That Scandalous Evening

by Christina Dodd

  He sighed. “Oh, Jane.”

  Walking to the edge of the dock, Blackburn called to his footmen. They came on the run, and he instructed, “When Lord Athowe makes it to shore, pull him out and tie him up. I’ll send someone back for him.”

  The footmen scampered to obey.

  Jane ignored them all for the tattered, muddy sketch of the Virginia Belle, and mourned its former beauty. She could do it again, of course, but never would she imbue it with the same feeling. Whatever she felt when she worked, it came through her brush and she couldn’t hide it. She was an artist. An artist! Nothing could ever change that.

  “Jane, I followed your drawings here. I have them in the carriage.” Slowly Blackburn moved toward her, behaving as if she might flee his approach.

  But why should she run from him? He wasn’t that important to her.

  Italy was important to her. Italy did beckon, tugging at her like the river’s current. If she went to Italy, she could see the great art, touch it, breathe it, and gain inspiration. If she went to Italy, she could grow as an artist, and grow old without the bitterness of wondering what she could have been.

  “It was very clever of you to think of dropping them.” Blackburn interrupted her dreaming, injecting a note of unwanted reality, compelling her to live in this moment. “Now we’ll go home, shall we, before the sun sets completely.”

  But the dream was there, and it could be real.

  And the reality was here. The reality was Blackburn. Lifting her gaze, she scrutinized him openly.

  He was handsome. Her early infatuation had steered her true. The man moved through life and peeled off layers of elegance, each time revealing a new form, one brighter and more noble. The bruises could not damage the basic structure; they only added character.

  She looked at the ship. Its paint was peeling. Its sails drooped. The gangplank sagged. Yet it held the appeal of the unknown, the untried. She could board that ship and leave disillusionment and pain behind.

  Blackburn nudged her, trying to catch her attention again. “This is not a safe area after dark.”

  Turning her face to the breeze, she relished the scent of freedom. So what if freedom smelled of the Thames? At least it didn’t reek of frustrated expectations and blighted hopes.

  She reached her decision. “I’m here. I’m at the docks. There’s a ship. It’s going to Europe, and that’s where I want to be.”

  “Jane.”

  Blackburn was observing her, she knew, trying to decide how to manipulate her into staying. And why? Because he’d be humiliated if his wife left him, of course. Because he had perhaps some small affection for her, and of course because he had a rather pressing lust.

  But those were insignificant reasons when weighed against her needs, and he would find another woman soon enough.

  When she left, women would be lining up to comfort him.

  That thought caused a twinge of something she might have called jealousy…if she had cared about him.

  So she turned her mind back to herself, to her art, to Italy. Blackburn was the old life; the life she would leave behind, and she didn’t care what he thought of her grand plans. “I’m going to live the life I always dreamed of. I’ll be gone from England. You ought to be glad of that.”

  “No.”

  She ignored him. It was much too late for false expressions of regret. “I’ll go to Rome and study art there. I’ll paint on the street, and pretend an Italian accent, and sell my paintings to the English tourists.”

  “Jane, please.”

  He sounded desperate, but such evidence was not to be trusted, a mere will-o’-the-wisp, a whimsy. “It will be a precarious existence, but no worse than eking out a living as a governess.”

  “You don’t have to be a governess. You’re the Marchioness of Blackburn.”

  She ignored that unwelcome truth. “And a good deal more satisfying, I must say. I can’t wait to begin.”

  “Jane.”

  Keeping her face resolutely turned away, she concentrated all her attention on the ship. Men scurried up the rigging. The captain shouted out commands. The boards creaked as the ship rose and fell in the current, and beneath Jane’s feet that same current nudged the dock.

  She was going to do it. She was going to leave England on that ship and never return. For one brief, bright moment, she was eighteen again, when facing the unknown meant adventure and all her life stretched before her.

  She lifted her chin, took a breath, and smiled.

  And Blackburn said, “Jane, please. Forgive me.”

  At those totally unexpected words, her head whipped around.

  For one second she didn’t see him.

  Then she did.

  He was kneeling. Kneeling in his tailored trousers on the filthy, splintered boards of the dock, his head bent in entreaty. “Please, Jane, listen to me. You didn’t deserve my suspicion.”

  He was kneeling, with every appearance of a supplicant, and that…that was more than she ever imagined.

  But he still didn’t understand. And she shouldn’t try to make him. She should just walk away.

  Instead, she found herself saying, “It wasn’t your suspicion that I hated. It was your condescension.”

