Betina Krahn (26 page)

“You don’t believe me.” He searched her pained and angry gaze, and pulled her closer. “She is
not
my mistress. And she never has been.”

“And I suppose you provide her an income out of the goodness of your heart,” she countered furiously.

“No, I do it because I cannot avoid it—I am bound to it as a part of my father’s will. She was
his
mistress, and he saddled me with an entailment that requires me to provide for and take care of her for the rest of her appallingly hedonistic life.” The heat and righteous anger of his declaration drove the words past her scalded pride and into the very core of her reason. He was deadly serious.

“She is not your mistress?” Her resistance died as she struggled to take it in. He released her and withdrew, giving her a heated, distancing look.

“Knowing my attitude on the support and maintenance of women, can you honestly believe I would voluntarily support a woman, even for the most immoral of purposes?” His laugh had a bitter edge. “I would not keep a mistress, Antonia Paxton, any more than I would keep a wife.”

She lowered her eyes, caught between relief and distress by the surety in his logic. She had known from the start that he disliked women. But it still somehow shocked her that he detested and distrusted her sex so much that he would not even ally himself with a woman in pleasure.

In a bizarre and sudden reversal of feeling, she began to regret that the much-handled Carlotta was nothing more to him than an irksome financial drain. Perhaps if he had wanted a woman in that way, if he had been deeply and passionately involved with a woman, he wouldn’t hold her entire sex in such contempt.

“And if you are wondering about my other visitor,” he said, his face now hard and polished with male indignation, “I can assure you that the story is the same. My father, it seems, had a broad taste in feminine companionship and a lamentable streak of both male protectivism and noblesse oblige. He didn’t abandon his old mistresses; he kept them in the style to which he had accustomed them—and gallantly wrote them into his will. In the end he saddled me with them. Hillary and Carlotta are a part of my legacy: I inherited them along with my title. And they never let me forget it for a moment.”

Antonia was speechless. His bitterness, his antipathy for women, his adamant stand against marriage—had they been spawned by his father’s peculiar generosity toward women who were unworthy of the care and protection he had lavished on them?

“They run up accounts all over town,” he declared, pacing away. “They hound my solicitors and haunt my business offices. They cannot deal reasonably with tradesmen
or physicians or even their own household staffs. They lurch from one catastrophe to another, hysterical one minute, scheming the next. And when they’ve bollixed things up royally, they simper and whine and drop it all in
my
lap.” He halted and glared indignantly at her. ‘Remington will handle it,’ they say.”

Against her better sense her gaze migrated to his. In its depths there was a flintiness she hadn’t seen before. Even when he had spouted his absurd ideology of equality, there had always been a roguish gleam in his eyes. And of late she had seen his gaze warming and softening as it rested on her ladies and, she fancied, on herself. The sudden loss of that warmth and its accompanying possibilities now made her feel strangely desolate.

“And so you tar all women with the brush they have handed you,” she said in a voice compressed by hard emotions. “Because of those two, all women are weak, dependent, contriving, and greedy.”

He turned away, visibly angered by her accusation of unfairness. “Oh, if it were only
two
,” he said caustically. “Pray give me
some
credit, Antonia. My experience with scheming, dependent females is broader than that. Paired with my father’s clinging paramours are my own longstanding observations of women, both wedded and not. Together they have soundly ratified my conclusions.”

“So we women are clinging, demanding creatures with no integrity, no character, no decency, and no initiative of our own,” she said, fighting the hurt in her voice as she felt at last the full impact of his disdain for women. “We exist solely to satisfy our own acquisitive urges and make men’s lives barren and miserable.”

She took a step closer, her eyes darkening.

“Have you ever thought that perhaps the fault might not lie with women at all, your lordship? Have you never once met a thinking, competent, capable woman who had
ideas, convictions, and interests outside her own comfort? Would you even recognize one if you did?”

The choked intensity of her voice penetrated his self-absorbed haze, and he turned to her with a scowl. Moisture sprang to her eyes.

“What have you been doing here at Paxton House, your lordship? Have you seen nothing? Heard nothing? Learned nothing?”

