Nicki hesitated, then he nodded. “That’s it.”
Sherry turned her head aside, fighting desperately not to weep for her stupidity, for her gullibility, and for falling in love with a man who felt nothing for her but responsibility. No wonder he’d never said he loved her! No wonder he’d wanted her to find someone else to wed! “He was actually going to marry me out of guilt and responsibility.”
“I wouldn’t say those are his only reasons as of this time,” Nicki said cautiously. “I suspect he feels something for you.”
“Of course he does,” Sherry replied scornfully, reeling with humiliation. “It is called pity!”
“I’ll escort you back to Langford’s.”
“I can’t go back!” she cried.
“Miss Lancaster,” Nicki began in a sharp, authoritative voice that normally quelled anyone who heard it. It made the stricken young woman across from him double over with hysterical laughter, her arms wrapped around her stomach. “I am not Charise Lancaster!”
Nicki quickly went round to her, cursing himself for letting her trick him into believing she was well enough to handle whatever he told her.
“I am not Charise Lancaster,” she repeated, and her laughter abruptly gave way to sobs. “I was her paid companion on the trip.” Her arms still wrapped around her stomach, she rocked back and forth, weeping. “I am a glorified governess, and he was going to marry me. What a laugh his friends would have had over that. He was drowning in pity for a glorified governess who’d never laid eyes on Lord Burleton.”
Nicki stared at her in blank shock, but he believed her. “Good God,” he whispered.
“I thought I was Charise Lancaster,” she whimpered, her shoulders beginning to shake with sobs. “I thought I was, I swear it.”
Belatedly it occurred to Nicki to pull her into his arms and offer her some form of comfort, and he did it, but he was at a complete loss for words to match the gesture. “I thought I was,” she wept against his chest. “I thought I was her until she came to the house today. I thought I was, I swear it!”
“I believe you,” Nicki said, and was a little amazed that he did.
“She wouldn’t go away. She had to tell him herself. He—he was getting ready for the wedding. A s-secret wedding. I don’t have anywhere to go—no clothes—no money.”
Trying to offer her one small bright spot out of all this, he said, “At least it was not your father who died.”
Very slowly, she lifted her head, her eyes dazed, unfocused. “What?”
“Langford received a letter one night last week that was forwarded to him from Burleton’s landlord. It had been intended for Charise Lancaster, written by her father’s solicitor, and informing her that her father had died two weeks after she sailed for England.”
She drew a shaky breath, coming to grips with that, and said bleakly, “He was a harsh man but not an unkind one. He spoiled Charise quite terribly—” Another wrenching probability struck her, and she thought she was going to retch. “Last week—was it the same night I went to Almack’s and the Rutherfords’ ball?”
“So I was told.”
Her head bowed with further humiliation and fresh tears spilled down her cheek. “No wonder he changed so abruptly from wanting me to find another fiancé, to deciding we should wed at once.” She remembered the way she’d touched his hand at the opera and thought of how repelled he must have been at having to sit through that—and pretend to want to kiss her and—
“I wish I were dead!” she whispered brokenly.
“Stop that sort of talk at once,” Nicki said mindlessly. “You can stay here tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll go with you to Langford’s and we’ll explain.”
“I did explain in a letter! I can’t go back. I won’t, I tell you, and if you send for him, I’ll go mad. I know I will. I can never go back now.”
She sounded as if she meant it, and Nicki couldn’t blame her.
Sherry wasn’t certain how long she cried in his arms or when she stopped, but as the silence lengthened, a blessed numbness finally took over. “I can’t stay here,” she whispered, her voice hoarse from the storm of emotions.
“As you said, you have nowhere else to go.”
She pushed free of his soothing embrace and sat up, then she stood, swaying a little. “I shouldn’t have come here. I would not be surprised if there are charges filed against me.”
The thought that Langford might do that filled Nicki with an anger that was almost uncontainable, but he couldn’t deny the possibility or the unthinkable results. “You’re safe here, at least for tonight. In the morning, we’ll discuss how I can be of help.”
The feeling of unworthiness and relief that surged through her at the realization that he was actually offering to help her nearly broke Sherry’s fragile grip on her control. “I—I will have to find some sort of position. I have no references. I can’t stay in London. I don’t—”
“We’ll discuss it in the morning, chérie. I want you to lie down now. I will have your dinner sent up.”
“No one who knows him or his family will consider employing me, and he—everyone in London seems to know him.”
“In the morning,” he said firmly.
Too weary to protest, Sherry nodded. She had started up the stairs with a servant when something hit her and she turned around.
“Monsieur DuVille?”
“I gave you leave to call me Nicki, mademoiselle,” he tried to tease.
“Paid companions do not address their ‘betters’ by their given names.”
She looked as if she were at the end of her tether, and so Nicki did not argue with her decision and let her ask her question.
“You won’t tell any of them where I am—promise me you won’t!”
Nicki hesitated, reviewed the alternatives and their consequences, and finally said, “I give you my word.” He watched her walk up the stairs, beaten and humbled. She had never resembled a meek servant, but she did then, and it made him want to do violence to Westmoreland. And yet, he had acted honorably until today. More than honorably, Nicki reluctantly decided.
