“Here. I believe this is what you require—what this charade has been about. Take it and get out. You’ve certainly worked for it. Let us say I have been paid in full.”
He had a way of speaking that was chilling in its effectiveness. He turned to go, but, utterly bewildered and unable to understand what had happened to turn him into this cold, dispassionate stranger, Louisa swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stood up, clutching the sheet to her throat with shaking fingers. “Alistair—wait. Please tell me what is wrong? What have I done?”
Alistair turned back to her and his gaze passed over her with cold contempt before travelling to the bed. He did not reply at once.
Louisa followed the direction of his gaze, her stomach sinking when she saw the tell-tale bloodied sheet, hidden until then by their bodies and the night. Mutely she stared at him—a figure made of porcelain, still and white—her eyes glazed. His blue eyes pierced hers, and she realised that nothing she could say would counteract the truth that she had been discovered. Too late, she saw the reason why she had roused his temper to a pitch she could never have imagined. There was something close to murder in his blazing eyes.
“I had not expected to be the first with you. Why did you not tell me you were a virgin?” he demanded harshly, his handsome features as hard and forbidding as a granite sculpture, his eyes as brittle as glass, anger uncoiling from his stomach and surging through him with all the savagery of a man betrayed—deceived—which was something Alistair’s implacable will would never allow him to forgive.
Louisa’s cheeks flamed at the scathing tone of his voice, failing to understand why her being a virgin should have created so much wrath in him, unable to see, as yet, that in her ignorance and innocence she had blundered into an irretrievable, appalling error.
“I—I—”
“Had I known, I would not have touched you.”
“But why?” she cried, her voice a mixture of pain and despair. “Why does it matter to you so much?”
“I have my reasons. I do not know what game you think you’re playing, lady, but I am not in the habit of deflowering virgins. Your cover is broken, Miss Divine—or is it something else? I really have no idea who you are.”
“Perhaps it would be better if we kept it that way,” Louisa whispered, her voice trembling with emotion. “I feel you would be none too pleased with my identity.”
“You are right. Under the circumstances it is best I know nothing about you,” he said, his face hardening into an expressionless mask, his eyes probing hers like dagger thrusts. “You are a schemer and a liar. Because of who I am, I have become accustomed to being pursued by socialites, and it would not be the first time a woman has insinuated herself into my bed with marriage as her object—and if you think I feel flattered that you gave me that which you have clearly denied Mr Fraser, then you are mistaken.”
His eyes glittered with a fire that burned her raw, his words flicking over her like a whiplash. Louisa’s eyes filled with helpless tears of misery. She wanted to shout that James was her brother, but, reluctant to reveal her identity in case her shameless conduct became known and ruined her reputation beyond redemption, she felt unable to discuss her present circumstances with Alistair. After all, he was still a stranger to her—and she to him—despite their previous intimacy.
“I realise what you must think, but it is not as it seems. You are right. I have not told you the truth,” she said, her voice pitched very low.
“That is something I have worked out for myself.”
“Whilst I have not exactly lied to you, I have been less than honest,” she said, moving towards him.
“Stay where you are,” he ordered harshly. “I have no wish to listen to more of your lies. Last night you told me you were not a whore—but I have to say you gave a fair imitation of one. I find it hard to believe the alluring temptress who offered herself to me so willingly was a virgin. If it is true that you came to me solely to procure Mr Fraser’s IOU, then you must think a great deal of him to throw away your virtue with a total stranger to retrieve it.
“No doubt you can justify your reasons to yourself, but your conduct tells me all I need to know about your moral standards, Miss Divine. However, I feel I must congratulate you,” he said, his eyes flicking over her with cynical contempt. “With your face and body—not forgetting your other irresistible charms—you have an extremely promising career as a whore ahead of you.”
Louisa gasped, her cheeks burning as she felt anger flare up inside her caused by his insult, his injustice. How could he be so cruel? How could he say these things to her? Her anger gave way to uncontrollable wrath.
“How dare you?” she flared. “How dare you hand down judgements on me when your own behaviour is highly reprehensible? You are hardly a person of irreproachable character, Lord Dunstan,” she accused, reverting to her former address.
“Oh, I do dare,” he replied, his voice scathing, mocking, his face white with fury, his cold eyes impaling hers. “A man may do and say anything he pleases with goods he has purchased. You gave me no indication that you were a proper young lady who expected the highest standards of gentlemanly behaviour from me. Any decent, well-bred young woman would have endured hell-fire and damnation rather than do what you have just done. I dare say that, unless you can persuade Fraser to marry you and make an honest woman of you, you will go down the same sordid road as countless women before you.”
“The kind of women whose company you enjoy so much,” retorted Louisa with heavy sarcasm.
“If you like,” he replied coldly, “but I do not feel I have to justify what I do to you. Now I have initiated you in the skills of lovemaking, you should be well qualified to follow that age-old profession—and I am certain you will do very well by it. Now get dressed while I order the carriage to take you home. I want you out of my house and out of my life.”
