With This Kiss: Part Three

by Eloisa James

  “And I did,” her father replied, but without his usual bluster. “Brought her up as my own.”

  “You brought her up as my sister,” James said flatly. He forced himself to cross the room and sit down. “And all the time you were stealing from her.”

  “Not all the time,” his father protested. “Just in the last year. Or so. The majority of her fortune is in funds, and I couldn’t touch that. I just… I just borrowed from… well, I just borrowed some. I’m deuced unlucky, and that’s a fact. I was absolutely sure it wouldn’t come to this.”

  “Unlucky?” James repeated, his voice liquid with disgust.

  “Now the girl is getting a proposal or two, I don’t have the time to make it up. You’ve got to take her. It’s not just that the estate and this town house will have to go; after the scandal, the name won’t be worth anything, either. Even if I pay off what I borrowed from her by selling the estate, the whole wouldn’t cover my debts.”

  James didn’t reply. The only words going through his head were flatly blasphemous.

  “It was easier when your mother was alive,” the duke said, after a minute or two. “She helped, you know. She had a level head on her shoulders.”

  James couldn’t bring himself to answer that, either. His mother had died nine years earlier, so in under a decade his father had managed to impoverish an estate stretching from Scotland to Staffordshire to London. And he had embezzled Daisy’s fortune.

  “You’ll make her love you,” his father said encouragingly, dropping into a chair opposite James. “She already adores you; she always has. We’ve been lucky so far in that poor Theodora is as ugly as a stick. The only men who’ve asked for her hand have been such obvious fortune hunters that her mother wouldn’t even consider them. But that’ll change as the season wears on. She’s a taking little piece, once you get to know her.”

  James ground his teeth. “She will never love me in that way. She thinks of me as her brother, as her friend. And she has no resemblance whatsoever to a stick.”

  “Don’t be a fool. You’ve got my profile.” A glimmer of vanity underscored his words. “Your mother always said that I was the most handsome man of my generation.”

  James bit back a remark that would do nothing to help the situation. He was experiencing an overwhelming wave of nausea. “We could tell Daisy what happened. What you did. She’ll understand.”

  His father snorted. “Do you think her mother will understand? My old friend Saxby didn’t know what he was getting into when he married that woman. She’s a termagant, a positive tartar.”

  In the seventeen years since Mrs. Saxby and her infant daughter had joined the duke’s household, she and Ashbrook had managed to maintain sufficiently cordial relations—primarily because His Grace had never thrown anything in the widow’s direction. But James knew instantly that his father was right. If Daisy’s mother got even a hint that her daughter’s guardian had misappropriated her inheritance, a fleet of solicitors would be battering on the town house door before evening fell. Bile drove James’s stomach into his throat at the thought.

  His father, on the other hand, was cheering up. He had the sort of mind that flitted from one subject to another; his rages were ferocious but short-lived. “A few posies, maybe a poem, and Theodora will fall into your hand as sweetly as a ripe plum. After all, it’s not as if the girl gets much flattery. Tell her she’s beautiful, and she’ll be at your feet.”

  “I cannot do that,” James stated, not even bothering to imagine himself saying such a thing. It wasn’t a matter of not wishing to spout such inanities to Daisy herself; he loathed situations where he found himself fumbling with language and stumbling around the ballroom. The season was three weeks old, but he hadn’t attended a single ball.

  His father misinterpreted his refusal. “Of course, you’ll have to lie about it, but that’s the kind of lie a gentleman can’t avoid. She may not be the prettiest girl on the market—and certainly not as delectable as that opera dancer I saw you with the other night—but it wouldn’t get you anywhere to point out the truth.” He actually gave a little chuckle at the thought.

  James heard him only dimly; he was concentrating on not throwing up as he tried to think through the dilemma before him.

  The duke continued, amusing himself by laying out the distinction between mistresses and wives. “In compensation, you can keep a mistress who’s twice as beautiful as your wife. It’ll provide an interesting contrast.”

