Fury ignited in the duke’s eyes. “No objection—” he thundered, then he bit back the rest of his words, clenching his jaw so tightly a muscle jerked in the side of his cheek. “And if I refuse?” he bit out.
“Then I shall bring you up on charges before the magistrates in London. Don’t think I won’t,” Mrs. Lawrence cried.
“You won’t do anything of the sort,” he said with scathing certainty. “To bring me up on charges would only broadcast throughout London the very scandal you apparently find so damaging to Alexandra.”
Pushed past the bounds of reason by his arrogant calm and the recollection of her own ill-use at her husband’s hands, Mrs. Lawrence sprang from her chair, shaking with wrath. “Now you listen to me—I’ll do exactly what I said I’d do. Alexandra is either going to have the respectability of your name, or she’s going to be able to buy respectability with your money—every cent of it, if I have my way. Either way, we have nothing to lose. Do you understand me?” she nearly screamed. “I’ll not let you take advantage of us and cast us off the way my husband did. You’re a monster, just as he was. All men are monsters—selfish, unspeakable monsters . . .”
Jordan stared icily at the nearly demented woman standing before him, her eyes feverishly bright, her hands clenched into fists so tightly that blue veins stood out beneath her skin. She meant it, he realized. She was evidently so consumed with loathing for her husband that she would actually subject Alexandra to a public scandal, simply to get even with another man—himself.
“You kissed her,” Mrs. Lawrence rasped in furious accusation. “You put your hands on her, she admitted it—”
“Mama, don’t!” Alexandra cried, wrapping her arms around her middle and doubling over with shame or pain, Jordan wasn’t certain which. “Don’t, please don’t do this,” she whispered brokenly. “Don’t do this to me.”
Jordan looked at the child-woman who was huddled into a pitiful ball and could scarcely believe she was the same brave, laughing girl who had charged to his rescue two days ago.
“God knows what else you let him do—”
Jordan’s palm crashed down on the desk with a force that exploded throughout the oak-paneled room. “Enough! he thundered in a murderous voice. “Sit down!” he commanded Mrs. Lawrence, and when she’d rigidly obeyed, Jordan got out of his chair. Stalking around his desk, he took Alexandra’s arm in a none-too-gentle grasp and drew her out of her chair. “You come with me,” he clipped. “I want to speak privately with you.”
Mrs. Lawrence opened her mouth to object, but the old duchess spoke at last, and when she did her voice dripped icicles. “Silence, Mrs. Lawrence! We have heard enough from you!”
Alexandra nearly had to run to keep up with the duke as he marched her across the drawing room, through the doorway, and down the hall to a small salon decorated in shades of lavender. Once inside, he let go of her arm, strode across the room to the windows, and shoved his hands into his pockets. The silence scraped against her raw nerves as he stared rigidly out across the lawns, his profile harsh, forbidding. She knew he was thinking hard for some way out of marrying her, and she also knew that beneath that tautly controlled facade of his there was a terrible, volcanic rage—a rage that was undoubtedly going to erupt against her at any moment. Shamed to the depths of her being, Alexandra waited helplessly, watching as he lifted one hand and massaged the taut muscles in his neck, his expression becoming darker and more ominous as each second ticked by.
He turned so abruptly that Alexandra took an automatic step backward. “Stop behaving like a frightened rabbit,” he snapped. “I’m the one who’s caught in a trap, not you.”
A deadly calm settled over Alexandra, banishing everything but her shame. Her small chin lifted, her spine stiffened, and before his eyes Jordan saw her put up a valiant fight for control—a fight she won. She stood before him now, looking incongruously like a proud, boyish queen in refurbished rags, her eyes sparking like twin jewels. “I could not speak in the other room,” she said with only a slight tremor in her voice, “because my mother would never have let me, but had you not asked to speak privately to me, I intended to ask to speak to you.”
“Say what you have to say and have done with it.”
Alexandra’s chin lifted even higher at his chilling tone. Somehow she had let herself hope he would not treat her with the same brutal contempt he’d treated her family. “The idea of our marrying is ludicrous,” she began.
“You’re absolutely right,” he snapped rudely.
