Slightly Tempted

by Mary Balogh

  Wulfric!

  For a moment she was so overwhelmed by shock and disbelief that she could neither move nor cry out.

  He had not seen her. But he had seen the Earl of Rosthorn. He stopped abruptly, his face a mask of narrow-eyed coldness, his nostrils flaring.

  But Morgan did not really notice. She had found both her feet and her voice.

  “Wulf!” she cried, and then she hurtled toward him, panic clawing at her back and at her heels. “Wulf!”

  Wulfric was not the sort of man into whose arms one would normally think of dashing. But at that moment he represented for her all that was solid and safe and dear. She hurled herself into his arms and felt all the reassurance of his presence as they closed about her.

  It was a moment that was soon over. He took her firmly by the upper arms, set her away from him, and glanced briefly down at her before looking over her head at the Earl of Rosthorn. His expression would have made icicles shiver.

  “Doubtless someone,” he said so softly that he was clearly at his most dangerous, “is about to offer an explanation.”

  He had clearly heard a thing or two, a part of her mind told her. The Countess of Caddick had doubtless been busy talking. But it was not that thought that was uppermost in Morgan’s mind. She did not even think to wonder what he was doing here in Harwich. Panic was clenching her stomach, threatening to make her retch.

  “Wulf,” she said, her voice shaking so badly that the words blurted out of her in jerky spurts. She pawed ineffectually at the capes of his cloak and forgot all about dignity and partially rehearsed speeches. “Wulf, Alleyne is dead.” Then all she could hear was the clacking of her own teeth.

  His cold silver eyes changed. Something—some light—went out behind them, leaving them flat and opaque. His hands felt like iron bands about her arms. Then he nodded his head once, twice, and again and again, slowly, almost imperceptibly.

  “Ah,” he said in a voice so distant that Morgan scarcely heard him.

  It was a truly terrifying moment—Wulfric at a loss for either words or actions. She had never seen its like before. He was suddenly a human who might at any moment show a vulnerability she had never suspected him capable of. She did not want him to be a human being. She wanted him to be her eldest brother, Wulfric, the invincible Duke of Bewcastle. She did not want to be eighteen years old and a woman at that moment. She wanted to be a child again in the safe orbit of his immutable power.

  But the moment of near vulnerability passed. His eyes focused on Lord Rosthorn again and he was Wulfric once more. His hands dropped away from Morgan’s arms. She opened her mouth to make the necessary introductions, but Wulfric spoke first.

  “Well, Rosthorn,” he said, with a slight emphasis on the name.

  “Bewcastle?” the earl said in return. “My sincerest condolences. I was in the process of escorting Lady Morgan and her maid home to London. Perhaps we can find some room where we may be more private? You have asked for an explanation.”

  Morgan darted him a glance. He sounded different, his words more clipped and precise, his French accent almost undetectable. He was looking back at Wulfric with hard eyes and hard-set jaw. Wulfric really had heard something, and Lord Rosthorn knew it. And so she was going to be caught between the pride and infernal sense of honor of two gentlemen.

  Just moments after she had told Wulf that Alleyne was dead.

  “I believe we may dispense with the need for explanations,” Wulfric said. “After the visit Lady Caddick paid me yesterday, I was on my way to Brussels in person to find Lady Morgan and bring her home. Now it would appear that it is unnecessary for me to proceed on my original errand, though perhaps I will need to go to make arrangements to have my brother’s body brought home.” Morgan watched his hand close about the handle of his quizzing glass, his knuckles very white. “Either way your escort is no longer needed, Rosthorn. I will see to Lady Morgan Bedwyn’s protection from this moment on. Good day to you.”

  Morgan looked at him in astonishment. He was not even going to listen to an explanation? He was not going to thank Lord Rosthorn for escorting her home? Or tell him exactly what Lady Caddick had accused him of? And was it her imagination, or did these two men know each other?

  She turned her head to look at Lord Rosthorn. His expression was still tight, granite-jawed, hard-eyed. She scarcely recognized him. But he looked back at her and made her a deep, formal bow.

