It Happened One Autumn (27 page)

“You must be eager to return to the amusements of town life,” Lillian remarked. “For a rake, your behavior has been surprisingly tame.”

“Even we dissipated rakes need an occasional holiday. A constant diet of depravity would become boring.”

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Lillian smiled. “Rake or no, I have enjoyed your friendship these past days, my lord.” As the words left her lips, she was surprised to realize that they were true.

“Then you think of me as a friend,” he said softly. “That’s good.”

“Why?”

“Because I would like to continue seeing you.”

Her heart quickened its pace. Although the remark was not unexpected, she was caught off-guard nonetheless. “In London?” she asked inanely.

“Wherever you happen to be. Is that agreeable to you?”

“Well, of course, it …I… yes.”

As he stared at her with those fallen-angel eyes and smiled, Lillian was forced to agree with Daisy’s assessment of St. Vincent’s animal magnetism. He looked like a man who was born to sin…a man who could make sinning so enjoyable that one hardly minded paying the price afterward.

St. Vincent reached for her slowly, his fingers sliding from her shoulders to the sides of her throat.

“Lillian, my love. I’m going to ask your father for permission to court you.”

She breathed unsteadily against the caressing framework of his hands. “I am not the only available heiress you could pursue.”

His thumbs smoothed the gentle hollows of her cheeks, and his dark brown lashes half lowered. “No,”

he answered frankly. “But you’re by far the most interesting. Most women aren’t, you know. At least not out of bed.” He leaned closer, until the heated touch of his whisper warmed her lips. “I daresay you’ll be interestingin bed as well.”

Well, here it was, Lillian thought dazedly—the long-awaited advance—and then her thoughts were muddled as his mouth moved over hers in a light caress. He kissed as if he were the first man who had ever discovered it, with a lazy expertise that seduced her by slow degrees. Even with her limited experience, she perceived that the kiss was wrought more of technique than emotion, but her stunned senses didn’t seem to care as he drew a helpless response from her with every tender shift of his mouth.

He built her pleasure at an unhurried pace, until she gasped against his lips and turned her head weakly away.

His fingers slid over the hot surface of her cheek, and he gently pressed her head to his shoulder. “I’ve never courted anyone before,” he murmured, his lips playing near her ear. “Not for honorable purposes, at any rate.”

“You’re doing quite well for a beginner,” she said against his coat.

Laughing, he eased away from her, and his warm gaze coasted over her flushed face. “You’re lovely,”

he said softly. “And fascinating.”

And wealthy,she added silently. But he was doing a very good job of convincing her that he desired her for more than financial reasons. She appreciated that. Forcing a smile to her lips, she stared at the
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enigmatic but charming man who might very well become her husband.Your Grace , she thought. That was what Westcliff would have to call her, once St. Vincent came into his title. First she would be Lady St. Vincent, and then the Duchess of Kingston. She would be above Westcliff socially, and she would never let him forget it.Your Grace, she repeated, comforting herself with the syllables.Your Grace…

After St. Vincent left her to go to the race meeting, Lillian wandered back to the manor. The fact that her future was finally taking shape should have relieved her, but instead she was filled with grim resolve. She entered the house, which was serene and silent. After the past weeks of seeing the place filled with people, it was strange to walk through the empty entrance hall. The hallways were quiet, with only the occasional passing of a lone servant to interrupt the stillness.

Pausing near the library, Lillian glanced into the large room. For once it was unoccupied. She stepped inside the inviting room, with its two-story ceiling and the shelves lined with more than ten thousand books. The air was filled with the pleasant scents of vellum, parchment, and leather. What little wall space wasn’t occupied with books had been crowded with framed maps and engravings. She decided to find a book for herself, a volume of light verse or some frivolous novel. However, with the acres of leather spines facing her, it was difficult to ascertain precisely where the novels were located.

