Reforming a Rake (20 page)

“So you’re a candle,” she said, unmoving.

“I light up a room, you mean?”

“No. You’re either fully aflame or out cold.”

“That sounds more like your temperament than mine. I’m merely being polite.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Yes, but why?”

“Someone told me it was the proper thing to do.” He motioned her toward the door again. “If you don’t mind. Parliament will be in session tomorrow, and I have a few papers to review.”

Alexandra hesitated, then climbed the shallow steps. With her back turned, he allowed his gaze to longingly travel the curves of her slender body. This plan had best work, because keeping his hands and mouth and mind and body off her was already killing him.

Rose twirled in a circle while Shakespeare tried to catch the hem of her dress in his teeth. As the girl plopped onto the couch, Alexandra scooped up her dog and gave him an old knotted sock to play with instead.

“So you enjoyed yourself,” she said with a smile, enduring her pupil’s high spirits with a small twinge of
jealousy. She hadn’t felt like spinning since Lucien had last kissed her.

“We went out in a rowboat, and we fed bread to the ducks. By the time we left the lake there must have been fifty ducks quacking behind us. Robert said they looked like Admiral Nelson’s fleet.”

“Oh, Robert, is it now?” Fiona said from her nest by the tea cakes. “Did he give you permission to call him that?”

“He insisted. And I said he should call me Rose.” She giggled, covering her mouth with both hands. “He said he might just as well call me Sunshine, but Rose would do.”

“That’s wonderful, my darling. Miss Gallant said that Lucien saw you off this morning.”

“Yes, he did. He was quite nice, Mama.”

Fiona dusted cake crumbs off her ample front. “Nice in what way?”

“He told me that seeing me almost made him want to go on a picnic himself.”

Rose’s mother beamed. “I knew having his family here would do him good. Don’t you think so, Miss Gallant?”

Alexandra shook herself out of a daydream in which Lucien said nice things to her. Had it only been yesterday? “Yes. I would have to say I’ve seen a definite change in him.”

“Why don’t you go find him, Miss Gallant, and ask him to join us?”

“To join us?” she repeated dubiously.

“Yes. Rose will play for him.”

“He said he had some papers to review.”

“Miss Gallant, if you please,” Fiona said, annoyance touching her already shrill voice.

“Of course.” Tossing Shakespeare’s sock into the corner to keep him occupied, Alexandra left the room. This had all been complicated enough to begin with. Now that she’d fallen in love with a man who looked to be quite possibly the world’s worst husband after Henry VIII, it was impossible.

He had a compassionate side; she’d seen it. With the horrid example of his own parents and his own lifestyle, though, he didn’t seem to have any idea of what made a marriage. If he did know, it didn’t seem to be anything he wanted. She could not and would not be anyone’s “convenience,” whatever she felt for him in her heart.

His office door was closed, and she hesitated before she knocked. “My lord?”

“Come in.”

Lucien sat at his desk, with what looked like several contracts and agreements open before him. He raised a hand at her, indicating that she should wait a moment, and finished scrawling something in the margin of one of the pages.

“Yes?” He lifted his head and looked at her.

From his expression, she might have been nothing more than a footman to him. “Mrs. Delacroix sent me to ask if you’d care to join us in the sitting room. Miss Delacroix wishes to play for you. I told her you were busy, but she insisted.”

“So you’ve blown out your candle, as well?”

She wanted to respond to his cynicism, and sternly stopped herself. “Please, my lord. I don’t wish to argue.”

Lucien nodded, rising. “I’m glad you’ve decided to stay until after Rose’s party.”

“I’m thankful you didn’t turn me away yesterday.”

Something she couldn’t decipher touched his face for
a fleeting moment, then was gone again. “You wanted to stay.”

It wasn’t a question. Alexandra stifled a curse and turned to lead the way back to the Delacroix ladies. She hadn’t meant to let him know that. The next few days would have been so much easier if he’d thought she was merely fulfilling her obligation to Rose. “I dislike leaving a task unfinished,” she improvised.

“So do I.”

She spent the rest of the day making up underlying meanings to his response, and ending up with nothing but a splitting headache. For once, Rose played passingly well, and even Lucien was generous with his compliments. After that, every time Alexandra tried to turn the conversation to Lord Belton, it went right back to Kilcairn. By bedtime she knew that his favorite color was blue, his favorite composer was Mozart, and his favorite dessert was, surprisingly, chocolate cremes.

