JMcNaught - Something Wonderful (10 page)

Impatiently, he pulled her hand away from his sleeve. "There's no way out of it for either of us," he clipped. "I'll arrange for a special license and we'll be married here within the week. Your mother and your uncle," he said with blistering contempt, "can stay at the local inn. I'll not shelter either of them under my roof."

That last comment caused Alexandra more shamed anguish than anything else he had said to her.

"I'll pay for their lodgings," he said shortly, misunderstanding the reason for her stricken expression.

"It isn't the expense!" she denied.

"Then what's bothering you?" he demanded impatiently.

"It's—" Alexandra turned her head, her gaze traveling desperately over the stultifying formality of the room. "It's
everything
! It's all wrong. This isn't the way I imagined being married." In her anxiety, she seized on the least of her worries. "I always thought I'd be married in a church in the village, with my best friend—Mary Ellen—to attend me, and all the—"

"Fine," he interrupted shortly. "Invite your friend here, if it will make you easier in the days before the wedding. Give her direction to the butler and I'll send a servant after her. You'll find writing materials in the drawer of that desk over there. You do know how to write, I presume?"

Alex's head jerked as if he had slapped her, and for one brief instant Jordan glimpsed the proud, spirited woman she would someday become. Her blue-green eyes snapped with disdain as she replied, "Yes, my lord, I know how to write."

Jordan stared at the scornful child who was regarding him down the length of her pert nose and felt a glimmer of amused respect that she would dare to look at him thus. "Good," he said curtly.

"—in three languages," she added with regal hauteur.

Jordan almost smiled.

When he left, Alexandra walked rigidly over to the small desk in the corner and sat down behind it. She pulled out a drawer and removed a writing sheet, quill, and inkpot. Too overwrought to concentrate on explaining her predicament, she wrote simply,

Dearest Mary Ellen, please accompany the bearer of this letter and come to me as soon as you may. Disaster has struck and I'm quite horribly desolate! My mother is here and so is Uncle Monty, so your mama needn't worry about your safety. Hurry, please. There isn't much time before I have to leave you
—

Two tears welled in Alex's eyes, trembling on sooty black lashes, then they trickled down her cheeks. One by one, they fell in damp splotches onto the letter until she gave up the hopeless struggle and laid her head on her arms, her shoulders shaking with wrenching sobs.

"Something wonderful?" she whispered brokenly to God. "Is this Your idea of wonderful?"

Three-quarters of an hour later, Ramsey ushered a satisfied, if very subdued, Mrs. Lawrence and Sir Montague out of the house, leaving the dowager duchess alone with her two grandsons. The duchess arose slowly, her shoulders stiff as she turned to Jordan. "You cannot
seriously
mean to go through with this!" she announced.

"I intend to do exactly that."

Her face whitened at his words. "Why?" she demanded. "You can't expect me to believe you feel the slightest desire to marry that provincial little mouse."

"I don't."

"Then why in heaven's name are you going to do it?"

"Pity," he said with brutal frankness. "I pity her. And, like it or not, I'm also responsible for what happens to her. It's as simple as that."

"Then pay her off!"

Leaning back in his chair, Jordan wearily closed his eyes and shoved his hands in the pockets of his pants." 'Pay her off,' " he repeated bitterly. "I wish to God I could, but I can't. She saved my life and, in return, I ruined her chances of having any sort of respectable life of her own. You heard what her mother said—her fiancé has already cried off because she's 'ruined.' As soon as she returns to the village, she'll be fair game for every lusting male. She'll have no respectability, no husband, no children. In a year or two, she'll be reduced to selling her favors at the same inn where I took her."

"Nonsense!" the dowager said stoutly. "If you pay her off, she can go somewhere else to live. Somewhere like London where the gossip won't follow her."

"In London, the most she could hope to be is some man's mistress, and that's assuming she could attract some wealthy old fool or foolish young fop to keep her. You saw her—she's hardly the sort of female to incite a man's lust."

"There is no need to be vulgar," the duchess said stiffly.

Jordan opened his eyes, his expression sardonic. "Frankly, I find it rather 'vulgar' to consider rewarding the chit for saving my life by consigning her to a life of glorified prostitution, which is what
you're
suggesting."

They regarded each other across the room, two fiercely indomitable wills clashing in silence. The duchess finally conceded defeat with an imperceptible inclination of her immaculately coiffed head. "As you wish, Hawthorne," she said, reluctantly yielding to his authority as the head of the family. Then another thought struck her and she sank into her chair, her face turning a grim, deathly white. "For seven hundred years, the bloodlines of this family have been unsullied. We are descendants of kings and emperors. Yet you mean for that utter nobody to produce the next heir." In supreme frustration, her grace turned her ire on her other grandson. "Don't just sit there, Anthony, say something!"

Lord Anthony Townsende leaned back in his chair, his expression wry. "Very well," he said amiably, accepting Jordan's decision with a fatalistic grin, "when am I going to be presented to my future cousin? Or do you intend to leave her in the salon until the wedding?"

The duchess shot him a killing glance, but she said nothing more. She sat quite still, her back ramrod straight, her white head high, but the bitter disappointment of the last hour had added a decade to her face.

Anthony glanced at Jordan and raised his glass in a gesture of a toast. "To your future wedded bliss, Hawk." He grinned.

Jordan shot him an ironic glance, but other than that, his features were perfectly composed. Anthony was not surprised at this lack of visible emotion. Like his grandmother, Jordan nearly always kept his emotions under rigid control, but unlike the duchess, Hawk did it effortlessly—so effortlessly that Tony and many others often wondered if he
felt
any really deep emotion other than anger.