She searched him for a moment as her questions faded into his silence; then she headed for the door. Pausing with her hand on the handle, she looked back with a controlled expression that only emphasized the distress visible in her eyes.

The sight of her face as she turned away lingered in his vision well after she was gone. It was not anger, not righteous indignation on behalf of her sex, nor even disgust that haunted him, though he had seen all that and more in her expression in those last moments. No, it was something else. It was the personal hurt he glimpsed in her face that had taken hold of his feelings and wouldn’t let go.

His discomfort grew, intensifying so that he had to escape. He headed for the front doors and quickly found himself standing in the sun-drenched street, hatless, gloveless, and directionless. When he began to walk, his feet carried him across the carriage lane and through the gate of the huge iron fence that surrounded Green Park.

The greens and paths were busy with fashionable gentlemen and ladies strolling, nurses pushing prams, and well-dressed children rolling hoops and playing ring games while governesses gossiped nearby. The activity stayed on the periphery of his vision and his thoughts as he stalked along the cobbled walkways.

What had he been doing at Paxton House? she asked. What had he heard, seen, and learned? The questions echoed
louder with each step. Soon they were all he could hear.

“Lord Carr—”

Something loomed up before him and brought him jolting rudely back to the present. He narrowly stopped in time to keep himself from bowling over someone in his path. Instinctively reaching out to steady his victim, he found himself holding Eleanor Booth by the shoulders.

“I beg your pardon, Eleanor,” he said, releasing her when he determined he had done no damage.

“Where were ye going in such a frightful hurry, yer lor’ship?” Molly McFadden’s voice brought his head up.

There were Aunt Hermione, Maude, Molly, Pollyanna, Prudence, Victoria, and Eleanor, sitting on benches, standing, and strolling nearby. What a sight they made … some in sunbonnets, some carrying parasols, and some simply past the restrictions of vanity and letting the sun shine on their bare faces. They were like delicate old roses in glorious late-summer bloom. And they were looking at him with what could only be called affectionate concern.

“I … um …” He had to clear the odd catch in his throat before going on. “I decided to take a bit of air and sunshine.”

“Ahhh.” Hermione nodded, smiling. “Excellent weather, indeed. Will you join us, your lordship? We were just having a good gossip about some of the styles we see parading up and down the promenade.” The others chuckled and she lowered her voice to a loud whisper. “I think I can promise you a juicy scandal or two.”

She looked like a worldly cherub: cheeks pink, eyes twinkling. Remington stood for a moment staring at her, unable to speak. Then he looked around at the others and found them smiling at him, too. He shook his head with what he hoped passed for an apologetic smile.

“Another time perhaps. I feel the need of a walk just now.”

He reeled off down the path, and with each step he felt his long-cherished prejudices colliding head-on with his feelings about the ladies of Paxton House.

Heaven help him, he liked them. Liked them? Hell—he was crazy about them. They had worked and winked and nodded and cosseted their way right into his impervious male heart. How could he have allowed such a thing to happen?

More to the point, how could he have kept it from happening? He groaned. Nothing in his experience with women had prepared him to deal with a houseful of beguiling old ladies with irresistible smiles, endless patience, and absolutely nothing to gain by being nice to him. They were nothing at all like the wide-eyed debs, grasping mamas, haughty doyens, and clinging courtesans that he had become inured to over the years. He had no defenses against women with white hair and cheery dispositions and forgetful spells that reminded him uncannily of his Uncle Paddington.

Intentionally or not, Antonia couldn’t have found more perfect agents to undermine his cynical beliefs about women.

He thought of Eleanor … bright, curious, practical yet visionary, an inventor in skirts. Then there was Gertrude … homey, sage, hardworking, and fiercely independent. Scrappy and resourceful Molly met the less-than-perfect-world on its terms, staring it in the eye until it blinked. Aunt Hermione managed and persuaded and compromised to see that everyone got what they needed and wanted. Florence and Victoria plied their needles with equal enthusiasm for a butcher’s wife or a duke’s granddaughter. And Cleo, wizened and wise, blunt and garish,
even long past feminine, she somehow still seemed the very soul of womanliness.

