One Little Sin (17 page)

It would be best, she supposed, if he said nothing at all. Had she not already acknowledged the wisdom—no, the
necessity
—of her leaving this place, even before her aunt’s arrival? She could not continue to live here and be, in essence, a kept woman. Still, in her fantasies, Alasdair burst into the schoolroom, flung himself at her feet, and begged her not to go. In her more logical moments, she imagined him simply arguing with her, just as he had that first night, then wheedling from her a promise to stay.

But neither happened, and by luncheon—a meal she sent away before the cover was removed—she realized he did not mean to come at all. It was a lowering thought, but she could not go without speaking to him just one more time.

Esmée found him in his study. The door was closed, but she sensed his presence inside the room. It was as if she could smell his scent, familiar and comforting, in the corridor. She drew in a deep breath, then tapped lightly.

She heard his answering bark. “Come!”

Esmée stuck her head inside. “I hope I am not disturbing you?”

He looked up from his desk. “Oh, you is it, my dear?” Abruptly, he shut a drawer, but not before she glimpsed the two green velvet boxes within.

She came into the room, feeling suddenly awkward. “I understand you met my aunt this morning.”

He had risen, of course, from his chair. “What?” he said absently. “Oh, indeed! Lady Tatton. A most worthy lady.”

“Aye, she is that,” agreed Esmée. “But a bit of a dragon, all the same.”

MacLachlan smiled. “In my experience, worthy ladies usually are.”

Esmée tried to smile back, but it faltered. “You know, I daresay, why she came?”

MacLachlan paced to the window, one hand set at the back of his neck, the other at his waist. It was a sign, she’d learned, that he was either angry or troubled. But when he turned round and paced back again, he sounded neither. “Ah, Esmée,” he said. “I collect you are to leave us.”

“Am I?” she said sharply. “I had thought we might…discuss it first.”

“Esmée!” He looked at her with chiding indulgence. “There is no question. You must go.”

The world felt suddenly unsteady to Esmée, as if the floor beneath her feet was shifting in a way she’d not believed possible. “I
must
go?” she echoed. “You beg me to stay here, and now you can so easily send me packing?”

He picked up a penknife from his desk, and began to toy with it in a way that looked faintly dangerous. “I mean only that this is an unlooked-for opportunity,” he said, slowly tilting the blade to the light. “Your aunt is well placed. She can give you entrée to a world most people can only dream of.”

“I
have never dreamt of it.”

“Liar!” he said, still smiling. “What girl has not?”

“I am not a girl,” she snapped. “If ever I was, my mother’s death put an end to it.”

“Quite right,” he agreed smoothly—
too
smoothly for Esmée’s liking. “You are a lovely young woman, full of grace, beauty, and potential.”

“Alasdair, you don’t understand,” she said. “She wishes…she wishes me to
marry.”

“Does she, by Jove?” For a long moment, he was silent. “And so you should, I daresay.”

Esmée did not understand what was happening. “But—But what about last night?”

“What about it?” he asked coolly. “I was drinking, you know. I usually am.”

Her eyes widened. “You are…you are saying you don’t
remember?”

“Not…er, completely,” he said. “No.”

Esmée threw up her hands. “Oh,
now
who is the liar?” she cried. “You drank little more than a dram! A good Scot puts twice that in his porridge of a winter’s morn!”

He laid aside his knife and took her hands in his. They felt bloodless. Cold, like his voice. “Esmée,” he said. “We ought not even speak of last night. We must pretend it never happened, for your sake. We were all of us under such strain, doing and saying things, I daresay, we would otherwise never have done.”

She looked at him accusingly. “I did naught I’d no wish to do!” she answered. “We made love, you and I. Oh, not, perhaps, in the usual way, no. But you cannot tell me it meant
nothing.”

“It
was
nothing, Esmée,” he said gently. “You are young. You do not understand men, or how they—”

“Oh, aye!” she snapped, jerking her hands from his. “A silly chit, am I? Well, listen to me, MacLachlan, and listen well. I have grown quite tired of everyone telling me how young and stupid I am. I am neither, and we both know it. And I know this, too: You are trying to drive me away.”

