The Last Waltz

by Mary Balogh

  He sat opposite her instead of remaining on his feet, looming over her, as he had intended.

  “Gilbert would not allow card playing?” he asked her.

  “Gambling” she said. “He would not allow gambling. Neither would I.” Her chin lifted a notch.

  “Or dancing,” he said quietly, “or any sort of socializing during which guests might have been in danger of enjoying themselves. And he was a nip-farthing. Life here must have been intolerably dull.”

  “I daresay you would have found it so,” she said, looking at him with the hard expression she seemed to reserve for him.

  “And you did not?” He frowned. “You were happy with such a life? Have you changed so much, then, Christina, from the girl I remember whose eyes and whole aspect always glowed with an eagerness to taste life to the full?”

  “No,” my lord,” she said, “I have not changed except to have grown older, wiser, more mature. I still value what I have always valued—safety, security, dependability.”

  He gazed at her, unable again to see the girl in the cold, beautiful, disciplined face of the woman. “And those things,” he said, “I was unable to give you? Because added to them there would have been a sense of adventure? I was not wealthy, heaven knows, but I could have supported you.”

  “I believe we have already agreed, my lord,” she said, the scorn back in her face, “that we both had a fortunate escape when I married Gilbert.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, and he felt mortified that he had tried yet again to make sense of what had happened within a twenty-four-hour span over ten years before.

  She had been at Vauxhall Gardens one evening, a member of a party that had included him. They had known each other for a few months by then. Although she had almost always been correctly chaperoned, they had contrived within the limits of the rules to see enough of each other and to converse enough beyond the hearing of others to have built what had seemed to be a close friendship. They had fallen deeply in love. But surrounded as they had been by the magical splendor of Vauxhall that night, their relationship had reached a peak of emotion.

  They had danced together, walked together, watched the fireworks display together. And they had succeeded in losing the rest of their group for just long enough to kiss in a secluded alley—not their first kiss, but definitely their most passionate. It had almost gone too far. But that had no longer seemed to matter. They had murmured their love for each other. As they strolled afterward, they had talked about things they would do, places they would see after they were married. She had been bright and warm with happiness and love and hope. He had begun that same night to compose in his mind a suitable speech to deliver when he called upon her father.

  “I have not changed,” she said now. “I never was the heedless woman you thought I was.”

  The next evening when he had arrived at a ball, one of the grand squeezes of the Season, eager as he always was to see her again, he had caught sight of her across the room, her hand on Gilbert’s wrist, a small crowd gathered about them. And then he had heard the news, which had been fast spreading among the guests—the news of the betrothal of the Earl of Wanstead to the Honorable Miss Christina Spense.

  She had refused to speak privately with him from that night on. She had refused to receive him when he called at her father’s house. She had returned both his letters unopened. Gilbert, to whom he had reluctantly introduced her just three weeks before the night of that ball, had sneered at him.

  “Did you seriously expect Miss Spense to marry you, Gerard?” he had asked. “When you have no title or property or fortune beyond the merest competence? When you have not even birth to recommend you? As a wise young lady she has chosen the Wanstead title and fortune, and Thornwood. I take it you will not expect an invitation to the wedding, cousin?”

  Gilbert and Christina had been married within a month. And within a month Gerard Percy had been on his way to Canada to seek his fortune and ease for a bruised heart— both of which he had found there. He had been happy there until word of Gilbert’s death had reached him and with it the news that he was now in possession of those very things for which she had rejected him ten years before.

  “No,” he said now in answer to what she had just said. “I liked the woman I thought you were, but I was deceived. I was too young and naive, I suppose, to understand that people are not always what they seem to be. Some people can amuse themselves with flirtations as if they were real love while at the same time conceiving calculating and mercenary plans for their own advancement.”

  He watched her lips thin, but she said nothing.

  “There will be card games in the drawing room tomorrow evening,” he said, “and most other evenings, I daresay. It is a favored amusement among members of the ton, as perhaps you are aware. I suppose money will change hands—small sums. It would be in grossly bad taste to play for high stakes at a party of this nature. Did you believe that Langan was serious in what he said about a fortune? I believe I won five pounds from him two weeks ago. Does that seem dreadfully depraved to you?”

  “No,” she said stiffly. “I beg your pardon, my lord. I spoke without thinking.”

  “Yes, I believe you did,” he said. “Especially when you referred to this house, or the roof of it, at least, as your own. I must advise you in future to think before you speak.”

  She flushed and looked down at her hands. “I beg your pardon, my lord,” she said again.

  He had come in order to make that point. He had come, he supposed, to see her look thus and speak thus—totally cowed. But having won the victory, he felt unaccountably irritated. Was that all she had to say? No arguments? No anger? He wished she would fight him. He would like nothing better than a shouting match with Christina. He resented her docility. It weakened his victory.

  “Thornwood is mine, Christina,” he said. “If I choose to make it into a gaming hell over Christmas, that would be my right. If I chose to conduct an orgy here, that too would be my right. Would you not agree?”