Even after the earl excused himself for the evening, the nonsense continued. If she hadn’t known any better, she would have thought Rose and Fiona were pursuing Lucien’s interest instead of Lord Belton’s. Alexandra paused in her tickling of Shakespeare. It couldn’t be. He detested them. Or he had, anyway.

“Oh, my,” she said into the prattle. “I hadn’t realized the time. I’d best get to bed.”

“Yes, we all need our beauty sleep,” Fiona agreed.

Alexandra excused herself and went to fetch Shakespeare’s leash. Thankfully, Lucien—Kilcairn, now, for she hadn’t any right to use his Christian name any longer—had become more lax about his “no piddling in the garden” rule, and she led the terrier downstairs and outside.

“I thought you’d end up out here.”

She gasped. Seated on a stone bench in the shadows beneath the library window, Lucien puffed on a cigar.

“My goodness, you gave me a start,” she whispered, wondering at how much had changed since their last midnight rendezvous by the roses.

The tip of his cigar glowed orange and faded as he inhaled. “I neglected something yesterday,” he said in the low, intimate drawl that made her knees weak.

“What was that?”

“Are you going to stand all the way over there?”

She looked at the dark rose blooms surrounding her. “Yes, I think so.”

“All right. I’ll shout it if you wish.”

“Fine.” With an annoyed harrumph Alexandra tugged Shakespeare out of the shrubbery and stalked a few feet closer to the earl.

He looked at her for a long moment, then lowered his gaze. “When you…refused me yesterday, I—”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” she interrupted, more harshly than she intended. If she didn’t work on keeping her anger, though, she would begin to cry.

“You may be pregnant, Alexandra,” he murmured.

She froze, blood draining from her face. “I am not!”

“Shh. You can’t know that yet. I wanted to assure you that if you are, I will take care of you.”

“Hide me away at one of your country estates, you mean?” she snapped, tears filling her eyes. “The Balfour men seem to excel at that.”

He whipped to his feet. “What would you have preferred that I tell you?” he growled. “That I would turn my back and leave you to the fates? I already asked you to marry me, and you refused. So you tell me, Alexandra. What do you want?”

With effort, Alexandra fought down her frightened,
angry panic. “I am not pregnant,” she said as calmly as she could. “And I am leaving in one week. You don’t need to concern yourself at all.”

He ground his cigar out on the bench. “It’s a bit late for that.”

She pretended not to hear as she and Shakespeare returned to the house and her bedchamber. What he’d said had been correct, and noble, and in a way, exactly what she’d wanted to hear from him. And part of her—a very small part of her—wanted to be carrying his child. The decision of whether to stay or go would be removed, and she would never have to admit even to herself that she’d given in.

Alexandra sighed. That was how she knew she wasn’t pregnant. It would have made everything too easy.

Fiona Delacroix moved away from the window and set down the book of French fashions she’d intended to take upstairs. Staying carefully quiet in the dim library, she listened until two sets of footsteps went up the stairs and faded away.

So that was it. She’d known something was afoot. The governess was after her nephew, and it sounded as though she’d gone a fair way toward catching him. Under the same roof—practically under her nose—Alexandra Gallant was a breath away from catching one of the wealthiest men in England.

Lifting her candle, she made her way over to the writing desk. She’d attempted it before, the little strumpet. She’d lifted her heels for Lord Welkins, and then no doubt did him in when he tired of her. Since Welkins had been married, she would only have been after his money. With Lord Kilcairn, though, no doubt she would want it all—his money, his land, and his title.

Well, not this time. Lucien Balfour was going to marry Rose, and that was that. She’d planned it for years; the moment was not going to slip away simply because her nephew had become temporarily infatuated with a woman who was practically a servant.

As for Miss Gallant, she knew where that miss belonged, too. Fiona sat and wrote out a note, folded it, and left it on the foyer table under some other correspondence to be delivered first thing in the morning. No doubt Lady Welkins had been lonely this Season. Lady Halverston had already mentioned knowing the unfortunate widow; Fiona would like to make her acquaintance, too. They apparently had something in common. Another widow to console Lady Welkins would be just what the baroness needed. And then Alexandra Gallant would go away.

