Until You wds-3

by Джудит Макнот

  Now that he thought about it, not one female, including those he'd spent enough time with to start betrothal rumors circulating, had ever presumed to try to engage him in a discussion about love, let alone expect him to actually profess it.

  Charise Lancaster, however, was obviously not so practical or so sensible. She clearly expected her fiance to discuss it-at length, no doubt-and that was something Stephen intended to avoid for his sake and her own. Once her memory returned, she was going to hate him for all his deceptions, but she would hate him far more for humiliating her with false protestations of undying affection that he didn't feel.

  Two footmen stepped forward as he reached the drawing room and swept open the doors. His forehead furrowed in thought, Stephen walked past them and then over to the sideboard, where he poured sherry into a glass. Behind him, the doors closed silently, and he turned his attention to the most pressing problem at hand. Within the next minute or two, he had to invent some truly plausible explanation to give her for his blatantly unloverlike behavior the last night they'd talked, and for avoiding her since then. When he'd first gone upstairs to see her, he'd intended to apologize and soothe her with a few vague platitudes. Now that he had a better idea of her temperament, he had the uneasy conviction that she wouldn't settle for that.

  15

  Seething and hurrying, Sheridan clasped the front of the long lavender gown closed as she rushed down the hall from her bedchamber, past startled footmen, whose heads turned in unison as she passed, their mouths agape. Just when she thought she must surely be coming to the living areas of the house, she emerged onto a balcony with a white marble banister that continued downward in a wide, graceful spiral for two full stories before it ended in a vast entrance hall below.

  Snatching up the hem of her gown, she ran down the staircase, past framed portraits of what must have been sixteen generations of the arrogant earl's ancestors. She didn't have the slightest idea where he was or how he expected her to find him. The only thing she knew for certain was that in addition to all his other unpleasant traits, he'd spoken to her as if she were a piece of his chattel, and that he was undoubtedly relishing the prospect of hauling her downstairs like a sack of flour in front of his servants if she didn't meet his deadline.

  To deprive him of that pleasure, she was willing to go to almost any lengths. She could not imagine how she could have been in her right mind and still have agreed to bind herself for life to a man like him! As soon as her father arrived, she would break her engagement and ask him to take her home at once!

  She didn't like the earl, and she was quite certain she wouldn't have anything in common with his mama either. According to the chambermaid, this gown belonged to the earl's mother. It was appalling to imagine an elderly dowager such as his mother, or any other respectable female for that matter, prancing around at balls or entertaining visitors in a flimsy, frivolous lavender gown with nothing but silver ribbons to hold the bodice together or keep the entire front from coming open. She was so angry and so absorbed in her own woes that she didn't give even a passing notice to the splendor of the great hall with its four immense chandeliers, glittering like giant tiers of brilliant diamonds, or to the exquisite frescoes on the walls and intricate plasterwork on the ceiling.

  As she neared the bottom step, she saw an elderly man in a black suit and white shirt hurry into a room that opened off the main hall on the left. "You rang, my lord?" she heard him say in the doorway. A moment later, he backed out, bowing reverently, and closed the doors. "Excuse me-" Sherry began awkwardly, tripping on the hem of her gown and reaching for the wall to steady herself.

  He turned, saw her, and his body froze. At the same time all his facial features seemed to twist and quiver in some sort of palsied shock.

  "I'm perfectly all right," Sheridan hastily reassured him as she righted herself and jerked the hem from beneath her left foot. Noting that he still looked a little queer, Sheridan held out her hand to him and said, "Dr. Whitticomb said I'm well enough to come downstairs. We haven't met, but I am Charise… um… Lancaster," she remembered after an awkward pause. He raised his hand toward hers, and since he seemed uncertain about what to do next, she took his hand in hers, and prompted with a gentle smile, "And you are-?"

  "Hodgkin," he said, sounding as if he had a blockage in his throat. Then he cleared it and said again, "Hodgkin."

  "I am happy to meet you, Mr. Hodgkin."