“We’re from two different worlds.”
“Right again.”
“You don’t want to marry me.”
“Another bull’s-eye, Miss Lawrence,” he announced in an insulting drawl.
“I don’t want to marry you either,” she retorted, humiliated to the core by every unkind word he said.
“That’s very wise of you,” he agreed caustically. “I’d make an exceedingly bad husband.”
“Moreover, I do not wish to be anyone’s wife. I wish to be a teacher, as my grandfather was, and to support myself.”
“How extraordinary,” he mocked sarcastically. “And all this while, I’ve been harboring the delusion that all girls yearn to snare wealthy husbands.”
“I am not like other girls.”
“I sensed that from the moment I met you.”
Alexandra heard the insult in his smoothly worded agreement, and she almost choked on her chagrin. “Then it’s settled. We won’t wed.”
“On the contrary,” he said, and each word rang with bitter fury. “We have no choice, Miss Lawrence. That mother of yours will do exactly as she’s threatened. She’ll bring me up on public charges before the Court. In order to punish me, she’ll destroy you.”
“No, no!” Alexandra burst out. “She won’t do it. You don’t understand about my mother. She’s—ill—she’s never recovered from my papa’s death.” Unconsciously, she caught at the sleeve of his immaculately tailored grey jacket, her eyes imploring, her voice urgent. “You mustn’t let them force you to marry me—you’ll hate me forever for it, I know you will. The villagers will forget the scandal, you’ll see. They’ll forgive me and forget. It was all my fault for stupidly fainting so you had to take me to the inn. I never faint, you see, but I’d just killed a man and—”
“That’s enough!” Jordan said harshly, and felt the noose of matrimony tighten inexorably around his neck. Until Alexandra began to speak, he had been searching madly for some means of escape from this dilemma—he had even been ready to seize on her assurance that her mother was likely bluffing. He had, in fact, been preparing to start listing all the reasons why she would hate being married to him—only he had not counted on her selflessly pleading with him not to sacrifice himself on the altar of matrimony for her sake. He had also managed, temporarily, to forget that she had killed a man to save his own life.
He stared down at the proud, pathetic child before him in her shabby gown. She had saved his life at the risk of her own, and in return he had effectively destroyed all her chances of getting a husband. With no husband to lighten her cares, she would be carrying the burden of that bizarre household on her thin shoulders for as long as she lived. He had inadvertently, but effectively, destroyed her future.
Impatiently, he pulled her hand away from his sleeve. “There’s no way out of it for either of us,” he clipped. “I’ll arrange for a special license and we’ll be married here within the week. Your mother and your uncle,” he said with blistering contempt, “can stay at the local inn. I’ll not shelter either of them under my roof.”
That last comment caused Alexandra more shamed anguish than anything else he had said to her.
“I’ll pay for their lodgings,” he said shortly, misunderstanding the reason for her stricken expression.
“It isn’t the expense!” she denied.
“Then what’s bothering you?” he demanded impatiently.
“It’s—” Alexandra turned her head, her gaze traveling d
esperately over the stultifying formality of the room. “It’s everything! It’s all wrong. This isn’t the way I imagined being married.” In her anxiety, she seized on the least of her worries. “I always thought I’d be married in a church in the village, with my best friend—Mary Ellen—to attend me, and all the—”
“Fine,” he interrupted shortly. “Invite your friend here, if it will make you easier in the days before the wedding. Give her direction to the butler and I’ll send a servant after her. You’ll find writing materials in the drawer of that desk over there. You do know how to write, I presume?”
Alex’s head jerked as if he had slapped her, and for one brief instant Jordan glimpsed the proud, spirited woman she would someday become. Her blue-green eyes snapped with disdain as she replied, “Yes, my lord, I know how to write.”
Jordan stared at the scornful child who was regarding him down the length of her pert nose and felt a glimmer of amused respect that she would dare to look at him thus. “Good,” he said curtly.
“—in three languages,” she added with regal hauteur.
Jordan almost smiled.
