The moment he closed the door, she spun around. “Have you lost your mind? What do you think you are doing? Those women in the drawing room are expecting a proposal. Of marriage. What am I to tell them when you leave? ‘No, ladies, his lordship does not wish to take me for a wife. He merely wanted to hear me recount another one of my unseemly dreams.’”
He drew close—she noticed for the first time the understated swagger of his gait, that of a man who’d always had everything he wanted.
“Have you been having more of those dreams?” he asked, speaking into her ear.
She shivered as his breath brushed her skin. And the woods-after-a-thunderstorm scent of him—she wanted to bury her face in his neck and inhale for all she was worth. “Of course I have. But that is not the point. The point is that—”
“Narrate one of your unseemly dreams.”
Was that the pad of his thumb tracing the line of her collar? She could barely feel it for the electricity racing along her nerve endings. “Now?”
“We still have a good few minutes. Why not?”
“Why not? I will tell you why . . .” Her voice trailed off as he undid the top button of her blouse. She gawked at him, her throat closing with both fright and thrill. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing? Do as I say or I’ll keep opening your blouse.”
She blinked, not sure whether she wanted him to stop.
He laughed softly. “My God, don’t tell me you want me to go on.”
“When have I ever given you the idea that I wouldn’t want you to go on?”
He shook his head. “You give me no choice. Fine. I’ll ask nicely. Please tell me one of your dreams, my dear Miss Cantwell.”
She swallowed. “That isn’t nice enough. You have to say ‘my dear Louisa.’”
He looked at her strangely for a moment. “Won’t you please, my dear, dear Louisa?”
Her name on his lips was pure music. She wanted to hear it again and again.
My dear, dear Louisa.
“For the past three nights I have dreamed that we are riding in a carriage together, a town coach not unlike yours, except it is made entirely of glass, even the floor. And . . . and I’m naked.”
His eyes were a deep, dark green, almost wintry—like a pine forest in December—yet his gaze was all volcanic heat. “Go on.”
“I . . . I fret about my nakedness. So you fashion a blindfold from your necktie and tell me that if I cannot see out, then I will not worry about those who might be peering in.”
“Impeccable logic, that. What happens next?”
“Once I’m blindfolded, you touch me with something. You say it’s your walking stick, but I’m not sure I believe you.”
“Why the doubt?”
“Because . . . it is hot.” Her face scalded. “And please don’t ask me what happens next. There is no next.”
In her dreams, she simply carried on in that state of horrified arousal.
He smiled slightly. “Do you like it when I touch you with my not–walking stick?”
She could see her hand reaching up, but she could not quite believe what she was doing, even when she had a lock of his hair between her fingers. “In my dreams, there is nothing you do that I do not like.”
“It’s worth abducting you from Lady Balfour’s drawing room, before a full crowd of onlookers, just to hear that.”
Dear God, Lady Balfour and all her friends. “Please tell me that wasn’t what you came for.”
“Of course not. I came to tell you that I have decided to rescind my offer. The idea has run its course—and expired.”
The contents of her skull imploded. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t breathe.
He wasn’t a good man and she hadn’t cared. She was willing to overlook any number of staggering faults, as long as he felt at least something of what she felt for him.
When he had been toying with her all along.
As if from a great distance away, she heard herself say, “You might as well, I suppose. I never would have cheapened myself by accepting that particular offer.”
It was a lie. She would have hated to become his mistress—because it would mark the beginning of the end—but she had never, at any point, eliminated the choice from consideration.
“You don’t look as righteously vindicated as you ought to,” he pointed out, his voice insidiously soft, insidiously close.
“Rest assured my immortal soul is pleased. It’s only my vanity that is crushed.”
And her pathetic heart.
“My poor, darling Louisa,” he murmured, the evil, evil man.
“It is still very ill done of you to come here and single me out, just to tell me you’ve thought better of your nefarious plans. What am I supposed to tell Lady Balfour in”—she glanced at the clock—“precisely forty-five seconds?”
And once those forty-five seconds flew by, once he walked out Lady Balfour’s door, she might not ever see him again. Who else would like her for her scheming ways? Who else would applaud her for thinking of herself? And who else would ask her about the telescope she had loved and lost?
He touched her face—but to her horror, she realized he was only wiping away her tears.
“You may tell Lady Balfour that in exactly three weeks, you will be married.”
She stared at him through the blur of her tears. “To whom?”
He only looked at her as if she were a very slow child who couldn’t grasp that one plus one equaled two.
“I don’t understand,” she said, though understanding was beginning to penetrate her woolly brain.
“What is there to understand? I have made you an offer of marriage. Will you take it, or must I rescind that offer, too?”
Suddenly she felt as if she’d drunk an entire gallon of coffee. Her fingertips shook. “Of course I will take it—I came to London to marry the largest fortune I could find, and there is none available larger than yours. But why would you marry me?”
“Because young ladies who confess to pornographic reveries ought to be rewarded with riches beyond their dreams?”
