She turned aside, a drooping figure with copper curls down her shoulders, half concealing her face. She clasped and unclasped her hands. “I’m sorry if you now regret marrying me.”
He didn’t, God help him. He wanted her more each day.
“I didn’t want to deceive you, but I cannot stand idly by while others suffer.” She whirled to face him again, clenching her fists. “Oh, our marriage was such a mistake. I should never have agreed to it. We are far too different from one another. I had no choice but to help Lavinia—whether or not you believe that—but I never meant to harm you in the process.” Her lip quivered. “How ironic. I married you to restore your reputation, and unwittingly I have done my best to make it worse.”
“You married me to restore my reputation?” That made no sense.
“Yes! Lord Bottleford said everyone would shun you. I couldn’t bear that, when you had been so kind to me.”
He barked a laugh. “Melinda, I don’t give a tinker’s damn for my reputation.”
“Of course you do. Otherwise why would you care if people found out I helped Lavinia to elope? Why would you care what Lavinia’s trustee thinks of you?”
“Neither of those has anything to do with my reputation, but rather my sense of right and wrong. I don’t wish to lie. I don’t relish being obliged to make up stories to conceal my wife’s behavior. What others think of me is their problem, not mine, as long as I adhere to my own code of honor.”
She had hung her head, but now she rallied. “According to your code of honor, it’s perfectly fine to stand by while a helpless girl is forced into marriage with a man she despises?”
“She didn’t despise him a week ago,” Miles said sotto voce, but put up his hands. “Melinda, I didn’t send her home. If Fellowes is determined to marry her, who am I to get in his way?”
“You—you didn’t send her home?”
“To a forced marriage? Of course not. What do you take me for?”
She sank onto the sofa.
“They have merely gone a little way out of London. I shall arrange for Jem to fetch them first thing in the morning and bring them to an out-of-the-way inn, where they will remain in hiding while I have my lawyer discuss settlements with her guardian and trustees. That way, she will have the appropriate protections and Fellowes will seem like less of a fortune-hunter.”
Her eyes, luminous with reproach, tugged at his heart. “Then why didn’t you just say so?” Her voice shook with what might have been misery or rage or both. “Why did you let me believe you had sent her home?”
“Because I was furious at you. Because I wanted you to know how it felt.” He bolstered himself against the entreaty in those eyes. “How do you think I liked it, watching you steal down the stairs and out of the house at night?”
“There’s no comparison,” she began, but made a tiny dispelling motion with her hand. “I apologize.”
“I don’t want an apology,” he said. “I want you to promise me never to sneak out at night again.”
She hung her head. “I’m sorry. I realize it’s scandalous to dress as a boy.”
Did she understand nothing? “It’s bloody dangerous, Melinda! If I hadn’t been half-blind with murderous rage at the thought that you were leaving me, I would have realized straightaway that I was following two women, not one woman and a smallish man. You don’t walk like a man and you don’t look like one, regardless of what you’re wearing.”
“M-murderous rage?” Her eyes widened. “You thought I was leaving you?”
“You didn’t enjoy dancing with me tonight, although you did a good job of pretending. You didn’t even want to kiss me, and then you left the house with baggage and a lover. What else was I to think?”
“A lover? I would never, ever do anything so vile!”
“How should I know what you would and wouldn’t do? I’ve been betrayed before.”
A heavy silence hung between them. Melinda had to break it. “So there was more to your secret than an illegitimate child.”
He said nothing.
“Miles, won’t you please tell me what happened with that woman?”
He turned away, shaking his head, and went to the window. “I shouldn’t have said that. Forget it.”
“I can’t forget it. I don’t even want to.” She stood and followed, hovering behind him, longing to touch him and hold him. “Why can’t you just tell me?”
“It’s in the past. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does, if it makes you believe dreadful things of me. I know I’m a hoyden, but I would never be unfaithful. I have my own code of honor and loyalty is at its core.”
Again, he was silent.
“I hated to deceive you,” she said. “Tonight, I wanted to dance with you. I wanted to kiss you and make love to you, but I couldn’t, because I was deceiving you—and yet I couldn’t abandon Lavinia, either.”
He kept on staring into the street. He looked so bleak and alone in the dim light, and her heart wept. She moved up beside him, still not touching him for fear it would further enrage or upset him. If only she understood…
“I meant to start our marriage over again tomorrow and make it up to you,” she said. “I suppose it sounds foolish now, but I thought that once I got rid of Lavinia and Mr. Fellowes, I could be comfortable with you again.”
“Comfortable,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be lovely.”
Must he resort to sarcasm? “If you’re not willing to try,” she burst out, “we never will be!”