“O
h, nonsense.” Alexandra gestured for Rose to precede her into the millinery. “I’m sure he’s not pining over you.”

“But it’s true!” the girl insisted. “He’s sent me a letter every day for the past week, and I know he’s called on Lucien at least twice.”

“They are friends, you know.”

“Lex, you just aren’t romantic.”

Alexandra chuckled. Perhaps Rose had hit on her problem. If she had been romantic, though, she probably would have drowned herself in the nearest pond by now. “All right. I concede that you may very well be correct, and Lord Belton is indeed pining over you, but I don’t want you to be disappointed if he’s not.”

Rose lifted a pretty blue hat off its stand to examine it. “I suppose you’re right. Freddie Danvers at home, the squire’s son, used to say he wanted to marry me all the time, but I never believed him. And Mama said it would take a dowry bigger than Dorsetshire to pay off his gambling debts, and he wasn’t likely to find that with us, anyway.”

Alexandra paused in her perusal of a practical brown schoolmistress’s hat. Despite their lack of social skills, she’d assumed the Delacroix ladies to be wealthy. They’d seemed more concerned with netting a title than a mound of cash, though perhaps they’d been under the impression that the two went together, as they did with Lord Kilcairn.

“If your dowry wasn’t a consideration, would you have wanted to marry this Freddie Danvers?”

Her student made a sour face. “Good heavens, no. He only has a six-room cottage, and no title at all. Even Blything Hall is bigger than that, and I wouldn’t want to move somewhere smaller.” She replaced the blue hat and moved on to a quaint green bonnet.

“Of course not. How silly of me.”

“Now you’re just teasing.”

“I am not. Please, go on.”

“About three years ago, when Lucien was in London, Mama and Papa and I went to Westchester and convinced his housekeeper to give us a tour of Kilcairn Abbey. You should have seen it, Lex. It has more than two hundred rooms, and six sitting rooms, and
two
ballrooms. Mama said she could imagine herself holding court there, while Lucien and I had all the neighboring nobility over for country balls.”

“You and Lucien?” Alexandra asked slowly, her heart giving a distinct lurch. This was ridiculous. She had no reason to become so…irrational every time a female mentioned his name. Half the time she couldn’t even decide whether she loved him or hated him.

Rose blanched, then with a nervous twitter put on the bonnet. “Oh, it’s not me at all, is it?” she said, giggling, and flung it off again. “Do let’s go somewhere else, Lex.
I don’t like anything in here.” With that she flitted off toward the door.

Alexandra looked after her for a moment. “Whatever you like, my dear.”

That was odd. Exceedingly odd, unless her own recent suspicions were correct and Rose did have her cap set for Lord Kilcairn. She’d seemed so pleased by Lord Belton’s attentions, though. Alexandra wondered if Lucien knew his cousin had developed a tendre for him. Given the way he’d been conducting his outrageous bridal search, he probably hadn’t noticed.

“Lex? Come on.”

“Right away.” She hurried out the door in Rose’s wake.

The first thing she needed to do was find out whether Rose preferred Robert or her Lucien. Alexandra frowned. He wasn’t
her
anything, just as she wasn’t his. She’d made that clear enough. And she was not jealous of a seventeen-year-old girl, whatever the circumstances. She wasn’t.

The noontime crowd in front of the corner bakery finally forced Rose to slow, and Alexandra caught up and wrapped her arm around her student’s. “Please slow down, my dear. I feel like a racehorse in the Derby.” The girl still wore a tense expression, and Alexandra reminded herself that her primary duty was to see to her charge’s well-being. “Shall we get a crumb cake?”

“Mama wouldn’t approve.”

“We won’t tell her.”

Rose gave a reluctant grin. “All right.”

She stepped into line. Alexandra moved up behind her—and then froze at the sight of the woman walking toward them along the street. Small and wasted looking despite her straight back and elevated chin, her graying
hair stuffed under a black widow’s cap, she looked neither right nor left, but continued unerringly toward the bakery as though she knew Alexandra was standing there.

“Oh, no,” she whispered, blanching, and grabbed Rose again.

“What—”

“Shh.” Alexandra pulled her surprised charge backward, around the corner and into an alleyway. When they were well out of sight she stopped, putting her hand to her chest and trying to catch her breath.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” Rose asked, her expression concerned.

