He had accepted her word and trusted her to keep it, and Whitney wanted him to believe she had, but the only one who could prove it was Paul, and Paul was in no mood to aid her.
Whitney bit her lip, concerned with more than just the loss of her honor. Without the incentive of marrying Paul to give her courage, she now felt a deep-rooted, genuine fear of Clayton’s wrath. The more she pondered it, the more convinced she became that the best way to avert certain disaster was to go to London and explain to Clayton what was happening here. He would be far less angry hearing it from her than from strangers, and he would know she wasn’t to blame. After all, if she was truly planning to marry Paul, as the gossip had it, why would she return to London to see Clayton?
Resolutely, Whitney got up and went down the hall to her aunt’s room. She poured out the entire story, including the gossip about her betrothal to Paul and her abandoned plan to elope. Aunt Anne blanched but she remained silent until Whitney was finished. “What do you intend to do now?” she asked then.
“I think it would be best if I went to London and stayed with Emily. As soon as I arrive, I’ll notify his grace I’m there, and he’ll naturally come to see me. Then I’ll choose exactly the right moment to tell him about the gossip here. I don’t think he’ll care so much about the talk, so long as he believes it isn’t my fault.”
“I’ll come to London with you,” her aunt instantly volunteered.
“There’s no need for that. You’ve been longing to visit your cousin in Lincolnshire, and Emily would love for me to stay with her for a while. I’ll send you a note as soon as I know for certain the duke didn’t change plans and isn’t en route here, then you can leave straightaway for Lincolnshire. I wouldn’t want both of us to be gone if he were to return here unexpectedly and hear the gossip.”
Lady Anne smiled. “You’re right. Now, when you see him in London, what reason will you give him for being there?”
Whitney’s smooth forehead knitted in an irritated frown. “I suppose I’ll have to tell him the truth—that I was afraid he would come back to the village and believe that despite his warning, I hadn’t refused Paul. Although, I find it excessively galling to have to tear off to London like a rabbit frightened of incurring his wrath. That man walked into my life a few months ago, and I’ve been like a puppet obliged to dance to his tune ever since. I think I shall tell him that too!” Whitney finished mutinously.
“While you’re bent on being so honest about your feelings,” Aunt Anne suggested with a knowing gleam in her eyes, “why don’t you also tell him that you have developed a sincere affection for him and you are willing now to honor the betrothal contract? It will please him immensely to hear you say it.”
Whitney shot up off the sofa as if she’d been scorched. “I most certainly will not!” she declared hotly. “Considering that he never cared whether I wanted to marry him, and has never doubted for a minute that I would marry him, I fail to see why I should flatter his vanity now by professing to want to marry him. Besides, I haven’t made up my mind to marry him.”
“I think you have, darling.”
Her aunt’s quiet voice checked Whitney in mid-stride as she headed for the door. “And if it will make it easier for you to admit your own feelings, I will tell you that, in my opinion, that man loves you with an intensity that would astonish him if he but recognized it—and very likely flatter your vanity.”
“You’re wrong, Aunt Anne,” Whitney said tonelessly. “He has never even said he cares for me. I’m a possession he’s acquired, nothing more. Don’t ask me to crawl to him; I have very little pride left as it is, and I won’t sacrifice it to soothe his temper or flatter his ego.”
* * *
Elizabeth Ashton appeared at the house each afternoon to report her progress, but by the end of the third day, there was still no cause for celebration. Clarissa and Whitney were packing for the next day’s trip to London when Elizabeth trailed into the bedroom, a soldier returning in defeat from a battle that should have been easy for her to win. “Peter is no nearer declaring himself now than he was ten years ago,” she said glumly, flopping into a chair.
Whitney thrust an armload of underclothing into a trunk and gazed at Elizabeth in perplexed dismay. “Are you certain?”
“Positive,” Elizabeth said morosely. “I suggested we dine at my house tonight, without my parents, and do you know what he said? He said”—Elizabeth sighed heavily—“that he likes dining with my parents.”