  She looked up at him. “Oh, assuredly,” she said. “But I believe one or two of your guests would have something to say about either of those uses of Thornwood, my lord.”

  “But it would be my right?”

  “Yes, my lord, it would be your right.” The scorn was in her face as well as her voice now.

  “You must trust me, then, as a gentleman,” he said, “not to do anything here unbecoming my position and my responsibility to the ladies and the children in my care.”

  Her nostrils flared and for the first time he had the satisfaction of knowing that she was angry.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, “I must trust you. Just as all my life I have had to trust the men who have had the care of me. It is one of the great benefits of being a woman. One always has a man—a gentleman—to take responsibility for one’s care. All a woman has to do is what she is told to do and she will be eternally happy. What could be easier? How gratifying it is to know that I am not to fear either a gaming hell or an orgy here over Christmas.”

  “You have had choices,” he said harshly. “You are not as much a prisoner of your gender as you would like to believe when you are in this self-pitying mood. Ten years ago you had a choice between Gilbert and me—between wealth and position on the one hand and love and adventure on the other. You made your choice. Is it my fault that both Gilbert and Rodney died young and left you to my charge after all?”

  “Choices!” She almost spat out the word. “You know nothing about choices, my lord.”

  “And you still have choices,” he told her, though the idea was new to him even as he spoke it. “You can remain here with your children as my dependent for the rest of your life, feeding your sense of martyrdom whenever I do or say anything that the sainted Gilbert would not have done or said. Or you can marry again. Have you considered that option? You are still young and beautiful—and desirable. You are probably aware that men of Luttrell’s caliber do not direct their gallantries to undesirable women.�
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  She stared at him, and he could see that she was white with fury. “So!” she said. “This is how you discharge your responsibilities, as you call them, my lord. You foist them upon some other man. And of course I am almost certain to be flattered into making what you wish me to believe is a choice. What woman, after all, would not melt with gratification at being described with those three words—young, beautiful, desirable? Am I really those things? But I must be if Viscount Luttrell has deigned to exchange a dozen words or so with me. Then it is truly amazing you do not desire me yourself. But perhaps you do. Perhaps this is why you have lured me alone to the library at such a late hour. Do you desire me?”

  “I do not believe, my lady,” he said coldly, “I would want you if you were the last woman left on earth.” He might at least, he thought, have found a more original way of uttering the setdown. “Why should I be aroused by a woman who can moan with desire and talk with passionate conviction of love one day and discover the next that there is someone wealthier to be hooked in exchange for similar moans? No, thank you, Christina. I find such calculating femininity distinctly unappealing.”

  She was smiling—not at all pleasantly—and she spoke huskily. “But I doubt, my lord,” she said, her eyes mocking him, “I would be able to find anyone wealthier than you are now.”

  And now, he thought as they stared at each other, there was nothing left for either of them to say. Now perhaps they were both satisfied. They had exchanged anger and spite and irritability, and where had it led them?

  To desiring each other, that was where.

  For although the husky voice had been deliberately assumed, and although he had declared that even her lone female presence on this earth would not entice him, they were gazing at each other with anger and dislike and unmistakable lust. He wondered if she was honest enough with herself to admit that last.

  “Perhaps,” he said, getting to his feet, “you can find someone here at the house party almost as wealthy, my lady. I would not, incidentally, advise you to set your cap at Luttrell though he has dazzling expectations. He is more interested in bedding you than wedding you. And I, unfortunately, am not on the market. Not for you, at least.”

  “No,” she said, placing her hand in his when he offered it and rising from her chair. “It is all too easy to see at whose doors you are shopping, my lord. Someone young and biddable and not too clever will suit you admirably. She will bend easily to your autocratic will.”

  “And perhaps,” he said, “she will be less bitter about the simple fact that she was born a woman. Shall we go to bed?”

  He could have bitten his tongue out as soon as he said it, as soon as he read her interpretation of his words in her startled eyes. He closed his own eyes briefly and smiled ruefully, his anger disintegrating.

  “Christina,” he said, “we must somehow cry truce. For at least a week, perhaps longer, we have to exist side by side in this house. Can we do it, do you suppose, without constantly crossing swords, often deliberately?”

  “I believe it should be possible, my lord,” she said.

  “Well, then.” He squeezed her hand, which for some reason he was still holding. “Tomorrow we will try to do better. Though today the house party made a good beginning, did it not? Everyone seems happy to be here.” Say good night, he told himself. Make an end of this.

  “Gerard—” she said.

  It was the sound of his name on her lips that did it. Spoken softly. He did not wait to hear what she was going to say, or even if she intended to add anything. Perhaps his name was all she had to say. He dipped his head and set his mouth to hers.

  Soft, warm, sweet, lips parted, as were his own, and pressing back against his own. Moist flesh, taste, heat. And the flaring of a need to delve deeper, to plunge beneath the surface of her, to drink at the well of her femininity.

  He lifted his head hastily.

  “Well, at least,” he said, “we know that some of what we spoke in anger was lies.”

  “Yes,” she agreed and she slid her hand from his. “Good night, my lord.”