  "No, miss, just 'Hodgkin.' "

  "I couldn't possibly address you by your surname alone. It's disrespectful," Sheridan said patiently.

  "It's required here," he said, looking harassed.

  Indignation made Sheridan's left hand clench on the front of her gown. "How very like that arrogant beast to deny an older man the dignity of being addressed as 'mister!' "

  His features contorted again, and he seemed to stretch his neck as if gasping for air. "I'm sure I don't know whom you might be referring to, miss."

  "I am referring to…" She had to think to remember the maid's answer when Sheridan had asked her the earl's name. It had seemed the woman had recited an entire litany of names, but his family name had been… Westmoreland! That was it. "I am referring to Westmoreland!" she said, refusing to dignify his name with his own title. "Someone should have taken a stick to his backside and taught him common courtesy."

  On the balcony above, a footman who'd been flirting with a passing chambermaid twisted around and gaped at the entrance hall, while the maid banged against his side in her eagerness to lean over the banister for a better view. A few yards from Sheridan, four footmen who had been filing decorously into the dining room carrying platters suddenly crashed into each other because the lead footman had stopped dead in his tracks. Another white-haired man, younger than Hodgkin but dressed exactly like him, materialized from the dining room, scowling ferociously as the lid of a silver chafing dish hit the marble floor with a crash and rolled into his leg. "Who is responsible for-" he demanded, then he, too, looked at Sheridan and seemed to momentarily lose control of his expression as his gaze ran over her hair, her gown, and her bare toes.

  Ignoring the commotion around her, Sheridan smiled at Hodgkin and said gently, "It's never too late, you know, for most of us to see the error of our ways if they're pointed out to us. I shall mention to the earl at an appropriate moment that he ought properly to address a man of your age as 'Mr. Hodgkin.' I could suggest that he put himself in your position and imagine himself at your age…"

  She stopped in puzzlement as the elderly man's white brows shot up into his hairline and his faded eyes seemed to pop out of their sockets. Anger with the earl had overruled her sense for those moments, but Sheridan finally realized that the poor man was obviously afraid of losing his position if she interfered. "That was foolish of me, Mr. Hodgkin," she said meekly. "I won't say anything about this, I promise."

  On the balcony above and in the hall below, servants exhaled a collective sigh of relief that was abruptly cut off as Hodgkin opened the doors to the drawing room and they heard the American girl say to the master in a haughty, unservile tone, "You rang, my lord?"

  Stephen whirled around in surprise at her choice of words and then stopped dead. Choking back a laugh that was part appalled and part admiring, he stared at her as she stood before him, with her pert nose in the air and her gray eyes sparking like large twin flints. In sharp contrast to the stony hauteur of her stance and expression, she was clad in a soft, billowing peignoir made of voluminous lavender silk panels that draped off both her shoulders, leaving them beguilingly bare. She was clutching the front closed, which lifted the hem just high enough off the floor to expose her bare toes, and her titian hair, still damp at the ends, was spilling over her back and breasts as if she were a Botticelli nude.

  The pale lavender color should have clashed with her hair, and it did, but her creamy skin was so fair that the overall effect was somehow more dramatic than actually displeasing. It was, in fact, so startlingly effective that it took him a momen
t to realize that she'd not deliberately selected Helene's peignoir out of some defiant desire to flaunt custom or annoy him, but because she didn't have anything else to wear. He had forgotten that her trunks had sailed with her ship, but if that ugly brown cloak she'd been wearing was indicative of her preference in clothing, he preferred to see her in Helene's peignoir. The servants wouldn't share his liberal view, of course, and he made a mental note to remedy her apparel problem first thing in the morning. For now, there was nothing he could do except be grateful that the peignoir actually covered enough of her to verge on decency.

  Biting back an admiring smile, he watched her struggle to maintain her frosty facade in the face of his silent scrutiny, and he marvelled that she could convey so many things without moving or speaking. She was innocence on the brink of womanhood, outrageous daring untempered by wisdom or hampered by caution. A vision of that gleaming hair of hers spilling over his chest flashed through his mind, and Stephen abruptly shook it off just as she broke the silence: "Have you finished staring at me?"

