“Then what will you do?”
“Have the marriage annulled on grounds of fraud.”
Chapter 7
No more than fifteen minutes after David left Lucian to see Rupert Crowe, he was back.
“The wedding will be this afternoon in the drawing room,” David told Lucian. “As I predicted, Crowe wanted a marriage settlement, but he knew better than to press his luck.”
David took his leave of Lucian a second time. A half hour later Lady Bloomfield came to his door.
Lucian had not seen her since she had led Angel from his bedroom. He liked Kitty’s mother, and he was determined that she should hear the truth about what had happened, even though she would not believe it.
“I swear to you that I did not seduce Angel Winter. Nor did I rob her of her virginity.”
Lady Bloomfield looked outraged. “You dare to claim she was not an innocent when you took her? You will never make me believe that!”
“I have no notion whether she is an innocent or not. I swear, though, that no matter how strong the evidence against me appears—and I am the first to admit how damning it is—I did not take her at all.”
“She says that you did,” Lady Bloomfield said coldly. “Angel is the most honest person I know. She would not lie about it.”
But she was lying about it, damn her! Choking down his rage at her perfidy, Lucian forced himself to say calmly, “I do not wish to debate her character with you, but I am telling you the truth.”
“I do not believe you.”
He could feel the leash on his temper slipping. “If you were a man, I would call you out for daring to challenge my veracity.”
“And if I were a man, I would accept for what you have done to Angel.”
“God’s oath, I have done nothing to her!
“She told me that you did lie with her.”
“She is the only one who is lying!”
“If it were anyone but Angel, I might believe you,” Lady Bloomfield confessed. “I have never known you to be a liar. But even if you are telling the truth, you have ruined her in the eyes of the world. And that is what counts.”
“I know. That is why I agreed to marry her.”
“Sir Rupert said you had. He has already sent for the rector at Bourton. You will be married as soon as he arrives, provided, my lord, you can convince Angel to wed you.”
“What?” Lucian could not believe he had heard her right.
“That is why I have come. Angel refuses to marry you. She knows you do not want her, and she has told her stepfather that nothing can force the vows from her lips.”
“That’s wonderful,” Lucian exclaimed, feeling the marital noose the Crowes had flung about his neck loosen. Honour required that he offer for her and he had done so. But if she refused him, he would be released from his obligation to marry her.
He wondered why, after trapping him like that, Angel was suddenly willing to let him go. She must have lost her nerve when she realized that, after the damning lies she had told about him, he would make her life miserable.
“No, it is not wonderful,” Lady Bloomfield snapped. “No other man will look at her now. You must change her mind. You must persuade her to marry you.”
“I must?” He stared at her in open-mouthed astonishment, then exploded, “God’s oath, woman, I want to marry her even less than she wants to marry me! And now you tell me that you expect me to convince her to go through with a wedding that is the last thing on earth I want. You are mad!”
“No, I am desperately concerned about Angel’s future. I want her out of Rupert Crowe’s control. She is like a second daughter to me. I love her dearly.”
“Apparently even more than your own flesh and blood,” he said scornfully. “Don’t you care that Kitty is the one who will be most hurt if I marry Angel.”
“It will hurt Kitty’s pride far more than her heart,” her mother said bluntly. “I will be candid with you, my lord. I preferred her to marry David Inge, although my husband strongly opposed the match. David is a good and honourable man.”
“The best,” Lucian seconded.
“He is also in love with Kitty, something you are not. In fact, I have often wondered why you offered for her.”
“The usual reasons a man of my position offers for a wife.”
“Ah, yes,” Lady Bloomfield said coolly, “a prestigious alliance, property, and good bloodlines.”
“And Angel will bring me none of them.”
“To the contrary, she would bring you all three if you help her recover the inheritance her stepfather has stolen from her.”
“You consider marriage to the daughter of some eccentric recluse and the stepdaughter of that blackguard Rupert Crowe a prestigious alliance?” he scoffed.
“There is not an aristocrat in the land who can look upon marriage to Lady Angela Winter as beneath him, and that includes you, my lord.”
“She is a lady? I don’t believe it! Who the devil was her father?”
“The Earl of Ashcott.”
Bloody hell! Ashcott. The scientific earl. Belle Haven’s late owner.
He remembered the dedication of the earl’s Journal of Belle Haven: “To my precious Angel.”
Lucian wondered bitterly what the scientific earl would think of his precious Angel if he could see the lying jade now.
Nevertheless, Lucian felt the marital noose tightening around his neck again. To appear to have publicly ruined an earl’s daughter and then not marry her would put him beyond the pale. Nor could he do that to Ashcott’s daughter.
Much as it galled him, he would have to convince her to marry him.
“Very well, I will talk to her,” he said wearily. “In return, I ask a favour of you. Please find her something that is not black and ugly to wear for our wedding. She has abysmal taste in clothes.” At first, he had thought it was because she had no money, but her father had been very rich.
