Lady Maggie's Secret Scandal (34 page)

“You are adorning this risk with a great deal of anticipation.” She considered biting his nipple, because his voice was ominously serious.

“Maggie, who are the two men who come around your kitchen of an evening, and why were they shouting at you the night I last graced your bed?”

“
What?
” She did raise her head, shrugging off the hand that had been offering such tender caresses.

He held her gaze with his own, his eyes so dark Maggie could not discern his pupils. “Who are the two men who come around to your back door after dark, Maggie, cadging hugs even as they raise their voices to you?”

“
You
have
spied
on
me
.”

She was out of the bed in an instant, rage and heartbreak swirling through her to create a sense of betrayal so profound she understood the urge to do violence to another person. “You lurked in the garden, spying on me and mine, and then you came to my bed, spouting inanities and tender kisses. Get out of my house.”

He sat up and tossed her a dressing gown, though Maggie was so angry she didn’t even care that she’d been naked.

“Maggie, I’m not castigating you, and I know you value your privacy.”

The reasoning tone made her nearly shriek. “Get. Out. Of. My. Bed. This
instant
.”

He eyed her warily as she pitched his breeches at his bare chest. “The degree of your upset tells me something is troubling you, and you never did tell me what was in that missing reticule.”

“Letters, Benjamin.” She crossed her arms over her chest, nigh hating his tenacity and insight. “Letters from a child who has not one friend in this entire, mean, stupid world.” She fired his balled-up shirt at him where he stood beside the bed. “And the men who come around my kitchen? They are my maternal half brothers. I hope you are pleased with your spying, for it has gained you the truth and cost you this idiotic engagement.”

“Maggie, you can’t cry off the engagement.”

She tossed his ring at him, which he caught neatly in one hand. “I just did.”

Her voice broke, which enraged her all the more. He took a step toward her, but she waved him away. “I want you to go. I mean it. I won’t say anything; you can nip off to Cumbria, and everybody will forget we’re engaged as soon as the next nine-days wonder comes along.”

“Maggie, jilt me if you must, but let me help you.”

Oh, damn him. Despite his spying, he’d graduated from decent to
noble
. “It isn’t your place to help, and it’s nothing I can’t handle myself.”

By the narrowing of his eyes, she realized she’d made an admission, likely confirming what had been only suspicion before. He busied himself with his clothing while he no doubt mentally rearranged arguments and emotional artillery.

“I did not spy on you, Maggie. I did have dinner with your father, but I also set someone to ensure your safety. Guarding and spying are two different things.”

“Maybe they are, but this engagement was never supposed to do more than scotch a budding scandal. You have to understand that I’m done with the pretense of it, and we will not marry, not ever.”

He sat on the bed to tug on his boots but then regarded her where she stood.

“I love you, Maggie Windham. More than I want to marry you, more than I want to swive you silly three times an hour, I want you to be safe.”

“I’m in no danger.” Except the danger that her heart would fail utterly, so ruthlessly did he wield three small words. She fisted her hands at her sides lest she give those words back to him, fling herself at his chest, and beg him to take up her problems.

When he rose, he seemed to stand very tall. “You might not be in danger, but you are in trouble. I specialize in making trouble go away.” He shrugged into his worn coat and whipped his cravat into a limp knot. “I beg you to recall this.”

“I beg
you
to go away,” Maggie said, but the fight had gone out of her, and she sank to the bed while he remained standing. He loved her, and she was sending him away. The injustice of it—to her and to him—robbed her of all other emotion, despite the fact that this was the only course that would keep him and her family safe from her problems. “I need you to leave me in peace.”

“And if you’re breeding?”

She shook her head. Not even a God as indifferent and perverse as the one presiding over her life would be so cruel.

“Here.” A little white epistle was shoved into her line of sight. He took it back, passed it under his nose, then held it out to her again.

“What’s that?”

He didn’t glare at her, but his nostrils flared with some male emotion. “I don’t know what it is. An old woman gave it to me to put into your hand when she saw me coming in from the mews. I did not recognize her, but I assured her I’d deliver the letter. If I were going to
spy
on you, I might have read it. Remiss of me, to be preoccupied with putting my ring on your finger, when I might have been reading your personal correspondence.”

He took the little box out of his pocket and put the ring back in it. Watching him, Maggie felt like every hope, dream, or pleasure she’d known in life had just been neatly tucked away, never to see the light of day again.

“I am not going north to Cumbria, not for some weeks. If you need me, Maggie, you have only to send for me.”

“You’ll not set any more strangers to guarding me?”

He looked torn, but in the end, the tears threatening to spill from her eyes must have convinced him. “I will not. I wish you’d open that letter.”

She shook her head, wanting him gone and wanting desperately for him to stay.

“Are your brothers decent to you?” He’d put the question quietly, one hand on the door latch, as if he couldn’t bear to see her face if she were going to lie.

“They’re very dear. They’re in service to Lady Dandridge, who dotes on them. They keep an eye on me, but not in any manner that would create awkwardness for my father’s family.”

He seemed satisfied with that but turned again to study her.

“Benjamin, I need you to leave now.”

He approached her swiftly where she sat on the bed, kissed her cheek, and only when she’d had one last chance to inhale his scent and his warmth did he do as she asked.

***

“Will you be needing the coach today?”

Ben looked up from staring at the financial pages—the same pages he hoped Maggie Windham was staring at in her tidy little corner house—to see Archer sauntering into the breakfast parlor. “Good morning, Cousin. I won’t need the coach. I’m going around to Lady Dandridge’s but can do that on foot.”