  "I was admiring you, actually."

  Sheridan had come downstairs fully prepared for a confrontation, longing for it, in fact, and she'd already suffered one setback when he looked at her with that peculiarly flattering expression in his bold blue eyes; his smiling compliment was the second. Reminding herself that he was a coldhearted, dictatorial beast whom she was not going to marry, no matter how he looked at her or how sweetly he spoke, she said, "I presume you had some reason for summoning me into your august presence, your worship?"

  To her surprise he didn't rise to her barbs. In fact, he looked rather amused as he said with a slight bow, "As a matter of fact, I had several reasons."

  "And they are?" she inquired stonily.

  "First of all," Stephen said, "I wanted to apologize."

  "Really?" she said with a shrug. "For what?"

  Stephen lost the battle to suppress his smile. She had spirit, you had to give her that. A great deal of spirit… and a great deal of pride. He couldn't think of a man, let alone a woman, who'd dare to face him down and verbally bait him as she was doing. "For the abrupt way I ended our conversation the other night, and for not coming up to see you since then."

  "I accept your apology. Now, may I go upstairs?"

  "No," Stephen said, suddenly wishing she had a little less courage. "I need… no, want… to explain why I did that."

  She gave him a scornful look. "I'd like to see you try."

  Courage was an admirable trait in a man. In a woman, he decided, it was a pain in the ass. "I am trying," he warned.

  Now that he'd lost a little of his composure, Sheridan felt much better. "Go ahead," she invited. "I'm listening."

  "Will you sit down?"

  "I might. It all depends upon what you have to say."

  His brows snapped together and his eyes narrowed, she noticed, but his voice was carefully controlled as he began his explanation. "The other night, you seemed to be aware that I… that things between us weren't… all that you'd expect from a fiance."

  Sheridan acknowledged the truth of that with a slight, regal inclination of her head that indicated nothing more than mild interest.

  "There's an explanation for that," Stephen said, disconcerted by her demeanor. He gave her the only reason he'd been able to invent that seemed logical and acceptable. "The last time we were together, we quarrelled. I didn't think about our quarrel while you were ill, but when you began to recover the other night, I found it was still on my mind. That is why I may have seemed…"

  "Cold and uncaring?" she provided, but with more puzzlement and hurt than real anger in her voice.

  "Exactly," Stephen agreed. She sat down then, and he breathed an inner sigh of relief that the skirmish and lies were over, but his relief was short-lived.

  "What did we quarrel about?"

  He should have known that a defiant American redhead with an unpredictable disposition and no regard for noble titles or respect for dress codes would insist on prolonging a disagreement, instead of accepting his apology and politely letting the matter drop. "We quarrelled about your disposition," Stephen countered smoothly.

  Puzzled gray eyes gazed straight into his. "My disposition? What was wrong with it?"

  "I found it… quarrelsome."

  "I see."

  Stephen could almost hear her wondering if he was so small-minded that he'd continue to harbor a grudge over a quarrel when she'd been so sick. She looked down at her hands folded neatly in her lap, as if she suddenly couldn't face him, and asked in a disappointed, hesitant tone, "Am I a shrew, then?"

  Stephen gazed at her bowed head and drooping shoulders, and he felt a resurgence of the peculiar tenderness she seemed to evoke in him at unexpected times. "I wouldn't say that exactly," he replied with a reluctant smile in his voice.

  "I have noticed," she admitted meekly, "that my disposition has been a little-uncertain-these past few days."

  Whitticomb had said he found her utterly delightful, and Stephen had the feeling that was a vast understatement. "That's completely understandable in these circumstances."

  She lifted her head, her eyes searching his, as if she, too, were trying to reassess him. "Would you tell me exactly what we quarrelled about the last time we were together?"

