The dowager countess swung her attention to her stepdaughter. “How could you do this, Henrietta,” she hissed. Suddenly Lady Holkham appeared to realize that seventeen fascinated pairs of eyes were watching her. She rose from her chair and drew herself up to her full height.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I am happy to announce the engagement of my beloved daughter Lady Henrietta, to Mr. Simon Darby,” she said. Her gaze flashed around the table, leaving scorch marks in its path.
Esme was feeling all the pleasure of a successful stage manager and so she didn’t hesitate to back up the leading lady. She clapped her hands and gestured to Slope, who immediately began uncorking champagne and sending his underlings around the table with brimming glasses.
Millicent gave Darby one last measured stare that promised to remove his manly parts if he didn’t dance to her bidding, then sat back into her chair, her chest heaving.
Darby felt as if he were watching everything without really participating, and if he was correct, Henrietta was in something of the same state. He didn’t believe for a moment that she had genuinely fainted. Not unless she could faint while simultaneously keeping her back rigid.
He leaned over. “What do you want me to do?” he asked in a low voice.
She just looked at him, seemingly struck dumb.
“As God’s my witness, I didn’t write that letter.” For some reason it seemed important that she know that he would never have wantonly destroyed her reputation.
She nodded.
“Well, all we have to do is find out who wrote it,” he said, with an awkward feeling of gratitude. Henrietta obviously believed him without hesitation. It would be impossible for those blue eyes of hers to conceal anything. “There’s nothing to worry about. Of course your stepmother will naturally retract her demand once she understands that you and I have had nothing to do with each other. I would suggest that we retire to the drawing room and discuss this with a modicum of privacy. But do you have any idea who wrote it?”
She nodded again.
“Who?”
“I did,” she whispered.
30
Confessions Are a Private Affair
“You wrote the love letter to yourself?”
“Yes,” she said. “I was lonely.” She twisted her hands in her lap. “I never had a debut, obviously. There wasn’t any reason to, under the circumstances. But it meant that I never made any friends, so we aren’t invited to house parties and things of that nature. I just wanted—”
“A letter.”
“No. A love letter. I didn’t think I would ever receive such a letter, so I wrote one to myself.”
He couldn’t fault her for that. It was heartbreaking, but hardly corrupt.
“But I wrote the letter for myself,” Henrietta insisted. “How could I know that it would go astray? It was just a pretense.”
“That pretense has ruined my life,” Darby pointed out.
Henrietta swallowed. “Surely your life isn’t ruined,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s a bit harsh? True, you will have a wife, but most men do take a wife at some point in their lives.”
He raised his head and looked at her. The warm brown of his eyes had darkened almost to black. A clear little voice in the back of her head cataloged the color change and thought: that’s a warning sign.
“Ruined seems a strong description,” she persisted.
“I disagree. I fully intended to marry at some point in the future, but I would rather chose that date myself.”
“Well, is it so bad to marry now rather than later?” She fixed her eyes pleadingly on his. She had never felt quite so sick to her stomach.
He gave a short laugh, more like a bark than a laugh. “I meant to marry—” he ran a hand through his hair. “I meant to marry someone I could bed.”
Color rose in her cheeks.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?”
She nodded.
“What the hell am I to do with a wife I can’t bed? Believe it or not, I thought of myself as someone who would be faithful to a wife, once I had one. But this is impossible.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wrote the letter before I knew. Before I completely understood that side of marriage.” She thought desperately about how she could bring up the sheath, but it simply wasn’t a decent topic of conversation. “You must continue to engage yourself outside of our marriage. That is the only tenable solution.”
He laughed, a brutal humorless noise. “A tenable solution, is it? So you want me to keep a mistress?”
“I can’t see that it matters one way or the other. Had we married in the normal course of things, I expect it wouldn’t have been much different. Many men—” She hesitated. “Many men have mistresses.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “But I didn’t fancy myself joining their ranks.”
It seemed a petty trifle to her. Perhaps he was afraid that his wife would cause an unpleasant scene, the way Lady Witherspoon did at the Regent’s ball last spring. “I would never make a fuss over such a thing,” she said in her most consoling tone. “I promise you, I truly am a very sensible person.”
“Sensible? You?”
She colored. “I am very sensible in person. And I will be a good mother to your little sisters. I would never say a word about your mistress—”
“Even if I flaunt her before your eyes? What if I take a woman from your circle of acquaintances? What if I dance with her before I dance with you?”
“I can’t dance. And I promise you, I won’t turn a hair whatever you do. I truly apologize for writing the letter. But it never occurred to me that anyone would see it except me. Even so, it may be the best for all of us.”
He looked at her sweet oval face, framed by silken hair, and longed to shake her. “You understand nothing,” he said savagely. “Nothing!”
“What don’t I understand? I do realize that you’re disappointed—”
“There is no such thing as a chaste marriage. I cannot live with you under those circumstances, Henrietta.”
As he watched, her eyes grew hazy with tears. She swallowed, but not one tear slid down her cheek.