  It occurred to James, not for the first time, that there was no human being in the world he loathed as much as his father. “If I marry Daisy, I will not take a mistress,” he said, still thinking frantically, trying to come up with a way out. “I would never do that to her.”

  “Well, I expect you’ll change your mind about that after a few years of marriage, but to each his own.” The duke’s voice was as strong and cheerful as ever. “Well? Not much to think about, is there? It’s bad luck and all that rot, but I can’t see that either of us has much choice about it. The good thing is that a man can always perform in the bedroom, even if he doesn’t want to.”

  The only thing James wanted at that moment was to get out of the room, away from his disgusting excuse for a parent. But he had lost the battle, and he forced himself to lay out the rules for surrender. “I will only do this on one condition.” His voice sounded unfamiliar to his own ears, as if a stranger spoke the words.

  “Anything, my boy, anything! I know I’m asking for a sacrifice. As I said, we can admit amongst ourselves that little Theodora is not the beauty of the bunch.”

  “The day I marry her, you sign the entire estate over to me—the Staffordshire house and its lands, this town house, the island in Scotland.”

  The duke’s mouth fell open. “What?”

  “The entire estate,” James repeated. “I will pay you an allowance, and no one need know except for the solicitors. But I will not be responsible for you and your harebrained schemes. I will never again take responsibility for any debts you might incur—nor for any theft. The next time around, you’ll go to prison.”

  “That’s absurd,” his father spluttered. “I couldn’t—you couldn’t possibly—no!”

  “Then make your good-byes to Staffordshire,” James said. “You might want to pay a special visit to my mother’s grave, if you’re so certain she would have been distressed at the sale of the house, let alone the churchyard.”

  His father opened his mouth, but James raised a hand.

  “If I were to let you keep the estate, you’d fling Daisy’s inheritance after that which you’ve already lost. There would be nothing left within two years, and I will have betrayed my closest friend for no reason.”

  “Your closest friend, eh?” His father was instantly diverted into another train of thought. “I’ve never had a woman as a friend, but Theodora looks like a man, of course, and—”

  “Father!”

  The duke harrumphed. “Can’t say I like the way you’ve taken to interrupting me. I suppose if I agree to this ridiculous scheme of yours I can expect to look forward to daily humiliation.”

  It was an implicit concession.

  “You see,” his father said, a smile spreading across his face now that the conversation was over, “it all came well. Your mother always said that, you know. ‘All’s well that ends well.’ ”

  James couldn’t stop himself from asking one more thing, though, God knows, he already knew the answer. “Don’t you care in the least about what you’re doing to me—and to Daisy?”

  A hint of red crept back into his father’s cheeks. “The girl couldn’t do better than to marry you!”

  “Daisy will marry me believing that I’m in love with her, and I’m not. She deserves to be wooed and genuinely adored by her husband.”

  “Love and marriage shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath,” his father said dismissively. But his eyes slid away from James’s.

  “And you’ve done the same to me. Love and marriage may not come
together all that often, but I will have no chance at all. What’s more, I will begin my marriage with a lie that will destroy it if Daisy ever finds out. Do you realize that? If she learns that I betrayed her in such a callous way… not only my marriage, but our friendship, will be over.”

  “If you really think she’ll fly into a temper, you’d better get an heir on her in the first few months,” his father said with the air of someone offering practical advice. “A woman scorned, and all that. If she’s disgruntled enough, I suppose she might run off with another man. But if you already have an heir—and a spare, if you can—you could let her go.”

  “My wife will never run off with another man.” That growled out of James’s chest from a place he didn’t even know existed.

  His father heaved himself out of his chair. “You as much as called me a fool; well, I’ll do the same for you. No man in his right mind thinks that marriage is a matter of billing and cooing. Your mother and I were married for the right reasons, to do with family obligations and financial negotiations. We did what was necessary to have you and left it there. Your mother couldn’t face the effort needed for a spare, but we didn’t waste any tears over it. You were always a healthy boy.” Then he added, “Barring that time you almost went blind, of course. We would have tried for another, if worse came to worst.”