42
“Will there be anything else, my lord, before I retire?”
Stephen lifted his gaze from the glass of liquor in his hand and stared at the elderly under-butler standing in the doorway of his bedchamber. “No,” he said shortly.
He’d kept his family and the cleric waiting until three hours ago, in the asinine belief that Sheridan Bromleigh would come back and face him. If she were innocent, if she’d really lost her memory, not only would she have wanted to explain and exonerate herself, she’d have demanded explanations from him about why he’d pretended they were engaged. Since she didn’t seem to need those explanations, the only answer was that she’d always known the truth.
Now, however, there was no way to avoid the truth and not enough liquor in the world to douse the rage that was beginning to burn like an inferno inside him. Sheridan Bromleigh had obviously never lost her memory. When she regained consciousness, she’d simply seized on a brilliant ploy to lead a better life for a while, and he’d sweetened the deal a thousand times by offering to marry her. She must have been laughing herself into a seizure while he pretended to be Burleton and she pretended to be her own employer.
After all his experience, his alleged sophistication, Stephen thought, as his wrath continued to build, he’d fallen like a rock for the oldest female ploy in the world—the helpless damsel in distress! TWICE! First with Emily and now with Sheridan Bromleigh.
With Sheridan’s talent, she should have been on the stage. That’s where she belonged, along with the rest of the ambitious semiharlots who danced and cavorted and recited their lines. He took another swallow of his drink, remembering some of her best performances: Her first one had been truly impressive. The morning he’d slept by her bed, he’d awakened to the sound of her weeping. “I don’t know what I look like,” she’d wept, wringing his heart with her tears. “It’s a trifling thing, really, but since you
’re already awake, could you just describe me a little?” Then there had been the morning she’d decided to point out her hair to him—in case he hadn’t already noticed its siren appeal, Stephen thought viciously: “My hair is not brown. Look at it. It’s red—”
Like the ass he was, he’d stood there transfixed by the sight of that glossy mantle, mentally likening her to a red-haired Madonna. “It’s so . . . so brazen!” she’d pointed out to him, managing to look unhappy about a head of hair that obviously suited her perfectly.
Then there was her charming confusion over how she ought to behave. “I understand from Constance—the maid—that you’re an earl, and that I ought properly to address you as ‘my lord.’ Among the things I do seem to know is that in the presence of a king, one does not sit unless invited to do so.”
But his absolute favorite, Stephen decided with blazing cynicism, was the first night she’d been out of her bed, when she’d begged him prettily, “And my family—what are they like?” After he’d explained her father was a widower and she was his only child, she’d looked at him with those big, beseeching eyes of hers and said, “Are we very much in love?”
In all their conversations, she’d only slipped once that he could remember. He’d been in the process of telling her she had to have a chaperone if she stayed in his house, and she’d laughed. “I don’t need a companion, I am a—” Her only slip, but in retrospect damning proof.
She’d been comfortable with the servants because she was one, or close to it.
“Jesus, what a scheming, brilliant little opportunist she was,” Stephen thought aloud, grinding his teeth. She’d probably been hoping she could persuade him to offer her his protection and set her up in a house of her own, and instead he’d offered her his name!
He tossed the rest of his drink down as if he could wash away his self-loathing, then he got up and headed into his dressing room.
Despite her strong protests in the coach when they left Almack’s, that redheaded sorceress had agreed to marry him in less than one hour and made it seem as if he’d convinced her.
He jerked off his shirt and flung it on the floor. It dawned on him that he’d intended to wear the clothes he had on at his wedding, and as he removed each piece of clothing, he dropped it carefully onto the growing heap. Damson came in just as he was pulling on a robe, and the appalled valet bent down to pick them up.
“Burn them!” Stephen bit out. “Get them out of here and go to bed. In the morning, have someone get rid of everything she left behind.”
He was standing at the fireplace, the last of the bottle of liquor in his glass, when he heard another knock at his door. “What the hell is it now?” he demanded when Burleton’s butler was standing just inside the room, looking as tormented as if he was being stretched on a rack.
“I—I do not wish to intrude into a situation that is none of my affair, my lord, but neither—neither would I—would I feel right were I to conceal information that—you might wish to know.”
Stephen had all he could do to contain his loathing for the old servant who now reminded him of Sheridan Bromleigh. “Do you intend to tell me or to stand there all night?” he snapped scathingly.
The old man seemed to wilt from the cutting tone. “Dr. Whitticomb privately told me that I was to keep an eye on Miss Lan—on the young lady.”
“And?” he gritted furiously.
“And so, when she left today in such a state, I felt obligated to send a footman to watch after her. She—she went to the home of Monsieur DuVille, my lord. That is where she is . . .” He trailed off at the sight of the murderous look on the earl’s face as he heard that news and hastily backed out of the doorway, bowing.
DuVille! She’d gone to DuVille. “Little bitch!” he said aloud.