As she passed before the shelves, Lillian discovered rows of history books, each of them sufficiently weighty to flatten an elephant. Atlases were next, and then a vast array of mathematical texts that would cure the most severe cases of insomnia. Near the end of one wall, a sideboard had been installed in a niche to fit flush with the bookshelves. A large engraved silver tray covered the top of the sideboard, bearing a collection of enticing bottles and decanters. The prettiest bottle, made of glass molded in a pattern of leaves, was half-filled with a colorless liquor. Her attention was caught by the sight of a pear inside the bottle.

Lifting the bottle, Lillian examined it closely and gently swirled the liquid until the pear lifted and turned with the motion. A perfectly preserved golden pear. This must be a variety of eau-de-vie, as the French called it… “water of life,” a colorless brandy distilled from grapes, plums, or elderberries. Pears as well, it seemed.

Lillian was tempted to sample the intriguing beverage, but ladies never drank strong spirits. Especially not alone in the library. If she were caught, it would look very bad indeed. On the other hand…all the gentlemen were at the race meeting, the ladies had gone to the village, and most of the servants had been given the day off.

She glanced at the empty doorway, and then at the tantalizing bottle. A mantel clock ticked urgently in the silence. Suddenly she heard Lord St. Vincent’s voice in her mind…I’m going to ask your father for permission to court you.

“Oh, hell,” she muttered, and bent to rummage through the lower cabinet of the sideboard for a glass.

“My lord.” At the sound of his butler’s voice, Marcus looked up from his desk with a slight frown. He had been working for the past two hours on the amendments to a list of recommendations that would be presented to Parliament later in the year by a committee that he had agreed to serve on. If the recommendations were accepted, it would result in a substantial improvement to the house, street, and land drainage in London and its surrounding districts.

“Yes, Salter,” he said brusquely, resenting the interruption. However, the old family butler knew better
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than to disturb him at his work unless something was significant enough to warrant it.

“There is a…a situation, my lord, that I felt certain you would wish to be informed of.”

“What kind of situation?”

“It involves one of the guests, my lord.”

“Well?” Marcus demanded, annoyed by the butler’s diffidence. “Who is it? And what is he doing?”

“I am afraid the person is a ‘she,’ my lord. One of the footmen has just informed me that he saw Miss Bowman in the library, and she is…not well.”

Marcus stood so suddenly that his chair nearly toppled over. “Which Miss Bowman?”

“I do not know, my lord.”

“What do you mean, ‘not well’? Is anyone with her?”

“I do not believe so, my lord.”

“Is she hurt? Is she ill?”

Salter gave him a mildly harried stare. “Neither, my lord. Merely …not well.”

Declining to waste time with further questions, Marcus left the room with a low curse, heading to the library with long strides that stopped just short of an outright run. What in God’s name could have happened to Lillian or her sister? He was instantly consumed with worry.

As he hurried through the hallways, a host of irrelevant thoughts flashed through his mind. How cavernous the house seemed when it was devoid of guests, with its miles of flooring and infinite clusters of rooms. A grand, ancient house with the impersonal ambiance of a hotel. A house like this needed the happy shouts of children echoing through the halls, and toys littering the parlor floor, and the squeaky sounds of violin lessons coming from the music room. Marks on the walls, and teatime with sticky jam tarts, and toy hoops being rolled across the back terrace.

Until now Marcus had never considered the idea of marriage as anything other than a necessary duty to continue the Marsden line. But it had occurred to him lately that his future could be very different from his past. It could be a new beginning—a chance to create the kind of family he had never dared to dream of before. It startled him to realize how much he wanted that—and not with just any woman. Not with any woman he had ever met or seen or heard of… except for the one who was the complete opposite of what he should want. He was beginning not to care about that.

His hands gripped into white-knuckled balls, and his pace quickened. It seemed to take forever to reach the library. By the time he crossed the threshold, his heart was driving in sharp blows inside his chest …a rhythm that owed nothing to exertion and everything to panic. What he saw caused him to stop short in the center of the large room.