In this instance, Tony was correct. Jordan was feeling nothing stronger than a certain grim, angry resignation toward his marriage. As he lifted his glass to his lips, Jordan contemplated with bitter amusement this unexpected twist of fate. After years of unrestrained wenching among England's most experienced, most sophisticated—and least virtuous—females, fortune had perversely saddled him for life with a child-bride who was the supreme, eternal ingénue. Every instinct he possessed warned him that Alexandra's lack of sophistication sprang not from mere inexperience, but rather from an ingenuous nobility of spirit and gentleness of heart.

At his hands, she would lose her physical innocence, but he doubted if she would ever lose her wide-eyed naiveté, nor would she acquire the smooth veneer of bored sophistication and droll wit that was as much a requirement for admission into the
ton
as were the right family connections.

It bothered him slightly that she would never be able to fit into his world, his life. It bothered him—but not much, for in truth he had no intention of spending much time with her in the years to come, nor did he intend to greatly alter his life-style. He would install her at his house in Devon and visit her there, he decided.

With a sigh, he realized that his mistress would have to be informed that she wasn't going to accompany him to Devon next week as planned. Thank God Elise was as sophisticated as she was beautiful and sensual; he would not have to endure a scene from her when he explained about the trip to Devon and his marriage.

"Well, when are we going to be properly presented to her?" Anthony repeated.

Reaching behind him, Jordan tugged on the bell cord. "Ramsey," he said, when the butler materialized in the doorway, "retrieve Miss Lawrence from the yellow salon and bring her here."

"Where are my mother and my Uncle Monty?" Alexandra asked a little frantically as soon as she entered the drawing room.

Jordan arose and came forward. "They have repaired to the local inn where they will remain in happy expectation of our forthcoming nuptials," he replied with unconcealed irony. "You, however, will remain here."

Before Alexandra could finish digesting all that, she was being introduced to the dowager duchess, who inspected her through a lorgnette. Humiliated past all endurance by the duchess' contemptuous appraisal, Alexandra lifted her chin and stared right back at the old woman.

"Do not stare at me in that rude, disrespectful fashion," the duchess snapped when she caught Alexandra's expression.

"Oh, was I being rude, ma'am?" Alexandra inquired with deceptive meekness. "I apologize, then. You see, I know it is rude to stare at someone. However, I am woefully ignorant of the etiquette involved when one is the
recipient
of the stare."

The duchess' lorgnette slid from her fingers and her eyes narrowed to slits. "How
dare
you lecture me! You are a nobody, a person without bloodlines or breeding or ancestry."

" 'It is certainly desirable to be well-descended,' " Alexandra quoted angrily," 'but the glory belongs to our ancestors, not to us.' "

Anthony emitted a strangled, laughing sound and hastily interposed himself between his infuriated grandmother and the unwise child who had chosen to enter into verbal combat with her. "Plato, wasn't it?" he asked with a smile and extended his hand.

Alexandra shook her head, smiling timidly in the hope she'd found an ally in this den of unfriendly strangers. "Plutarch."

"I was close, anyway," he chuckled. "Since Jordan seems to be struck dumb, permit me to introduce myself. I'm Jordan's cousin, Tony."

Alexandra put her hand into his extended palm. "How do you do."

"Curtsy," the duchess ordered icily.

"Pardon?"

"A young lady curtsies when she is introduced to a person of superior age or rank."

«
^
»

A
t dusk
the following evening, Alexandra was standing at the windows of her bedchamber, looking out across the drive, when she saw a stately coach drawing up, its lanterns twinkling in the dusky light. "Mary Ellen!" she breathed and ran from her room, hurrying down the long hall on the third floor.

Ramsey opened the door just as Mary Ellen erupted from the coach and ran up the front steps of the huge house, her long red hair streaming out behind her, her arms laden with oddly shaped parcels, the brim of her bonnet clutched in a fist. Skidding to a halt in the foyer, Mary Ellen curtsied to the astonished butler, whom she judged from his haughty demeanor to be An Important Personage, and then demanded in an agonized voice, "Please, milord, where is Alexandra? Is she still alive?"

When the butler merely gaped at her, Mary Ellen whirled around and confronted a footman, executed another curtsy, and then implored, "Where is Alexandra, sir?
Please
tell me!"

Alexandra plummeted down the staircase and into the foyer, throwing her arms around Mary Ellen, packages, bonnet, and all. "Mary Ellen!" she burst out joyously. "I'm so happy you've come—"

In the normal tomblike silence of the duchess' stately home, this noisy greeting ranked as an uproar and therefore drew not only three more servants into the foyer, but the dowager duchess and her eldest grandson as well.

In Morsham, Mary Ellen came from a simple, straightforward farm family which neither knew nor cared about refined manners, genteel behavior, or the opinions of their betters, whom they never came into contact with anyway. And so Mary Ellen was blessedly unaware of, and supremely unconcerned with, the fact that she was being judged on sight and found wanting by the inhabitants of Rosemeade, including the butler and footmen.

She cared naught for their opinions; all that mattered to her loyal heart was that Alexandra was apparently in some sort of trouble. "Oh, Alex!" Mary Ellen exclaimed in an agitated, disjointed rush. "I thought you were dying! And here you are looking almost as well as ever, except a little pale, which probably comes from inhabiting this
gloomy
house with these
gloomy
people." Scarcely pausing for breath, she continued anxiously, "Your note sounded so grim, and Mama was going to come too, but she couldn't, because my papa's not well again. And that dreadful coachman wouldn't tell me a
thing
about what was wrong with you, although I
pleaded
with him to do so. All he would do was look down his huge nose at me and say, 'I'm sure it isn't my place to know.' Now tell me at once before I burst! Why are you 'desolate' and what is the 'horrible disaster' you wrote about and—and whoever are these people!"