“My stepmother explained to me that gentlemen have expectations about that intimacy,” she said, finally.
“I cannot imagine living with you without being able to bed you,” he said fiercely.
“I see.” She was biting her lip hard, but still she didn’t cry. Her very self-control made him feel insane, made him want to destroy her composure.
He wasn’t sure where his own equilibrium had gone. It was swallowed into the dizzying prospect of marrying Henrietta—of not bedding Henrietta—of bedding Henrietta—
“Why didn’t you think when you entangled me in your ridiculous set of lies?” he snarled, with all the force of his confusion. “Did you think of anyone but yourself?”
She blinked. “Of course I didn’t. It was my letter, after all. I had no expectation that anyone other than myself would read it.”
“When Lady Rawlings brought it up in the dining room, you could have confessed,” he said. “You could have saved me from this—this travesty of a marriage!”
“You’re absolutely right,” she said steadily. “I didn’t because I was greedy. I have never had anyone for myself, you see.”
“I know,” he said, feeling tired. “So you took me and my sisters.”
He saw that her little hands were clenched tight inside her gloves.
“I am not sorry that I wrote the letter, and I am not even sorry that it found its way to a public forum. I will love your sisters. I will love them as if they were my very own children. No one could love them more than I will.”
Her tone was fierce. Now her eyes were passionate. Now—when it was a matter of the children, and not him.
“I see no reason for further discussion,” he said slowly. “I suppose I would summarize our future life thus: you act as a nursemaid to my sisters. I carry on amorous relationships outside the house. We occasionally me
et in the hallways or at dinner.”
“You are very cruel,” she said.
“Practicality is the bane of my family.”
“I see no reason why we cannot be friends.”
“Friends?”
“I should like to be your friend, Mr. Darby. I would like to be more than a nursemaid in your house.”
“I am never friends with those who have stolen from me,” he said.
Somewhere Henrietta found a pulse of anger stealing up her spine. “It seems to me that you are taking a great deal of umbrage for this. After all, if I am a nursemaid, you will pay my salary with my inheritance. Unless I am mistaken, you desperately need my dowry in order to support your sisters. At least, that was my understanding.”
She waited, shaken. Would he explode with rage, or, or—
Instead the corner of his mouth twisted in a wry smile.
She continued. “You knew there is a fair chance that Lady Rawlings’s child will be a male. It may be only gossip, but people say that your father’s estate was not…”
“Was not profitable,” he said. “The gossip is truthful as regards my father’s gambling debts.”
“You would have had to marry,” she said, looking at him. “You would have had no choice.”
“Had I decided to hunt a fortune, I should have liked to chose my own heiress.”
“English gentlemen frequently marry to extract themselves from debt,” she said, with that wry strain of irony that characterized her observances. “You likely would have had to marry a woman whose father was a merchant.”
He shrugged. “You’re absolutely right, my lady. I might have had to marry someone from another class. But at least I could have bedded her.”
That silenced Henrietta.
“The primary point on which your gossip went astray concerns my financial situation,” he remarked. “I am worth approximately double your father’s estate.”
She stared at him, mouth open.
“I own lace in this country,” he said gently. “Had you ordered gold lace on your new curricle, the lace would have been supplied by me. The lace on your fichu was undoubtedly imported by me, and the lace on your stepmother’s reticule was made in a factory in Kent. My factory, as it happens.”
“No one knows—Esme doesn’t know that!”
Her observation didn’t seem pertinent, but he nodded. “You are correct. I never saw any advantage to advertising my wealth. People assumed that my uncle was making me an allowance. In fact, I supported my uncle for the past five years.”
“In that case, everything is different,” she said slowly. Her chin rose even higher in the air. “I shall inform my stepmother that I am uncompromised, and I shall tell her that I wrote the letter myself. You are right: she will immediately withdraw her demand that you marry me.”
He said nothing for a moment, just looked at her little pointed face. How could someone who looked so delicate be so intrepid? He’d met women who looked like army sergeants, and were as weak as kittens. It was oddly erotic to face a woman who looked like a kitten but had the ruthlessness of a corporal.
She rose. “I shall inform her immediately. I offer my apologies, Mr. Darby.”
He didn’t bother to rise, just reached up and pulled her back down on the settee. “You are likely right,” he said. “I am infuriated—but I shall get over it.”
“That is not relevant. It would be an adequate bargain if you had need of my fortune, and I had need of your children. But there is no reason in the world why you should continue with the marriage if you have no need of a fortune. You may find a mother for Josie and Anabel as soon as the season begins, if not sooner. And then, as you say, you may bed your wife.”
“I will strike you another bargain,” he said. “My children for—”
“I have nothing to offer,” Henrietta said quietly. Her hands were clenched in her lap. “I cannot accept an offer in which you would lose so many things you hold important.”
All of a sudden her heart started thudding against her ribs. His eyes had darkened again. Danger, she thought. Danger. But it was danger of a different flavor.