  “Good night, my lady,” he said and watched her cross the room unhurriedly, with her customary lithe grace. She opened the door without jerking on it and closed it quietly after she had passed through it. He wondered how much of an effort of will it had cost her to act as if nothing untoward had happened.

  Hell! His hands closed into fists at his sides. He was fighting full-blown arousal.

  Damnation!

  Chapter 9

  NEVER once had Christina thought of remarrying. She had found a guilty sense of freedom and peace in her widowhood, even during the year of deep mourning with all the restrictions it had imposed upon her appearance and activities, even during the months since when she had continued to live in much the same way she had lived for nine years before Gilbert died—as if asleep or in that dazed state between sleeping and waking.

  But she was not free. And there was no peace. She did not even have the limited freedom of knowing herself mistress of Thornwood.

  Thornwood is mine, Christina.

  There had been intense satisfaction in his voice when he had spoken the words. They had repeated themselves in her mind over and over again during a night of disturbed sleep.

  You can remain here with your children as my dependent for the rest of your life... Or you can marry again.

  He wanted to be rid of her. Was it surprising? She wanted to be rid of him. And there was only one way of doing it.

  The following morning, the first full day of the house party, was as bright and sunny as the day before. He was eager to grant Miss Lizzie Gaynor’s request and give a tour of the house, the Earl of Wanstead said at breakfast, but how could they possibly waste such glorious sunshine when his head gardener, apparently renowned as a forecaster of weather, was predicting snow within the next day or two?

  There was a flurry of excitement about the table. White Christmases were rare, everyone agreed. It was rarer still to find oneself on a country estate when one of them happened along.

  Perhaps they would change plans, then, his lordship suggested, and take a walk in the park while they might do so without the danger of breaking their necks at every step. There would be time enough later for him to show off his house.

  And so almost all of them walked about the long lawn before the house, stopping to view its architectural splendor from various angles, and then they had proceeded on the scenic walk over the hill north of the house. The earl had Miss Gaynor on his arm the whole way. If she was disappointed at the postponed tour of the house, she was certainly not showing it. Her face glowed with rosy color beneath the fur-trimmed hood of her cloak, and she stopped the whole party far more often than seemed necessary in order to exclaim with delight over the beauty of various picturesque views.

  There was a young lady, Christina thought, who had set her cap for a title and a fortune and a grand estate and a young and handsome husband. Just as she herself had been accused of doing when she married Gilbert. She wondered if Gerard was making the parallel in his mind.

  Christina moved from group to group, making sure that everyone saw the best prospects and was not too cold or breathless or footsore to continue. Margaret was walking arm in arm with Winifred Milchip, though they were flanked by Frederick Cannadine and Viscount Luttrell and appeared to be very merry indeed. Christina steered clear of them and found herself during the final stage of the walk beside Mr. Geordie Stewart.

  “This is a grand estate, Lady Wanstead,” he said to her, offering his arm. “It is enough to make any man who owned it forget about returning to the rigors of life in the New World.”

  It had been her one hope during the night, Christina thought, that Gerard would not forget, that he would return to Canada in the spring and having returned would never come back again.

  “You will like the house too, sir,” she said. “The state apartments are rarely used, but they are glorious to gaze at. And his lordship does intend to use the state dining
room and the ballroom over Christmas. There is a lovely portrait gallery too for anyone interested in family histories.”

  “I shall look forward to the tour,” he assured her.

  But their conversation soon became more personal. He sympathized with her over her loss of a husband so recently and so young, and she asked him about his late wife. Mrs. Stewart had been a native woman with whom he had lived during his winter in the interior of the continent beyond Canada.

  “Such arrangements are quite respectable, ma’am,” he explained to her, “else I would not have sullied your ears by mentioning it. There are no white women in that part of the world, you see, yet many white men live there for years at a time. Such arrangements with native women are known as country marriages. They are monogamous relationships and are frequently happy unions for both partners. Sometimes they last beyond the term of a man’s stay in the Northwest. I brought my country wife out with me and married her in Montreal. She died a year after that when I brought her here. There were diseases to which she had never been exposed.”

  “I am sorry,” Christina said.

  “Yes.” He smiled. “I was fond of her, ma’am, and she was good to me. I wish we had had children. I understand that you have?”

  “Two daughters,” she said and mentioned their names and ages to him.

  “They must have been a comfort to you,” he said, “when you lost your husband.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. ‘They have been the chief source of joy in my life since their births.”

  “I hope,” he said, “you will allow me the pleasure of meeting them. Colin is a bachelor and I am a childless widower, but we have a sister in Scotland who has ten children and a number of grandchildren too. I have had some experience in amusing children.”

  The idea of remarriage, new to her and quite abhorrent in many ways, had persisted through the morning. And it focused itself now on the unsuspecting person of Mr. Geordie Stewart. He was a man of mature years, a kindly man, or so it seemed, and one with wealth enough if her guess was correct to offer a wife perfect security. But it seemed unpleasantly calculating to be thinking of marrying a man who had done nothing more than be courteous to her. She had been accused last night of being calculating.