When he left, Alexandra walked rigidly over to the small desk in the corner and sat down behind it. She pulled out a drawer and removed a writing sheet, quill, and inkpot. Too overwrought to concentrate on explaining her predicament, she wrote simply,
Dearest Mary Ellen, please accompany the bearer of this letter and come to me as soon as you may. Disaster has struck and I’m quite horribly desolate! My mother is here and so is Uncle Monty, so your mama needn’t worry about your safety. Hurry, please. There isn’t much time before I have to leave you—
Two tears welled in Alex’s eyes, trembling on sooty black lashes, then they trickled down her cheeks. One by one, they fell in damp splotches onto the letter until she gave up the hopeless struggle and laid her head on her arms, her shoulders shaking with wrenching sobs.
“Something wonderful?” she whispered brokenly to God. “Is this Your idea of wonderful?”
* * *
Three-quarters of an hour later, Ramsey ushered a satisfied, if very subdued, Mrs. Lawrence and Sir Montague out of the house, leaving the dowager duchess alone with her two grandsons. The duchess arose slowly, her shoulders stiff as she turned to Jordan. “You cannot seriously mean to go through with this!” she announced.
“I intend to do exactly that.”
Her face whitened at his words. “Why?” she demanded. “You can’t expect me to believe you feel the slightest desire to marry that provincial little mouse.”
“I don’t.”
“Then why in heaven’s name are you going to do it?”
“Pity,” he said with brutal frankness. “I pity her. And, like it or not, I’m also responsible for what happens to her. It’s as simple as that.”
“Then pay her off!”
Leaning back in his chair, Jordan wearily closed his eyes and shoved his hands in the pockets of his pants. “ ‘Pay her off,’ ” he repeated bitterly. “I wish to God I could, but I can’t. She saved my life and, in return, I ruined her chances of having any sort of respectable life of her own. You heard what her mother said—her fiancé has already cried off because she’s ‘ruined.’ As soon as she returns to the village, she’ll be fair game for every lusting male. She’ll have no respectability, no husband, no children. In a year or two, she’ll be reduced to selling her favors at the same inn where I took her.”
“Nonsense!” the dowager said stoutly. “If you pay her off, she can go somewhere else to live. Somewhere like London where the gossip won’t follow her.”
“In London, the most she could hope to be is some man’s mistress, and that’s assuming she could attract some wealthy old fool or foolish young fop to keep her. You saw her—she’s hardly the sort of female to incite a man’s lust.”
“There is no need to be vulgar,” the duchess said stiffly.
Jordan opened his eyes, his expression sardonic. “Frankly, I find it rather ‘vulgar’ to consider rewarding the chit for saving my life by consigning her to a life of glorified prostitution, which is what you’re suggesting.”
They regarded each other across the room, two fiercely indomitable wills clashing in silence. The duchess finally conceded defeat with an imperceptible inclination of her immaculately coiffed head. “As you wish, Hawthorne,” she said, reluctantly yielding to his authority as the head of the family. Then another thought struck her and she sank into her chair, her face turning a grim, deathly white. “For seven hundred years, the bloodlines of this family have been unsullied. We are descendants of kings and emperors. Yet you mean for that utter nobody to produce the next heir.” In supreme frustration, her grace turned her ire on her other grandson. “Don’t just sit there, Anthony, say something!”
Lord Anthony Townsende leaned back in his chair, his expression wry. “Very well,” he said amiably, accepting Jordan’s decision with a fatalistic grin, “when am I going to be presented to my future cousin? Or do you intend to leave her in the salon until the wedding?”
The duchess shot him a killing glance, but she said nothing more. She sat quite still, her back ramrod straight, her white head high, but the bitter disappointment of the last hour had added a decade to her face.
Anthony glanced at Jordan and raised his glass in a gesture of a toast. “To your future wedded bliss, Hawk.” He grinned.
Jordan shot him an ironic glance, but other than that, his features were perfectly composed. Anthony was not surprised at this lack of visible emotion. Like his grandmother, Jordan nearly always kept his emotions under rigid control, but unlike the duchess, Hawk did it effortlessly—so effortlessly that Tony and many others often wondered if he felt any really deep emotion other than anger.
