One for the Rogue

by Charis Michaels

  He finished. “Against my better judgment.”

  “Better judgment in what?” she said, laughing. Surely he would not go to the bother of flirting with Lady Dora and extracting Teddy, only to say he now he regretted it.

  He said, “My better judgment in anything at all to do with you.”

  Or perhaps he would say it. The dreamlike nature of the moment dissolved, and she went rigid, dancing the steps but barely touching his hand in hers. She cleared her throat. “It’s lovely to see you, Rainsleigh, really it is, but I’ve quite enough trouble in my life without the worry that you’ll turn up and put yourself out by . . . how did you say it? Doing ‘anything at all to do with’ me. If you must complain about coming to my aid, then why come at all?”

  “I was tricked,” he said. “Lady Frinfrock.” He rolled his shoulders, gathering her more closely against him—scandalously close. She could not help but touch him. “She actually came to the canal and suggested that she would expire if I did not attend. I had no idea you would be here.”

  Emmaline narrowed her eyes at him, feeling her own irritation double with every turn of the waltz. “Are you suggesting that you would not have come if you’d known? Good God, Rainsleigh, I see now why your brother wished to hire me. I don’t care how dashing you are; you truly are unfit for decent company.”

  “My brother did not hire you to teach me bollocks,” he said, spinning her again. The ballroom was a blur of jewel-toned silk, evergreen, and candlelight. “I see that now. He was matchmaking. He tossed us together intentionally, because he’d happened upon a girl who appeared to be the perfect combination of temptation and a good bloody influence.”

  Emmaline opened her mouth to suggest, perhaps, that he simply stop talking so they could enjoy the dance without saying anything more that either of them would regret, but he lifted her up on the next spin, just a little scoop, and her feet left the floor, her skirts whirled around her ankles, and she veritably sailed around the corner of the ballroom in a way that took her breath away.

  He made a small, irresistible noise of exertion and set her down without missing a step. They came to the next corner, and they whirled again. Their dancing had become sweeping and athletic, and she was forced to hold tightly to his muscled shoulder and squeeze his hand to keep up. All the while, he continued in that low, flat tone. “You were meant to bewitch me. I would be resentful if I did not enjoy you so bloody much.”

  High praise, she wanted to say, but the dancing took all of her concentration. She was breathless with the effort and exhilaration.

  “I would also resent Bryson if he didn’t assume, clearly, that I could possibly, remotely, be suitable for a woman like you. Only my brother, blinded by his love for me, would know my every fault and still see me as a suitable match.”

  Between the complicated dancing and his flat, unreadable tone, Emmaline could scarcely understand what the devil he meant. It sounded as if he’d just paid her a marginal compliment. As if he was revealing that he . . . enjoyed her company.

  She looked up at him, studying his face. Her irritation began to warm into something more like frustrated confusion.

  Beau went on. “As always, he aspires too much. For me, that is.”

  She was not sure how to answer. She tried. “I thought he genuinely wished for me to teach you something. I thought he wanted me to instruct you on basic good manners.”

  “He wanted you to captivate me. The manners were an added benefit, I’m sure.”

  Emmaline thought about this. How bad it must feel, whether real or imagined, that he’d been manipulated, even for his own good end. She had some idea of this. Her mother had done that very same thing when she’d married her off at age nineteen.

  Beau said, “This song will soon end. I’m not finished. We’ll dance again. To the next song, whatever it is.”

  Emmaline tried to look around, but the room still spun. “It would never do to dance two songs in succession. People will talk. The duke and duchess will be already irate.” She thought of Lady Dora. “This does not bode well for my brother. I . . . I cannot dance again, Beau. I must find him.”

  “Joseph and Stoker have Teddy in a safe place until we’re finished. And we’re not finished.”

  Just as he predicted, the music softened to silence. Beau glided two more steps and then went still. For two beats, he released her, took a small step back, and bowed. Just as the music began again, he took up her hand and waist and pulled her into new steps.

