At Last Comes Love (13 page)

Your chosen bride and her family will believe that you have jilted me too.”

“Perhaps.” He would not glare. It would suggest that she was getting under his skin. He fixed her with a stare that many people found intimidating.

When trying to recall her face earlier, he had assumed that with her dark hair she must have brown eyes. They were actually a startling blue—and they did not waver from his.

“Why should I marry you?” she asked him. “Give me reasons, Lord Sheringford. Not the financial details. I knew of those even before stepping in here. I am not swayed by such considerations. I no longer have to fear poverty even if I never marry and live to be a hundred.

Why should I marry you? With what persuasions did you arm yourself before you came here?”

If he had arrived in that ballroom two minutes before or after he actually had, he thought, there would have been no collision and no dance and no conversation in an alcove. He would have picked out some pathetic-looking girl who would have been only too delighted to marry him. Indeed, he had already picked out such a girl a moment before the collision, had he not? He would not be sitting here now being interrogated by a woman he suspected he might easily come to dislike quite intensely.

He stopped himself from drumming his fingertips on the arm of his chair.

“You are not a young woman,” he said. “How old
are
you?”

“Thirty,” she said. “You think I am desperate for a husband, then?

You did not expect that any great persuasion would be necessary?”

He stared at her for a few moments.

“You would have to be blind to be desperate,” he said. “Since you are not, you must know how beautiful you are. You must also realize how sexually appealing you are, though I do not suppose you use just those words in your genteel mind. We both know that I do not represent your last chance, Miss Huxtable. But you have been shaken during the past few days by the reappearance of a former lover.
Was
he a lover, by the way? Or was he merely a man you loved?”

For the first time she flushed. She did not look away from him, though.

“He was—” she said before stopping abruptly. “You are impertinent.”

Ah—interesting!

“You went to last evening's ball,” he said, “expecting that Allingham would offer you marriage. You were ready to accept him even though you do not love him.”

“How do you know I do not?” she asked him.

“You were not distraught,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows.

“I was not? Yet I collided with you when attempting to dash from the ballroom in ungainly haste,” she reminded him.

“Because you were chagrined, even humiliated,” he said, “and because you had spotted your faithless lover and remembered that you would not after all have a fiancé to dangle before him. When Allingham came to claim his dance with you, you showed no symptoms of a woman whose heart he had just shattered.”

“I am relieved to hear that,” she said. “Major Dew came here this morning to beg me not to marry you. He offered to marry me instead.”

“And?” He raised his eyebrows.

“And I said no,” she told him.

“And yet,” he said, “you still love him.”

She looked consideringly at him.

“Do I?” she said. “You seem to know me better than I know myself, Lord Sheringford. But you would marry a woman you believe to be in love with someone else?”

“You would not be happy with him,” he said.

“Because he has a weak chin?” She raised her eyebrows again.

“Because he loves
himself
more than he loves anyone else,” he said.

“Such men do not make good husbands.”

“But you would?” she asked him.

“I am not in love with myself,” he said. “Or with you.”

The corners of her mouth lifted in a slight smile.

“Are you always so honest?” she asked him.

“We lie,” he told her, “in order to persuade the world and ourselves that we are something we are not—usually something far better and more flattering than what we really are. I have no wish to deceive myself, and others already believe they know me very well indeed.”

“And
do
they?” she asked him. “Are you defined by what you did five years ago?”

“You must confess,” he said, “that there is nothing much worse a man can do than abandon his bride on her wedding day—except perhaps to run off with her married sister-in-law instead.”

“Why did you do it?” she asked him.

“I suppose,” he said, “because I liked the one woman better than the other and was willing to take what I wanted and be damned to the consequences.”

“And yet,” she said, “you told me last evening that you were head over ears in love with your bride. Are your feelings so fickle? And do you always take what you want?”

He ignored the first question and thought about his answer to the second.

“What I want is not always available for the taking,” he said.

“Do you want
me
?” she asked.

But she held up a hand again before he could answer.

“You claim always to tell the truth,” she said. “Tell it now, Lord Sheringford. As you said a short while ago, there is still time for you to find a different bride. Despite everything, there is bound to be someone out there who will be only too happy to marry an earl and future marquess. Do you want
me
?”

He scorned to look away from her, and she would not look away from him, it seemed.

Would he prefer someone younger, someone quietly biddable, someone who would be pathetically grateful to him for marrying her, someone who would be content to be bedded and impregnated and otherwise ignored? Someone too timid to protest the presence of an illegitimate child in her home—and one her husband doted upon?

With such a woman he could be almost free.

Except that he would always suspect that he had broken her spirit—about the worst thing any man could do to any woman.

Margaret Huxtable, he suspected, would be a constant challenge. A woman of unquenchable spirit. A constant thorn in the flesh. A constant …

“Yes,” he said abruptly, “I do.”

“I am going to ask a difficult thing of you, then,” she said. “You must feel free to refuse my request. You owe me nothing, you see, since what happened last evening was entirely my fault. I cannot marry a stranger. I know that we must marry—if we
do
marry—within the next thirteen days. However, a marriage by special license can be performed at a moment's notice, can it not? It does not call for a great deal of planning. I will marry you on the last possible day, Lord Sheringford, provided we both wish to marry when the time comes. The difficult thing for you, of course, is that if you agree with this demand, you will be wagering everything upon my ultimately saying yes. And I may well not do so. I certainly will not marry you only to rescue you from having to earn your own living until your grandfather passes away.”

“And in the meantime?” he said. “In the next twelve days?”

