The Captain's Christmas Bride (5 page)

‘We are both—’ he put in swiftly before floundering to a halt. He may not have come up with a story to satisfy the heart of a doting father, but he knew the truth wasn’t going to suffice. ‘That is, neither of us—that is—the truth is, sir, that...’

Actually, there could probably be only one excuse he could give that might, eventually, mollify an outraged father.

‘Our feelings for each other overwhelmed us.’

That eyebrow went up again. ‘Your feelings?’

‘Yes, sir. We got carried away.’ Well, that was certainly true. He couldn’t remember ever being so completely entranced by a woman. There had been nothing in his head but her. After all the months of oak and muscle and sinew, the sweetly scented softness of her body had been too alluring to resist. He hadn’t stopped to think. He’d just wanted to drown in the haven she offered. The heaven.

‘And when Lady Julia says it was her fault, she can only mean, of course, in permitting me to take her to a secluded spot when she knew it was not at all the thing. The blame for what happened afterward was entirely mine. As a man, an experienced man, I should not have let things go so far.’

‘And how far, exactly,’ said the old man in that cold, forbidding tone, ‘did things go?’

He felt Lady Julia flinch. He squeezed her hand again.

‘I regret to have to inform you, sir, that your daughter could be with child.’

The earl went very still. Not a single flicker of emotion appeared on his face. But in a voice that could have frozen the Thames, he said, ‘You have, in effect, left me with no choice.’

Chapter Three

W
ith child? Heavens, that possibility hadn’t even crossed Julia’s mind.

But of course, doing what they’d just done was obviously what started babies.

And just as obviously, she would have to marry the man who might have started one growing inside her. She simply couldn’t have a baby out of wedlock. She couldn’t do that to a child.

And no matter what she felt for the father, she would love her own child. She knew only too well how much a child could suffer because of what the parents felt about each other. She’d always known that the main reason her father hadn’t been able to warm to his first two sons was because they resembled their mother in looks.

The thought sent a fresh chill down her spine. Captain Dunbar was very, very angry with her. What if that anger never went away? What if the resentment he felt about having to marry her spilled over to their child?

‘It appears,’ her father continued, jerking her back to her present difficulties, ‘that my daughter has escaped the wiles of one fortune hunter only to fall into the clutches of another.’

* * *

Alec’s stomach turned over, as her father brought that aspect of the case to his attention. Not only was he going to be saddled with a wife, he was also going to be accused of marrying her for her money. Like father, like son, they’d say. When he’d worked so hard, for so long, to prove he wasn’t that kind of man at all. Damn the chit!

‘No, Papa!’ Lady Julia took a step forward, as though attempting to defend him from the invisible darts her father was shooting his way. ‘I told you it was my fault. Entirely my fault. He didn’t even know it was
me
in the orangery. Just look at the way I’m dressed.’

‘Eh?’ The earl stopped trying to send Alec to the coldest reaches of hell by sheer force of will, and turned to look at his daughter.

‘He thought I was the Neapolitan Nightingale. I... I deliberately deceived him and lured him out there...’

‘You did what? Why?’

‘Well...’ She swallowed and then started gazing frantically along the rows of books on the shelves, as though she might find inspiration amongst the stiff leather spines.

Yes, what excuse could she possibly come up with to explain this evening’s fantastic sequence of events? Without, that is, confessing the whole truth, which would land her friends in the very trouble she’d already declared she wanted to spare them.

Or laying the entire blame upon his shoulders, which it looked as though she was equally reluctant to do. Which came as quite a surprise. He would have thought she’d have been only too willing to throw him to the lions. Instead, she’d drawn the earl’s fire down on herself. Although from the look on her face now, she hadn’t really thought it through. She’d acted on impulse. And backed herself into a corner.

Alec supposed he had to give her credit for speaking up in his defence. He hadn’t expected her to demonstrate the slightest shred of honour over this affair, not given the way it had come about.

‘Don’t say another word,’ he advised her. He’d come in here seething with resentment at the way she’d trapped him. But she’d drawn the line at letting her father think he was a fortune hunter as well as a despoiler of innocence. It would cost him nothing to return the favour.

Besides, he could see she was floundering in a welter of equally unpalatable choices. Whatever lie she might choose to tell her father next was only likely to plunge them both into even deeper water. And he was used to thinking on his feet. Alec knew, only too well, that no matter how meticulously you planned an assault, something always cropped up that you couldn’t possibly have foreseen. The success or failure of many a mission had depended on his ability to adapt to such new challenges.