“I was trying,” he said. There was another silence. It stretched into the darkness, and Melinda held her peace, almost held her breath. At last he said, “She went to bed with three footmen.”
For a ghastly second, Melinda couldn’t speak. “Footmen?” she squeaked. “Three of them?”
“Strapping fellows. Handsome, too—rather like Hubert.”
“But . . . three men at once? That makes no sense at all.”
“People do many incomprehensible things for pleasure,” he said bleakly. “Evidently, I wasn’t enough for her.”
“She must have been mad,” Melinda retorted. “That explains what they were saying in the bookshop.”
He turned, his brows furrowed. “What who were saying?”
“Some ladies I heard whispering on the other side of the shelves—something about Hubert being your footman, and then about me being pretty, and what if your side of the story was true. I knew they meant something nasty, but now I understand.” She blinked up at him. “Why did you insist on sending Hubert with me? You could have chosen another footman.”
“I was trying to trust you,” Miles said.
Shame washed over her. “Whilst I was deceiving you and wishing I needn’t.”
He ran a hand over his face and faced the window again. “I suppose I shall have to tell you, but it’s not a pretty story, and you’ll probably say I acted too harshly, but I was very, very angry.”
“Like tonight,” she said.
He blew out a long breath. Melinda tucked her hand in his arm. He didn’t seem to mind.
The watch passed on the street below: “One o’clock, and all’s well.” It wasn’t quite well between herself and Miles yet, but perhaps it would be.
“I never intended to fall in love,” he said. “It had always seemed a foolish sort of emotion to me. Then I met Desiree Sibley.”
“Lady Eudora’s cousin,” Melinda said. “Lavinia told me.”
He grunted. “We were guests at the same house party. She was . . . astonishingly beautiful, a redhead like you, although I think if I could see her now, I would recognize the shallowness of her attractions. In any event, she set her sights on me, and I succumbed gladly. We, er . . . To put it in the least offensive way, we couldn’t keep our hands off one another, and at
house parties it is all too easy to sneak into another bedchamber at night.”
Melinda’s nose twitched. She had suspected such goings-on at a few house parties she’d attended. Now she understood the temptation such proximity aroused.
“I thought of it as love at first sight,” Miles said. “I even assumed I had taken her virginity, but afterwards I realized that was unlikely. At the time, I was too blindly infatuated to notice anything but that she wanted me as much as I wanted her.”
Melinda wished she could strangle the dead Desiree.
“But her parents had their eyes on an earl of much more impeccable lineage than mine,” Miles said. “When I think back, I wonder if Desiree had her eyes on the earl, too, but nature intervened. I returned to London and a scant month later, she ran away from home and came to me, saying she was expecting my child. Evidently she hadn’t managed to seduce the earl, so she was obliged to settle for me.”
“Settle? She should have felt honored to marry you!”
A wisp of a smile crossed his lips and was gone. “She was underage, so I went out to make arrangements to drive post-haste to Gretna Green. She waved goodbye to me from the balcony of the bedchamber that would soon be hers.”
“That explains why you were so angry when you saw me there,” Melinda said. “It was a kind of déjà vu.”
“I returned to find her in bed, stark naked, with all three of my equally naked footmen.” His lips curled slightly. “At this distance, it seems rather funny, but at the time…”
“I would kill her,” Melinda said, “if she wasn’t already dead.”
“Those footmen had no idea how close I came to murdering them. Somehow I managed to contain my rage, ordered them to dress, and dismissed them in a most civilized way—with a fifty pound reward to each of them for showing me Desiree’s true nature before it was too late.”
“Fifty pounds! That’s a huge sum for a footman.”
“Yes, but I didn’t blame them much. Desiree was almost impossible to refuse. As for Desiree herself…”
“She also deserved to be sent on her way,” Melinda said.
His mouth twisted. “If only it had been that simple. Marriage was out of the question. I wouldn’t put up with an unfaithful wife or a child who could have been sired by anyone who’d caught her eye. I still don’t know who Rebecca’s real father is.”
“You’re her father,” Melinda said. “Surely it’s obvious.”
“Not to me, it isn’t.” An emotion dawned on his face—hope, perhaps. How noble of him to bring up a child he assumed was someone else’s. “To me, she resembles Desiree,” he added slowly.
“I expect she does in some ways, but she has your adorable, tentative smile and your determined chin. I kept thinking she reminded me of someone, but it took a while before I realized it was you.”
His lips quirked into that rueful half-smile. “I felt she was my responsibility regardless, but it’s good to know she’s truly my daughter.”
“She is indeed, and you’re a wonderful, compassionate man, Miles.”