His eyes hardened. “No, I am merely accepting what you apparently cannot,” he said in an artic voice. “We have not been living in the real world, Esmée. We have grown close—
inappropriately
close—and I am to blame. It was a pleasant flirtation, no more. I should never have permitted you to stay here. And if you remain here, what do you honestly think will happen between us? I need hardly tell you, my dear, that I am not the marrying kind.”

She began to sputter with indignation, but he cut her off. “And if I am not the marrying kind, Esmée, then you need to find someone who is,” he finished. “You are a beautiful, deeply sensual creature. Lady Tatton has come home, it seems, in the very nick of time.”

Inexplicably, nausea gripped her. Esmée set a hand to her stomach. “My aunt—she put you up to this, didn’t she?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Esmée! I’m half again your age!” He tore his gaze from hers. “Your aunt made me ashamed of myself.”

“I don’t believe you!” she retorted. “I think you are just trying to do the honorable thing.”

Finally, he laughed aloud. “Oh, Esmée, I can hear society’s collective giggling all the way from Mayfair,” he said. “Sir Alasdair MacLachlan, sacrificing himself on the altar of a young lady’s honor!”

“Oh, aye!” she said, sneering. “Make a great joke of it!”

But Alasdair pressed on. “Oh, you think me noble and good now, is that it?” he challenged. “Just because I held you, and helped you forget something horrible and tragic? If you think that, Esmée, then you are as silly and romantic as your mother. I took my pleasure from your body—and trust me, I did not leave your bed feeling good and noble. There is nothing at all of the romantic in me, Esmée. I live only in the here and now, not in dreams of some perfect future. Go. Go with your aunt, and make a life for yourself. Forget about me, and forget about Sorcha. Let Lady Tatton find you some well-mannered, respectable young man who can give you children of your own.”

Esmée wondered if he’d lost his mind. “How—how can I?” she asked incredulously. “I am no longer innocent.”

“Oh, trust me, my dear; you are the very definition of innocence.”

“But after last night—I mean, what man would even contemplate—?”

“You still have your virginity,” he said.

“A technicality,” she countered.

“Perhaps,” he conceded. “But that little technicality is all that matters.”

She fell quiet for a moment. She did not feel like an innocent. But otherwise, there was little in what he’d said that she had not already decided. Still, she had not thought to hear it spill so coldly and so logically from his beautiful mouth. A mouth which had coaxed and comforted and made languorous love to her but a few hours earlier. The very memory of it still make her shiver, and for an instant she feared she might make a fool of herself again.

Perhaps she was like her mother, God help her. All of her life, she had tried to be otherwise. She had tried to keep both her head and her heart safe, but Sir Alasdair MacLachlan had been her undoing. She wished to God she could blame him for it. Instead, she drew in a ragged breath. “Do you—do you think I am silly and romantic, then?” she demanded. “Do you think I am like my mother?”

Something inside him seemed to explode. “How the devil do I know?” he snapped. “I don’t even remember the woman, you will recall. That’s the sort of man I am, Esmée! There have been a hundred Lady Achanalts in my bed—lovers I never really knew, and whose names I don’t even care to recall. The truth is, I barely know
you
—and obviously, you do not know
me.”

She felt hot, angry tears spring to her eyes, and blinked them back. “Oh, I know you, MacLachlan,” she returned in a low, steady voice. “I know you better than you might wish.”

“Come, Esmée! You have been here but a few weeks. You know nothing of the world beyond Scotland. Take what is being offered you. Don’t throw yourself away, girl, on a cad like me.”

“How can I?” she retorted. “You have already said you do not want me.”

He turned to the window and refused to look at her. “Esmée, please go to your aunt now,” he said. “I have things to do.”

“Aye, I shall, then!” she answered. “And fair fa’ ye, MacLachlan! I mean to forget about you. Perhaps it won’t even prove difficult—”

“Oh, it won’t!” he interjected.

“Aye, you’re right, I do not doubt!” she agreed. “But what I’ll not be forgetting is my sister. You cannot cut me off from her.”

He did not turn around, did not move from the window. “I have no intention of doing so,” he rasped. “You may see Sorcha whenever you wish. Lydia will bring her. Just make the arrangements, please, with Wellings. As I said, I have things to do now.”