‘My lord,’ he said, turning to her father, ‘I am sure your daughter did not know what she was doing. She is so naïve—’

‘No, I won’t have you taking the blame, and everyone saying you are a fortune hunter when it is no such thing,’ she cut in, hotly. ‘I may not have planned for things to go so far, but—’ She broke off, blushing. ‘Papa—you...you saw how he was with all the ladies. So curt. So dismissive. How he refused to take any notice of me at all.’

The old earl’s wintry gaze turned on her. He regarded her coldly for some moments. ‘I have spoiled you,’ he said. ‘You saw a man who wouldn’t pay court to you, and decided you must have him, by hook or by crook.’

It hadn’t been like that. It hadn’t been the least like that. She had detested him.

So why was she implying that it was? Why was she willing to shoulder the blame herself? She could easily have painted him as the very sort of opportunistic fortune hunter her father had taken him for. Instead, she was clearing his name.

And he couldn’t even contradict her story, not without exposing what she’d really been up to out there... Ah! So that was it. A matter of saving face. She’d rather her father think
he
was the man she’d wanted to seduce all along, than for him to know how very far her true plans had gone awry.

He gave a sort of mental shrug. If that was the way she wanted to play it—fine.

‘Well,’ said the earl with weary resignation. ‘At least this one is an improvement on the last fellow you fancied yourself in love with. At least nobody will blink at the connection. Only the manner by which it came about.’

‘Yes, Papa. He is the Earl of Auchentay, as well as being a naval captain, is he not? And you always did say I should marry within my own class.’

‘The title is hollow, sir,’ he felt duty bound to point out. ‘My lands are mortgaged—’

‘But still in your possession?’

‘Aye, but not likely to bring in any revenue, beyond what I get for renting the house and land. Which isn’t very good land, either.’

‘You won’t be needing the rent so very much now you are marrying into my family. Julia’s dowry will enable you to buy half-a-dozen Scottish properties, I dare say, if you had a hankering for them.’

‘I’ll not be squandering your daughter’s money on foolishness of that sort,’ he said testily. A man should take care of his womenfolk, not marry them for their dowry then fritter it away. Making free with his wife’s money would smack too much of what his father had done—marrying an heiress then gambling away her entire fortune. Something he’d sworn he’d never do.

Not that lifting the mortgages would be a bad thing, if he could do it.

And he would like to improve conditions for his tenants, too. But...

‘I had no thought of that when we—that is when I—’

The earl held up his hand in a peremptory gesture. ‘Spare me the details of what you were, or were not, thinking when she took you out to the orangery.’

‘Aye, sir.’ For the first time that night, he felt his cheeks heat in a flare of embarrassment. He’d been too long at sea, too long without a woman to have been thinking of anything but the glorious release the siren in the blue-silk gown had appeared to be offering. He just wasn’t used to being surrounded by so many females, all revealing so much flesh. There’d been nothing but delicate arms, and slender necks, and tantalising bosoms wherever he’d looked, ever since he’d arrived. And all of them belonging to gently reared girls who were out of bounds. He’d been so frustrated, what with one thing and another, that by the time a mature, available woman—or so he’d believed—had offered him the opportunity to do something about it, he hadn’t stopped to think.

He’d just followed her out to the orangery like a lamb to the slaughter.

‘Whig, I suppose, are you? Like so many of your countrymen?’

‘Aye, but—’

‘Good, good. You’ll be taking up your seat in the House, in due course. When you do, it may interest you to know I have the ear of—’

‘No. My lord, it is very good of you to take a concern in my future, but I must tell you right now I have no head for politicking.’

‘Then what do you plan to do, now the war is over? England doesn’t need so many ships. Nor so many captains. Do you intend to return to your ancestral lands and take up the reins of estate management?’

Alec hadn’t thought about it. He’d still been in the process of gutting his last ship when he’d received that letter from Lizzie which had brought him hotfoot to Ness Hall. Getting married and restoring his ancestral home had been the last thing on his mind.

‘You didn’t expect to be pressed into marriage, did you, by Gad!’

It was as if Lord Mountnessing had read his mind. Not only that, but his cold expression had melted into something approaching sympathy, the words sounding downright apologetic. Having given them both a hearing, he’d clearly decided to blame his headstrong daughter.

And it
was
her fault.
All
her fault.

Yet he couldn’t just stand here and let her take all the blame. It wouldn’t be the act of a gentleman.

‘I did not, no, but I can only say what I always say to men pressed into the Navy. This is my life now. No point in complaining. Just have to make the best of it.’

