Betina Krahn (30 page)

A storm of conflict rose in her as she stood looking at the empty doorway, then wobbled to her dressing-table bench on weakened legs. Several minutes passed before she looked up into her mirror and was jolted by what she saw. In the glass, staring back at her, was a woman with mussed
hair, kiss-swollen lips, and a dark, sensual luminosity to her eyes. Who was this brazen creature, this woman with desire simmering in every inch of her body? Was this how Remington saw her? Was this what his loving made her into?

Her hands flew to the half-finished buttons of her bodice and frantically began to undo them. A moment later she pulled her bodice apart, staring at her half-bared breasts. Her gaze fastened on one rosy crescent peering over the top of her corset and she again felt the wet heat of his mouth on her there. Desire hit her with gale force and she swayed on the bench.

What was she going to do?

Remington held turmoil at bay long enough to exit her room, retrieve his vest and coat, and leave the house. But as soon as he reached the street, it descended with a vengeance, causing his heart to pound, his chest to heave, and the muscles in his gut to contract into a rock-hard knot. It felt as if he’d burst if he didn’t move, so he began to walk the streets, arguing with himself and battling both his best and his worst impulses. Up the Piccadilly, through Mayfair and on to Hyde Park he went, with his hands shoved into his coat pockets and his gaze all but melting holes in the paving bricks. More than once he jostled a fellow pedestrian and tipped his hat in irritable apology. He was nearly run down by a high-wheeled phaeton in the hands of a reckless young whelp. But the prospect of being flattened by a team of runaway horses wasn’t half so daunting as the quandary he now found himself in.

His agreement with Woolworth and the rest of Antonia’s Whites’ Club victims was that he would lure Antonia to his bed and let them catch her there, just as she had once caught them. But after all that had passed between
him and Antonia, he could never carry through that degrading scheme.

He had told Antonia the stark, undeniable truth of the matter: he was crazy about her. Twelve irresistible old coquettes had blown a hole in his heart the size of Nelson’s flagship, and Antonia, with her cool beauty and fiery passions, had sailed right in through it. She had roused and toyed with his affections, and despite all the preparation and determination in the world, despite being “forewarned” and even “forearmed,” she had still gotten to him.

She was no longer the cold, calculating arbiter of morality who trapped indiscreet bachelors into marriage. She was a woman, with pride and vulnerability and irresistible passion. Today she had almost become his lover, and with any luck, that “almost” would be revised to “certainly” tonight.

He had come to Paxton House with bitterness in his heart, intending to match and best her, to seduce and subject her to the same humiliation she had inflicted on his fellow bachelors. Now every sinew, every thought, every impulse of his being rebelled at the thought of causing her pain. God, he groaned, what was he going to do?

The faces of his coconspirators appeared in his mind’s eye. Angry, resentful, and bemoaning their common matrimonial demise, they had enlisted him to work out their revenge. If he backed out now, after so much publicity and expectation, they would be irate, furious, implacable. His personal standing, never sterling in polite society, would be ruined in the last place where it had any meaning: the exclusive and honor-bound world of a gentleman among gentlemen.

But then, as a gentleman of honor, how could he live with himself if he sacrificed Antonia’s honor in the service of his own? More important, as a man of flesh and blood, how could he forfeit his desire for Antonia, and hers for
him, to appease the vengeful urges of a few old schoolmates?

Somewhere between Grovenor Square and his Hyde Park mansion his decision was made. When he stepped through the front doors of his house and handed his hat, walking stick, and gloves to Phipps, he ordered the butler to send for two messengers.

“Two, sir?” Phipps said, raising an eyebrow.

“I have several messages to send,” he declared, heading for his study. “And I want them to arrive in plenty of time.”

The bar of White’s was busy that evening; there was scarcely a place to sit or stand. Remington managed to secure the table in the corner, where the noise was not so loud and where there wasn’t room enough for anyone to take a swing at him, should it come to that.

Remington’s fellow conspirators arrived in pairs, well before the appointed hour. Their faces were flushed and they were in jocular spirits as they hurriedly pulled chairs from nearby and seated themselves around the table.

“We’ve followed you in the papers, Landon,” Searle declared, perching on the edge of his seat. “God—corsets and scrubbing floors and scullery work—”

“Read every word. Especially the articles from that Fitch bloke, in
Gaflinger’s.
Great stuff!” Sir Albert Everstone added gleefully.

“Made you sound like a godless heathen, though,” Peckenpaugh said, outraged.

The knot in Remington’s stomach wrenched tighter as he looked around the circle. Their eyes were glowing, their bodies were taut with tension and excitement. They were all but salivating at the prospect of a taste of long-awaited revenge.

“Well, don’t keep us in suspense, Landon,” Woolworth declared nervously, jerking the tray out of the waiter’s
hands, waving him off, and serving the drinks himself. “You’ve got news, obviously.”

“Come on, man, tell us!” Bertrand Howard demanded. “Is it tonight?”

“No,” Remington said, steeling himself.

“Well, then … when?” Basil Trueblood demanded breathlessly. “Tomorrow? Saturday?”

The clock over the bar seemed to labor over every second as Remington searched their faces. Tension condensed on his skin, making it feel moist and prickly.