In this instance, Tony was correct. Jordan was feeling nothing stronger than a certain grim, angry resignation toward his marriage. As he lifted his glass to his lips, Jordan contemplated with bitter amusement this unexpected twist of fate. After years of unrestrained wenching among England’s most experienced, most sophisticated—and least virtuous—females, fortune had perversely saddled him for life with a child-bride who was the supreme, eternal ingénue. Every instinct he possessed warned him that Alexandra’s lack of sophistication sprang not from mere inexperience, but rather from an ingenuous nobility of spirit and gentleness of heart.
At his hands, she would lose her physical innocence, but he doubted if she would ever lose her wide-eyed naiveté, nor would she acquire the smooth veneer of bored sophistication and droll wit that was as much a requirement for admission into the ton as were the right family connections.
It bothered him slightly that she would never be able to fit into his world, his life. It bothered him—but not much, for in truth he had no intention of spending much time with her in the years to come, nor did he intend to greatly alter his life-style. He would install her at his house in Devon and visit her there, he decided.
With a sigh, he realized that his mistress would have to be informed that she wasn’t going to accompany him to Devon next week as planned. Thank God Elise was as sophisticated as she was beautiful and sensual; he would not have to endure a scene from her when he explained about the trip to Devon and his marriage.
“Well, when are we going to be properly presented to her?” Anthony repeated.
Reaching behind him, Jordan tugged on the bell cord. “Ramsey,” he said, when the butler materialized in the doorway, “retrieve Miss Lawrence from the yellow salon and bring her here.”
“Where are my mother and my Uncle Monty?” Alexandra asked a little frantically as soon as she entered the drawing room.
Jordan arose and came forward. “They have repaired to the local inn where they will remain in happy expectation of our forthcoming nuptials,” he replied with unconcealed irony. “You, however, will remain here.”
Before Alexandra could finish digesting all that, she was being introduced to the dowager duchess, who inspected her through a lorgnette. Humiliated past all
endurance by the duchess’ contemptuous appraisal, Alexandra lifted her chin and stared right back at the old woman.
“Do not stare at me in that rude, disrespectful fashion,” the duchess snapped when she caught Alexandra’s expression.
“Oh, was I being rude, ma’am?” Alexandra inquired with deceptive meekness. “I apologize, then. You see, I know it is rude to stare at someone. However, I am woefully ignorant of the etiquette involved when one is the recipient of the stare.”
The duchess’ lorgnette slid from her fingers and her eyes narrowed to slits. “How dare you lecture me! You are a nobody, a person without bloodlines or breeding or ancestry.”
“ ‘It is certainly desirable to be well-descended,’ ” Alexandra quoted angrily, “ ‘but the glory belongs to our ancestors, not to us.’ ”
Anthony emitted a strangled, laughing sound and hastily interposed himself between his infuriated grandmother and the unwise child who had chosen to enter into verbal combat with her. “Plato, wasn’t it?” he asked with a smile and extended his hand.
Alexandra shook her head, smiling timidly in the hope she’d found an ally in this den of unfriendly strangers. “Plutarch.”
“I was close, anyway,” he chuckled. “Since Jordan seems to be struck dumb, permit me to introduce myself. I’m Jordan’s cousin, Tony.”
Alexandra put her hand into his extended palm. “How do you do.”
“Curtsy,” the duchess ordered icily.
“Pardon?”
“A young lady curtsies when she is introduced to a person of superior age or rank.”
Chapter Six
AT DUSK the following evening, Alexandra was standing at the windows of her bedchamber, looking out across the drive, when she saw a stately coach drawing up, its lanterns twinkling in the dusky light. “Mary Ellen!” she breathed and ran from her room, hurrying down the long hall on the third floor.
Ramsey opened the door just as Mary Ellen erupted from the coach and ran up the front steps of the huge house, her long red hair streaming out behind her, her arms laden with oddly shaped parcels, the brim of her bonnet clutched in a fist. Skidding to a halt in the foyer, Mary Ellen curtsied to the astonished butler, whom she judged from his haughty demeanor to be An Important Personage, and then demanded in an agonized voice, “Please, milord, where is Alexandra? Is she still alive?”