Esmée stiffened her spine and went to the door, but at the last moment, another torment struck. “I wish to know one last thing,” she said, her hand on the doorknob. “I claim the privilege of asking, as Sorcha’s sister, if for no other reason.”

“What?” he snapped impatiently.

“Are you going to marry Mrs. Crosby?”

He was so quiet and so rigid, she feared she had gone too far. “God, I hope not,” he finally said. “But I suppose stranger things have happened.”

“What is to come will be as real and as painful as that bruise between your eyes.”

Behind him, the door slammed. Alasdair bent his head, shut his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose as hard as he could. But the beautiful Gypsy’s words would not stop echoing in his brain

“You have cursed yourself, with no help needed from me. Now you must make restitution. You must make it right.”

Good God, he was trying to make restitution! He was trying to make right whatever the hell it was he’d done so bloody wrong! But why did it have to hurt so much? Why wouldn’t that goddamned voice leave his head? He
knew
what he had to do.

What did he have to offer a young lady like Esmée, anyway? His good name? His fine reputation? Oh, if he could have pointed to one thing—just one small thing—that Lady Tatton had been wrong about, perhaps he would have gone chasing after the chit. Perhaps he would have thrown himself at her feet and promised to be as good a husband as he possibly could be.

But Lady Tatton, damn her, hadn’t been wrong. His only talents were his charm, his looks, and a steady hand at the gaming table. Just as he had said, he was not the marrying kind. Not really. He had never in his life been faithful to a woman, and though it now felt as if that had changed, how could he know? How could he be sure?

More importantly, what did Esmée deserve? Everything. The world. Her rightful place in society. A life of happiness and ease. A sober and respectable husband, just the sort Lady Tatton had promised to find.

Lady Tatton!
Lord God Almighty! Never would he have dreamt his drowned wren was blood kin to such a pillar of English society. And had he known it, would he have treated her any differently?

Oh, he knew the answer to that one! It left him almost ill. He would not have let Lady Tatton’s niece set so much as one toe into his parlor. He would have rousted every servant in the house from their beds and sent them out into the drenching rain to scour all of London in search of a suitable chaperone with a suitable roof beneath which she might shelter. Someone. Anyone. Dev’s mother. Quin’s sister. Julia. Even Inga would have been better than him, for God’s sake
.

Instead, he had treated Esmée like the near nobody he’d believed her to be. He now knew that Esmée was far from being a nobody. She was something extraordinary; extraordinary in a way which still eluded him. Extraordinary in a way which had nothing to do with class or social standing or Lady Tatton. And now he was being royally punished for his presumption.

Just then, he heard a heavy tread coming down the hall. He turned to see his butler on the threshold. “Yes, what is it, Wellings?”

The servant hesitated. “Sir, Miss Hamilton has asked that her empty trunks be brought down from the attics.”

“Has she?” he asked. “Best get them down, then.”

Wellings began to wring his hands. “But she says—well, she says that she is leaving, sir. Going to live with her aunt. Is that right?”

Alasdair smiled faintly. “I think it best, don’t you?”

The butler colored a little. “I’m not sure I do.”

Alasdair looked down to realize that he’d somehow got hold of the penknife again. His knuckles had gone white and bloodless from clutching it. “Miss Hamilton is not a slave, Wellings,” he finally answered. “Do as she asks.
Please.”

Wellings crept closer to the desk, one eye on the knife, and laid before him a slender package wrapped in wrinkled white paper.

“What the devil is that?”

Wellings drew back. “I couldn’t say, sir. Miss Hamilton bade me give it to you.”

Alasdair looked at it again, and felt his heart lurch. “Wellings,” he rasped.

“Yes, sir?”

He dropped the knife. “Tell Mrs. Henry to hire another maid,” he said, as the blade clattered to the floor. “It seems Lydia will be moving up to the nursery full-time.”

Still glowering, Wellings bowed himself out of the study.

Alasdair picked up the fold of paper, and weighed it in his hand. He closed his eyes, and willed himself to breathe. There was no need to open it. No, none at all. He already knew what he would find inside it. Three hundred pounds. In cash.

Esmée, it seemed, no longer needed her insurance policy. Indeed, she no longer needed
him.
His wish to be set free of his “managing female” had come true at last.