Lillian stood before a row of books, with a pile of them surrounding her on the floor. She was pulling rare volumes from the shelves one by one, examining each with a puzzled frown and then tossing it heedlessly behind her. She seemed oddly languid, as if she were moving under water. And her hair was
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slipping from its pins. She didn’t look ill, precisely. In fact, she looked…

Becoming aware of his presence, Lillian glanced over her shoulder with a lopsided smile. “Oh. It’s you,”

she said, her voice slurred. Her attention wandered back to the shelves. “I can’t find anything. All these books are sodeadly dull…”

Frowning in concern, Marcus approached her while she continued to chatter and sort through the books. “Not this one…nor this one…oh no, no,no, this one’s not even in English…”

Marcus’s panic transformed rapidly into outrage, followed swiftly by amusement. Damnation. If he had required additional proof that Lillian Bowman was utterly wrong for him, this was it. The wife of a Marsden would never sneak into the library and drink until she was, as his mother would phrase it, “a trifle disguised.” Staring into her drowsy dark eyes and flushed face, Marcus amended the phrase. Lillian was not disguised. She was foxed, staggering, tap-hackled, top-heavy, shot-in-the-neck, staggering drunk.

More books sailed through the air, one of them narrowly missing his ear.

“Perhaps I could help,” Marcus suggested pleasantly, stopping beside her. “If you would tell me what you’re looking for.”

“Something romantic. Something with a happy ending. There should always be a happy ending, shouldn’

there?”

Marcus reached out to finger a trailing lock of her hair, his thumb sliding along the glowing satin filaments. He had never thought of himself as a particularly tactile man, but it seemed impossible to keep from touching her when she was near. The pleasure he derived from the simplest contact with her set all his nerves alight. “Not always,” he said in reply to her question.

Lillian let out a bubbling laugh. “How very English of you. How you all love to suffer, with your stiff…

stiff…” She peered at the book in her hands, distracted by the gilt on its cover. “…upper lips,” she finished absently.

“We don’t like to suffer.”

“Yes, you do. At the very least, you go out of your way to avoid enjoying something.”

By now Marcus was becoming accustomed to the unique mixture of lust and amusement that she always managed to arouse in him. “There’s nothing wrong with keeping one’s enjoyments private.”

Dropping the book in her hands, Lillian turned to face him. The abruptness of the movement resulted in a sharp wobble, and she swayed back against the shelves even as he moved to steady her with his hands at her waist. Her tip-tilted eyes sparkled like an array of diamonds scattered over brown velvet. “It has nothing to do with privacy,” she informed him. “The truth is that you don’twant to be happy, bec—” She hiccupped gently. “Because it would undermine your dignity. Poor Wes’cliff.” She regarded him compassionately.

At the moment, preserving his dignity was the last thing on Marcus’s mind. He grasped the frame of the bookcase on either side of her, encompassing her in the half circle of his arms. As he caught a whiff of her breath, he shook his head and murmured, “Little one…what have you been drinking?”

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“Oh…” She ducked beneath his arm and careened to the sideboard a few feet away. “I’ll show you…

wonderful, wonderful stuff…this. ” Triumphantly she plucked a nearly empty brandy bottle from the edge of the sideboard and held it by the neck. “Look what someone did…a pear, right inside! Isn’ that clever?” Bringing the bottle close to her face, she squinted at the imprisoned fruit. “It wasn’ very good at first. But it improved after a while. I suppose it’s an ac”—another delicate hiccup— “acquired taste.”

“It appears you’ve succeeded in acquiring it,” Marcus remarked, following her.

“You won’ tell anyone, will you?”

“No,” he promised gravely. “But I’m afraid they’re going to know regardless. Unless we can sober you in the next two or three hours before they return. Lillian, my angel …how much was in the bottle when you started?”

Showing him the bottle, she put her finger a third of the way from the bottom. “It wasthere when I started. I think. Or maybe there.” She frowned sadly at the bottle. “Now all that’s left is the pear.” She swirled the bottle, making the plump fruit slosh juicily at the bottom. “I want to eat it,” she announced.

“It’s not meant to be eaten. It’s only there to infuse the—Lillian, give the damned thing to me.”