  James pushed himself to his feet, hearing his father’s voice dimly through a tangle of hideous thoughts that he couldn’t bring himself to spit out.

  “Neither of us raised you to have such rubbishing romantic views,” the duke tossed over his shoulder as he left the room.

  Having reached the age of nineteen years, James had thought he understood his place in life. He’d learned the most important lessons: how to ride a horse, hold his liquor, and defend himself in a duel.

  No one had ever taught him—and he had never imagined the necessity of learning—how to betray the one person whom you truly cared for in life. The only person who genuinely loved you. How to break that person’s heart, whether it be tomorrow, or five years, or ten years in the future.

  Because Daisy would learn the truth someday. He knew it with a bone-deep certainty: somehow, she would discover that he had pretended to fall in love so that she would marry him… and she would never forgive him.

  Two

  Theodora Saxby, known to James as Daisy, but to herself as Theo, was trying very hard not to think about Lady Corning’s ball, which had been held the night before. But, as is often the case when one tries to avoid a topic, the only thing her mind saw fit to review was a scene from said ball.

  The girls she had overheard chattering about her resemblance to a boy weren’t even being particularly unkind. They weren’t saying it to her, after all. And she wouldn’t have minded their comments so much if she didn’t have the distinct impression that the gentlemen at the ball agreed with them.

  But what could she possibly do about it? She stared despairingly into her glass. Her mother’s fear of just that assessment—though Mama refused to acknowledge it—had led to Theo’s hair being turned to ringlets with a curling iron. The gown she’d worn, like everything else in her wardrobe, was white and frilly and altogether feminine. It was picked out in pearls and touches of pink, a combination that (in her opinion) did nothing but emphasize the decidedly unfeminine cast of her profile.

  She loathed her profile almost as much as she loathed the dress. If she didn’t have to worry about people mistaking her for a boy—not that they really did, but they couldn’t stop remarking on the resemblance; at any rate, if she didn’t have to worry about that—she would never again wear pink. Or pearls. There was something dreadfully banal about the way pearls shimmered.

  For a moment she distracted herself by mentally ripping her dress apart, stripping it of its ruffles and pearls and tiny sleeves. Given a choice, she would dress in plum-colored corded silk and sleek her hair away from her face without a single flyaway curl. Her only hair adornment would be an enormous feather—a black one—arching backward so it brushed her shoulder. If her sleeves were elbow-length, she could trim them with a narrow edging of black fur. Or perhaps swansdown, with the same at the neck. Or she could put a feather trim at the neck; the white would look shocking against the plum velvet.

  That led to the idea that she could put a ruff at the neck and trim that with a narrow strip of swansdown. It would be even better if the sleeves weren’t opaque fabric but nearly transparent, like that new Indian silk her friend Lucinda had been wearing the previous night, and she would have them quite wide, so they billowed and then gathered tight at the elbow. Or perhaps the wrist would be more dramatic… .

  She could see herself entering a ballroom in that costume. No one would titter about whether she looked like a girl or a boy. She would pause for a moment on the top of the steps, gathering everyone’s gaze, and then she would snap open her fan… . No, fans were tiresomely overdone. She’d have to come up with something new.

  The first man who asked her to dance, addressing her as Miss Saxby, would be treated to her slightly weary yet amused smile. “Call me Theo,” she would say, and all the matrons would be so scandalized they would squeak about nothing else the whole night long.

  Theo was key: the name played to all those infatuations men formed on each other, the way their closest relationships were with their friends rather than with their wives. She’d seen it with James. When he was thirteen he had positively worshipped the captain of the cricket team at Eton. It stood to reason that if she wore her hair sleeked back, along with a gown that faintly resembled a cricket uniform, all those men who had once adored their captains would be at her feet.