Drowning in an agony of shame and humiliation, Louisa watched him go. The desolation of his sudden departure, and the manner of it, overwhelmed her. A sob rose from the pit of her stomach to her throat and she threw herself onto the bed, burying her face in the pillows as she wept in silent misery, feeling the full force—the reality—of what she had done. She felt cheap and soiled, and Alistair had been right. She deserved his condemnation. She had behaved no better than a whore.
In the silent, helpless misery of despair, she got up from the bed, reproaching herself, hating herself, wondering what could have possessed her, what she could have been thinking of to allow herself to submit to this mindless, wicked weakness. Why, oh, why, had she not listened to Timothy? He had warned her how she would feel afterwards—of the terrible guilt and shame that would be like demons in her life and never leave her—and that it would be impossible to carry on as though nothing had happened. After what she had done, to escape her terrible shame, she wanted to wither away and die.
Hot tears of physical and emotional suffering coursed their way down her cheeks as she dressed hurriedly and, clutching the object of her misery, James’s IOU in her hand, blindly she ran from the room and the house, glad that Lord Dunstan was nowhere to be seen, for at that moment she had no wish to see him ever again.
From a window in the upper part of the house Alistair watched Louisa, pale and stricken, climb into the carriage and drive away. Only then did he turn and stare at the empty room, in the house which had been alive with her presence until he had ordered her to leave.
When he’d woken and seen her lying in the crook of his arm, her body glowing and warm from their lovemaking, he had looked at her, watching as she slept, thinking how heartbreakingly lovely she was—a picture of alluring innocence and intoxicating sensuality. Her slender body had lain stretched across the bed like a beautiful white snow leopard, and he had wanted her with a fierceness that took his breath away. She was beautiful, dignified and ladylike in her demeanour, but beneath the façade of serenity and gentleness she was sensual and provocative. When he had made love to her they had been sexually attune
d to each other and she had satisfied him completely, in a way no other woman had before—not even Marianne.
But on seeing the tell-tale stain—stark evidence of her youth, her innocence—instinctively, with his senses reeling, he’d known she was not what she seemed and that she spelled trouble to his well-ordered life. He would have none of that. After his turbulent marriage to Marianne he had reconciled himself to a life of transient affairs, which satisfied and relieved his body and left his emotions intact, but he suspected that this one occasion would prove unforgettable.
All manner of thoughts raced through his mind—suspicions and questions which would have to remain unanswered. Had retrieving Fraser’s IOU been the sole purpose of her agreeing to spend one night of love with him? Or was she some shallow little rich girl looking for excitement? No well-bred young lady, who would normally be seen exclusively among the company of the social élite, would have been seen dead attending one of Lady Bricknell’s parties, and nor would she have risked her reputation by indulging in such wanton behaviour that would damage any chance she might have of making a decent marriage.
Was she an impoverished but well-bred young woman out to make a decent marriage? And would her outraged father come hammering on his door, demanding he make amends for compromising his daughter? To be damned, he thought angrily, summoning one of the servants to have the carriage brought to take him to his club. He’d have none of it.
Yet try as he might, he could not banish Louisa from his mind so easily. She had a way of getting under his skin and insinuating herself into his mind that troubled him. She was physically appealing, with a face and body that drugged his mind, but she was also appealing in other ways, with an intelligent sharpness of mind and a clever wit that he admired, making her pleasant company and interesting to be with. It puzzled him that it should make him angry that she could be bought so cheaply, and his anger was exacerbated by a kind of rage that she should demean herself, and by an inexplicable disappointment.
With his experience, he should have known as soon as he’d begun making love to her that she was a virgin. But it had been a long time since he had made love to a woman, and when she had writhed beneath him like a full-blown temptress, driving him on with an uncontrollable force, he had failed to notice any pain and discomfort she might have been feeling.
He recalled the dignity with which she had borne his insults, his rage. It had touched him deeply, almost weakening his resolve not to become involved with a woman in the way he had been with Marianne in the early days of their marriage—and why, he asked himself, did the feelings Louisa had evoked echo his feelings about his wife, feelings which had been buried deep for so long? There had also been a moment when the compulsion to comfort and protect, to hold her, had been so strong that he’d had to keep his hands rigidly in control lest they stray of their own accord.
When she had come to him he had wanted nothing more than to make her his mistress and to keep her in style, until he had discovered that she was unsullied, untouched by any other man, and that had suddenly posed a threat, a danger to his peace of mind. She was dangerous because never having belonged to another man made her different, gave her added appeal, and he could so easily fall in love with her—and become completely undone into the bargain.
Alistair had no wish to sacrifice his freedom, to become shackled in that way to a woman ever again. He’d been there once and had no mind to travel down the same road twice. Disgust replaced his anger. He told himself that, no matter who she was, she had the makings of a skilful harlot and he’d be well rid of her. If he made her his mistress, she would make his life a living hell.