“That idiot!” Whitney burst out irritably. Slowly she began to pace back and forth. “You may be ready to accept defeat, but I’m not—at least not from Peter Redfern, of all people! That dolt has worshipped you since we were children. What he needs is some sort of motivation to force him into declaring himself without delay.” Idly, Whitney shoved the fully packed portmanteau out of the way with her foot and frowned at the luggage scattered everywhere around the room. “I have it!” she burst out, whirling on Elizabeth with an impetuous, daring gleam in her green eyes that Elizabeth well remembered from days gone by. Terrified, she shrank back into her chair: “Whitney, whatever you’re thinking, we aren’t going to do it.”
“Oh yes, we are!” Whitney hooted triumphantly. “Miss Ashton, I hereby invite you to come to London with me.”
“But I don’t want to go to London,” Elizabeth sputtered desperately. “I want Peter.”
“Good, and you’re going to get him tonight. Now repeat after me, ‘Yes, I will go to London with you.’ ”
“Yes, I will go to London with you,” Elizabeth parroted. “But I don’t want to.”
“Perfect, because you aren’t going to. But I have just asked you and you’ve accepted. This way, when you tell Peter you’ve agreed to come with me, you won’t be lying to him.” Advancing purposefully on a bewildered Elizabeth, Whitney caught her hand and pulled her over to the writing desk. “Now, write and tell Peter to join you here for supper with me tonight. Tell him . . .” Whitney hesitated, her forefinger pressed to her lips, then chuckled at her own stroke of genius. “Tell him that you and I are planning to do the most extraordinary thing together. That should petrify him.”
“Peter isn’t going to like our going to London together,” Elizabeth said.
“He’ll detest the idea!” Whitney agreed proudly. “Even though I’ve grown up, Peter still watches me as if he expects me to commit some outrageous act at any moment.”
For the first time in her sweet, acquiescent life, Elizabeth displayed a stubborn streak. “If Peter won’t approve, I won’t go.”
Stung by Elizabeth’s lack of appreciation for her brilliant plan, Whitney said, “You aren’t going. Don’t you see, Peter will be appalled at the idea of our going off together. He doesn’t think I’ve truly changed. He still thinks of me as the same hoyden who used to smite Reverend Snodgrass’s old mare on the rump with a slingshot.”
“You did that?” Elizabeth gasped.
“That, and a great many other things Peter knows about,” Whitney admitted impertinently. “He’ll try to dissuade you from coming with me, but you are to tell him that I am insisting. I’ll be right there to insist, and when Peter can’t talk either of us out of it, he’ll do the only thing he can do.”
“What?” Elizabeth asked, looking intrigued but dubious.
Whitney threw up her hands. “Why, he’ll propose, you widgeon!” Taking Elizabeth’s trembling hand in an affectionate, reassuring grasp, Whitney said, “Please, please trust me. Nothing wrings an offer so quickly from a man as the fear that you are going to leave him. And nothing makes a man quite so brave and bold as the opportunity to rescue an innocent female from ‘unsuitable companions,’—in this case, the unsuitable companion is me. Nicolas DuVille scarcely paid any attention to me unless he objected to some gentleman who was courting me, then he swooped down like an avenging angel to protect me from some man who was not nearly as dangerous a flirt as he! It was vastly amusing, I can tell you. Now please write that note. Before this night is over, P
eter will propose, you just wait and see.”
Reluctantly Elizabeth did as she was bidden and the note was dispatched to Peter with a footman.
Three hours later, against her protests, Elizabeth was draped in Whitney’s most daring gown, which had been temporarily shortened, and her golden curls had been tamed into a sleek chignon. Still objecting, she was led to a mirror by Clarissa and Whitney.
“Go ahead,” Whitney urged. “See how lovely you look—”
Elizabeth’s timid gaze traveled up the clingy folds of the elegant silk gown, past her slim hips and dainty waist, then riveted in shock on her exposed décolletage. Her hands flew to cover the tops of her breasts swelling above the bodice of the gown. “I can’t,” she gasped, blushing.
Whitney rolled her eyes. “Yes, you can, Elizabeth. Why in France, this gown would be considered only a tiny bit daring.”
A nervous giggle trilled from Elizabeth as she slowly lowered her hands. “Do you think Peter will like it?”
