Ravishing in Red (16 page)

Suddenly he was gone from her side, leaving her flushed and vulnerable in the breeze. Its cool flow made her open her eyes and blink.

He had not gone far. He knelt right in front of her. Her head cleared enough to realize he was going to propose again, on bended knee. That was too charming to bear.

Only he did not propose, and nothing in his expression suggested such honorable intentions. The way he looked, and looked at her, sent a thrilling alarm straight through her.

He lifted her left foot, slid off her slipper, and placed its arch on the front of his knee. Before she collected herself enough to object, he began raising her skirt.

Shocked, she reached to push it down again. “What are you doing?”

“What you want me to do, or at least what our circumstances permit right now.”

“You misunderstand what I want.” Except he really did not. As he pushed up her skirt, he also caressed her leg, and his palm’s movements soon became of more interest than her skirt’s.

“You are being too wicked.” She tried again to push the skirt even as it inched up, but pleasure was making her the worst fool.

“Yes.” He managed to get the hem over her knee so her stocking leg was bare to her thigh. He ignored her attempts to cover herself. He bent and kissed her knee, then the inner flesh right above her garter.

She almost jumped off the bench. The shock to her body left her breathless. She stared at him while he did it again, fearful of how everything had transformed suddenly, and turned most serious, and very dangerous. She suddenly found herself in deep water and she did not even care if she drowned.

His hand replaced his mouth. His caresses made wanton moans and pleas sound in her head. It was all she could do to hold them in.

He watched her helplessness while he caressed higher. Her body throbbed in response. She could feel distinct pulses down there, wanting and waiting and hot.

His fingers pushed up the bottom edge of her drawers until they bunched at the top of her thigh. She closed her eyes and tried to gather some self-control.

“You should not,” she whispered.

“No, but I am not so good as to stop. Nor am I being really bad. After all, the world has already given you to me, and there really is no choice for you except to submit to what fate has decreed.” His hand teased along that edge of fabric. “You should know how it will be when you do.”

His fingers slid beneath the fabric of her drawers. He touched that pulse. Her breath caught as the sensation obliterated every other awareness.

He caressed and her mind split from the intensity. She closed her eyes and the pleasure overwhelmed her. He said something and she did not hear him, or could not remember if she did.

She lost the fight to contain it. She leaned back against the bench, boneless and weightless. She shifted her hips so she might feel more and succumbed completely to the pleasure.

Soon she could not bear it. The pleasure took on an angry, frustrated center. Shrieks of need began streaking through her abandon. One escaped, she was sure, sounding through the garden.

Those wicked touches stopped, replaced by soothing caresses on her thigh. A cry of frustration escaped and she heard herself this time. She pressed her hand to her mouth lest one more slip out. She let his soothing strokes do what they could, but she wanted to hit him for stopping and leaving this hungry edge of desire in her.

She rode the tide down until something like sanity returned. She still felt the breeze on her leg. She opened her eyes and straightened, embarrassed now, and at a bigger disadvantage with this man than she had ever been.

He no longer caressed her thigh. Instead he fastened a chain around it.

A gold chain, with dangling green stones. Her thigh now wore an emerald necklace.

She stared at it. “Payment?”

“No, a bribe.”

She touched the green stones and they beat gently against her flesh. He was going to a lot of trouble. “Why?”

He rose and sat beside her. She worked the clasp and removed the necklace, admiring it in the sunlight.

“Because you deserve more than scandal and infamy, and because I no longer can afford to be known as a rake and a scoundrel.”

“Did you ever really stop being one?”

“I would like to think that I was never a scoundrel.”

That begged the question about the rake part. It was fair warning that outside those obligatory hours together, he would be going his separate way too.

She pushed down her dress and slipped on her shoe. “I am sure that Daphne has been waiting. I must go.”

They strolled back to the house. She should feel more embarrassed than she did. That alone had her thinking over the various implications of both his proposal and this powerful sensuality.

She had quite forgotten for a while, within that pleasure, her resentments toward him. The anger had been obscured within that daze. That momentary timelessness, more than the sensations, might indeed make this marriage tolerable.

Would it be a betrayal of Papa to accept? Even if it gave Mama security, and Sarah a chance for a better life? She did not believe Papa would hold it against her. The question was whether she would hold it against herself.

On the other hand, she might more easily find a way to vindicate him if she had this new, higher station being offered.

“If we were to do this, I assume it would be a sophisticated union, such as one hears about among the
haut ton
,” she said. “That you would have lovers and that, after a time, after a son is born, I could too.” It was, she discovered, fairly easy to speak frankly with a man with whom one had shared scandalous intimacies.

He paced on a bit before answering. “Of course.”

When they reached the house, she still held the necklace. “I cannot take this.”

He removed it from her hand, then also took her reticule. He dropped the necklace inside and handed the reticule back. “If you reject me again, it will be the only compensation you will have. If you do not, it is an appropriate engagement gift.”

Daphne indeed had arrived back from her errands. She had refused the offer to wait inside, and still sat in Lord Sebastian’s carriage.

Lord Sebastian handed Audrianna to a footman at the house’s door. She bid him adieu, stepped away, then thought better of it and turned for a last word. “I suppose those few hours a week might be tolerable enough.”

“Today was the least of what waits in that part of our union, Miss Kelmsleigh. Perhaps you will let me know your decision about the other parts by week’s end.”

“Yes, I will do that.”

She climbed into the carriage. Daphne appeared serene, and not at all annoyed that she had to wait.

“Did you meet the marquess?” she asked as the carriage rolled away.

“Yes, and he is very amiable.”

Daphne resettled herself on her bench. “And was the marchioness home?”

“As promised. I met her too.” Audrianna wrinkled her nose in distaste.

