Ignoring the squelching in his boots, he reached for her again. In the bare second his wet hand rested on her lower arm, warm under his chilled fingers, longing flooded his veins. “Eleanor,” he whispered.
“Get your wet hands off my gown.” She shook him off.
“Won’t you forgive me?”
Her gray eyes held his. He’d seen them bright with affection and wild with ecstasy. Now they contained polished steel.
“I think, Mr. Quinton, it would be better if we both forget that there is anything to forgive.”
Max deliberately mistook her meaning. “Good,” he said. She watched with the outrage of a dowager as he unbuttoned his clammy, clinging waistcoat. Yet she’d seen him wearing even less. Or felt him, rather. It had been dark at the time.
The garment slid down his arms. “I’m ready to apologize again, but I’d like it even better if we could begin a new chapter. May we start again? Please Eleanor.”
Eleanor watched Max Quinton drape his wet waistcoat over a branch, in fascinated disbelief that, meeting him after five years, he should be stripping off his clothes. She trusted he wouldn’t be removing all of them. The entreaty in his voice affected her, but only for an instant. Giving him a dunking had blunted the edge of anger that his appearance provoked, that was all. Nothing else had changed.
“I made it clear in the past,” she said, “that our acquaintance was over. Forever. Should we meet again, which I trust won’t be necessary, you may call me Miss Hardwick.”
“Don’t you think that’s absurd, given what we once were to each other?”
She stepped farther away from this unpleasantly damp man. Never mind that his figure was displayed to advantage beneath clinging linen, fine enough to limn the contours of his chest and reveal an intriguing dark shadow descending to the waist. It was true that his thick, wavy hair looked quite good wet, but she no longer responded to the lilt of laughter in his deep voice. “Our past relationship was founded on falsehood and meant nothing. I never think of you and I’d like to keep it that way. We meet as indifferent strangers.”
A smile tugged on his lips. It was one of the first things she’d noticed about him, that hint of humor in an otherwise grave face. “Do you often push strangers into rivers?”
“You deserved it.”
“I’ll own up to my transgressions and again humbly beg for your forgiveness. I have never held you in anything but the greatest esteem.” He sounded reasonable and earnest. The sincerity in his voice plucked at her heart.
She’d be a fool, again, to believe him. “I was nothing but a game to you, a conquest to impress your friends.”
“You were my love, the woman I wanted to marry.”
She answered in precise, clipped syllables. “You wanted to marry me because you had no choice. I appreciated the honor you did me with your forced proposal, but declined to tie myself for life to such a man, for such a reason.”
She would have stalked off, but he stayed her with a hand on her elbow. “You insult me, Eleanor, and you are wrong,” he said. “It’s true that I owed you marriage but I didn’t offer for you solely because I had to. You were not compromised, not publicly, as is proven by the fact that your reputation is intact.”
Again she shook him off. “No thanks to you! I was the subject of a drunken wager. Do you deny it?”
“I cannot, to my shame, though it was not I who made the bet. It was Ashdown. I wanted no part of it until I set eyes on you.”
Far from placated, she spun around to confront him. “Am I supposed to be flattered by that?” she demanded, putting her hands on her hips and glaring at him. “Is it acceptable that you took part in a contest for my favors because you discovered that I wasn’t quite the dried-up spinster Sir George Ashdown had claimed?”
“That is not how it was.” His voice had lost its soothing tone and she was glad of it. It was only fair that he should be as agitated as she.
“But you took the money. You won the competition and collected your winnings. Will you deny it?”
“You are willfully misunderstanding me. I’d have kissed you even if there wasn’t a penny in it for me.”
Kiss! He’d done a great deal more than kiss! “I really don’t care,” she said with her nose in the air. “I was overcome by the proximity of a charming rogue on a summer night, not the first foolish woman to make such a mistake and doubtless not the last. Luckily no lasting harm was done.”
Voices intruded, Robert’s and a young female’s. Max looked around as they came into view. From the state of their garments, it appeared both had suffered the same fate as he. The three of them were dripping wet, while Eleanor stood immaculate and dry, her clothing as unruffled as her heart. She could very well be the officious harridan who had been described to him before he set eyes on her.