“It is not Angel’s fault,” Lady Bloomfield said. “Her father ignored fashion and ridiculed it to her as silly and frivolous. The dear child has no notion of how to dress. Quite frankly, I suspect that he wanted her to look shabby and dowdy in the hope that she would attract no man’s eye. I think he hoped to keep her with him as his companion in his seclusion.”
“Will you see what you can find for her for our wedding?”
“Aye, but there will not be one unless you can change her mind about marrying you.”
Lucian said grimly, “There will be a wedding.”
He found Angel huddled on a settee in Fernhill’s small library, where he had been drinking in the early hours of that morning.
She was wearing the shabby black gown that he had first seen her in. Once again her lustrous chocolate hair had been caught up in an unbecoming knot atop her head. A few wisps had escaped the fastening and curled about her face.
A book was open in her lap, but she was not reading it. Instead she was rubbing her temples as though she had a headache and staring unhappily out the window at the green lawns still wet from the rainstorm that had been intense but brief.
Lucian quietly shut the library door to give them privacy. He silently crossed the room to the settee. Angel was so lost in her thoughts that she did not notice him until he said her name.
She started in surprise. When she looked up at him, he forgot his anger, so stunned was he by the change in her. Her eyes were no longer brilliant but dull and unhappy. All trace of the vitality that he found so winsome was erased. She looked pitifully young and small, defenceless and woebegone huddled there. Lucian had an irrational urge to comfort her.
Bloody hell, was he going daft?
He reminded himself of what she had done to him, of what she had cost him, and his heart hardened against her.
Lucian saw a quick flash of unease in her huge blue eyes before she managed to hide it. Then her face tightened in determination, and she met his gaze defiantly.
Despite his anger at her, he could not help admiring her courage. Many men he
knew would have quailed before the look he had given her.
“I will not marry you,” she told him firmly.
Taken aback by the intractable note in her voice, he said, “I do not want to marry you either, but unfortunately we must—”
“No! I shall not! I am a woman of honour—”
“You certainly fooled me on that point,” he interjected sardonically.
“Well, I am!” Her eyes, the colour of the sky on a summer day, blazed with indignation. “And a woman of pride, too. I will not marry a man who does not want me!”
“You should have thought of that before you sneaked into my bed, and left us with no choice in the matter.”
There was no mistaking the resolve in her expression. Her delicate chin tilted proudly, stubbornly. “Papa said a person always has a choice when it comes to his honour.”
Lucian was astonished that after what she had done to him, she could still have the audacity to prattle about honour. “What an odd sense of honour you have in light of that very public performance you staged this morning.” The memory of it made him grind his teeth. “You should have told our very interested audience the truth—that I did not sleep with you.”
“But you did! Everyone saw you.”
Lucian was baffled why, now that Angel seemed determined not to marry him, she would continue to lie about his having slept with her.
“Everyone saw what you and your evil stepfather wanted them to think they saw, and you know it,” he exploded. “If you were half so concerned about your precious honour as you profess to be, you would confess what really happened in my bedroom!”
Angel’s expression was so troubled and mortified that he wondered whether the reprehensible Crowes had forced her to help them against her will. Was she trying to atone for it now by refusing to marry him?
“Why won’t you tell the truth?” he pressed. “Are you afraid of what your stepfather and brother will do to you?”
He sat down on the settee beside her and took her hands in his own. They were as cold as two chunks of ice. “If that is what it is, Angel, I swear that if you tell the true story about this morning, I will protect you from the Crowes’ wrath.” He gave her an encouraging smile. “Did they force you into my bed.”
Her troubled eyes met his without evasion. “No.”
He dropped her icy hands as though they had stung him. His sympathy for her vanished. He wanted to throttle the little liar.
“Then why did you come to my bed like that?”
“But I did not.”
“Well, I surely didn’t coax you there, as you well know!”
She looked horribly embarrassed and her gaze fell away from his. “The truth is I do not know how I got in your bed.”
“God’s oath, what you will try to tell me next—that the world is flat?”
“Please, I know it sounds impossible”—her mouth and chin were trembling—”but I swear that when I went to sleep I was in my own bed, and when I awoke I was in yours.” She looked at him with those wide blue eyes that seemed incapable of guile. “Do you think I could have been sleepwalking?”
“No, I do not,” he said sharply. She managed to look so damned innocent that she would have had Lucian believing anything she said if he had not heard her lie so convincingly to Lady Bloomfield about his having taken her. He could only marvel at what a superb actress she was.
Suddenly, her face crumbled, “I know I must be at fault in what happened, for I am the one who was in your bed.”
“How kind of you to admit that much,” he said sarcastically.
Angel rubbed her temples again as she had done when he had first come into the library.
“Do you have a headache?” Lucian asked.
“Aye, I do not understand it. I have never had one before, but ever since I awoke this morning I have had this dull, throbbing pain.”
So did Lucian from the drug in the wine.
Bloody hell, could Angel have been drugged, too?
He grabbed her arms. “Tell me everything you did last night between the time you left the ball and you fell asleep.”
She blinked at him, clearly surprised by the sudden urgency in his voice. “I went directly to my room and went to bed.”
“Did you talk to anyone?”
