So Wild a Heart (8 page)

"No, no," Joseph hastened to assure her. "It's no new gentleman. It's the same gentleman. Lord Ravenscar."

Miranda stared. "What? Here?" Her hand flew to her hair.
She must look like a fright!
Her hair was not arranged becomingly at all, and the dress she wore was so old and outmoded that she was embarrassed to be seen in it. "Papa! No! I can't—he mustn't."

"Pish-posh, girl," Joseph replied cheerfully. "I've already told him he could speak to you. Wouldn't be polite to send him packing now. Won't take but a minute." He turned and walked toward the door. "Come, Hiram, you and I had better leave the girl alone."

Hiram, with a single puzzled glance at Miranda, who was standing as if turned to stone, stuck his pen back into the inkwell and followed his employer out the door.

"No, wait!" Miranda hurried toward the door.
She couldn't let Ravenscar see her like this!
But she had not even reached the doorway when it was filled by a large, well-dressed gentleman.

Miranda's first thought was that she had been right. The man standing before her, handsome and tall, was the same man whom she had helped to escape his attackers last night. Her second thought was to wonder what had happened to all that man's charm.

This man's face was faintly bored and settled into lines of aristocratic hauteur. He was handsome, certainly, and his figure was slim and well-muscled in his perfectly tailored clothes, but the green eyes held no laughter or excitement now as they flickered coldly around the room and settled on her briefly.

"Miss Upshaw," he drawled as he made an elegant bow in her direction.

"Lord Ravenscar," Miranda replied in a tone as cool and distant as his face. She wondered if the excitement of the evening before had addled her brain that she had been drawn to this man. The Earl of Ravenscar seemed to be like every other arrogant nobleman she had met—if not worse.

Devin glanced at Miranda again. He hated being here. It was humiliating, degrading. It grated at his soul to be reduced to this—for however Leona or his mother or Rachel might phrase it, it still boiled down to his selling himself for this woman's money. It was proof, he knew, of just how low he had sunk.
Well, as Leona had pointed out, he was in the mire now, had been for years; he might as well wallow in it.

Still, it was hard for him to do. He had felt shamed as he had spoken to the girl's father; he felt even more so now, facing the girl herself. But he had enough pride left that he would not allow them to see the way the humiliation scored his soul. His family, he reminded himself, had walked and talked with kings; he was not about to let some fur trapper or his daughter see him humbled. He lifted his chin and cast another look at the homely creature before him.

She was much as he had imagined her: dowdy in an old-fashioned, rather shapeless dress, her hair skinned back into an unfashionable bun, a pair of spectacles perched on her nose. She was without mistake a spinster, a plain woman who would be married only for her money. No doubt her speech and manners would be just as bad as her looks—a grating American accent and no idea what to do or say in polite company.

His eyes skimmed away again as fast as they had settled on her. He could not bear to look at her as he did this, so he fixed his gaze on a point just over her left shoulder and began his speech. "Miss Upshaw, I have asked your father's permission to pay my addresses to you, and he graciously gave it to me." He drew a breath and plunged on. "It would give me great pleasure if you would do me the honor of consenting to be my wife."

He paused, waiting. Miranda stared at him for a long moment, scarcely able to believe what she had heard. She was so furious, she could hardly make a coherent sentence.

Finally, flatly, she said, "No."

His mouth dropped open comically, and for the first time he stared straight at her. "What?"

His look of astonishment was so great that Miranda let out a giggle. "I said, 'No,' Lord Ravenscar," she repeated.

"You
are refusing me?"
Not only that, the silly cow had the nerve to laugh at him!

"Yes, I am."

"Good God, woman!" he burst out. "I hope you don't think that you are going to receive a better offer!"

"My dear sir," Miranda said crisply,
"any
offer would be better than the one you just made me."

She whipped off her spectacles and strode forward until she was standing only a foot away from him. She looked pugnaciously up into his face. "I have never heard a more graceless speech in my entire life. I can assure you that there is not a woman on earth who would marry you if you approached her like that. Who do you think you are? Do you think that any woman would just fall down in gratitude before you because you had decided to let her be your wife? You are the rudest, most arrogant man I have ever had the misfortune to meet, and I would rather live and die alone than to tie myself to the likes of you!"

Dev looked down into the wide gray eyes, snapping with fury, and he had the second great surprise of the afternoon. "You! Why, you are the woman who—"

"Yes," Miranda replied crisply. "I am the woman who saved your unworthy hide last night. If you were not so thoroughly arrogant and conceited, no doubt you would have realized it sooner. And I can tell you that I am rapidly regretting that I made the effort. A drubbing at the hands of those ruffians would probably have done you a world of good. Indeed, I am inclined to think that perhaps they were hired by some other woman who you insulted with a marriage proposal."

"Insulted!" Devin exclaimed, fury surging up in him. He wasn't sure what annoyed him more—this woman's disdain, or the fact that his body remembered quite suddenly and vividly the desire that had stirred in his loins last night when he had looked at her. "You dare to say that I insulted you by asking you to marry me? I am the sixth Earl of Ravenscar. I can trace my bloodlines back to the twelfth century. I dare swear
you
would be hard put to know who your grandfather was."

"That is a colossally foolish argument," Miranda said dispassionately. "Everyone's ancestors go back that far. The fact that you know the names of yours means nothing except that your family kept good records. The Lord only knows what sort of man your ancestor was—he may very well have been the most evil fellow around. And it certainly doesn't mean anything about
your
character. That is something that you make yourself, and from the things I have heard, you have not done a very good job of it."

"You dare—" Ravenscar looked at her through narrowed eyes. "Good God, if you were a man, I'd call you out for that." He moved even closer, glaring down into her face.

