Suzanne Robinson (18 page)

If she didn’t, Nick was going to take matters into his own hands. She’d seen it in his face. He had made up his mind before her eyes. She could very well end up tossed into a trunk and hauled back to London. What would happen if he abducted her? They would be alone on the journey back to the city. The disgraceful, uncivilized part of her that responded to Nick found this prospect enticing. The duke’s daughter abhorred the idea of being compromised, of losing her dignity and her reputation. By the time the carriage reached Threshfield, Georgiana had a headache.

In spite of her discomfort she went in search of Threshfield with Nick hounding her footsteps, but the earl wasn’t home. He’d gone to visit his farms in a remote part of the countryside and wasn’t expected back until evening. Nick said he’d simply gone to ground in order to avoid him, Georgiana, and Aunt Livy. Her headache grew worse with Nick glowering and fuming and looming over her like some protective mastiff.

She retired to her own room with his admonishments to be alert ringing in her ears. Rebecca provided a headache powder, and she lay down to rest. She hadn’t thought sleep possible after such a harrowing day, but after Rebecca closed all the drapes and sat beside the bed to read to her from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, Georgiana felt her body grow heavy, and she slept.

She woke to find her muscles stiff from her exertions. Dressing for dinner, she chose a black damask gown of intimidating severity offset by pearls and diamonds. If she was going to browbeat Threshfield, she
would need to feel and look older than she was. Dinner proved to be a painfully quiet ordeal punctuated by rigid politeness on the part of the family. Ludwig forgot to show up until halfway through the fish course. Then he arrived with a copy of an ancient Egyptian medical papyrus, which he studied throughout the meal.

Augusta was upset and tapping her little slippers against the polished floorboards. “I tell you, John, Wellington will defeat the French at Salamanca and occupy Madrid.” She pointed her fork at Georgiana. “You must stop her from telling Napoleon.”

“Of course, my dear,” said Threshfield. He was paying more attention to his favorite dish, stewed rabbit. No one else liked it, and mutton had been served as well.

Georgiana sighed and took another bite of her mutton. Her head was still foggy from her nap, and Augusta’s foibles no longer amused. She glanced up to find Nick looking at her in sympathy. His fingers were entwined around a sterling fork. They were distracting, as was the rest of his hand. The nails were neat, unblemished, the joints of his fingers small, the tips square. It was a hand that could grip with the strength of a bear, yet caress with the knowing gentleness and enticement of a sorcerer.

“Georgiana, I’m speaking to you.”

She blinked and turned. Everyone was staring at her.

“I beg your pardon?” she asked.

“I’ve been speaking to you for the past five minutes.”

She looked from one face to another around the table only to end up looking at Nick. He gave her a
smirk that told her he knew exactly what had captured her attention and reveled in the knowledge. She jerked her head in Prudence’s direction and refused to meet his gaze for the rest of the meal. When Prudence rose as a signal for the ladies to leave the table, Georgiana stood with the rest but paused as they filed out of the dining room.

“Threshfield, I would have a word with you in the library.”

The earl was watching the butler pour the port and glanced at her uneasily. “Later this evening, my dear.”

“Now, Threshfield.”

“It can wait, my dear.”

“Threshfield, you and I are going to have a discussion full of plain talk, especially regarding your character and conduct toward me. We can have it here in the dining room in front of the staff and the gentlemen, or we can have it in the library, privately. You have one minute in which to make your decision.”

Nick gave a bark of laughter and pulled out a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket. “I’ll give you the time, Threshfield.”

The earl rose from his wheelchair, his flaccid skin flushed. “I’ll not be ordered about in my own house!”

Georgiana only folded her arms and waited.

“Forty seconds, old chap,” said Nick, squinting at his timepiece.

Evelyn threw down his napkin. “Really, Georgiana, your behavior grows more bizarre by the day.” He marched out of the room.

“Twenty seconds,” Nick said.

“Randall, Randall, I’m retiring to my rooms at once!”