“Only the maid the Crowes insisted I must bring with me,”
“Maude?” Lucian asked, releasing Angel’s arms.
Her eyes widened in surprise. “How did you know her name?”
“I met her yesterday.”
“I did not like her at first,” Angel confided, “but she was very kind to me last night.”
“How?” Lucian asked, certain that Maude would not have been kind except for some nefarious reason.
“When I got into bed, I started to sneeze terribly. I could not seem to stop. I don’t know what was wrong with me. I have never sneezed like that before except when I got a nose full of dust.”
Lucian’s hands tightened into fists as he remembered the dust-covered pillow hidden in the chest of drawers. It would have made anyone sneeze.
“Maude gave me some of her grandmama’s special elixir to stop my sneezing, and it worked wonderfully because I stopped sneezing almost immediately and went sound to sleep.”
“Angel, when Maude gave you the elixir, did she by chance also do anything with your pillow?”
“Why, yes, she did. How did you know?” Angel asked in innocent surprise. “She said my pillow did not look very comfortable, and she was right. She brought me a new one that was much better.”
Maude and the Crowes had drugged Angel, too. An inexplicable surge of joy and relief washed over Lucian at the realization that she was as innocent as she claimed. She had not been a willing participant in the Crowes’ trap after all.
After drugging her, they had dumped her in his bed. The naive girl had awakened to all those staring faces and been utterly mystified as to how she had gotten there. He at least had known immediately that the Crowes were responsible and what their reason was.
Lucian wanted to snatch her up in his arms and hug her. Then his elation faded. If she was innocent, why the hell did she keep insisting he had slept with her when he had not?
An ugly suspicion seized him. “Angel, have you been sleeping with another man?”
“No, only you.”
“God’s oath, why do you continue to insist that I slept with you when you know it is a lie,” he growled. “I ought to beat the truth out of you.”
“But I am not lying!” she cried, clearly distressed.
“You may be able to convince everyone else of that, but I know better. I was there, remember? I know that I did not sleep with you!”
Angel looked at him in bewilderment. “But you did.”
“God’s oath, why do you persist in that fiction?” he ground out through rigid jaw. “I have already agreed to marry you.”
Her eyes glittered with defiant anger. “I told you I will not marry you.”
“And I told you that we have no choice.”
“Why? Because of the baby?”
He looked at her blankly. “What baby?”
“The one we may have made when we lay together.” Her eyes were suddenly bright and hopeful again. “Well, you need not worry about it. I want the baby very much, and I promise you that I shall take very good care of it. I will never let anyone take it away from me.”
“Angel,” Lucian said through clenched teeth, “I have not given you a baby.”
“Lady Bloomfield said you might deny responsibility for it. She said men often do.”
Lucian prayed for patience. “Angel, I am not denying responsibility. I am telling you for a fact that you are not carrying my baby. It is an impossibility.”
Angel frowned in confusion. “But Lady Bloomfield says there is no sure way to prevent a baby.”
“She is wrong. There is one absolutely foolproof way of doing so, and I used it.”
“What is it?”
“Abstinence.”
“Lady Bloomfield is under the mistaken impression that I slept with you.”
“But you did. Do you deny that I was in your bed with you when you awakened!”
“Aye, you were in my bed, but I did not sleep with you.”
“You are making no sense! How can you admit that I was in your bed, and then say I did not sleep with you?” She looked up at him with huge blue eyes full of reproach. “Why did you not tell me when I asked that it is so easy to make a baby? I had no idea I had only to lie on a bed beside you and your baby would begin to grow inside me.”
Lucian’s jaw dropped in astonishment. Surely, she must be hoaxing him. No one could be that innocent.
Then he recalled Lady Bloomfield’s words: “Angel is so naive... I doubt she even knows what happens between a man and a woman.”
Bloody hell, she did not know! His anger at her dissolved in relief, followed by the unhappy realization that he was now more securely trapped than ever. When he had believed her a willing participant in the plot against him, he had not cared what happened to her. He had intended to dump her at Ardmore until he could obtain an annulment, but now that he knew she was blameless, he could not even do that.
She was as much the Crowes’ innocent victim as he was, and she deserved better than a husband who would abandon her to solitary confinement at a remote estate.
His anger that his long struggle to redeem himself in his father’s eyes has gone for naught—fourteen wasted years—had not abated, but now it was directed at the proper target, the Crowes. It was not Angel’s fault that he had been robbed of his chance to prove himself to his father.
But it was the Crowes’ doing. And he swore that he would have a full measure of vengeance against them. His eyes narrowed assessingly as he recalled something his hostess had told him.
“Angel, Lady Bloomfield said that the Crowes stole your inheritance from you. How did they do that?”
She told him how her father’s will was missing. “The only one that can be found was made many years ago before my mother deserted Papa and leaves everything to her.”
Lucian frowned. Ashcott had been a very rich man. By marrying Angel’s mother, Rupert Crowe had gained legal control of the great fortune she had inherited from her first husband—the fortune that should have gone to Angel.
Devil’s Angel Page 8