But that made no sense at all. “I don’t—”
“Our ten minutes are up,” he said, buttoning her blouse and wiping away the rest of her tears, his fingers sure and warm. “I will not allow any eclipsed second to besmirch my sterling reputation. Time for us to return to the drawing room, Louisa.”
He was already turning away when she gripped his hand.
Kiss me. Shouldn’t you at least kiss me when you propose to me?
But when she opened her mouth, out came, “I still want my house and my thousand pounds a year—for the duration of my natural life. And I want those conditions written into the marriage settlement.”
He tilted his head. She could not tell whether he was vexed or amused. “You do?”
She gathered her courage. “If something seems too good to be true, then it probably is. For all I know, you are secretly readying your solicitors for an annulment as soon as you’ve tired of me.”
“Such a cynic.”
“Better be unromantic than thoroughly used and still poor.”
He took her chin in hand. “And if I refuse?”
“Then I will tell Lady Balfour that I turned down your proposal.”
She could scarcely believe it, but she was extorting the most eligible bachelor in London.
“I will give you a house and five hundred a year,” he countered.
Her heart was in her throat. “I won’t marry you for a penny less than eight hundred. And it had better be a house with at least twenty rooms.”
His fingers cupped her cheek. The pad of his thumb rubbed against her lips. His gaze was cool and severe, and she was suddenly in a panic.
No, no, it’s quite all right. I will marry
you for five hundred a year and a hovel. In fact, take my mother’s pearl brooch. Take my great-aunt Imogene’s jet pin. And you can also have the emergency money I’ve hidden away at home, all eleven pounds and eight shillings of it.
He smiled. “You will pay for this. You know that, right?”
The way he looked at her, so much wickedness, delight, and camaraderie. If she hadn’t been born with the constitution of a horse, she would have fainted from both relief and a tsunamic surge of sheer happiness.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”
A thousand yeses.
CHAPTER 7
Louisa’s life changed from the moment Lord Wrenworth declared to a roomful of breathless ladies that Miss Cantwell had consented to become his wife.
Within the crisp, freshly ironed pages of the next day’s Times, she found the engagement announced with all due pride and gravity. An hour later, an enormous bouquet of pink-tinged white orchids arrived at the house, courtesy of her husband-to-be. At noon, more evidence of his regard, a magnificent diamond ring, made its dramatic appearance, sending Lady Balfour into a swoon of ecstasy.
“What did I tell you, Louisa? What did I tell you?”
Notes of congratulations snowed upon the house, along with invitations to every event taking place from then to the end of the Season. Louisa spent two entire days answering the well-wishers. When she went on calls with Lady Balfour, amidst many an envious and sometimes incredulous look, much fuss was made of her.
The luckiest lady in London.
Louisa herself was no less staggered than any of her well-wishers. She giggled when she was alone. She gaped at her ring whenever she caught sight of it. Sometimes, as she lay in bed at night, she pummeled her mattress with both hands and feet, as gleeful and irrepressible as a child about to go on her first holiday.
But other times, her dumbfoundedness took a more sober turn. Clearly his proposal took place, but with each passing day it made less sense. A mistress was a temporary feature in a man’s life, a passing fancy to be discarded or replaced anytime he so chose. A wife, on the other hand, was a permanent installation, almost as irrevocable as a mother.
What could possibly have induced him to make such a decision? She had a healthy regard for herself, but even if she esteemed herself ten times as much, she still couldn’t comprehend what it was about her that had proved irresistible to a man who could have had any woman.
The tentative explanation she cobbled together was a discomfiting one. He enjoyed wielding power over her—almost from the very beginning, he had intentionally set out to disrupt and destabilize. She’d had to fight back for every inch of footing she could command, so that she was not entirely at his mercy.
It was possible that even with her resistance, he’d come to the conclusion that he would never hold greater sway over a woman. Or perhaps it was precisely her resistance that he relished, that in spite of it he could still prevail over her as much as he did.
She often thought back to the moment their engagement first became reality, that flash of euphoric happiness that he liked and wanted her enough to pledge his name and all the privilege that came with it. But the fact remained that she could trust him no more now that he was her fiancé than when he had been merely a devious and amoral would-be lover.
When they were married, she would not try to deny his dominance in the bridal bower—in that particular arena he would probably always render her breathless and helpless. But that was the only weakness she would ever admit, lust of the body. Her mind would remain her own. And her demented and slightly shameful love she would carry as a secret to her grave.
It was the only path through the dangerous and, someday, very possibly heartbreaking terrain of her marriage.
• • •
Louisa’s epic success brought her family to London.
Their departure from home was delayed two days by Frederica’s continued refusal to leave her room. Frantic telegrams arrived for Louisa, who cabled back, Tell Frederica Lord Wrenworth has the means and the connections to make her skin marble smooth again.
Whether anything in the world could accomplish what she promised was immaterial. At twenty-seven Frederica was still a head-turningly beautiful woman—her problem had far less to do with dermatology than with perception.