  “Yes, I was wrong.”

  Somehow his peculiar admission didn’t relieve the pressure within her. Rage bubbled in her until she wanted to shriek, to stomp, to pound on him with her fists.

  Being Jane, she did none of those things. She’d done it once in her bedchamber, and it had not helped him to understand or her to feel better. She should just board the ship.

  Board the ship.

  She found her hands bunched into fists, but her voice was steady and, she was proud to note, rather cool. “I’m not noble or rich, but I have more character and more talent in my little finger than you embody in your entire person.”

  “I know.”

  “You thought I was a spy.” Still Ransom kept his head bent, and Jane imagined it was because he was smirking in that horribly superior way of his. He bent his knee to her, not in supplication, but as the easiest way to avert disgrace. “You dared conjecture I would be grateful that you wed me anyway.”

  “I was a fool.” He looked up at her at last.

  And when she gazed into the night sky of his eyes, she realized the foolishness of her every conjecture. Blackburn wasn’t kneeling because it was the easiest way to win her back. At any moment he could have swept her off her feet and carried her to his carriage, coercing her rather than pleading with her. He could keep her imprisoned in his home, and because she was his wife, the English law would allow it.

  No, he didn’t kneel because he had no other recourse. This public display of humbleness was agony for him. He hated it with every fiber of his being. He quivered with the humiliation; he wanted to stand and shout out his antecedents and his pride and his worth.

  But for her, he knelt on the dock in front of his footmen, in front of the whores that lolled across the street, in front of the common sailors on the ship.

  And he begged. “Jane, please. I don’t want you to go. I did marry you thinking you were a spy, but haven’t you wondered why? I’d walked away from you before, and I couldn’t do it again. You’ve bound me with your wit and the way you move like a good horse, and when you smile, I realize you don’t do it very often and I want to make you…find you…something to smile about.”

  A vivid purple bruise swelled on his brow from the fight, and dirt smudged his chin. His rumpled hair stuck up in spikes above his forehead, and not even his valet could rescue this cravat. He looked hot and disheveled.

  He looked beautiful.

  “If you want to live in Rome and paint on the streets, we’ll do it together.” He shifted as if the boards were none too comfortable to his knees. “Together, Jane. We could do that. I don’t think I can paint, but perhaps I could sing or—”

  “You dance well.” Stupid! Why had she answered?

  “Dance. Yes.” His lids dropped to her h
ands, and she realized she no longer clenched them in fists. “Will the tourists drop a penny in my hat, do you think?”

  She was softening, stupid woman that she was. “I would drop a penny in your hat to see you dance.”

  “Would you, Jane?”

  He looked up at her through those extraordinary blue eyes and in any other man, she would have said that expression meant one thing. In any other man, it would have meant she was his ideal of perfection.

  “Or would you stay with me in England, take advantage of my true and sincere remorse—oh, Jane, I am really so sorry—and let me build you the best studio any artist ever owned?”

  He’d do it, too. One thing she knew, and that was that a Quincy kept his word.

  She must have been quiet too long, for he grasped her skirt. “Not just one studio. A studio in every house. You’ll have whatever equipment you wish, and an art teacher. Even a French art teacher.”

  Thinking of the glorious, half-finished statue waiting at the Tarlins’, she asked, “Will you pose for me?”

  “No other shall.”

  Her fingers twitched with that sense of wanting. If she could do him in clay just one more time…

  He must have seen. He must have known victory was within his grasp. Yet he bent his head once more. “Please, Jane. Forgive me.”

  Her hand stretched itself out toward his rumpled crown.

  Then she remembered. That first, humiliating rejection. The years of poverty and loneliness. His toplofty behavior when he saw her with Adorna for the first time. His attentions, his seduction, and their marriage. Not because he wanted her, or adored her, as she had mutely hoped, but because he needed to distract the French and all of society from his real objective.

  Her hand curved and shook. The tendons grew strained. Her hand clenched.

  “Jane,” he said in a low voice. “I love you.”

  I love you.

  I love you?

  He’d said that?

  Oh, but really. So what?

  She stared at her hand, at the veins and bones covered by fragile skin made white with strain. If she opened it and laid her palm on his head, if she gave her forgiveness for what must be the cruelest betrayal ever dealt to a woman, she would have to be mad.

  Or in love herself.

  Was she? Was she in love with Blackburn? Not in love like a worshipful child, or in love like a grateful adult, but truly in love?