  She was powerless to resist him. “I hope you do not believe that I meant to”—she searched for the correct word—“entrap you in some way.”

  “No,” he said, looking over her shoulder at the route they’d cut across the floor, “not you. Only my brother. And Elisabeth, the traitor. And now bloody Lady Frinfrock. It doesn’t matter. For some reason, they look at me and see only potential, not risk. As if you did not already have enough problems.”

  It occurred to her that he was saying these words to her, but the conversation was actually with himself alone. He was coming to terms with his brother’s meddling. Why he wrangled with it here and now, she could not guess. But she listened, trying to understand why he suffered some sort of internal turmoil each time he looked at her.

  “You are an excellent dancer,” she finally said. The truth. These were certainly the most exciting dances of her sheltered life. “I would not have guessed that you enjoyed dancing.”

  “Viscounts are expected to dance, aren’t they? Naturally, this would mean I should hate it. But I wasn’t always a viscount, was I? Before you knew me, I enjoyed dancing very much.” An afterthought. He wasn’t really listening. He stared at the Duke of Ticking’s party as they danced past.

  “Who brings an infant to a bloody New Year’s ball?” he asked.

  Emmaline cringed, thinking of tired, fussy baby Henrick. “The duke and duchess have taken to bringing their youngest child with us whenever the family ventures out. I think His Grace wishes to make a show of my role as grandmama. And to keep others away. Nothing discourages conversation like a crying baby.”

  Beau nodded. “And Teddy? Why subject him to a ball?”

  Emmaline squeezed her eyes shut, thinking of her brother. “Yes, why indeed. Teddy has been dragged out repeatedly at the duke’s side. I believe the message is, Teddy is very much in his keeping, an invalid, unfit to be left alone, even for a moment. And of course, I am unfit to mind him. Ticking moved us from the dower house the day after I saw you in the ballroom.”

  “Is it terrible?”

  “Well, I mind the children, I suffer constant supervision with no freedom, and my brother endures the repeated torture of family outings, regardless of how the chaos upsets him. It is killing us both, but I hold to the hope of our escape to New York. The new life that will allow us to forget this time. It is the only thing that gets me through.”

  “Emmaline,” he said, not looking at her, “you know that if you were to marry, His Grace would have no control over you. You would not have to forge a new life in another country if you did not care to do. You would not have to do anything at all but walk away from the Ticking dukedom, and good riddance.”

  Emmaline was so stunned by this statement that she almost stopped dancing. In fact, she did miss a step, but he easily propelled her around.

  “Marry?” She could barely form the word. She tried to laugh and failed. “Whom, I ask you, am I meant to marry?” And now she did laugh, a sad, bitter sound. “My dowry was taken by the previous Duke of Ticking. The current duke does his best to present me to the world as a nanny, smothered in hideous gray and perpetually carrying a baby. I have a brother who will require special care for the rest of his life. Before I was a duchess, I was the daughter of a merchant—a rich merchant, yes, but a merchant who came from nothing, just the same.” She laughed again. “Who, I ask you, would marry me?”

  To this, Beau had no answer, but he effected another of the swooping, airy turns, lifting her around the corner of the room
.

  She landed with a little gasp. It was impossible to dance in his arms and not be breathless. She tried to find the words to tell him that she had no wish to be married again. That she had a plan about which she was excited and intended to see through, achieving something on her own terms for once in her life. The music swelled to a final, soaring note, ending the song with the pure, joyful blast, and Beau held her until she was steady on her feet.

  She caught her breath just as the music faded to wild applause, and before she could tell him anything more, he looked at her and said, “Well, you could marry me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Beau had known he would propose marriage to her from the moment he’d seen her sitting across the ballroom with the ducal family, holding a crying baby and enduring her brother’s misery.

