.
Their conversation had continued in the general vein until they had reached the far end of the room, where no one could hear their lowered remarks.
“I must say, Miss Burrowes, your father’s letter putting forward his desire for our nuptials took me by surprise, but not nearly as much as the amount he has proposed for your dowry.” He’d smiled, revealing white, predatory teeth. “Much more than my uncle had given me to believe. I understand it is imperative for you to marry.” His eyes darkened and Amelia repressed a shudder at the hunger in them. “I believe I shall enjoy making the match very much.”
A sickening drop in her stomach made her steps falter. Every gentleman who had been interested in marrying her over the years had expressed more or less similar sentiments. She’d been lucky that none of the other attempts had born fruit, for those suitors had, by and large, given her the jim-jams when she’d thought about actually marrying them. They would have no affection for her whatsoever, simply lust for her body and for her father’s bank account. She supposed those would be the only reasons anyone would desire to marry a fallen woman, still it hurt to think her husband must be one so mercenary.
This time, however, something in Mr. Burke’s demeanor had so incensed her that she had made some slight excuse to be taken back to her mother. Mama had not been pleased, but Amelia did not care. If not for the dire consequences for her sisters, she’d refuse Mr. Burke and all of his ilk out of hand and request to be taken home to Benington immediately. As she could not do that, she had resorted to hiding once they had been announced at Lady Hamilton’s. The idea of being seen with the predatory Burke turned her stomach, although she likely must do so at least once tonight or face Mama’s wrath.
She’d no idea how long she’d been in the library, but she suspected Mama would send Papa, or one of her brothers who had turned out tonight, to find her. She hoped it might be her youngest brother, Tim, who she could possibly wheedle into remaining with her instead of doing his duty and dragging her back to the ballroom.
Her reverie was broken by the sudden opening of the library door.
“There you are, my dear.”
Discovered, drat it. Again, Amelia tightened her grip on the arms of the chair.
“I have been looking for you everywhere.” Mr. Burke smiled at her as he entered the library and shut the door. The hollow thud sounded like a death knell. “What are you doing in here? I think this is hardly the time to try and improve your mind.” He started toward her, his smile turning into a leer. “We might, however, take this opportunity together alone to become… better acquainted.”
Bounding out of the chair as though shot from a cannon, Amelia landed on her feet and backed toward the fireplace. “I do not think that is wise, Mr. Burke. Our betrothal is supposed to help repair my reputation. If we are to become better acquainted, it must be done properly, in full view of my parents and Lady Hamilton’s guests.” She must get them out of this place before he could damage her reputation even more or make it impossible for her to refuse his suit, which she now desperately wished to do.
“Come, come, Miss Burrowes. Or should I say, Amelia? Being alone with your intended cannot matter so much in the eyes of the ton.” Pacing slowly toward her, Mr. Burke held out his hand. “In your case, they may well assume we have been intimately acquainted as soon as the betrothal is announced.” He leered at her. “Why not make their suspicions correct?”
Completely outraged, Amelia stopped backing away. How dare he assume she would do such a thing? Even if her reputation was soiled, to think she would simply submit to his crude suggestion—and in her hostess’s library of all places—could not be born. The devil flew into her and she stalked toward him. “I will not stand here and be so insulted, Mr. Burke. I may not have the sterling reputation of the other young ladies of the ton, but common decency demands that you treat me with some respect.”
To her dismay, her outburst, rather than acting as a deterrent, seemed to inflame his ardor. His eyes widened, and he grinned as he continued toward her. “Ah, you do have spirit. I suspected as much. One does not come by a reputation such as yours without some spark of passion.” He licked his lips. “This arrangement may prove to be a better bargain than I could have hoped for.”
Dear Lord, she needed to get out of this room before he ruined her for once and all. Dodging around the chair, she made a break for the door, but he grabbed her wrist and swung her around to face him.
“What’s your hurry, my dear?” He showed his teeth again, making him look just like the wolf in the Grimm brothers’ story.
“Let me go, sir.” Amelia twisted her wrist, trying to break his hold, but he was strong. She’d likely have a bruise there tomorrow.
“Not without some token of your affection, surely? We must learn to get along amiably, mustn’t we?” Sliding his arm around her shoulders, he pulled her against him until it seemed every inch of her touched his body. “Much better, don’t you think?”
“I do not, Mr. Burke.” Well, this would teach him. She raised her foot and stamped hard on his. “Ouch.” Her soft kid slippers were no match for his leather dancing pumps. Now the arch of her foot ached.
“A veritable spitfire, aren’t you?” His grin widened. “Let’s see if that all that passion can be redirected.” He darted his head down toward her, seeking her lips.
“No.” Twisting her head from side to side, she tried desperately to avoid his mouth. “Mr. Burke, please. Stop.” She got her hands up between them and gave a mighty push, but the effort had no effect on him whatsoever.