“Your task, when they arrive, is to make her feel as lovely as the first star in the sky,” she told Lord Wrenworth.
It was the first time they had seen each other since the day of their engagement—she’d been quite buried by the work that came with mounting a wedding, in three weeks, of the magnitude and splendor required by his station in life.
“What?” he mock-exclaimed. “I am out a twenty-room house plus eight hundred pounds a year. And I have to play the swain to the sister-in-law, too?”
He looked both commanding and delicious standing by the window of Lady Balfour’s drawing room, bathed in the light of the afternoon. She was proud one moment, covetous the next, and then fearful the moment after that. It would always be like this, wouldn’t it, being the wife of a man she loved but couldn’t trust, whose true motives were as murky as the bottom of the sea?
“It will save you—well, me, actually—money on milk baths and exotic emollients later.”
“And why would I want to save you money?” He rounded to the side of her padded chair and looked down at her. “Wouldn’t I prefer it if you had to spend it all and come begging for more?”
She stared at his lips. He had not kissed her, ever. She would like him to, but she refused to ask. She even held back from reaching out and touching the hand he braced on the back of the chair. It was one thing to try to undermine his mastery of the situation with unwholesome speech and action, quite another to betray heartfelt desires that only further strengthened his hand.
“I couldn’t spend eight hundred pounds a year if I tried.”
“Don’t let anyone hear you speak like that. My reputation will never recover if it is known that I married a woman who can make do with eight hundred pounds a year. Besides, what will I have to complain about at my club if my wife isn’t suitably spendthrift?”
My wife. A wife could be the object of unabashed adoration or simply another nuisance in a man’s life. Where would she fall along that continuum? And would his, if not black, then at least darkish grey heart ever be hers?
She folded her hands together primly. “Does no one complain about their wives being too insatiable in bed?”
His gaze swept her entire person. Her skin tingled. He wanted to do wicked things to her—it was the reaction she had hoped to provoke—but he touched her nowhere, not even the fabric of her enormous sleeves.
He took a seat opposite hers, his long legs taking up most of the space between them. “Are you planning on being an overly enthusiastic wife?”
The way he studied her both absorbed and unsettled her. “Would you like me to be?”
“I am much more interested in the wife you cannot help being,” he said, the firm last word on the subject.
He wanted to strip her bare in every way. Her naked body was only the beginning. From there, her undisguised thoughts. At last, her unhidden heart.
She took a sip of her tea, her fingers tight around the handle of the cup. “So . . . will you promise to shamelessly flatter Frederica?”
• • •
Two days later, as Lord Wrenworth strolled into Lady Balfour’s drawing room to meet Louisa’s family, there was a reverent collective intake of breath, as if the Cantwell women were a group of mortals who had accidentally stumbled into the presence of Apollo himself.
Louisa, too, felt as if she were seeing him again for the very first time, her eyes blurring with the potency of his physical perfection.
You, sir, are a scoundrel.
As if he’d heard her thought, he glanced her way. Their gazes held, a pair of miscreants recognizing each o
ther in a roomful of upstanding people.
It lasted only a moment, but the sweetness of that secret communion lingered: a joy that was also an ache in her heart. They were two of a kind—she wished she wouldn’t need to always guard herself from him.
“May I present his lordship the Marquess of Wrenworth?” said Lady Balfour, still giddy from having pulled off the most spectacular match—or mismatch, as Louisa sometimes thought of it—in years. “Sir, my dear cousin Mrs. Cantwell, Miss Julia, Miss Matilda, Miss Cecilia, and Miss Cantwell.”
Frederica, addressed as Miss Cantwell, as she was the eldest, kept her head lowered.
Lord Wrenworth approached her chair. She still sat with her head down.
Much to the surprise of everyone present, he lowered himself to one knee, so as to be level with her. Flustered, she turned her entire body to one side. He studied the angle she presented him, then calmly rounded to her other side.
Lady Balfour and Mrs. Cantwell both glanced toward Louisa, who could only shake her head to show that she had no idea what he was doing.
He straightened. “I understand you have been mourning the loss of your beauty for years, Miss Cantwell. What I do not understand is why your family has allowed such an act of rampant narcissism.”
Frederica looked up in shock.
“The only imperfections I see are a few shallow pockmarks on your right cheek. I would never have permitted any sister of mine to brood over such minor blemishes for the better part of a decade.
“Had you come for a London Season, you would not have dislodged Mrs. Townsend from her perch as the most beautiful woman in London. You might not even have disturbed Miss Bessler’s place third on that list. But make no mistake, you would have been mentioned in the same breath as those women. Instead, you have wasted your youth grieving for a gross misfortune that never took place: You are perhaps five percent less lovely than you would have been without the pockmarks, not fifty percent.
“Miss Louisa asked me to compliment you, but I shall not, not when you can go out and garner hundreds of them on your own with minimum effort. And if you will not, then there is nothing anyone can do for you—the matter is not with your face, but your head.”
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