Alexandra glanced back the way they had come. She’d best salvage what propriety she could. “I’m sorry, Rose,” she said in a low voice. “That was inexcusably rude of me.”

“Don’t mind that. Are you all right?”

Slowly her breathing began to return to normal, though she’d probably be jumpy for the next week. “Yes, I’m fine. It’s just…well…you see, I saw my former employer a moment ago. It…rather surprised me.”

The girl’s blue eyes grew round. “You mean Lady Welkins?”

She nodded. So even her pupil had heard the rumors. “I just didn’t know she was in London. I should have realized.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Nothing.” Alexandra squared her shoulders. “I’ll be leaving soon, anyway. I will simply stay out of her way as much as my duties allow.”

“Well, I certainly won’t make you talk to her,” Rose said indignantly.

Alexandra smiled. “Thank you, Rose.”

Fiona sipped her tea and half listened to the chatter around her. Mrs. Fox was lamenting the gout that kept her husband housebound all day, but didn’t prevent him from venturing out to his clubs at night. Lady Howard had heard that Charlotte Tanner hadn’t left her debut Season in London early because she was ill, but because she was with child—by a gentleman unknown. And right on schedule, Lady Vixen Fontaine had broken another poor boy’s heart.

It was all very interesting, but it wasn’t what she was waiting for. The butler opened the door to Lady Halverston’s drawing room yet again, and Fiona looked up as she had every time someone had joined their tea over the past hour. This time she didn’t recognize the woman being ushered into the room, and she straightened, setting aside her cup.

“Ah, Margaret,” Lady Halverston said, rising to clasp the woman’s hands. “I’m so glad you’ve come.”

“Thank you, Lady Halverston. I was pleased to receive your invitation.”

“Nonsense. We’re happy to have you here.” Lady Halverston urged her farther into the room. “My dears, please welcome Lady Welkins.”

Fiona rose before anyone else could. “Oh, Lady Welkins, you have my deepest, deepest sympathies.”

“Margaret, Mrs. Delacroix,” Lady Halverston provided, and with a slight nod at Fiona, returned to her seat.

“You must call me Fiona, please. I already feel we have so much in common, and I couldn’t wait to meet you. Do sit with me, won’t you, my lady?”

“Thank you, Fiona.” The thin woman, her dark hair turning to silver beneath her black widow’s cap, sat on
the couch and accepted a cup of tea from a waiting footman.

“I have only just put off my mourning cap myself,” Fiona said. “My dear Oscar simply dropped dead one afternoon, leaving my poor daughter and myself all alone in the world.”

“My husband was cruelly taken from me,” the other woman responded, sipping her tea.

“My goodness.”

Lady Welkins nodded. “I don’t know if you’ve heard the rumors, but I firmly believe him to have been murdered.”

Fiona put a hand to her bosom. “Oh, it can’t be so!”

The other woman nodded. “By my own trusted companion, though I could never prove it, of course. Otherwise I would have seen her in prison, where she belongs.”

The meeting was going to be even more productive than Fiona had expected. “You poor dear. It happened right in your own household, then?”

“Nearly under my very nose.”

Fiona settled a look of dismay on her face, wishing Lady Welkins would hurry up and mention her blasted companion’s name. She had enough woes of her own without listening to this drivel. “This is outrageous. And you say she was never arrested?”

“No. I dismissed her immediately, of course, but that seemed entirely too mild a punishment.”

“Of course it does. I only ask, you know, because my nephew hired a new governess for my daughter, and oh, it would be so awful if we had to send the dear girl away.”

“I’m sure you have nothing to worry about. That de
vious Miss Gallant would only choose a household with a wealthy man present for her to seduce.”

Finally
. “Did…did you say Miss Gallant?”

“Yes. Alexandra Gallant, that—”

“Oh, no. Miss Gallant is the name of my niece’s companion.”

Lady Welkins looked truly shocked. “Surely not!”

“It’s true! She’d been living at Balfour House for the past month. And—Oh, no!” Fiona put her hands over her mouth as though holding in a shriek.

Her newfound bosom companion tugged at her arm. “What? What is it?”

“Just in passing, I thought Miss Gallant might have designs on my nephew. I didn’t take it seriously, but now—Oh, my! Do you think she might do harm to dear Lucien?”

“Is your nephew wealthy?”