“I’m afraid the answer is never. The plan, gentlemen, is
off.
”

Despite the noise all around them, it seemed as if the room went pin-drop quiet. As the sense of it sank in, their eyes widened and their jaws loosened. Woolworth glanced at Searle, Searle looked to Trueblood, and Trueblood turned to Sir Albert, who sputtered to life.

“Off?” he echoed. “You’re joking. And a damn poor jest it is, Landon.”

“I assure you, Everstone, I am completely serious.” He lifted his head and narrowed his eyes with the same patrician disdain that had served him well with greengrocers. “The plan is off. It was a cockeyed scheme at best, doomed to failure. Quite frankly, I am fed up with washing, scrubbing, and mending … sick to death of being held a hostage of my own poor judgment in a house filled with crusty old women who watch my every move. It’s off, and that’s all there is to it.”

Shock quickly melted into distress as the six stared at him, unable to believe their ears. Something had gone terribly wrong. Their stares of horror turned slowly to fierce scrutiny. They detected a new bit of tension and a reserve that spoke of a great deal left unsaid. It didn’t take them long to put one and one together and to come up with …

“It’s
her
!” Trueblood declared in a choked voice.

The others snapped to attention, staring at Remington, expecting a hot denial. All they got was a telling bit of red creeping up his neck, above his collar.

He knew they could read in his embarrassment a capitulation to their declared enemy, and it took every bit of his manly self-control to sit there and endure the horror and disillusionment dawning in their faces.

“Good God—look at him. It’s true!” Everstone croaked, groping the table for his glass of Scotch.

“But it can’t be true,” Woolworth declared, looking as if he’d been gut-punched.

“Not you—not our Last Bachelor—not the Bastion of Bachelorhood!” Peckenpaugh insisted in a rising whine.

Remington lifted his chin, resurrecting his most imperious manner. “I have stated my reasons. I will say only that the situation was far more
complicated
than I was led to believe.” He scowled accusingly, in an attempt to turn their disapproval back upon themselves. It failed.

“She learned why he accepted the wager and booted him out!” Searle proposed.

“Or caught him in one of her nooses—set him up with one of her widows and compromised him,” Peckenpaugh declared. “It’s blackmail, most likely—”

“Ye gods—she’s shackled him to one of her crepe-hangers!” Everstone gasped.

Remington listened to their wild suppositions in shock. All evening he had prepared himself to withstand the fury of their disappointment in him, only to have them cast the entire blame for the failure on Antonia. They honestly believed she had plotted and schemed to marry him off!

He was appalled by their bias and ignorance, until he suddenly recalled that he had expected the very same of her. He, too, had fully expected her to cast some needy female into his arms and then demand that he do the right
thing by her. But she hadn’t done it, or anything else they were charging her with. Her only plots had been against his opinions and affections, and the only woman she had caught in his arms was old enough to be his grandmother.

Through the thick, smoke-laden air he regarded his fellow conspirators with new eyes. They looked like petulant schoolboys whose sporting privileges had been taken away, or whining adolescents caught smoking and forced to finish a stolen cigar.

In the back of his mind the image of Antonia appeared as she had been that afternoon: her blue eyes filled with passion and uncertainty, her body trembling, vulnerable. She wasn’t what they had made her out to be, and if not, then perhaps neither were their forced marriages nor the circumstances under which they were arranged. Suddenly he knew his decision was the right one.

“That is all I have to say, gentlemen. The plan is over and done. I’d advise you to go home and take a good long look at your wives and your lives. Someday, with a bit of luck, you’ll understand that what I am doing is the right thing.” He tossed back his drink and with a grave nod headed for the door.

They stared after him in disbelief, then turned to one another.

“I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t heard it with my own ears,” Trueblood said, ashen and gripping his glass with a trembling hand.

“Beet-faced, he was. And wouldn’t hardly look at us,” Searle added.

“He avoided our eyes the way a man does when he meets the husband of a woman he’s just bedded,” Wool-worth said, scowling toward the door. The others halted, middrink, glanced at one another, then looked at him in dawning horror.

“Good God,” Everstone choked out. “He hasn’t fallen into her trap … he’s fallen under her spell!”

A moment later he turned from his stunned, slack-jawed companions and motioned frantically to the barman. “Scotch, man—bottles! And be quick about it!”

The cab sped through the darkened streets, wheels clattering over bricks and cobblestones. Antonia had told the driver to hurry, fearing that in the darkness and quiet of the ride she would lose her nerve and turn around before she reached Remington’s Hyde Park address. But the ride was mercifully short, through the mostly deserted streets, and soon she was being handed down onto the sweeping front steps of Remington’s house.

Drawing her cloak tighter and her hood lower, she mounted the steps and stood before the massive front door with her hand poised at the knocker. This was her last chance to turn back from this mad, impulsive course. But, she chided herself, it could scarcely be called impulsive if she had spent several hours weighing, deciding, planning, and anticipating it. And she had.

Every argument and line of reason she had pursued, throughout that endless evening, had ended in the same confusing tangle of fear and longing. In all her life she had never encountered a man like Remington Carr, never experienced feelings like the ones he produced in her … never expected to fulfill the romantic dreams of her girlhood. All the sober and logical arguments in the world couldn’t outweigh the combination of Remington’s desire for her and the unexpected seduction of her own girlish hopes, resurrected.