Nick snapped his watch closed and stepped between the butler and the earl and smiled. The smile was enough to make the servant pause. Then Nick turned to the earl.

“Do go with her to the library, sir,” he said softly. “Otherwise I’ll have to push you there myself.”

Threshfield banged his cane on the floor. “I’ll call my attendants and have you both thrown out of the house.”

“You will not,” Georgiana said. “You’re going to do as you’re told for once, or I’ll break our engagement.”

“What? Breach of promise, that’s what it would be.”

“Whatever it is, you won’t have your pending marriage to hold over the family if I do.”

Nick walked around the wheelchair and gripped the handles. “Come on. You’ve danced your dance. Time to pay the piper.”

Once in the library, Georgiana thought to ask Nick to leave. After all, the subject of her conversation with Threshfield was delicate. Nick rolled the earl’s chair near the fireplace and stoked the coals. She hovered in the threshold and opened her mouth as he rose from the grate to give her a severe look.

“Forget it,” he said. He leaned a shoulder against the Italian-marble mantel.

Compressing her lips, she shut the door and marched over to the earl. The old man rose to meet her, bracing himself on his cane and beaming at her with watery eyes.

“I shall be brief,” she said.

“You’re always admirably succinct, my dear. It’s one of your most endearing qualities.”

“Don’t try to butter me, Threshfield. What you’ve done is unforgivable. No one would blame me for rejecting you, and if you don’t retract your abominable lies at once, I will reject you. Do you know what you’ve done? You’ve driven someone to try to run me out.”

“Oh, yes. I did hear something about that.”

Georgiana threw up her hands. “Something? You make it sound like a mere inconvenience. Someone may be trying to kill me!”

“I’m sorry you’ve had a few accidents, my dear, but it’s only Augusta. I’ll have her watched more closely.”

“Your word,” Georgiana said. “I’ll have your word you’ll tell the truth tonight.”

“Now, my dear. Tomorrow will do just as well.”

Nick pushed away from the mantel, took the earl’s arm, and guided him, protesting, back to the wheelchair. “Stow it. Your fun is over.” He winked at Georgiana, who smiled back at him and preceded them to the door.

“It’s a plot,” the earl said, waving his cane as Nick pushed the chair past Georgiana. “What right have you to interfere, you lowborn sod? You intrude, sir. You have no call to intrude. I told you to leave her until she was a widow, now you’re acting the enraged bull.”

Georgiana’s hand was on the knob. She let it fall and put her back to the door. “What did you say?”

“Nothing important,” Nick said with a glare at the old man.

The earl cackled and banged his cane on the floor. “Think I don’t know what’s going on, my dear? I see the way he looks at you. A satyr amidst wood nymphs
couldn’t be more randy, and you flit and swish your backside at him like—”

“You quit flapping your rotten tongue,” Nick snarled.

“Oh, spare me your foolish sensibilities,” the earl said. “I told you I had no objections as long as you observed the proprieties.”

Georgiana’s hand clenched against the stiffness of her bodice. “Dear heaven, you’ve discussed me between you. You’ve decided how to hand me about, how to share me, like some prize mare.”

“Now, don’t come all atwitter, my dear,” the earl said. He reached out and patted her hand. “You understand how these things work. Once married and a widow, a woman becomes, shall we say, available. It’s all to her own good. What’s the use of drying up and blowing away from being unfulfilled?”

Nick’s voice was silky. “Why, you bloody-minded old carp. If you weren’t ancient and frail, I’d slit your gullet and leave you to bleed your life away.”

Georgiana felt sick. Her head throbbed, and she couldn’t escape imagining the scene that must have taken place between the earl and Nick. Had the earl offered her, or had Nick asked to be allowed first claim? It was all rather too much like what she’d always speculated happened in brothels. Customers lined up; the first to come had the first turn with a woman. Nausea churned in her stomach. Her stays threatened to suffocate her.

“It wasn’t like that, love.”