It did, however, distract her from evading his determined efforts to kiss her, and he sank his mouth onto hers with a triumphant cry.
Amelia went still, hoping not to encourage him. If she held herself aloof, did not respond at all, perhaps he’d think her unfeeling. God knew she didn’t want his kisses, though he was remarkably gentle once he settled into it. Ceasing to struggle, she forced herself to relax, go limp in his arms, show that the kiss meant nothing to her whatsoever.
Unfortunately, that only seemed to encourage him. He ran his tongue along the seam of her mouth, pushing insistently, trying to gain entry. Oh, absolutely not. Once again she pushed against his chest, digging her palms into his jacket and trying frantically to back away.
The click of the library door opening froze Amelia as if she were a Greek statue.
“Kate? Are you in here?”
The man’s voice spurred her to desperate measures. The one thing she couldn’t afford was to be compromised by Mr. Burke. Then she’d be forced to marry him or become even more of an outcast in Society than she was presently. Praying for strength, she hauled back her hand and thumped him on his ear.
He grunted and released her.
Amelia sprang backward, her hands covering her mouth, scrubbing at her lips. Turning her gaze toward the door, she locked eyes wit
h the startled gray-eyed gaze of a very tall, very handsome stranger.
The man’s eyebrows had shot straight up, but now returned to normal. His lips drew into a disapproving pucker. “Well, you certainly are not Kate.”
CHAPTER TWO
Nathan Locke, Viscount Ainsley, stared at the couple in dismay and cursed beneath his breath. He’d come in search of his sister, Katherine, who had managed to avoid him for most of the evening after he’d collected the wager he’d won with her and made her dance with his friend, Lord Haversham, whom she disliked severely. Now, instead of his recalcitrant charge, he’d stumbled onto some ill-conceived tryst.
The gentleman looked intolerably smug, a veritable cat who’d eaten a very tasty canary. Nathan could see why with one look at his fetching partner. An unusually tall woman in a becoming gown of deep violet, with chestnut hair curled prettily on her head that gleamed in the candles’ glow. A handsome face, round with a generous mouth that the gentleman appeared to have been taking advantage of, to judge by the deepening pink of the lady’s cheeks.
Common sense told him he’d interrupted a sweet interlude between an affectionate couple. However, something in the back of his mind niggled at him about them. Still, it truly was none of his affair.
“If you will pardon us, my lord,” the gentleman stepped toward the lady and tried to take her arm, though she shrugged him off. “You have interrupted us at a tender moment. The lady has just consented to be my wife.”
Definitely bad timing on Nathan’s part. “Your pardon then, Mr…?”
“Burke, my lord. Mr. Lawrence Burke of Derbyshire.”
“Mr. Burke.” Nathan bowed solemnly. “My felicitations to you and Miss—”
Sight of the lady’s wide eyes and a slight shake of her head gave him a new meaning for the scene. In Nathan’s experience young ladies sometimes sought to entrap a gentleman into marriage by being discovered with the man in question in a compromising position. From the lady’s subtle hints, he might be persuaded that in this case the gentleman might be compromising her for the same reason.
“Miss Burrowes, my lord.” Mr. Burke smiled broadly while the lady in question glanced about as though searching for a hole to drop into.
The name brought Nathan up short and he peered more closely at the woman. “Miss Amelia Burrowes?”
Her head came up and their gazes met. She swallowed hard. “Lord Ainsley?”
“Yes. I wonder you remember me. It has been ten years, hasn’t it?” A shadow from his past rippled over Ainsley’s soul, calling to mind a moonlit garden and a lingering kiss long ago.
“Eleven, my lord. We met at Lady Somerville’s my first Season out.” She’d taken her hands from in front of her face and now twisted them before her.
“Just so.” He remembered that introduction to the most beautiful woman of the Season distinctly. Then he frowned. “It is not Lady Carrington? I had heard—”
“No, my lord. I never married him.” She shook her head, her face stark white.
Nathan blinked. She’d never married?
“Miss Burrowes and I were about to announce—” Burke reached for the lady’s arm, but she stepped quickly toward Nathan instead.
“May I beg an old acquaintance to return me to my mother?” Her blue eyes pled eloquently for him to agree to the request. “With so much excitement, being here at a ball after all these years, I seem to have a sudden headache.”
“I will be happy to escort you, Am—”
“Of course, my dear,” Nathan smoothly slid her arm into the crook of his as he cut Burke off before he could claim intimacy with the woman by calling her by her first name. He had the feeling that Miss Burrowes had not yet bestowed that privilege on Mr. Burke. “I would be delighted.” Glaring directly at Burke, whose pop eyes made him seem ready to have a fit of apoplexy, Nathan steered her toward the door. “I am completely at your service.”