  She was so caught up in a vision of herself in a severely tailored jacket resembling the Etonian morning coat that at first she didn’t even hear the pounding on her door. But an insistent “Daisy!” finally broke through her trance, and she pushed herself up from the settee and opened the bedchamber door.

  “Oh hello, James,” she said, unable to muster much enthusiasm at the sight of him. The last thing one wants to see when in a melancholic fit is a friend who refuses to attend balls even when he knows perfectly well that all three weeks of her first season had been horrific. He had no idea what it was like. How could he? He was devastatingly handsome, rather charming when he wasn’t being a beast, and a future duke, to boot. This embarrassment of riches really wasn’t fair. “I didn’t realize it was you.”

  “How could you not realize it was me?” James demanded, pushing open the door and crowding her backward, now that he knew she was decent. “I’m the only person in the world who calls you Daisy. Let me in, will you?”

  Theo sighed and moved back. “Do you suppose you could try harder to call me Theo? I must have asked you a hundred times already. I don’t want to be Theodora, or Dora, or Daisy, either.”

  James flung himself into a chair and ran a hand through his hair. From the look of it, he’d been in an ill humor all morning, because half his hair was standing straight up. It was lovely hair, heavy and thick. Sometimes it looked black, but when sunlight caught it there were deep mahogany strands, too. More reasons to resent James. Her own hair had nothing subtle about it. It was thick, too, but an unfashionable yellowy-brown mixture.

  “No,” he said flatly. “You’re Daisy to me, and Daisy suits you.”

  “It doesn’t suit me,” she retorted. “Daisies are pretty and fresh, and I’m neither.”

  “You are pretty,” he said mechanically, not even bothering to glance at her.

  She rolled her eyes, but really, there was no reason to press the point. James never looked at her close enough to notice whether she’d turned out pretty… why should he? Being only two years apart, they’d shared the nursery practically from birth, which meant he had clear memories of her running about in a diaper, being smacked by Nurse Wiggan for being smart.

  “How was last night?” he asked abruptly.

  “Terrible.”

  “Trevelyan didn’t make an appearance?”


  “Geoffrey was indeed there,” Theo said gloomily. “He just never looked at me. He danced twice—twice—with the cow-eyed Claribel. I can’t stand her, and I can’t believe he can either, which means he’s just looking for a fortune. But if he is, then why doesn’t he dance with me? My inheritance must be twice as large as hers. Do you think he doesn’t know? And if so,” she said without stopping for breath, “can you think of some way of bringing it up that wouldn’t be terribly obvious?”

  “Absolutely,” James said. “I can hear that conversation now. ‘So, Trevelyan, you flat-footed looby, did you know that Theodora’s inheritance comes to thousands of pounds a year? And by the way, what about those matched grays you just bought?’ ”

  “You could think of a more adroit way to bring it up,” Theo said, though she couldn’t imagine it herself. “Geoffrey isn’t flat-footed. He’s as graceful as a leaf. You should have seen him dancing with cretinous Claribel.”

  James frowned. “Is she the one who was brought up in India?”

  “Yes. I can’t understand why some helpful tiger didn’t gobble her up. All those plump curves… she would have made a lovely Sunday treat.”

  “Tsk, tsk,” James said, a glimmer of laughter coming into his eyes for the first time. “Young ladies in search of husbands should be docile and sweet. You keep coming out with these appallingly malicious little remarks. If you don’t behave, all those matrons will declare you unfit, and then you’ll be in a pickle.”

  “I suppose that’s part of my problem.”

  “What’s the other part?”

  “I’m not feminine or dainty, nor even deliciously curvy. No one seems to notice me.”

  “And you hate that,” James said with a grin.

  “Well, I do,” she said. “I don’t mind admitting it. I think I could attract a great many men if I were simply allowed to be myself. But pink ruffles and pearl trim make me look more mannish than ever. And I feel ugly, which is the worst thing of all.”