  Trapped, Stephen turned toward the drinks tray and reached for the crystal decanter of sherry, thinking quickly for an answer that would soothe and placate her. "I thought you paid too much notice to another man," he said on a stroke of inspiration. "I was jealous." Jealousy was an emotion that he'd never experienced in his life, but women were inevitably pleased when they could evoke it in a man. He glanced over his shoulder and was relieved to discover that in that one respect, Charise Lancaster was like all her sisters, because she looked amused and flattered. Hiding his smile, he poured sherry into a small crystal goblet. When he turned to hand it to her she was still looking at her hands. "Sherry?" he asked.

  Sheridan's head snapped up, an inexplicable surge of delight in her heart. "Yes?"

  He held the goblet toward her and she looked at him expectantly but not at the glass. "Would you like some wine?" Stephen clarified.

  "No, thank you."

  He put the glass on the table. "I thought you said yes."

  She shook her head. "I thought you were talking to me and-Sherry!-" she exclaimed, surging to her feet, her face positively radiant. "I thought it was me. I mean, it is me. I mean, it must be what I was called, what-"

  "I understand," Stephen said gently, experiencing a sense of relief that was nearly as strong as hers. They stood within arm's reach, smiling at each other, sharing a moment of triumph that seemed to bind them together and send their thoughts in similar directions. Stephen suddenly understood how Burleton could have been "madly in love" with her, as Hodgkin had claimed. As Sherry looked into his smiling blue eyes, she saw a warmth and charm that made her understand why she might have pledged herself to him. Odd phrases began to flit through the blankness of her memory, suggesting what ought to happen next…

  The baron captured her hand and pressed it to his lips as he pledged his eternal devotion. "You are my one and only love…"

  The prince took her in his strong embrace and clasped her to his heart. "If I had a hundred kingdoms, I would trade them all for you, my dearest love. I was nothing, until you…"

  The earl was so overwhelmed by her beauty that he lost control and kissed her cheek. "Forgive me, but I cannot help myself! I adore you!"

  Stephen saw the soft invitation in her eyes, and in that unguarded moment of complete accord, it seemed right, somehow, to respond. Tipping her chin up, he touched his lips to hers and felt the gasp of her indrawn breath at the same time her body seemed to tense. Puzzled by her rather extreme reaction, he lifted his head and waited for what seemed a long time for her to open her eyes. When her long lashes finally fluttered up, she looked confused and expectant and, yes, even a little disappointed. "Is something amiss?" he asked cautiously.

&n
bsp; "No, not at all," she said politely, but it seemed as if the opposite were true.

  Stephen looked at her in waiting silence, a tactic that normally prompted others to continue speaking, and which was predictably successful on his "fiancee."

  "It is only that I seemed to expect something different," she explained.

  Telling himself that he was merely trying to help her jog her memory, he said, "What was it that you expected?"

  She shook her head, her smooth brow furrowed, her eyes never leaving his. "I don't know."

  Her hesitant words and steady gaze only confirmed what he already suspected, which was that her real fiance had evidently given freer rein to his passion. As Stephen gazed into those inviting silvery eyes, he abruptly decided that he was practically obligated to live up to her memory of Burleton. His conscience shouted that he had another, selfish reason for what he was about to do, but Stephen ignored it. He had, after all, promised Whitticomb that he would make her feel safe and cherished. "Perhaps you were expecting-" he said softly as he slid his arm around her waist and touched his lips to her ear, "something more like this."

  His warm breath in her ear sent shivers up Sheridan's spine, and she turned her face away from the cause, which brought her lips into instant contact with his. Stephen had intended to kiss her as Burleton might have done, but when her soft lips parted on a shaky breath, his intentions slipped from his mind.

  Sheridan knew the moment his arm tightened on her waist and his lips began to move insistently against hers that she couldn't have been expecting this… not the stormy rush of sensation that made her gasp and cling tighter to him, nor the compulsion to yield her mouth to his searching tongue, nor the frantic beating of her heart when his fingers shoved into the hair at her nape, holding her mouth tighter to his while her body seemed to want to meet and forge into his.