He colored. “You won’t say so when you hear the rest of the story. I gave Desiree several options. She could return to her parents if she dared; she could live in a house of my providing, as my cast-off mistress, until some other fool took her on; or she could walk out the door and never return. After multiple pleas and tantrums, she chose the second option. I got her a house in Kensington and servants to care for her.” He gave a hard laugh. “There was the devil of a scandal. I was put under enormous pressure to marry her.”
“I can imagine,” Melinda said.
“People blamed me, saying I’d bedded her and then abandoned her. That I shouldn’t have bedded her if I didn’t intend marriage, and so on. Which was true—I should have known better.”
“But she was a—a slut!”
“Yes, but no one believed that, for she claimed that I had betrayed her, which was much more believable considering my family’s reputation. Even if a few people wondered if she wasn’t as innocent as she seemed, they felt that I had made my bed and should lie in it.”
“With a woman like that? Never!”
“Sweet, indignant Melinda,” he said. “I told my side of the story, but I had no proof of what she’d done. I had dismissed the footmen, but even if I hadn’t already admitted to rewarding them—which people naturally saw as a bribe of sorts―people aren’t inclined to believe the word of servants. But worst of all, my version of the story disagreed with Lady Eudora’s.”
“Lavinia told me her mother’s version.” Melinda squeezed his arm. “I didn’t believe it.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Lady Eudora, as the daughter of a respectable earl, had far more credibility than I. That’s why Colin spoke for me. He swore he was there when I found Desiree in bed with the footmen. Actually, he arrived about fifteen minutes later. The footmen were dressed by then, but Desiree was still naked and having a tantrum.”
“That was kind of him—to lie for you, I mean.”
“It meant that not everyone eschewed my company,” Miles said. “He also restrained me. Giving Desiree some options was his idea; in my rage, I might well have thrown her naked into the street. He also kept me sane for the next several days, although his methods weren’t of the best—such as inviting a few well-known courtesans to attempt to seduce me out of my misery. When I sent them away and sought consolation in the bottle instead, he kindly made sure I didn’t die in a drunken stupor.”
This explained Lady Eudora’s story about the courtesans. Melinda put a tentative hand to his shoulder. “Poor Miles.”
He blew out a long breath. He must be finding this frightfully difficult. “I was so…torn apart,” he said. “It was partly pride, I suppose, but the betrayal was what hurt the most. I was so desperately in love with her, so utterly devoted, and she betrayed me without a thought.”
“I’m glad she’s dead,” Melinda said.
He took a deep breath. “Yes, I have to admit it was a relief when she died soon after Rebecca was born.” He brushed his hands together as if dispelling all memory of Desiree Sibley. “But Lady Eudora has never forgiven me—nor I her, for that matter. I admit that I wasn’t entirely disinterested when I agreed to help Fellowes elope the first time. It was a way to quietly get my own back without causing another scandal.”
“But now I’ve caused a far worse one,” Melinda said, dropping her hand. “I’m sorry.”
“You really must stop apologizing,” Miles said, smiling down at her, a full-hearted smile at last. “To hell with the scandalmongers. You did what you believed was right. What more could I ask for in a wife?”
She flung her arms around his neck. “Oh, Miles! I promise to discuss everything from now on. I shall never, ever do anything you disapprove of again.”
He chuckled. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, sweetheart, just as I won’t promise not to be a jealous fool. All we can do is our best.” He pulled her hard against him and crushed her mouth beneath his. Melinda succumbed, swept away by the ruthlessness of his passion.
When he broke the kiss, they were both breathing heavily. “You are unexpectedly alluring in these clothes,” he said, his big hands roaming to cup her buttocks through the nankeen breeches. “Where the devil did you get them?”
“They used to be Stephen’s.” She wriggled under his hands. “I kept them for when I—” She stopped. She didn’t want to spoil this moment. She loved him, and he was no longer enraged, but of this he was sure to disapprove.
He stripped off her coat. “When you . . .?” He set to work on the Belcher handkerchief she’d knotted around her neck.
“Go for a moonlight ride,” she confessed. “Not here, of course, but in the country. Stephen used to take me. I brought the clothing with me to London every year because I was afraid someone at hom
e would find it and give it away.” She sighed again. “I suppose I shall have to give it up now.”
“Why? I’ll take you for moonlight rides.” He unbuttoned the fall of her breeches and pushed them down. “And naked swims in the lake, if you still like to do that.” He pulled her shirt over her head and eyed her up and down with a gleam of satisfaction. “I know I shall.”
She wound her arms about his neck. “Miles, I’m sorry to have to say this, because you don’t believe in it, but . . . I love you very much.”
His hand cupped her cheek. “You do?”
To Kiss a Rake (Scandalous Kisses) Page 24