Fiona nodded. “He’s the Earl of Kilcairn Abbey.”

“The Earl…Surely he must have heard of Miss Gallant’s reputation.”

“My nephew is very stubborn. If he did know, he may have thought to reform her, or even that the rumors were unwarranted.”

Lady Welkins stood. “They are very much warranted, I assure you. She pursued Lord Welkins relentlessly, and when he finally and definitively refused her advances, I know she pushed him down the stairs—and then I think she may have strangled him. The physician said it was his heart, but William was as large as a bull, and he was only just fifty.”

“But no one saw her do it?”

The widow sank back onto the couch again. “No. You see how devious she is.”

“I must go at once and inform Lucien!”

Grabbing her arm, Lady Welkins forced her to remain seated. “If you do that, she’ll only escape again. You must observe her. Or better yet, let her catch sight of me. That might startle her into a confession.”

“You would help me with this?”

“It would be my pleasure.”

Fiona smiled just a little. “My daughter’s birthday celebration is in just a few days. I will see that you receive an invitation.”

Lady Welkins smiled back at her. “That would be wonderful.”

Alexandra sat at the music room pianoforte and played her father’s favorite dance tune. “Mad Robin” frolicked through the candlelit room, chasing away the near-silence of the huge house. Rose and Fiona had thankfully retired early, and Kilcairn had abandoned them for his office hours ago. Even rakes had paperwork, she supposed.

When she’d left Lady Welkins’s employ, she’d thought—and hoped—never to see the woman again. Margaret Thewles, Lady Welkins, had every right to grieve for her dead husband; Alexandra felt bad enough about that herself. But to suddenly turn a man whose lecherous activities his wife had complained about daily into a saint was ridiculous. And to turn Alexandra into a murdering whore just to retain her own standing and avoid some mild embarrassment—that was unforgivable.

If Lady Welkins hadn’t begun her tirade about Alexandra, no one in London would have had cause to give her—or her husband—a second thought. Perhaps that was why she’d made such a stink. At least people knew who Lady Welkins was now.

She tried to calm herself. Even though Lady Welkins had come to London, there was little reason for them to meet. With just over six months gone since her awful husband’s passing, she wouldn’t be able to dance, so she had little reason to accept any invitations to the same soirees Rose delighted in. That was some comfort, anyway. And with Rose’s birthday only a few days away, the odds of Lady Welkins making trouble before Alexandra left for Miss Grenville’s Academy were quite small. Or so she hoped.

“You play beautifully.” Lucien’s soft voice came from the doorway. “Something else for which I should thank Miss Grenville?”

Her fingers hit a few sour notes in response to his sudden appearance, but Alexandra continued to play. “My father taught me.”

“Your father played?”

“Painting wasn’t his only skill.”

His quiet approach stirred the air around her. “Do you have any of his paintings?”

“I had to sell them to pay for my parents’ burial, and to settle their outstanding accounts.”

He seated himself on the other end of the bench, facing opposite her. “Do you have any family remaining on your paternal side?”

“I believe I have a few second cousins in the North, but I wouldn’t know where to begin looking if I were inclined to do so.”

“So here we sit, two orphans, all alone,” he mused.

Alexandra glanced at his profile, quiet and sensuous as sin in the half dark. “You seem to be able to tolerate Rose.”

He shrugged. “She’s hardly anyone I could confide in.”

“It’s lucky you don’t require a confidante, then.”

For a moment he was silent, while the music danced in the shadowy corners of the room. “Yes, I suppose it’s lucky neither of us needs anyone else.”

She pretended not to hear his soft comment; with Lady Welkins in London, Lucien’s company was rather comforting. Tonight she was content not to argue with him. The dance ended, but she began it again with barely a pause.

“Rose and I had a little chat this evening,” he said in the same quiet tone.

“I’m glad you’re becoming slightly more civilized.” At the same time, a large, lonely portion of her heart wished he and his cousin hadn’t begun to get along so well.

“She mentioned that you saw Lady Welkins today.”

Her fingers faltered.

“Keep playing,” he murmured. “‘Mad Robin,’” isn’t it? I haven’t heard it for a long time. And never played so well.”

He was only trying to flatter her, but she didn’t mind all that much. “It was a family favorite.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you, Alexandra. I just wanted to make certain you were all right. Lady Welkins didn’t see you, I assume?”