“Privately, we will get to know each other,” she said, “as well as any two people
can
become acquainted in such a short time. And publicly you will court me. If you walk away today after refusing to agree to this condition, I shall not feel a moment's embarrassment. I shall live down the gossip with the greatest ease. But if I were to rush into a marriage with you during the next day or two, then I would be more than embarrassed. I would be humiliated. The
ton
would dream up a dozen reasons for my ungainly haste, none of them flattering. If you wish to marry me, Lord Sheringford, then you will pay determined, even ardent, court to me, and you will risk everything for me—including your beloved home and income.”

He pursed his lips. He might very well grow to dislike this woman, he thought again—indeed, he was almost sure he already did—but he could not stop himself from respecting her.

She was a power to be reckoned with.

It was indeed a great risk—far more than she realized. She might reject him at the last moment. It was even possible that she was deliberately leading him into a trap on behalf of all abandoned women. She looked as if she might well be the crusading sort.

“I must warn you,” she said, “that everyone who knows me—and even someone who does not—is horrified to find that I would even
consider
marrying you. They will keep on trying to persuade me against you—and they will be barely civil to you.”

“Who is the someone who does not know you?” he asked.

“Mrs. Pennethorne,” she said. “The lady you abandoned.”

Ah.

“She came here this morning,” she said, “and begged me not to court misery by marrying you. She is very lovely. I am not surprised that you once loved her—though not more than her brother's wife as it turned out. You
are
fickle.”

“So it would seem,” he said. “Do you still wish me to court you now that I have admitted that damning fact?”

“Yes,” she said, “since you have not made the mistake of pretending to have fallen in love with
me
. I believe it would be an interesting experience to be wooed byLondon 's most notorious villain. And I have little to lose. If I decide at the end of it all that I cannot marry you, I will be hailed as something of a heroine.”

Her lips curved slightly at the corners again, and he could not decide if she was a woman with a sense of humor or a woman whose heart was as cold as steel. He rather suspected the latter.

“I shall woo you, then, with persistence and ardor,” he said, “on the assumption that you are giving serious consideration to marrying me in thirteen days’ time.”

“I will be attending the theater this evening,” she said. “I will be sitting in the Duke of Moreland's box with the members of my family. Shall I inform them that you will be joining us there, my lord?”

Daniel into the lions’ den. Or into the fiery furnace.

She stood, and he got to his feet too. Presumably he was dismissed.

He bowed to her.

“I shall see you this evening, then,” he said. “It is a pleasure to which I shall look forward with some eagerness … Maggie.”

This time that suggestion of a smile lurked in her eyes as well as at the corners of her mouth.

Perhaps she
did
have a sense of humor.

8

MARGARET did not invite the Earl of Sheringford to stay for tea even though all her family was assembled in the drawing room above, anxiously awaiting the outcome of her meeting with him.

She was far more breathless than she ought to have been by the time she had climbed the stairs. Even so, she would gladly have climbed another flight to take refuge in her room. It could not be done, however. She squared her shoulders and opened the door.

Stephen was standing at the window, facing into the room, his hands clasped behind his back, his booted feet slightly apart, an unusually grim expression on his face.

Elliott was standing behind Vanessa's chair beside the fireplace, one hand on her shoulder. She was looking agitated; he was looking like a dark, brooding Greek god. Jasper was sitting on a love seat beside Katherine, Baby Hal asleep in the crook of his arm. Katherine was perched on the edge of her seat, her hands clasped so tightly in her lap that her knuckles showed white.

All of them, with the exception of Hal, turned toward the door, glanced beyond Margaret's shoulder, and almost visibly relaxed when they saw that Lord Sheringford was not with her.

“Well, Meg?” Stephen asked tensely, and it occurred to her that at some time during the past couple of years, when she had not been paying particular attention, he had grown fully and admirably into his role as head of the family. He was no longer simply the carefree, sometimes careless, always charming youth she remembered.

“Well,” she said cheerfully, “here I am, and I have given directions for the tea tray to be brought up without further delay. You must all be as parched as I am. There will be an additional guest in your box at the theater this evening, Elliott. I hope you do not mind. I have invited the Earl of Sheringford to join us there.”

Of coursehe minded. It showed in the further darkening of his expression.

They
all
minded.

Shewould have minded, very much indeed, if she had been sitting there and one of her sisters had been standing here. She would have wondered if the sister concerned had windmills in her head instead of a functioning brain.

“Oh, Meg,” Kate said, “you have accepted him.”

“I am
not
betrothed to the earl,” Margaret said. “If I had been, I would have brought him up here with me to present to you all.”

Stephen's shoulders sagged with relief.

“I
knew
you would not accept him in a million years, Meg,” Vanessa said, smiling warmly at her. “You have always been by far the most sensible of us all, and it would be decidedly
un
-sensible to marry a man like the Earl of Sheringford merely because of a little silly gossip.”

Vanessa was right, Margaret thought. She
was
sensible. She was all sorts of very proper, very reasonable, very
dull
things. But since last evening, and more especially since this morning, she had conceived the startlingly irrational urge to do something that was not sensible at all. She wanted to… Well, she wanted to
live
.

“But you have nonetheless invited Sherry to join you at the theater this evening, Meg?” Jasper said. “A consolation prize for the poor man, perhaps?”

The tea tray must have been all ready to bring when she had given the word. It was carried into the room almost on Margaret's heels, and they all fell silent while it was set on a low table that had been placed before her usual chair, which everyone had left empty.

It was a chair that would probably be left empty for her use all her life if she did not marry, Margaret thought. No one must sit in it because it was Aunt Margaret's chair—or
Great
-Aunt Margaret's—and she needed to be close to the fire to keep the chill out of her aged bones and close enough to the mantel to prop her cane against it.

It was a horrifying glimpse into the future.

She seated herself and picked up the teapot.