“Is this business or an attempt to placate an old tabby who’s in a position to spread scandal?” Archer took the seat at Ben’s elbow, topped up Ben’s cup of tea, and then poured one for himself.

“Neither. It seems the matched pair of footmen she’s so proud of are Maggie’s half brothers.”

Archer stirred his tea, frowning at the pattern created by the cream swirling in his cup. “Do you suppose Lady Dandridge knows that?”

“Not likely, and I don’t intend to tell her. Maggie is trying to cry off, and I’m hoping her brothers can provide me some insights into what is so bloody objectionable about being my countess.”

Archer stared at him for a moment then went back to studying his tea. “I don’t suppose you told the woman you’re arse over teakettle in love with her?”

“I did.” Ben picked up the financial pages and began to carefully refold the paper. “I went about it all wrong.”

“There’s a wrong way to tell a woman you love her?”

“Nearly shouting it at her when she’s angry and frightened and looking for excuses to throw your ring at you might qualify.”

A little silence formed—What reply could even a good friend make to such a pronouncement?

“I think I’m going to propose to Della. I’m telling you because it’s theoretically possible she’ll be the mother of the next Earl of Hazelton, but don’t try to change my mind just because her upbringing was humble.”

As replies went, that one served. It also explained a great deal, most notably the desultory fashion in which Archer had undertaken his work recently, and the abundance of late nights likely spent mooning under the window of a mere lady’s maid.

“Will she accept your suit?” Ben put the question carefully, because Archer was routinely smitten with the very women who did not reciprocate his sentiments. It was a kind of pleasant sentimental game to him, not one Ben understood.

“I believe she will. Her present employer is a wretched old witch of a fading courtesan who Della will only refer to as Madam. Della’s usually free only when her employer goes driving at the fashionable hour.”

“Which, given the often rainy weather, is but a few hours a week. Will you and Della continue with the business, or will you whisk your viscountess off to Scotland when you get a ring on her finger?”

“You’re being very reasonable about this.”

A stalling tactic. Archer hadn’t discussed future enterprises with his intended.

“Besides a maternal half brother smitten with his recently acquired baroness, you are my only adult male family, Archer Portmaine.” Ben spoke gently, realizing for the first time he’d miss his cousin were their paths to part. In many ways he was closer to Archer than to his own half brother. “Marry where you will, but be sure she loves you.”

“Well, as to that…”

Ben shifted back in his chair. “Tell me you haven’t cast your heart to an indifferent lady, Archer. Not again.”

“She’s kept busy. I was going to propose yesterday, but she had some damned letter she had to see delivered and nobody to deliver it. Then the old besom arrived in high dudgeon because it started to sprinkle before she’d even reached the park, and I went over the garden wall like a poaching lad.”

“The course of true love and so forth.”

Ben poured them each more tea but tried to fathom what in this recitation was making that tickling start up at the back of his mind, one so intense as to feel almost like a prickling of the hairs on his nape.

Something to do with letters and garden walls. Or perhaps with a lady who had no care for the heart of the man who loved her.

“I won’t be home until quite late tonight,” Ben said, pushing the tray of scones over to Archer’s elbow.

“You’re on a case?”

“No, I am not, but I promised Maggie I wouldn’t set any strangers to spying on her.”

Archer paused with a scone in one hand and the butter knife in the other. “You did not promise her you yourself would abstain from spying, though. Do you think the distinction will be any comfort when she discovers you lurking in her mews?”

“She won’t discover me, and I’m not spying. I’m protecting.”

Archer smiled, shrugged, and went back to buttering his scone.

***

The letter from Bridget was a litany of horrors, and it still said the same awful things when Maggie read it for the hundredth time the next morning. Not only was Cecily forcing the girl to use face paints, but Adele must alter all Bridget’s dresses to fit more tightly through the bust. Bridget was to read lurid texts pressed on her by her mother, things unfit for any young girl, much less one still innocent. Bridget was to forego wearing drawers even on chilly days, and when Cecily drove her in the Park, Bridget was to flirt with the gentlemen who stared at her half-exposed breasts.

And Cecily was muttering dark things about revenge and scandal and people who forgot their humble beginnings.

Worse, Bridget reported that they were preparing to move once again, but Cecily hadn’t revealed their next address, and the letter was at least several days old.

The present address, however, was provided plain as day at the bottom of the letter, right below Bridget’s final sentence:
Please, Maggie, you have to help me—she’s planning something dire.

This was not adolescent dramatics. Cecily had recounted to Maggie often enough that she’d had her first protector at the age of fifteen, a wealthy cit who’d lavished attention and jewels on her. His Grace had been a passing conquest, one undertaken between other longer engagements—a younger son on leave from his regiment, but a ducal younger son and handsome enough to turn a seventeen-year-old’s head.

To Cecily’s way of thinking, Harriette Wilson had allowed herself to be seduced by Lord Craven when she’d been but fifteen, and thus fifteen was a fine age to undertake the life of a courtesan. The younger Wilson sister, now sporting the title of Lady Berwick, had undertaken her trade at the age of
thirteen
and married Berwick while still a minor.

Something drastic was called for, or Bridget would be condemned to the very life Cecily had led, and all of Maggie’s sacrifice and saving would have been for naught.

Maggie looked out at the dreary day. The weather meant fewer people would be abroad. It would also mean Lady Dandridge would likely be at home, and thus both Teddy and Thomas would be easily found. They might know where Cecily was removing to, or at least have some ideas how to go on in the midst of such an awful mess.