  “Good-bye, chérie,” he said.

  “You are leaving, then?” she asked him. Just like that?

  But he had already turned away from them and was moving with long strides toward the outer door. She could not let him simply go like that, she thought. But before she could take one step after him Wulfric took one of her upper arms in his grasp again and she turned her wide-eyed attention back to him.

  He had not thought it necessary to find a private room when Lord Rosthorn had suggested it. But he must have given some indication to the staff on duty in the reception hall. Within moments they were being ushered with much bowing and scraping into a private parlor, and the door was closing behind them.

  Her legs felt weak beneath her then as she realized anew the enormity of the moment. Her dearest friend was gone, so swiftly and unexpectedly that she had not even had a chance to say good-bye to him. But she was home. Wulf was here and she had already unburdened herself of her terrible secret knowledge.

  He was looking at her with his pale silver eyes. His hand, in a familiar gesture, had already possessed itself of the handle of his quizzing glass.

  “You will tell me now, Morgan, if you will,” he said, “how Alleyne lost his life.”

  She looked steadily back at him, ignoring the ringing in her ears, the coldness in her head, and the weakness in her knees.

  “He died at the Battle of Waterloo,” she told him.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE RAIN WAS STILL FALLING IN A STEADY drizzle and the wind was still blowing in chilly gusts. Gervase nonetheless rode his hired horse at a pace close to a gallop, heedless of either danger or discomfort.

  He had been dismissed out of hand. Bewcastle, who had clearly heard enough from Lady Caddick to send him on his way to Brussels in person, had first demanded an explanation and then refused to listen to one. He had dismissed his old enemy just as if he were nothing and nobody.

  Gervase seethed with a hatred that had flared to new life as soon as he set eyes upon Bewcastle. It was a hatred he had not yet paused to consider. It blinded him, pulsed in his mind, clouded his judgment. But of one thing he was satisfied—for all his cold control, Bewcastle was clearly rattled. And he would be more so, Gervase vowed. They were not finished with each other yet.

  Oh, no, not by a long way.

  He pulled his horse over to the side of the road to allow a mail coach to pass from the opposite direction, spraying up water and mud as it did so. He moved forward again at a more cautious, mindful pace.

  He would be paying the Duke of Bewcastle a visit in London soon. But not too soon. Even through his hatred he recognized the need for some decency. The Bedwyn family must be allowed a short while to mourn.

  She needed time. Foolishly, he tried not to put a face or a name to the one person who might soften his resolve at the same time as she gave him the opening he needed to cause lasting mischief.

  In the meantime gossip from Brussels and from the ship was bound to spread to London, and with the Caddicks to fan the flames Gervase did not doubt that it would be vicious and unrelenting enough to erupt into a full-blown public scandal.

  He would not go to London immediately, he decided. It was high time he went home to Windrush Grange in Kent. It was time somehow to pick up his life where he had left it off nine years ago. He wondered if it would be possible, though. He was neither the man he had been then or the man he had been growing into.

  He rode onward, very aware that he was in England again, very aware too that it was not a soft welcome that was being extended to him. The landscape was gray and dreary,
the clouds heavy and low. Raindrops dripped from the brim of his hat and somehow found their way down the back of his neck. The road ahead glistened with mud and gleamed with puddles denoting mild depressions or deep potholes—there was no knowing which unless one were incautious enough to step into one of them. Perhaps, he thought, it would have been wiser to remain in Harwich, to have taken passage on the first ship back to the Continent.

  But he had business here in England. It was time.

  He continued to ride onward.

  And despite himself he thought of Lady Morgan Bedwyn—exquisite in her youthful loveliness at the Cameron ball, haughty and intelligent and alluring at the picnic in the Forest of Soignés, disheveled and beautiful and unflinching at the Namur Gates as she bent over a human bundle of bloody rags, huge-eyed with grief in his rooms on the Rue de Brabant, fierce with passion as she reached for comfort. A fascinating woman of many facets.