“Not,” Whitney predicted happily, “when I tell him that I think your gowns are much too demure and that when we’re in London I intend to make certain you buy more like this one to wear at the parties we shall be attending.”
At eight o’clock Peter strode into the candlelit drawing room and joined the two young women who were waiting for him. After a brief nod in Whitney’s direction, he looked around the room for Elizabeth, who was staring out the window with her back to him.
“What is this ‘extraordinary thing’ the two of you are planning to do?” he demanded.
Elizabeth slowly turned and an expression of comical incredulity froze Peter’s features. With slackened jaw and glazed eyes, he gaped at her.
Elizabeth, who had evidently hoped he would take one look at her and fall to his knee to propose matrimony, waited in expectant silence. When he neither spoke nor moved, her dainty chin lifted with stubborn determination and for the first time in her twenty-one years, Elizabeth consciously began to use the feminine wiles with which she was born. “Whitney is taking me for an extended trip to London tomorrow,” she explained, while strolling back and forth, parading her blond loveliness before a staggered Peter. “Whitney thinks I shall be all the rage in London once I have new clothes and a new hair style. She is going to teach me how to flirt with gentlemen too,” ad-libbed Elizabeth with wide-eyed innocence. “Of course,” she finished with a spurt of inspiration, “I do hope I shan’t have changed so much by the time we return that you won’t recognize me . . .”
Whitney’s lips trembled with admiring laughter which she quickly suppressed as Peter’s outraged glower swung toward her. “What the devil do you think you’re doing?” he snapped furiously.
Somehow Whitney managed to look almost as innocent as Elizabeth. “I’m only trying to take Elizabeth under my wing.”
“Elizabeth would be safer under an axe!” he exploded. “I won’t permit—”
“Now Peter,” Whitney soothed, struggling desperately to keep her face straight. “Be reasonable. All I intend to do is take Elizabeth to London and introduce her to some of the gentlemen I met at a ball there this week. They are a most charming, eligible group, and all of them have impeccable backgrounds and unexceptionable reputations. They may be a little fast, but I’m quite certain Elizabeth won’t fall violently in love with more than one or two of them. It’s time for her to marry, you know. She’s a year older than I.”
“I know how old Elizabeth is!” Peter raked his hand through his hair in frustration.
“Then you should also know that you have no say in what she does. You aren’t her papa, nor her husband, nor even her fiancé, so do stop arguing and admit defeat. I’ll just go and see about supper,” she finished, hastily turning away to hide her brimming laughter.
Whitney was absolutely certain that Peter would propose when he took Elizabeth home. She was wrong; they were standing hand-in-hand when she returned to the drawing room ten minutes later.
“It grieves me to upset your plans,” Peter mocked, “but Elizabeth will not be accompanying you to London. She has agreed to become my wife. Well,” he demanded irritably, “what have you to say to that?”
“Say?” Whitney repeated, lowering her eyes to hide her delighted smile. “Why . . . how very provoking of you, Peter. I had so wanted to . . . give Elizabeth a glorious taste of London.”
Peter, who was innately good-tempered, glanced with smiling tolerance at his future wife and said in a friendlier voice, “Since you’re so bent on being with Elizabeth in London, you can shop for her trousseau with her. If her papa accepts me tonight, I expect she’ll want to leave tomorrow, and she has already informed me that she wants you to be a bridesmaid.”
23
* * *
Upon arriving at the Archibalds’ townhouse, Whitney was greeted by a flustered Emily, her brown hair covered with a kerchief, her cheeks smudged with dirt. “You look like a chimney sweep,” Whitney laughed.
“You look like a godsend!” Emily countered, embracing her. “Can a knight be seated beside an honorable at dinner?” she burst out desperately.
Whitney blinked in surprised confusion.
“It’s this wretched party,” Emily explained in the salon after Whitney had taken off her pelisse and Clarissa had been shown to her room. “Michael’s mama said that I must begin to entertain as suits Michael’s station in life. Have you any idea how much fuss the ton can make over the simple act of sitting down to dinner? Here, just look at what I’ve been going through.” She went over to a desk and plucked up a seating diagram for the dining tables that evening. It was obvious she had repeatedly scratched out names to rearrange them. “Can you, or can you not, seat an honorable beside a knight? Michael’s mama lent me a dozen books on etiquette, but they’re so filled with contradictions and exceptions to rules that I know less now than I did before I read them.”