The world they had introduced him to was vastly more textured and complex than he could ever have imagined. Their society was full and productive and pleasurable. And their work was far more demanding and multifaceted than he had guessed; it required the patience of a saint, the timing of a circus juggler, and the strategic skill of a field marshal mounting an offensive.

With Antonia’s help these women had made a place for themselves, a life independent of men, doing their own work, thinking their own thoughts, sharing their own concerns. Yet each had once been intimately linked to a man, shared her bed and her days and the vicissitudes of life with him. And when they spoke of their husbands, it was with respect and affection, and not a little longing. They seemed genuinely to like men. They seemed genuinely to like him. And in spite of his prejudices and suspicions, he had come to know and understand and respect them.

That was what he had learned at Paxton House: that he could
like
a woman.

Striding along with his thumbs shoved into his vest pockets and his eyes trained unseeingly on the ground, he hadn’t paid much attention to where he was going. But his own contrary instincts had led him back to the very place he started.

When he looked up, he was standing in front of Paxton House. Gazing raptly at its elegant winglike shutters and well-tended geraniums, the insight struck him with such force that he almost staggered.

Antonia Paxton had just won their wager.

The house seemed to purr in the late-afternoon sun, the result of the fact that every available sunbeam streaming
through every available window had a cat at the bottom of it making contented noise. Remington strolled through the downstairs on his way back to the kitchens, looking for Antonia and trying to think of what he would say when he found her.

As he passed the study, he paused. Antonia wasn’t there, but he was drawn inside for a moment. In the stillness he stared at Cleo’s visible memories, thinking about the stories she told and the life she had lived. He couldn’t help wondering what memories he would have when he was her age. Stories of grand passion and life fully lived, like hers, or a single story of missed opportunity and regret, like his Uncle Paddington’s?

“You look just like Pinkie when you frown like that!”

Cleo’s loud voice startled him, and he turned to find her tottering into the study with her feather duster. He took a steadying breath and dragged a chair from the figurine-laden table for her.

“Pinkie Landon?” He recalled she had mentioned that name before.

“I called him that because he had a fondness for pink. I was wearing pink the night we met.” She scowled at him, trying to remember. “Young fella … some years younger than me. He was an earl, too, like you.”

Remington stopped in the middle of reaching for her arm. “An earl? You mean Landon as in the
Earl of Landon?
” It couldn’t have been. “What was his given name?” he asked anyway, trying once again to steer her toward the chair.

“Rupert … Reginald … Rutabaga …” She scratched her head. “Maybe Rutland? Rutland sounds about right. He’s here somewhere.” She weaved back and forth among the tables and shelves, searching for a certain figurine.

Remington stood watching her numbly. Rutland Carr,
eighth earl of Landon, was his father. Had he also been “Pinkie” Landon? His father had an infamous yen for actresses. Had old Cleo been among them?

“There it is.” She pulled out a figurine made like an ornate birdcage. Cobwebs trailed along with it; she obviously hadn’t dusted off that memory in quite some time. As she stared at it, her frown turned into a rueful smile. “I remember now. He was in Paris on his grand tour … takin’ in the high sights and the low life. Loved me madly. Wanted me to quit the stage and go back to London with him. Wanted to set me up in a fancy house. Even talked of marriage.” Her gaze drifted far away. “But I couldn’t.”

Remington managed two words. “Why not?”

“That’s why not,” Cleo said, thrusting the figurine into his hands. He looked down at the birdcage and saw inside a bird with plumage a faded shade of pink. “He would have locked me up. I couldn’t live like that. Soon after, I met Fox Royal.” Her gnomelike grin softened into a heartbreaking smile of longing.

“My Fox gave me a nest, not a cage. And when I wanted to fly, he flew with me.”

She patted his arm and rambled off among her other memories, leaving him to stare at that dusty bit of porcelain in turmoil. He thought of his father’s penchant for choosing disastrous women and wondered what would have happened if old Cleo had said yes to Rutland’s first proposal and he had made her another, more permanent one. Rutland wouldn’t have been the first young nobleman to embarrass his family by bringing home an actress-bride. If it had been so, then perhaps Cleo would have been his mother. And his life, as well as his father’s, would have been vastly different.