How long would it be before he found himself wanting to share his life with her in every way? How long before she betrayed him with another, as Marianne had done? After all, if she thought her virtue of such little importance that she could sacrifice it without a qualm—and with a virtual stranger at that—for such a small matter as an IOU, then who was to say she would not do so again when she had the desire to look elsewhere for sexual fulfilment?
Alistair coldly consigned Louisa Divine to the past. She was already dead to him, and any feelings he might have had for her were wiped clean from his heart. But memory was the worst thing of all, and that he could not erase from his mind.
Somehow Louisa could never remember the journey from Dunstan House to Henrietta Street. It was a blur, something she preferred not to dwell upon. After all that had transpired Bierlow Hall and its problems seemed so far away, and the emptiness in her heart without Alistair was so piercing that she seemed unable to keep the relative importance of them in proper proportion. She didn’t wait for James to return from Oxfordshire but, full of guilt and confusion, like a whipped dog seeking shelter to lick its wounds in private, she decided to return to Bierlow where she belonged, where she could indulge herself in anonymity and solitude.
If James discovered what she had done he would never forgive her. Never. Humiliation and shame pounded through her. She would never be able to look him in the eyes, knowing what she was guilty of. He would despise her and she could not blame him. But why was she so upset? she asked herself. Why did she feel so wretched? Hadn’t she got what she wanted? With the return of James’s IOU everything would go back to how it had been before—except that it wouldn’t be the same. Nothing would ever be the same again because she wasn’t the same any more.
And so she returned to Surrey, leaving James the retrieved IOU and a short note explaining that she had returned to Bierlow. With any luck at all he would not enquire too deeply into Lord Dunstan’s reasons for returning it, but she had a distinct feeling that it would not be too long before James arrived at Bierlow, demanding to know what she knew about the matter. It was a situation she would have to deal with when, and if, it arose.
On her return she threw herself into her work, trying to pick up the threads of her life, devoting herself to the well-being of the few people who worked at Bierlow and depended on her for their subsistence, trying to blot what had happened to her in London from her mind—to blot out Alistair Dunstan—but the whole night she had spent in his arms stood out with such agonising clarity that it made her weep.
Swamped with self-retribution and tortured by memories, she told herself that she was a shameless wanton, soiled and used and unfit for any gullible male who might come along in the future and want to marry her. She had broken all the rules that had been made to protect young ladies from experienced men like Lord Dunstan, rules that governed the moral code of a young lady of her class.
Isolated in her private misery, adamantly she refused to think of him, but despite herself a tremor of remembered passion and bitter-sweet memories sometimes coursed through her. The continuation of that desire he had awoken in her confounded her. She was still reeling from the impact of him, shattered by the power of the physical attraction she felt for him. She had never realised she had been capable of such intense passion. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for what he had done to her, or the emotions he had aroused, triggering off an explosion of sensuality, the like of which she could never have imagined, prompting her to respond in a way that had astounded her. They had been lost to everything but each other, their lovemaking having a frenzy that made everything pale beside it—and every other man she might meet in the future.
A letter arrived from James who, having returned from Oxfordshire, was cock-a-hoop to find that Lord Dunstan had returned his IOU, although why he should have done so remained a complete mystery to him. He wrote informing Louisa that he was to give up the house in Henrietta Street and return to live at Bierlow and would explain his reasons for doing so when he arrived. Louisa was astounded, unable to believe that James would give up his wayward life and return to Bierlow to live the quiet life of a country gentleman.
But at this time Louisa had a growing anxiety that all was not as it should be with herself, and there was a nagging fear in her that could not be dismissed. She often felt unwell, especially early in the morn
ing when she became plagued by bouts of nausea and dizziness, which gave her reason to suspect the worst—that she might be with child.
Disbelieving and shocked, she would not accept that this could be the reason why she felt so ill. She was unprepared for this sudden explosion in the quiet landscape of her life. It was a nightmare, one she would wake up from soon, but it soon dawned on her that it was no nightmare. It was tenacious, terrifying reality, and when her suspicions were duly confirmed she was devastated.
Her face became pale and drawn, her mouth tense, and there were dark circles under her eyes. She could not sleep, her predicament and her future causing her to lie awake night after night worrying, pondering over what she should do—and how she was going to tell James.
Chapter Seven
Bierlow Hall was a magnificent stone mansion built in perfect proportions. At the end of an avenue of oaks, it was set in the heart of the gently undulating Surrey countryside, and, despite its sad air of neglect and lonely isolation, standing a mile away from the ancient and picturesque village of Bierlow, no one could fail to be impressed by it.
Determined to make good his brotherly shortcomings, James arrived at Bierlow Hall, in surprisingly high spirits and with an enthusiastic air of purpose, six weeks after his letter to Louisa. He was immediately concerned when he saw her pallor.
“Truly you do not look well, Louisa. Have you seen the doctor?”
An Innocent Proposal Page 13