Whitney scanned the seating diagram and then promptly slid into the sabre-legged chair at the desk. Dipping the quill into the inkpot, she deftly rearranged the guests, then sat back and flashed a sunny smile at her stunned friend. “Thanks to Aunt Anne’s training, I can do that when there are nobles from five different countries present,” she said.
Emily sank down on the sofa, her eyes still clouded with worry. “This is our first formal party and Michael’s mama is going to be here watching every move I make. She’s a stickler for formalities. She was less than pleased when her son married A Nobody, and I want more than anything to show her I can have the most perfect, grandest party she’s ever attended!”
Whitney, who had been racking her brain for some excuse to see Clayton other than the obvious one, slowly began to smile with delight. Turning back to the desk, she picked up the quill and wrote his name and title in the proper place on the seating diagram. “This should make you the hostess of the year,” she announced proudly, handing the diagram to Emily. “And it will also make your mother-in-law positively envious!”
“The Duke of Claymore,” Emily gasped. “But he’d think me the most presumptuous person in the world. Besides, he’d not come—none of our guests is his social equal, despite their titles.”
“He’ll come,” Whitney assured her. “Give me a spare invitation and a sheet of paper.” After a moment’s thought, Whitney wrote to Clayton and explained that she had come to London to visit Emily, and that she hoped very much that he would join her at the party. She enclosed the invitation card and gave it to one of the Archibalds’ footmen with instructions to take it to his grace’s secretary, Mr. Hudgins, in Upper Brook Street and to tell Mr. Hudgins that the note was from Miss Stone—which was how Clayton had told her to reach him if she wanted him to come back early.
The footman returned a short time later with the information that the duke had gone to his brother’s country home, and would be back in London early the next day—Saturday.
Emily looked simultaneously relieved and crestfallen. “He’ll be too weary to come to the party tomorrow night,” she sighed.
>
“He’ll be here,” Whitney said with smiling certainty.
After dinner, Emily tried to open the subject of Paul, and then the Duke of Claymore, but Whitney said very gently, and very firmly, that she didn’t want to discuss either of them just yet. To take the sting out of her refusal to confide in her best friend, Whitney then regaled her with an hilarious account of how she’d coerced poor Peter into offering for Elizabeth. “Elizabeth and Peter, along with their parents, and Margaret and Mrs. Merryton, all left the village this morning when I did,” she finished gaily. “They have come here to shop for Elizabeth’s trousseau.”
“If anyone had told me a few years ago that you would someday be Elizabeth’s bridesmaid, I’d have accused them of being deranged!” Emily said with a laugh.
“I think Elizabeth means to ask you to be her matron of honor,” Whitney said. “The wedding is going to take place here in London, since most of Elizabeth and Peter’s relatives live here.”
* * *
Not until Saturday afternoon did Whitney allow herself to dwell on her forthcoming confrontation with Clayton tonight. She and Clarissa spent the morning doing errands for Emily, and on the way back, Whitney asked the Archibalds’ driver to turn into the park and stop. She left Clarissa in the open carriage and wandered along the path between the neatly tended beds of chrysanthemums.
She had told Aunt Anne that Clayton didn’t care for her, but she knew that wasn’t entirely true. He had said he “wanted” her, which must mean he desired her. Whitney sat down on the park bench, a faint blush staining her cheeks as she thought of his lips moving warmly on hers and his hands caressing her body, molding her to his masculine frame.
She thought about the times they had been together, beginning with the first time she’d seen him in England. He’d been standing beside the stream with his shoulders propped against the sycamore, watching her sunning her bare legs. He had already been betrothed to her that day, and she had virtually ordered him off her property. She felt a surge of righteous indignation when she recalled the way he had nearly used the crop on her backside, but it dwindled away when she thought about what she’d done to deserve it. A smile touched her lips as she recalled the night they had played chess at his house, and her flush deepened as she remembered the stormy passion of his kisses before he took her home.