She jumped at hearing Nick’s voice. He was at her side, his hand sliding around her waist. She cast it off with a quiet little shriek and yanked open the door. Before he could move, she rushed out and
slammed it after her. Bursting into a run, she hurtled across the saloon, up the stairs, and into her room. There she shoved a bureau in front of the door to keep Nick from stealing inside.

Out of breath, eyes blurred with tears, she heard a knock. Nick called her name gently. Backing away from the door, she covered her ears against that velvet sound. Soon the knocking turned to pounding. Tears slid down her cheeks, and she pressed her hands tighter against her ears. She could still hear him, still imagine his tall, muscled body straining against the door. Uttering a gasp and a sob, she rushed across the sitting room and down the short hall to the cabinet.

She shut herself in and turned the key in the lock. Slowly she uncovered her ears. The pounding was faint, hardly perceptible, thanks to eighteenth-century workmanship. In the darkness she fumbled for the drapes and uncovered a window to let in the moonlight. Then she retreated to a corner farthest away from the sitting room, sank to the floor, and cried.

The cabinet had been designed as a sort of treasure room, an elegant little chamber with plastered and paneled nooks in which were set paintings by Reynolds, Titian, and Rembrandt. Delicate Louis XIV chairs were scattered about, and there was a gilt-and-red-painted marquetry chest filled with oddities collected by various Hyde ladies—a wig said to have belonged to Charles II, one of Elizabeth I’s prayer books, a gilded silver ice pail born by Tritons and topped by a Venus. In the midst of these beauties and curiosities, Georgiana Marshal wept.

She cried so hard, her stays creaked. Crouched in the billowing circle of her skirts, petticoat, and crinoline, she at first failed to perceive the discomfort her position caused. Finally, however, her tears ebbed, and she grew conscious of bone pressing into her ribs, of not being able to draw a full breath, and of sweltering amid mountains of heavy cloth. She found her kerchief tucked into the sleeve of her glove and
dabbed her eyes. Straightening from her hunched posture gave some relief.

She still could hardly bear thinking about Nick asking to be first in line for her favors, of his staking a claim with Threshfield. What was worse, after she’d stopped crying so hard, she had slowly realized she wouldn’t be so upset if she hadn’t fallen in love with Nicholas Ross.

Then she began to understand how he had brought spark and fire into her life. What had she been but a porcelain figurine, pure, gleaming Meissen on a shelf, untouched, oblivious to the bone-wrenching turmoil of desire and love. Her brief attraction to Silverstone had been too superficial to compare with what she felt for Nick. At heart she’d still been a majestic but merely decorative ornament to her aristocratic world. Hardly alive and in need of quickening.

Yet over the past few days Nick had burst into her life, with his scorn for falsehood and pretension, and provoked a cleansing storm. He blew gale winds of irreverence at her that tossed aside the rules and conventions behind which she sheltered for protection.

He’d refused to be intimidated by regal dignity. Nick Ross waded through proscriptions and sacrosanct tenets of civilized society as if they were stands of rotting grass. And he’d been more real, more alive, than a hundred pampered scions of the nobility.

Slowly, without thinking about it, she had succumbed to the allure of his independent, rebellious nature. Unbound by convention, he had dared her to live. True, he was interested in art, literature, civility, but for the quality these things brought to his existence, not because they would improve his social position.
But these refinements masked a ruthlessness the depth of which she hadn’t suspected. He had provoked her to abandon all propriety, all honor—for his own selfish purpose.

Now she understood why Nick pulled away when it seemed they would both succumb to passion. He’d taken heed of her sketch of Society and its arrangements for the sexual entertainment of married women. She had outright told him he could wait a few months and have what he wanted without the risks that came with seducing a duke’s daughter. She’d been more than a fool. She’d been stupid.

And it was too late for wisdom, because, despite his ruthless manipulation, she couldn’t seem to kill her desire for Nicholas Ross. Nor could she murder her love for him. She loved his bravery, his impudent humor, his championing of misused children with her brother, and most of all his emancipation from the iron rule of Society. He had done what she wished to do, what she would do.