  He’d known this in the same way he’d always known what he would do with any woman. When to tease, when to compliment, when to crowd against the wall for a kiss. It surprised him to learn that his proficiency extended to “when to propose marriage,” and he was grateful he’d not been struck with the impulse before tonight.

  But perhaps it boiled down to, what bloody choice did he have?

  He could not toss her over his shoulder and steal away with her; he could not launch himself at the duke and stab him in the thigh with his dagger. But also, he could not see her so incredibly abused.

  Were there other ways to remove her from this situation? Beau could not think of one. He also could not think of (or would not allow himself to think of) all the ways marriage had been unfathomable to him before this moment.

  He would not think of the conventional marriage Emmaline deserved.

  He would not think of his patent unsuitability as a husband.

  He absolutely would not think of the high value he put on his own personal freedom.

  Most of all, he would not think of how marriage would expand the bloody viscountcy, resulting in not one titled lord, but a lord and his lady. He didn’t even want one Rainsleigh, and now there would be two.

  But anything was better than bloody, bleeding Dowager Duchess of Ticking.

  Whether in denial or simply because he refused to dwell, Beau thought of none of these. Instead, he thought only of her.

  The song had ended, and members of the orchestra had chosen that moment to leave their instruments for refreshment and respite. The applause died around them, and in his peripheral vision, he saw couples filtering from the floor. They had but seconds. Standing there in the silence that threatened, looking down at the shock on her face, Beau had the fleeting thought that he might, for the first time ever, pass out cold on the floor.

  “I beg your pardon?” she said, blinking up at him.

  Of course she would make him repeat it. “If you feel no one else will have you, then why not marry me?” His mouth was dry. He had no idea how he’d said the words without a break in his voice. Without sounding like a quivery, high-pitched version of himself, which was exactly how he now felt.

  “Beau,” she began, shaking her head, “you honor me with this suggestion, but I cannot allow you to martyr yourself, not for me. Consider the magnitude of what you offer. You detest convention and contractual dealings and being tied down. These are the very definition of marriage. It would make my own situation more miserable to know I’d bound you in such a way, especially when you did it out of some misplaced sense of honor toward me.”

  It was a pretty speech, and it came out in a gush, almost as if she’d rehearsed it—which, oddly, made it worse. It had been a very long time, indeed, since any woman had denied him anything at all.

  Still, she had not rejected him yet, not in as many words, and he was gripped with an unfamiliar sort of determination that would not allow him to look away from her. He raised an eyebrow.

  She took a breath and went on. “I know I appear helpless and wretched at the moment, but I’ve only to survive a few weeks more. My plan is a complicated one, I know—risky and with no guarantee—but it’s been many careful months in the making, and I am determined to give it a go. If it works, I’ll not only set Teddy and myself free from this . . . this family, but it will allow me to realize the dream of my own.”

  “I have every belief that you will. I should like to help you.”

  “So in this marriage you propose, we should go to New York together?”

  “Yes, of course. And how lucky you are that I am the sort of fellow who embraces travel to foreign ports and wild schemes.”

  “Yes, lucky,” she repeated, but she did not appear to feel lucky. The head shaking continued, although her expression was conflicted and jittery and flushed. Beau looked right and left. They were very nearly the last couple remaining in the center of the ballroom. The Duke and Duchess of Ticking watched them from the sidelines, looking every bit as if they had been shot by a bolt of lightning, eyes bulging. Their golden goose was being stolen, right before their very eyes, and they knew it. It was just the boost Beau needed.

  Beau returned his attention to Emmaline, winked, and took her by the arm. While she stared at him, he half led, half dragged her to the opposite side of the room and stopped on the far side of a fat marble pillar.

  “Teddy and I will pay for the dances and this conversation,” she said, looking over her shoulder.

  “His Grace cannot stop a young widow from dancing with an attentive suitor, and he knows it.” He propped an arm on the pillar above her head and looked down at her. She fell back against the cool marble and tilted her head up.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “but our existence inside his house can be made very nearly unlivable because of it. Every infraction will make it more and more difficult for us to steal away when the time comes.”