  “Damnation!” He reined in his horse when he realized that he had urged it to a gallop again. “Damnation!”

  How could he use her . . .

  But he already had, of course.

  He already had.

  FOR TEN DAYS MORGAN SEEMED TO LIVE IN A FOG of unreality. She explained everything to Wulfric, much of it spilling out of her in a great rush in that private parlor at the Harbour Inn, more of it drawn from her by his careful questioning both then and during the seemingly interminable journey home to London the next day. She told him all she knew about Alleyne’s disappearance and about the reappearance of the letter, which seemed to be incontrovertible proof that he had been killed. She told him about the Caddicks and their determination to return home and their consequent refusal to remain in Brussels with her. She told him about Mrs. Clark’s giving her a temporary home and of all the work they and the other regimental wives had performed tending the wounded.

  The story Lady Caddick had told when she called at Bedwyn House, all righteous indignation, had been somewhat different from her own, Morgan gathered. She had made no mention of Alleyne’s being missing or of Morgan’s tending the wounded. In Lady Caddick’s version Morgan had been simply a headstrong, wayward, disobedient girl who had refused to be torn away from the pleasures of the city and the ineligible beaux who danced attendance upon her there, most notably the Earl of Rosthorn.

  “And you believed,” Morgan asked haughtily, turning her head to look out of the carriage window, “that I stayed for the sake of frivolity, Wulf? Do you know me so little?”

  “It would seem so,” he agreed. “I did not expect that you would be so bold as to dismiss a chaperon like yesterday’s outworn bonnet. However, neither did I expect that your chaperon would discard you. I had a word with Lady Caddick on the subject before she took her leave.”

  Morgan would love to have been an invisible witness to that particular set-down, which she did not doubt had left the countess feeling half an inch tall.

  She tried several times to tell him about the kindness the Earl of Rosthorn had shown her, but each time he listened without comment and then spoke about something quite unrelated to what she had just told him. Wulf would not be able to understand, of course, that there had been nothing ordinary about the past couple of weeks, that the usual rules of propriety had seemed supremely irrelevant to her. But there was, undeniably, the great guilt of what had occurred between them during that final evening in Brussels. It was hard to believe that either of them could have allowed it to happen.

  “Do you have a previous acquaintance with the Earl of Rosthorn?” she asked Wulfric at one point of their journey.

  “Enough to know that he is no suitable escort for you,” he said. “I trust this inn we are approaching is the one appointed for our next change of horses. I will need an explanation of why we are half an hour late.”

  Nine years ago Wulfric would have been twenty-four. Doubtless he had known the earl. Doubtless too he knew of the scandal that had sent the younger man into long exile. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him for an account of those sordid events, but she held her peace. The Earl of Rosthorn had never volunteered the information himself. She would not now try to worm it out of Wulfric, who was clearly hostile to him.

  She missed him. Their parting had been far too sudden and abrupt. He had left a certain void in her life. She wondered if he would come, as he had said he would, to make a formal offer for her hand to Wulfric. She sincerely hoped not. But when he did not come at all, when he did not even call to see how she did or to pay his official condolences, she was undeniably disappointed, even hurt.

  She tried not to think about him. He owed her nothing, after all—despite what his sense of honor might say to the contrary. Indeed, matters were quite the other way around. It was she who was in his debt.

  Freyja and Joshua were still in London, Parliament being still in session. It was not just Joshua’s political obligations that had kept them here, though. Freyja had sponsored Morgan’s presentation and come-out, but at the same time she had sponsored Lady Chastity Moore, Joshua’s cousin and ward, who was living with them at their London home. Chastity had recently become happily betrothed to Viscount Meecham. But even apart from their other obligations they would probably have delayed their return to Penhallow in Cornwall for Freyja to consult a reputable physician. She was in the early months of pregnancy.

  Aidan came from Oxfordshire with Eve and their adopted children, Davy and Becky, and Rannulf and Judith came from Leicestershire even though William, their son, was only a little over two months old. They all came in immediate response to the letters Wulfric wrote them and sent by special messenger.