It had been at a dinner hosted by the Earl of Egremont for the officers of the Sussex militia.
“You want to hear about pestilential females?” The question came from Sir George Ashdown, one of the local gentry summoned to Petworth Park for this all-male occasion. “There’s no woman who’s more of a nuisance than my wife’s cousin Eleanor.”
There were some embarrassed protests from the officers. The topic of conversation had been women and the traps they set for unwitting men. Women, not ladies. It really wasn’t proper for a group of gentlemen, who’d left the dinner table to take the air, to discuss ladies.
“Damn it, Ashdown.” The speaker was the major of the regiment who had invited Max down to Sussex for the weeklong race meeting. “I wouldn’t discuss any cousin of mine when my cock’s pissing in the wind.” The earl’s claret had been good and plentiful and the major’s words were slurred.
So were Ashdown’s. “Button it up then. Complain all you want about your birds of paradise, but at least you can be rid of them. There’s no disposing of a wife.”
“You’re talking about Lady Ashdown?” Another officer was confused as well as disapproving.
“Lady Ashdown never gave me any trouble until Eleanor Hardwick came to stay with us. Now it’s nothing but nagging, all day long. No muddy boots in the house, no wet dogs in the drawing room, and she won’t let me bed her when I’m drunk.” Sir George arranged his breeches. “The haughty bitch Eleanor put her up to it.”
Max did not regard himself a fastidious man. He bred horses and spent much of his life in the stables. But he was inclined to be on the side of Ashdown’s wife in this matter. Though no judge of male allure, he had the feeling that if he was Lady Ashdown, he’d try to avoid bedding Sir George, who possessed a large belly and an unpleasant odor, at every opportunity.
“You know what?” Ashdown continued, aggrieved. “She asked me to bathe more often. I bathe! Once a month. Just like my father. Always have, always will.”
Some of the officers, the married men among them, made sympathetic noises and a couple of them mentioned interfering female relations.
“Interfering is right. She has no business telling my wife what to do. She’s a cold-hearted bitch and could never get a man of her own. Who would want her? Needs to be put in her place.”
A despicable man, Ashdown, still was. He had been flat wrong about Eleanor. But that crude complaint of Sir George’s had eventually led to the destruction of Max’s hopes.
An insistent female voice brought him back to Somerset, where he had improbably encountered his lost love.
“Eleanor!” cried the girl. “This is Robert Townsend, our neighbor. Imagine! We met when we were little children but he hasn’t lived here in years. Now he has returned for his twenty-first birthday, and his guardian is to celebrate it with a grand ball!”
Eleanor’s presence was explained. She must be visiting relations in the neighborhood. She had a great many relations.
“Robert,” he said. “I see you’ve managed to get into trouble, as usual. I believe introductions are in order. I am already acquainted with Miss Hardwick.”
Robert knew how to behave when he wanted to. Despite hi
s wet clothes he produced a bow and his most winning smile. “Delighted to make your acquaintance, ma’am.”
Eleanor curtsied. “You met my cousin in midstream, and I daresay you introduced yourselves. But now we are on dry land, let’s try for a little formality. Mr. Townsend, allow me to present Miss Caroline Brotherton.” Five years ago, he’d been charmed by her quips. Time had not changed that at all.
The girl, a pretty creature with a mop of damp red hair, shivering in an indecently clinging gown, curtsied without taking her eyes off Robert. Max coughed.
Eleanor’s voice turned from amused raillery back to frost. “Caro. This is Mr. Quinton. I believe he is Mr. Townsend’s guardian.”
“Only for three more weeks! How do you and Max know each other, Miss Hardwick?”
Max waited with interest to hear her answer.
“We met in Sussex several years ago. Our acquaintance was of the slightest.”
That was one way of putting it. Measured in time their acquaintance had, indeed, been slight.
CHAPTER TWO
* * *
Eleanor had hoped never to see Max Quinton again. But if she had to, there was a certain satisfaction in having pushed him into the river. Then he had the nerve to beg her pardon. The gall of the man! And he had the nerve to look extremely fine, even when dripping wet. And, unlike her, he had the presence of mind to fetch his dry coat for Caro, not the first time he’d demonstrated such chivalry. In the cool of a summer night, he’d draped his evening coat around Eleanor’s shoulders as they’d sat beside a Sussex lake.