He did not consider going after her. She was dead to him now, and he didn’t give a damn where she went or whose bed she occupied. She had a highly refined sense of survival, and she’d land on her feet wherever she went. With a malicious smile, he wondered what Banbury tale she’d fed DuVille today to persuade him to let her stay under his roof. Whatever it was, DuVille had an equally good sense of survival, and he had never been besotted by her, as Stephen had been.
No doubt DuVille would set her up in a nice little house somewhere if she asked him prettily and pleased him in bed.
The redheaded sorceress was a born courtesan, if ever there’d been one.
* * *
Standing at the window of a guest suite in Nicholas DuVille’s house, Sherry stared into the night, her forehead resting on the cold glass, her eyes aching with tears she couldn’t let herself shed. In the six hours since she’d come up here at Nicholas’s insistence, her mind had cleared, and with that clarity came the full realization of what she had almost had—and lost—and she didn’t know how she was going to bear it.
Turning away, she walked listlessly over to the bed and lay down, too exhausted to fight down the memories. She closed her eyes, willing sleep to come, but all she saw was his lazy smile and the tender way he’d looked at her at the Rutherfords’ ball. “Miss Lancaster . . . may I have the honor of this dance?” Swallowing convulsively, she squeezed her eyes tighter closed, but in her mind, she felt him kissing her the way he had in the coach. “This is why we are going to be married,” he’d said in that husky voice he used when they’d been kissing. Surely, she thought achingly, he hadn’t been pretending he liked to kiss her. Surely that had not been pretending. She needed to believe, had to believe, that much had been real. If she couldn’t believe in that, she didn’t know how she would go on after today.
The memory of that and the other times he’d kissed her were hers alone to cherish. They did not belong to “Charise Lancaster.” They belonged to her. She rolled onto her stomach, holding the memories close, and she fell asleep to dream of strong arms crushing her tightly and demanding kisses that stole her breath . . . of caressing hands that gentled and tantalized her and made her forget it was wrong to let him touch her in that intimate way. She slept, dreaming of things she would never know again in reality.
* * *
Wrapped in a dressing gown, Whitney stood in the nursery, gazing down at her sleeping son’s cherubic face. She looked up as the door opened, admitting a wedge of light, and her husband walked in, his face more grim than she’d seen it in years. “I couldn’t sleep,” she whispered, leaning down and smoothing the light blanket over Noel’s shoulders. He already had his father’s square chin and dark hair.
Behind her, Clayton slid his arms around her waist, silently offering her comfort. “Have I thanked you recently for my son?” he whispered near her ear, smiling down at the three-year-old.
“Not since this time last night,” she said, tipping her face up to his and trying to smile.
He wasn’t fooled by her smile any more than she was fooled by his careful avoidance of the discussion of today’s aborted wedding. “I feel so terrible,” she confided.
“I know you do,” he said quietly.
“I will never forget the look on Stephen’s face as it became later and later and he realized she wasn’t coming back.”
“Nor I,” he said tersely.
“He kept the vicar there until after ten o’clock. How could she do a thing like that to him? How could she?”
“None of us really knew her.”
“Stephen was insane about her. I could see it every time he looked at her and when he was trying not to look at her.”
“I noticed,” he said curtly.
Swallowing over the lump of sorrow in her throat, she said, “If it hadn’t been for Stephen’s intervention, you would be married to Vanessa and I’d be wed to someone else, and Noel wouldn’t exist.”
Clayton reached up and smoothed her tousled hair off her shoulder and pressed a reassuring kiss against her temple, as she continued in an aching voice, “I always wanted to repay him for that, but all I could do was wish and wish that he would find someone who would make him as happy as we are.”
>
“Come to bed, darling,” Clayton said, leaning down and lightly tousling his son’s hair. “Stephen is a grown man,” he said as he drew her firmly toward their own bedchamber. “He’ll get over her because he wants to get over her.”
“Did you get over me as easily as that when we were—” she hesitated, carefully refraining from any mention of the hideous night that had nearly destroyed all chances of a marriage between them, “when we were estranged?”
“No.”
When they were both in bed and she had curled into his arms, he added, “However, I had known you longer than Stephen knew Ch—Sheridan Bromleigh.”
She nodded, her soft cheek sliding against his arm, and he tightened his hold, drawing her tighter against him because he, too, remembered the event that had nearly torn them apart.
“Time has little to say to the matter. Do you remember how long after we met again in England it was before you loved me?” she said into the darkness.
Clayton smiled at the memory. “It was the night you confessed you used to pepper your music teacher’s snuffbox.”
“If memory serves me well, I told you that story only a week or two after I came home from France.”
“Something like that.”
“Clayton?”
“What?” he whispered.
“I do not think Stephen is going to get over this as easily as you think. He could have any woman he wants, and yet in all this time, she was the only woman he ever wanted—except for Emily, and look how cynical he became after that!”
“All Stephen has to do is crook his finger, and dozens of desirable women will line up to soothe him. This time, he’ll let them because his pride and his heart both took a more serious beating than the last,” Clayton predicted grimly. “In the meantime, he’ll get completely foxed and stay that way for a while.”
She tipped her face up to his. “Is that what you did?”
“That’s what I did,” he confirmed.