  It should have been enormously comforting to Morgan to be surrounded by her family. And in many ways it was. But Wulfric, apart from providing the bare facts, was more than usually reticent and spent most of his time in the library. It fell to Morgan’s lot, then, to answer the myriad questions they all asked.

  It was a dreadful thing to witness the grief of her strong-minded siblings. Freyja bore up the best, on the outside, at least, remaining determinedly brisk and cheerful even though her face looked chiseled out of marble and Joshua hovered over her almost every moment, lines of worry etching his normally good-humored face. Rannulf—bluff, hearty Ralf—became almost totally withdrawn and spent much of his time in the nursery holding his new son even when the baby slept. Aidan—the tough, dour ex-cavalry officer—wept as he held Morgan in a viselike grip, embarrassing himself with painful, gulping sobs that he tried in vain to swallow.

  There was a terrible, yawning emptiness in their family circle where Alleyne had been.

  Perhaps the very worst aspect of the whole tragedy was that there was no body—none to weep over and sit vigil beside. None to bury and visit with flowers and gradually softening memories as the years passed. No body—just emptiness.

  Wulfric arranged a memorial service to be held on the eleventh day after Morgan’s return at St. George’s in Hanover Square. It was an event that was very well attended. Morgan sat beside Wulfric in the front pew and would have held his hand if he had offered it. But he was colder, more unapproachable, than ever, as if he had frozen himself deep within a massive, all-encompassing iceberg. Perhaps only a sister would understand that he did indeed feel grief. But that understanding was little consolation to her. Aidan had Eve, Rannulf had Judith, and Freyja had Joshua. She had no one. She sat through the service with her hands in her lap and her eyes on her hands.

  The Earl of Rosthorn had not come. She could no longer hope otherwise when the service was over and most of the congregation lingered outside the church to allow the Bedwyn family to drive away first. He was nowhere in sight even though she looked around deliberately for him. Nor did he come to Bedwyn House with almost everyone else for tea.

  Perhaps he was not in London, she thought. Perhaps he had gone back to Belgium or somewhere else on the Continent—Paris maybe. Perhaps he had gone into the country to his own estate. But she was hurt by his absence. Even apart from that evening in Brussels, she
had really thought they were friends. He had not even written. He could not write personally to her, of course—it would not have been at all the thing. But he might have written a letter of condolence to the whole family, might he not?

  Other people came back to the house that she would rather not have seen. The Earl and Countess of Caddick came with Rosamond. Even Captain Lord Gordon was there, looking dashingly romantic in full dress uniform, with one boot missing to accommodate his splinted leg. He moved about on crutches, his batman hovering at his elbow, and won for himself the admiring regard of many of those in attendance—a hero and survivor of the Battle of Waterloo.

  Rosamond hugged Morgan and was reluctant to let her go.

  “I do not care what they say, Morgan,” she said. “I always tell anyone who will listen how splendidly brave you were. I am so dreadfully sorry about Lord Alleyne.” She was too choked with tears to say more.

  Her mother suffered from no such impediment.

  “I am delighted to see you safely at home again, Lady Morgan,” she said, a sharp edge to her voice. “It is a good thing for you that you returned bearing such sad news or I daresay Bewcastle would have shown his displeasure over your selfish disobedience to me in a manner you would not have enjoyed. At first he was inclined to blame me for leaving without you, if you can imagine such a thing. I daresay he has realized his error since then, though. Indeed, I do not know how he could avoid doing so.”

  Morgan merely lifted her eyebrows, regarded her former chaperon with silent disdain, and moved on to another group.

  She would have preferred to avoid Captain Lord Gordon altogether, but he deliberately put himself in her way and asked for a private word with her. She sat with him in one corner of the drawing room, a little removed from everyone else. She would, she supposed, forgive him. But it would take an effort of will to speak the words. She would do so only because really he was of no importance to her whatsoever.