Hurrying Caro home before she caught a cold, Eleanor continued to dwell on the way Max’s clothes clung to his well-developed sportsman’s physique. Unlike his friend Sir George Ashdown, loathsome husband to Cousin Sylvia, he’d kept his figure despite being past his first youth. Pretty good for nearly forty.
Who was she fooling? She knew quite well that he was thirty-five and a half, exactly five years older than she. Their birthdays were two days apart. It was absurd the way trivial facts lingered in the memory, facts as unimportant as what she had for dinner on Tuesday. Except that she couldn’t remember last week’s menu and she was annoyingly aware of Max Quinton’s preference for lamb over beef, for apple tart over syllabub. He preferred Shakespeare to the modern poets, the country to the town.
She had first seen him at the Petworth Inn, at an assembly initiating the week of the militia races. The cluster of officers who’d surrounded her, begging to stand up with her, had been a surprise. Though no wallflower, she’d never been a beauty, and at twenty-five she approached spinster or chaperone status. She put her sudden popularity down to the shortage of younger ladies owing to the sudden influx of officers at the humble provincial assembly. Nevertheless, she had enjoyed the unexpected attention. A sea of red coats and eager faces pressed around her. She’d been laughing, attempting to distribute her dances among the supplicants, when she noticed him.
A tall, broad-shouldered man, visible over the crowd, he’d stood a little apart, his evening dress marking him a civilian. With his craggy features and prominent nose, he wasn’t handsome by most standards. Lightly tanned skin spoke of a life lived outdoors. Locks of brown hair fell over a broad forehead and raked the collar of his coat. He’d regarded the proceedings with a careless expression. Perhaps it was the sobriety of his dress, but he struck her as a sensible man, in contrast to the soldiers strutting in their uniforms and swords.
Then she’d happened to catch his gaze. They looked at each other and his indifference turned to warmth. In the weathered face his eyes stood out very blue, as did white teeth revealed by a dawning smile. Her heart seemed to stop…
“I’m in love!”
Caro’s exclamation brought her back to the present.
“It’s true,” the girl insisted. “Who ever loved who loved not at first sight?” Caro’s ignorance of poetry didn’t extend to Romeo and Juliet. “No sooner did I lay eyes on Robert than I knew. I shall love him forever.”
“Nonsense!” Eleanor said. She was in a position to know.
“I shall! You don’t understand, Eleanor!”
Eleanor also knew better than to argue with an infatuated girl. “He seems very pleasant,” she said. “How delightful for you to meet an old playmate after all this time.”
Her attempt at painting Townsend as a callow youth failed to impress. From the vantage point of seventeen, Caro saw the twenty-year-old as the perfect romantic figure. And so she should. For a first flirtation, Robert Townsend was quite suitable, and as long as she kept an eye on her little cousin, it would be nothing more. While she realized that not every woman preferred spinsterhood, she thought disaster even more assured when marriage was entered too young. Sylvia had been seventeen when she wed Ashdown. Eleanor’s own mother had wed at the same age.
Caro chattered at her side. “Robert has been to Italy and France and Holland, you know? He writes poetry and knows all about art. Isn’t Robert the most beautiful name? Do you think Mama will let him call on us? I shall die if I never see him again. Die!”
“Since Mr. Townsend is visiting his estate, I expect we’ll meet him in the neighborhood,” Eleanor replied cheerfully. More cheerfully than she felt. Meeting Mr. Townsend also meant meeting his guardian.
“Robert Townsend is back,” John Mathews stated the next morning. Elizabeth Brotherton’s son by her first marriage, John resembled his mother in character if not looks. His simplest remarks were always delivered with the weight of momentous opinions. “We won’t wish to pursue the acquaintance.”
Eleanor quelled Caro’s rising protest with a frown. She’d helped the girl creep into the house and change into dry clothes without being discovered. Somehow Caro had managed to keep silent for almost an entire day, but Eleanor wouldn’t wager a farthing on her continued discretion if she didn’t soon get a chance to meet her youthful neighbor.