Daphne laughed. She adjusted the curtain. She eyed the carriage’s fine interior appointments.

She looked out the window a few minutes, then turned a very direct gaze on Audrianna.

“So, dear cousin, when is the wedding?”

S
ebastian received Audrianna’s letter accepting his proposal two days after her visit. Mrs. Kelmsleigh’s letter arrived the next day, expressing restrained joy and inviting him to call on her. He did so at once and met her younger daughter, Sarah, and drank punch in her tidy drawing room near Russell Square while they passed a half hour pretending she did not hate him.

Then she got down to business. She demanded a discreet, small wedding since it would be less than a year from her husband’s passing. She also asked for permission to put Audrianna’s new wardrobe on his accounts, along with wedding garments for her and her daughter.

No specific amount was requested. It would be indelicate to actually talk sums. In agreeing to cover these feminine costs, he accepted that he had just given them carte blanche. Between the impulse for revenge and the opportunity for indulgence, the Kelmsleigh women would probably put him in dun territory.

Morgan expressed satisfaction at the news that Sebastion was “doing the right thing” by Miss Kelmsleigh, but then Morgan possessed uncomplicated views of right and wrong, of honor and decency. Sebastian was pleased that his brother was pleased because, when that letter from Audrianna came, he had found himself pleased as well.

She was proving to be lively, smart, and sensual, and he could do worse. And if he later decided that he had been trapped into a temporal hell, he could follow his father’s example in this as in so much else. She even expected him to.

Their mother said absolutely nothing the evening that Sebastian sought her out to inform her. She did not even look at him during the announcement. A statue would display more reaction, but even an actor could not be more eloquent.

Finally, as he was leaving, she flatly said that she would see to the wedding preparations and the breakfast, so the family was not totally humiliated in every possible way. Since he had braced himself for a long, tedious row, he kissed her in gratitude before retreating from her icy presence.

The announcement of the engagement raised eyebrows and caused another gust of gossip, but the wind soon went out of the scandal’s sails. There would be little breezes for years, of course, but a week after sealing the deal, a letter came from Castleford, accepting the mutually beneficial trade of favors that he had dismissed before. That signaled the return to normal in Sebastian’s political influence.

One colleague in the Commons, Nathan Proctor, tried to make amends for a few reckless cuts by approaching him one afternoon as they both left Brook’s.

“That boy from my county is finally coming home,” he said in passing.

Sebastian’s mind was on other things, and he could do nothing except smile blankly at the reference.

“That one with the third regiment that I told you about last year. All blown up, he was. On death’s door and being cared for in a convent over there up until last autumn. He is finally fit to travel, and is coming home to his family. He will be staying here in London with a sister for a while.”

The third included the company that had been left defenseless by the bad gunpowder. Sebastian had spent two years seeking out the few who survived, to discover what light they might shed on the business. Other than stories of death and helplessness, of cannon that misfired and muskets made useless, he had learned nothing.

His mind picked back through memories of all the evidence and facts he had learned. “He was a gunner, wasn’t he?”

“He was. It is a miracle he is alive. They train their cannon on ours, of course. The lad only survived because he had been bending to open another keg to check it.”

Gunners handled powder all the time. This young man might know more than the other survivors.

“When will he be in England?”

“Two weeks or so, I am told. The family finally found the money to send people over to bring him back. Not able to make it on his own, of course.”

Sebastian thanked Proctor, and asked to be told when the soldier was home. He then continued on his way. How capricious of fate to offer another potential breakthrough in the case of Kelmsleigh, right on the heels of his engagement to the dead man’s daughter.

Unfortunately, he did not expect to learn anything that would exonerate Audrianna’s father. Rather the opposite.

Upon returning to Park Lane, he checked on Morgan and discovered that Kennington and Symes-Wilvert were visiting. Unable to make a good escape, he was trapped into a long hour of whist. Morgan’s two friends wanted to talk about the wedding.

“Damned decent of you, Summerhays,” Kennington offered sonorously.

“Yes, damned decent,” Symes-Wilvert concurred.

“My brother is only sorry that they could not announce their intentions before this unfortunate gossip started,” Morgan said. “In attempting to allow Miss Kelmsleigh’s family the entire period of mourning for her late father to pass, and in trying to let time itself blunt future gossip on the capricious direction that affection can take, they innocently opened the door for worse speculation.”

Sebastian stared at his cards. Morgan had just lied. Not baldly, since Morgan did not know for certain there had not been a liaison prior to the night at the Two Swords, but . . . His brother admired Audrianna, and it appeared he would stretch the truth to help her weather this storm.

“I hear she is a handsome woman, so I am sure the match is not all caprice,” Kennington said. “You met her while looking into that business about her father, I assume.”

“Yes.” And he had.

“I expect that you will be giving up on that now, like the others did. It did not look like it was going anywhere anyway, once he all but confessed in hanging himself,” Symes-Wilvert said.

Sebastian played a card.

“If there were others involved, I do not think they should sleep easily just yet,” Morgan said. “My brother can be most tenacious in the execution of his duty.”

“Of course. I was not implying that he would not do his duty, you understand,” Symes-Wilvert said, flushing. “Just, his bride will not be wanting all that dug up again. I thought—”

How like Symes-Wilvert not to realize that in marrying Miss Kelmsleigh, Sebastian all but forced himself to exercise that tenacity that Morgan mentioned. If he gave up his investigation now, he essentially admitted those engravings had got his character right.

He noted Morgan’s serious expression now that the conversation had turned to that gunpowder. It had always been thus. Since the first reports of that massacre reached London, Morgan’s interest had been very keen. He had lost his composure once, when he spoke of the horror those soldiers had faced due to negligence or worse. Morgan’s fondness for Audrianna would not change any of that.