Paying the other gentleman no mind, Nathan escorted Miss Burrowes from the library, her arm trembling beneath his hand. “Do you indeed wish to go to your mother?” he asked her in hushed tones.
“No, I do not,” she whispered back. “But neither do I wish to continue in Mr. Burke’s company.”
That was an easy request to manage. “Mr. Burke.” Nathan put on his most concerned face, brows lowered, jaw set. “Miss Burrowes feels a bit faint. I will take her outside for a breath of air. Please find a footman and get a glass of lemonade brought to wherever Mrs. Burrowes is currently. We will meet you there.”
Before the man could make a protest, Nathan had steered his charge down the corridor toward a veranda that overlooked the rear garden. “I believe he will give us a few moments at least before returning to search for us.” He opened the French windows and the lady shot outside, breathing deeply, as though she had been holding her breath. Indeed, she looked incredibly pale in the moonlight. “Miss Burrowes, are you quite well?”
She paused, then composed herself. “Yes, I am well. It’s only that I have not been out in Society for such a long time, I am quite overwhelmed by it all.” Another long pause in which she seemed to be contemplating the wisdom of saying more. “Especially by Mr. Burke’s attentions.”
“Are you indeed betrothed to him?” Something in Nathan froze, hanging on her next words as if nothing else in the world mattered.
“Not exactly, no.”
The flicker of hope deep within him burst back into life. “Not exactly?”
“My parents are arranging the marriage. I have only just met Mr. Burke this evening at dinner. We are supposed to take the opportunity of the ball to become better acquainted.” Even the faintness of the moonlight couldn’t disguise her distaste at the idea.
“And I interrupted his attempt to do so?” Not as bad as he’d feared, but still not behavior becoming a gentleman. “I am sorry if I have impeded his suit in any way.”
“Do not be, my lord.” Her hand on his wrist startled him, both in its very presence there and in the warmth it appeared to generate within him. “As I have said, the match was brought about by my parents.” The liquid blue of her eyes flashed like quicksilver. “I am submitting to it because, as you well know, no one else has been willing to have me. Not one in ten years.”
“Why not?”
She jerked her head back, as though he’d shocked her. “What do you mean, ‘Why not?’ You must know the story. Everyone else in the ton does.”
“Except, apparently, for me. My father wrote to me in Italy that you had become betrothed to Lord Carrington. I assumed you had married him. I didn’t find out until just now that you did not.” That piece of information still hadn’t registered. “Can you tell me why you didn’t marry him?”
“He died.”
Nathan flinched at the unfeeling tone of her voice. But of course, her grief must be long in the past.
Her gaze on his face didn’t falter.
“May I extend my very belated condolences on his loss?”
“Thank you.” With a choked sigh, she hurried down the veranda steps out into the garden, to a bench where she sat, her back almost to him.
He followed, not too closely. Give her time to compose herself. “You must have loved him very much.”
“So all the gossips in Society say, at least.”
He cocked his head. “I beg your pardon?”
Shaking her head, she straightened, her breasts jutting out proudly. “Never mind, my lord. It is old news in any case. And I do thank you for your concern.” She took a breath, then hesitantly stole a glance at him. “I confess I did wonder what happened to you. After our last encounter in the garden.”
“Here in this garden, as I recall.” Nathan glanced over at a cherry tree just coming into bud. “Under that very tree, if I remember correctly.”
“You do.”
The admission sent a thrill through him, though why he could not fathom. “As to what happened to me, almost the next day I was sent off on my Grand Tour, although with the war raging with France at that
time, the tour was not quite as grand as it had been in times before. Still, I was gone for two years, mostly in Italy, although I spent some time in Switzerland, Prussia, and Greece.”
“It must have been a marvelous experience.” Her voice, carefully neutral, made him suddenly quite aware how his disappearance might have seemed to her.
“I would have written to you, but I truly had no time before I left for Portsmouth. Then I was on a ship bound for Italy.” Why did he feel the need to explain? He hadn’t thought of that encounter with Miss Burrowes for years, although he had thought about her quite a lot on board the ship. His animosity toward his father for sending him off so quickly—he’d not been allowed to tell her goodbye, even though he had begged to do so—had lasted for some time as well.
“I understand. I did not pine over it, although I did wonder why you’d sent no word.” She shrugged. “Not too long after you left, I was introduced to Lord Carrington, and we came to an understanding quite quickly.”
A flame of jealousy raised its head in Nathan’s chest. He squelched it almost as soon as it appeared. What good to be jealous of a dead man? And why, for God’s sake, be envious at all of a woman he’d not seen for over a decade? Still, the thought of Carrington with her was distasteful to say the least. He rose. “Perhaps we have stayed away too long. I would not wish to ruin your reputation, Miss Burrowes, when I was trying to save it.”
At that she laughed until she wept, sitting on the bench with her eyes streaming.
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