  “I don’t want you in an unlivable situation, even for a day.”

  “And I don’t want to marry a man who does not love me. I’ve done it once already, and it was misery.”

  This startled him into silence. He blinked and forced himself to close his mouth.

  Love?

  She was the last person he expected to press him for something quite so personal and intimate and emotional as love. Hadn’t she first hounded him about polite detachment in all things? Wasn’t that the proper way?

  She waited, watching him. It was her turn to cock an eyebrow.

  Finally, he said, “You see now why I endeavored to stay away from you. I told you that your heart was open and trusting; that someone like me had the potential to do it great harm.”

  “And yet now, here you are, proposing marriage. Quite a change of tune. What if I told you that, against all better judgment, I already love you? What say you then?”

  Another shock. He forced himself to keep the reaction from his face. “I would say we’ve only known each other for a month.”

  She laughed. “Very well, then. I ask you the same thing about marriage. How could you propose marriage after you’ve only known me for a month?”

  He opened his mouth to answer, but she held up a hand. “Stop. I’ve just watched Lady Dora embarrass herself at the mere suggestion of one dance with you. Women fall in love with you all the time, as we both know.”

  “That’s different,” he insisted. “Women like the Lady Dora fall into the kind of love that compels them to sneak out of their bedroom windows, or throw vases at walls, or eat nothing but chocolate for a week.” He cleared his throat. “Or so I’ve been told. Not the kind of—” He looked away and then back again. “Not what you mean.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, shaking her head at the bough of evergreen above their heads, “I am one of those women.”

  “Stop,” he said, almost laughing. “Look, I’ve not considered marriage before—to you or anyone else—because I’m restless and easily distracted. These hardly are desirable traits for a proper husband. And the example I saw in my own parents’ marriage was meaningless—no, it was worse than meaningless. Theirs was actively destructive. As a result, or perhaps as an homage, I’ve never considered fait
hfulness to any one woman, let alone marriage.”

  “Are you trying to convince me or repel me?” she asked.

  He continued. “When I, er, discovered how truly innocent you are, I did try to repel you, Duchess, remember? What manner of man would I be if I did not try to protect you from me?”

  “The manner of man who would not be proposing to me now.”

  “I’m proposing to you,” he said, his voice lower now, serious—urgently serious, “because against all odds, you’re in dire need of protection from something worse than I am. God save you, I feel compelled to provide it.”

  “You feel compelled?” She shoved off the pillar. Her breath came in deep little huffs. “You feel compelled? Let us stop talking, here and now, shall we?” She took a step. “I’d rather carry on with no one at all than with someone who feels compelled. My late husband felt compelled to marry me to line his own pockets, and I still suffer for that mistake.”

  “Yes,” said Beau, “but he didn’t want you, not as I do.”

  She looked up when he said this, her eyes growing wide, and he felt himself on more familiar, almost solid ground.

  He reclaimed the step she’d taken. “Look, Emma. I cannot account for love, because I’m not entirely sure what it means, but I’m very, very sure what it means to want. And I want you, Duchess, very much. The size and nature of that want is crystal clear in my mind.” He took another step closer and lowered his lips to her ear, speaking in a low, rumbling whisper. “I wasn’t going to bring it up, considering your penchant for all things proper, but I would be telling a very great lie if I didn’t admit that the appeal of knowing you as a husband knows a wife crosses my mind at least a hundred times a day.”

  She dropped her head back and stared at him. “So it is to be that kind of union?” Her voice was soft, and the look on her face swamped him with exactly the type of need he’d just described.

  He ducked his head again, deliberately bussing her ear with his lips. “Of this you may have no doubts,” he rasped.

  Emmaline inhaled sharply and looked away, but he saw the flush rise on her cheeks. She swallowed and licked her lips. Beau stayed intimately close—close enough to feel the heat of her body. Close enough to smell her. He waited.