Darby reached out one finger, let it run down the clear plane of her forehead, the elegant nose—stopped. Stopped at her lips.
“I think,” he said, and his voice had lost its expressionless quality, “I would go mad married to you, Henrietta.”
She shivered.
His finger moved, a bit unsteadily, over the curve of her lower lip.
“Do you see what I mean?”
She gave a little gasp. The finger tipped up her chin, forced her to meet his eyes. She felt a dark shiver down her spine.
“You can’t feel that—for me,” she said rashly.
“Oh? Why not?”
The finger burned its way down her neck.
“I think you mean to say that I ought not to feel that. And indeed, I ought not.” But he leaned closer. She could smell him, a clean, male scent. Suddenly his hand left her neck and curved around the back of her head.
“You think I should not—why?”
Henrietta’s mouth was open and she spoke breathily, in a way she detested. “Because…Because I am lame.”
“True enough.” She was exquisite, untouched, pure.
He had to leave her that way.
She was going to be his nursemaid, for God’s sake. He’d never approached a servant.
A weak defense.
She had the most beautiful lips he’d ever seen: curved and plump and begging to be kissed. In fact, the whole of her was begging to be kissed. The devil of it was that he’d just tied himself to her for a century of longing. Actually, centuries of watching his wife, his own wife, with that heightened sense of erotic desire that almost burned as it ran through his veins.
And without further thought, he bent his head and put his lips on her mouth.
For a moment, his rational abilities stayed with him. He tasted surprise on her lips. She held herself very still, the way she did when she was afraid that she would fall over and embarrass herself.
So, purely in order to relax her, he ran his hand down her back. She had a back like a bird’s wing: slender, fragile, speaking of willowy bones and exquisitely delicate shapes. He kept his hand there, a great still hand that could almost encompass her entire back in one grasp. So she couldn’t fly away, his little bird.
Then he turned his head and began to kiss her in earnest. And forgot about his rational thoughts.
She opened her mouth and welcomed him in. He meant to teach her a lesson. But she opened her mouth as if she craved him, as if she felt even half of the surging roaring waves of lust that made his life miserable when he saw her.
Her tongue met his. Heat roared down his spine.
She gasped against him. Heat pooled in his loins, thundered in his ears. He took her small mouth as if it were a world to be conquered. And she let him…how she let him! She moaned. He tasted the moan on his tongue.
She gasped; he stole her breath with his own.
He melted into a simmering, driven lust, a fierce desire to taste her, to touch her. He spread his hand on her back. She had not swayed toward him, the way women normally did during such a kiss. She still sat as upright as a statue.
Her breath was coming quickly, in little pants. She had her eyes closed. And yet she sat without touching him. She had not even moved her hands from her lap.
“Henrietta,” he said.
Her eyes slowly opened. They were the color of the evening sky, dazed pools of desire.
“Put your hands around my neck.”
She blinked and looked down at her hands as if she’d forgotten they were there.
“Of course,” she murmured. And lifted her arms around his neck, as commanded. Her back was so narrow that he could feel every movement.
Then she just looked at him.
This was damnable. He’d never wanted anyone as much. Even now, he could catalog her face without hesitation: slim nose, the most intelligent ey
es he’d ever seen in a woman, eyebrows that bent delicately, lips that were a deep red.
Normally her skin was porcelain white. Now there was a little bloom in each cheek.
“I have a—” she blurted out and stopped.
He kissed her nose, let his lips slide to her eyes. “You ravish me,” he said quietly. “That’s the damnable thing, Henrietta. I’m damned with you, and damned without you.”
“Esme told me about an object called a sheath,” she said in one breath.
He stopped for just a second, and then went back to kissing her cheekbone.
“It prevents conception,” Henrietta whispered, drunk with kisses and mortified by the very words that were falling from her mouth.
“I’ve heard of them,” he said neutrally. Inside, his mind was racing. Henrietta—his own prim and proper Henrietta—was raising the issue that he had intended to save for marriage. For the right moment on their wedding night, even if he had beg her to try it on hands and knees.
“She—” Henrietta gasped. He seemed to be licking her neck so she forgot what she was saying.
“Do you have a sheath?” he said, sometime later. “Do you know how to use it?”
She blushed even brighter red. “Esme will explain its use.”
“Infamous Esme,” he said.
“She is not infamous,” Henrietta said sharply.
“Mmmm.” His fingers played with the neck of her gown and then very slowly, looking directly into her eyes, he pulled it down. For a moment Henrietta thought about protesting, but every inch of her body was celebrating the fact that he seemed to be giving in.
Perhaps he would marry her.
A large hand curved around her breast. His lips followed his fingers, slipped below the line of her bodice.
Henrietta was too busy trying to decide whether she should allow him to make this sacrifice to pay much attention. Not that she wasn’t aware of his big hands roaming around her body, but her mind was still spinning with the implications of his lace empire. He didn’t need her money. He didn’t need her. He could find a mother—a nanny—anywhere. And the woman he married would be able to bear him children.