  Slowly, gradually, her fist opened.

  Yes. She was in love. In love with a Blackburn who had been stripped of all illusion and still was never less than her ideal.

  She placed her hand on him.

  He lifted his down-turned head, and her hand slid down over his cheek. He didn’t look humble or happy or any of the lesser emotions. Rather, his nostrils flared and his teeth were bared; he was the very epitome of a savage who would reach out and take what he wished.

  And he wished for her.

  Standing, he wrapped his arms around her waist and brought her close, body to body and soul to soul. His words were a soft growl against her lips. “Woman, you’ll pay for making me wait.”

  He kissed her, a soft, explicit kiss that promised and demanded at the same time, and while she could think, she reflected that his kisses decidedly influenced her in his favor. That, and the sensation of his strong shoulders under her kneading hands, and the way he held her as if she were precious and delicate as fine china when she knew she was strong as an earthenware bowl.

  When they separated, she could dimly hear shouting, and when she opened her eyes she realized the ship’s crew hung over the railing, yelling crude encouragement to the lovers. “How embarrassing,” she said weakly.

  “What?” Bending, Blackburn put his shoulder into her stomach and lifted her so she draped him like a scarf.

  The shouting intensified as he strode off the dock, and Jane lifted her head and cheerfully waved to the ship.

  “I’ll let you sculpt our children, too.” he said.

  “Shall we name the oldest Figgy?”

  He didn’t pause. “No. But I won’t let you sculpt anyone else. Not when you have the distressing tendency to sculpt naked bodies.”

  Discovering a heretofore unexplored wicked streak, Jane could not resist saying, “You can’t stop my imagination.”

  He halted. “Jane…”

  He sounded uncertain and not nearly so sure of himself, and she found she didn’t like that. In a pleasant tone she said, “But you’re the only one I’ve wanted to sculpt as a nude.”

  “Really?” He started walking again.

  “And if you’ll pose for me, I have a statue to finish when we get home.”

  “I’ll pose for you.” Setting her on her feet, he grinned at her with the kind of smile she’d dreamed of all her life. “If you’ll let me wash the clay off of you afterward.”

  This marriage, she realized, was going to work very well indeed.

  About the Author

  New York Times-bestselling author Christina Dodd has written more than twenty-one historical romances. Her first such novel, Candle in the Window, won both the Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart and RITA awards. In celebration of her new novel, Scandalous Again (2003), HarperCollins is publishing Ms. Dodd’s classic backlist, including: That Scandalous Evening; The Governess Brides Series: My Favorite Bride; Lost in Your Arms; In My Wildest Dreams; Rules of Surrender; Rules of Engagement; Rules of Attraction; The Princess Series: Someday My Prince and Runaway Princess; and The Well Pleasured Series: A Well Favored Gentleman and A Well Pleasured Lady. Please visit www.christinadodd.com.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Praise

  Welcome to the scintillating world of Christina Dodd

  “A fine stylist who spins a wonderfully drawn-out love scene.”

  Publishers Weekly

  Praise for her A Well Favored Gentleman

  “A magician with a pen…Ms. Dodd has outdone herself in a tale that is spun with magic, yet is always romantic and captivating.”

  Romantic Times

  and A Well Pleasured Lady

  “With a title like this, you’d expect there to be some hot reading, and there is. But what really stands out in this finely tuned tale of disguises, are the characters you want to cheer on, and those that deserve the hisses.”

  Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “The vividly depicted, bawdy Georgian setting is the perfect backdrop for this highly sensual story of intrigue.”

  Library Journal

  By Christina Dodd

  Candle in the Window

  Castles in the Air

  The Greatest Lover in All England

  In My Wildest Dreams

  A Knight to Remember

  Lost in Your Arms

  Move Heaven and Earth

  My Favorite Bride

  Once a Knight

  Outrageous

  Priceless

  Rules of Attraction

  Rules of Engagement

  Rules of Surrender

  Runaway Princess

  Scandalous Again

  Scottish Brides

  Someday My Prince

  Tall, Dark, and Dangerous

  That Scandalous Evening

  Treasure of the Sun

  A Well Favored Gentleman

  A Well Pleasured Lady

  Credits

  Cover art by Paul Robinson

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THAT SCANDALOUS EVENING. Copyright © 1998 by Christina Dodd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book
on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ePub edition © November 2003 eISBN: 9780061795350

  Version 04282015

  First Avon Books printing: September 1998

  10

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