“Why not?” Mrs. Brotherton asked. “I haven’t seen him since he was a boy, but we visited his late parents. Both your father and Mr. Brotherton approved of them.”
“I don’t like to gossip,” John said mendaciously, “but I hear shocking things about young Townsend. He was ejected from Oxford and has spent much of the time since in France.”
Mrs. Brotherton clutched her lace fichu. “Among those savages who murdered their king?”
“I believe he returned to England before that,” John admitted with some reluctance. “But his behavior and that of his friends has been the talk of London. And he collects pictures.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Eleanor asked. “Gentlemen of the highest rank are cognoscenti of art.”
“Portraits of one’s ancestors are all very well,” John said, only a hint of discomfort on his bland features revealing that he had no idea what she was talking about. “But word at the Corn Exchange this morning is that his taste runs to indecent subjects. I will say no more in front of ladies.” That was so like John, to hint at interesting news and then refuse to repeat it. “His guardian is with him, a Mr. Max Quinton. Said to be a very sound man who has kept the estate in excellent condition.”
Against her better judgment, Eleanor wanted to hear more.
“I don’t know any Quintons.” Elizabeth knew the peerage by heart and dismissed anyone who wasn’t in it with a sniff.” If young Townsend calls, I shall not receive him. He sounds like a poor influence for Caroline.”
John frowned. “I don’t think we can refuse the acquaintance altogether. He will be our neighbor. I shall call at Longford Hall and determine whether he is fit to be introduced to my mother. And sister.”
Mrs. Brotherton’s cold, handsome features creased into a rare smile. “Dearest John. What would I do without you?”
John returned from Longford with the news that Robert Townsend’s three fellow expellees from Oxford had joined him for his birthday celebrations, which were to include a grand ball. Although two of them were of negligible, even undesirable birth, the third was Viscount Kendal.
; “The Earl of Windermere’s heir.” Trust Cousin Elizabeth to know. “Quite an eligible parti. Caroline may put up her hair and attend the assembly. As long as she gives me no reason to change my mind.”
“Will you stay for the ball, Eleanor?” Caro begged. “It won’t be fun with just Mama as my chaperone.”
Eleanor looked up the date. Three more weeks of possible encounters with Max Quinton. Her instinct was to make an excuse and leave immediately. But she had little confidence in Caro’s ability to maintain good behavior without help. She stiffened her spine. If she let Max Quinton drive her away again, she admitted he still had the power to affect her. She had every confidence in her ability to meet him again with polite mutual indifference. To do otherwise would be irrational.
“I had intended to leave that week, but my father won’t miss me if I remain in Somerset an extra day or two.”
Max had come to the guardianship late. In exchange for a fee, he’d overseen the estate for several years on behalf of the previous incumbent, a distant cousin. Upon the latter’s death he’d been appointed guardian for the last two years of Robert’s minority. Since the boy, having been ejected from Oxford, was in Europe doing a truncated Grand Tour, his skills in loco parentis hadn’t been much required or tested.
Now he found himself surrounded by youth, undisciplined boys whose Parisian junkets had ended when the French political situation slid into chaos. Despite their Latin tags, French phrases, and worldly knowledge of culture and politics, the boys still made Max think of a quartet of colts: handsome and bumptious. Colts with access to the dangerous toys of strong drink, cards, and dice.
Like most young animals, they needed fresh air and exercise, and this, in the declining days of his influence, Max was determined Robert and his friends would have. Not incidentally, calls around the neighborhood would bring Max into company with Eleanor Hardwick.
Finally, after five years, he’d met her again and no, it had not gone well. He’d made no headway at all in explaining what had happened, let alone excusing it. The trouble was, his actions were inexcusable. When Sir George had maliciously offered a pony to any officer who’d seduce his prissy cousin-in-law into a kiss, Max had been indifferent, his mild disgust drowned by Lord Egremont’s claret. When the gathered competitors had raised the stakes and each contributed his own twenty-five guineas to the pot, he’d been somewhat interested. At that time sports had been of overwhelming interest and women little. Marriage had been something he saw in an indeterminate future. His time was consumed by responsibilities: arranging the future of his younger brothers and sisters; turning his late father’s small estate into a flourishing enterprise.
The Second Seduction of a Lady Page 2