"Another supremely silly thing to bring up, since I obviously am not," Miranda pointed out, standing her ground. She was not about to let him intimidate her by looming over her this way. Her temper was up, and she was enjoying herself. This man deserved to be taken down a peg or two, and she was quite happy to be the one to do so. Lifting her chin defiantly, she glared back at him, only inches away from his face.

"You impudent little—" Ravenscar broke off his words, and suddenly his hands went around her arms like steel. He jerked her up and into him, and his mouth came down on hers.

Miranda stood stock-still for a moment, unable to move. She had never been treated like this before in her life, handled so roughly or kissed so thoroughly. No other man would have had the arrogance—or the courage. Indignation shot through her. But at the same time, every fiber in her being thrilled to the sensations that coursed through her. His mouth was hot and demanding, and the taste of it intoxicated her. His lips pressed into hers, fervent, velvety, searing. Then his tongue was in her mouth, invading her. A tremor of excitement shot through her, a vibration that sizzled down every nerve ending in her body in a way that she had never experienced—indeed, had never even imagined existed.

An ache started low in her abdomen, warm and pulsing, insistent. She sagged against him, lost in the heat and pleasure, her anger and indignation burned away by the desire that swept through her. Her breasts felt full and soft, the nipples prickling with longing, and she was aware that she wanted to feel his hands on them, to have him touch her everywhere. She shuddered, her moan swallowed by his voracious mouth.

Then, suddenly, shockingly, his mouth was gone from hers. He pulled back and looked down into her passion-softened face. His eyes glittered, green as glass.

"There," he muttered huskily, his hands falling away from her arms. "Now you know what you could have had but were too much a fool to take."

His caustic words cut through the haze of pleasure, and Miranda's spine stiffened. Anger and a fierce self-dislike seized her. She lifted her hand and slapped him hard.

"Get out," she snapped. "Get out of this house, and never show your face here again."

"With great pleasure," he responded sardonically and turned on his heel to stride out of the room.

Miranda's knees were suddenly too weak to stand, and she sank down in the nearest chair.
Dear God, what had just happened?

In an instant her whole life had been turned upside down. She coursed with fury and indignation and a fire that was completely new to her. Her hand stung from slapping him. She was glad she had; she wished he were back here so she could slap him again. At the same time, her insides felt jumbled and hot and hungry, and she wanted to feel again the pleasure that had surged in her when he kissed her.

The man was arrogant and rude—no, he was beyond arrogant and rude; he was something so irritating and provoking that she could not think of a name for it. She hated him, and she hated him all the more because she had thrilled so to his kiss. She had weakly wanted to lean against him, had wantonly wished that the kiss would go on and on forever. She had enjoyed it, even though everything in her screamed not to. She had wanted him with a fierce and urgent ache that she had never felt for any other man. And it was infuriating that he had made her feel that way quite against her will.

The man was the very devil, she thought, and she hoped that she would never have to see him again. But, no, she realized immediately, that was not true. She hoped she would see him again—and soon—so that she could tell him exactly how much she despised him!

******************

Devin strode down the street, his feet keeping pace with the rapid tumbling of his brain.
The nerve of the wench! To slap him, to tell him he was not good enough to be her husband! Who did she think she was? He was an Aincourt of Darkwater, and she was a nobody, puffed up in importance just because her father had made a pile of gold selling animal skins
—
as if that made her anyone of consequence!

He thought of a dozen scathing things he should have said to her. He should have told her how little her refusal of his proposal had meant to him.
He had not wanted to ask her to marry him in the first place
—
he had only done it because everyone kept hounding him to.
He should have pointed out to her that she was no prize for any man, least of all an earl.
But, damnation, she had felt so soft and yielding against him. And her lips had tasted of honey, and the scent of roses that clung to her had filled his nostrils in the most delightful, heady way.

He let out a growl of frustration, startling a passerby and making the man move quickly to the opposite side of the street. It seemed too bizarre, too absurd, that she could possibly be the fetching woman who had rescued him last night. He had been in his cups, of course, and he'd had only a hazy memory of the woman's face, but he'd remembered those wide, expressive gray eyes and the way they had lit with laughter and excitement.
How could she have been the same person as that drab, infuriating creature he had forced himself to propose to this afternoon?

It had been the woman from last night who had responded to his kiss. He had felt the warmth and excitement in her, the same passion that yesterday had sent her flying into the midst of a fray. He smiled a little as he thought about the kiss, remembering the warmth of her lips, the sweet eagerness. He wasn't sure why he had done it—he had wanted to get back at her in some way. She had been so infuriating, so cold and controlled, so contemptuous of him, that he had wanted to show her that he had the upper hand. And he had done so, despite the slap. The slap only showed how much he had struck a nerve with her; he suspected that she was more furious at herself for responding than anything else.

He knew, too, that he could make her respond again.
Hell, if he put an effort into it, he could make her fall in love with him.
Devin knew that he could be charming. There had been many women over the years who had succumbed to that charm—even some who most people would have said were far too circumspect to have anything to do with a rake such as Devin Aincourt. Generally, he simply did not make the effort to woo a woman who resisted him; there were too many others who were quite happy to climb into his bed...and there was, of course, Leona, who always retained first hold on his affections.

But this time, he thought, this time it just might be worth the trouble.
So the American wench thought that he was poor husband material.... Any other proposal would be better than his.
He wondered how she would feel about that after a few days of determined wooing. The smile that touched his lips at that thought was not pleasant. He would be charming and attentive; he would seduce her with great care and tenderness. It wouldn't be difficult, not with the kind of passion that he had felt in her this afternoon. And when he had her deeply in love with him, telling him that she wanted more than anything to marry him...well, then he would smile and say that he was sorry, he never offered more than once.