He felt her stiffen at his side. Probably in outrage that he should speak of making the best of marriage, when she must consider it ten times the disaster he did.

‘Quite so,’ said the earl drily. ‘Julia—’ he turned to his daughter ‘—I need to speak with Captain Lord Dunbar in private.’

‘Oh, no, Papa—’

‘Oh, but, yes, my girl,’ said the earl firmly. ‘You need not fear I am about to tear the poor fellow to shreds. But we do need to deal with all the dull, legal matters with our lawyers. Settlements, and so forth.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘But nothing. I am too disappointed in you to bear looking at you tonight. Tomorrow, when I have come to terms with your behaviour, you may say whatever you wish. I dare say I shall even be able to consider forgiving you once my anger has cooled.’

‘Thank you, Papa,’ she said in a small, penitent voice. He glanced sideways at her downbent head. If he were a doting father, her pose would have wrung his withers.

As he was not, it made him want to wring her neck.

‘We will announce your engagement tomorrow, at the Hunt Ball,’ Lord Mountnessing continued. ‘Too many people saw you coming in from the garden in a state of disarray for us to prevent gossip. But at least we can turn it into the kind that nobody will very much mind. And then everyone can attend your wedding before they return home. We can fit most of them into the chapel. We even have a bishop on hand to perform the ceremony—’

‘Uncle Algernon?’ Lady Julia’s head shot up, and she wrinkled her nose.

‘And there will be no problem procuring a licence. So we can hold the wedding the day after tomorrow.’

‘Oh, but—’

He turned a wintry stare on his daughter. ‘If you are going to say something about not having time to shop for bride clothes, or anything of that nature, then I have to tell you, my girl, that you should have thought of that before you dressed up like a trollop and all but ruined a man who has so far served his country in a brave and commendable fashion.’

Nothing commendable about deflowering his host’s daughter though, was there? Angry with her though he was, still it rankled to hear the man scold her, in his hearing, whilst remaining silent in regard to his own conduct. He’d rather the man had ordered him flogged.

For Lord Mountnessing had been a remarkably generous and understanding host. He hadn’t batted an eyelid when he’d shown up two days ago without an invitation, demanding to see his sister. Instead, after hearing a brief, and strategically censored, version of what had brought him here, Lord Mountnessing had told him he was welcome to stay for as long as he needed, to get the business with the wayward girl settled to his satisfaction. True, he’d then proceeded to serve him up as a sort of after-dinner entertainment to stimulate the jaded palates of the lords, poets, and bishops already
in situ
. Nothing like having a serving naval officer, who could provide eyewitness accounts of battles they’d only been able to read about in the papers before.

Though he found it hard to speak about his part in any of the actions in which he’d been involved, he felt he owed it to his host to repay his hospitality by at least answering any question put to him as honestly as he was able. And so, each evening after dinner, when the ladies withdrew, Alec had rendered accounts of various engagements in which he’d fought, drawn verbal sketches of the more famous among the officers with whom he’d served, and attempted descriptions of the various countries where he’d dropped anchor.

It generally ended in them all raising their glasses to him. Which he’d hated. His answering toast had always been to all the other gallant officers and men who’d served with him. Aye, and died, too, in defence of their country. Though the memory of all the friends he’d lost over the years wasn’t all that left a bitter taste in his mouth. It was the fact that these pampered, soft gentlemen felt a sort of patriotic glow from just drinking a toast to the men who’d actually gone out and done the dirty work. That they felt a part of an action they’d never seen, just because he’d told them about it. And though possibly one or two of them might have followed the course of the war against France, the general level of ignorance of the others had been hard to stomach.

They hadn’t cared, not really, that men like him had spent their entire adult life fighting so that they could lounge about their clubs and country estates, secure from threat of invasion.

‘I shall do all in my power,’ said Lord Mountnessing, now, to his daughter, ‘to prevent any slur being cast upon his name because of this. And you will do the same, d’ye hear me?’

She hung her head again. And in a small, chastened voice, a voice that might have fooled him had he not known how many lies she’d told this evening, said, ‘Yes, Papa.’

* * *

One good thing about having been at war for most of his adult life was that Alec was used to surprise attacks from the enemy. Not that Lady Julia was his enemy, but she’d certainly surprised him. Which meant he’d had to come up with a strategy to deal with the new tack on which he was going to have to steer his life. He’d spoken the truth last night when he’d said that, like a press-ganged man, there was no point in struggling against the inevitable. Marriage, like life on board ship, would depend a great deal upon how a man went about it. So the question was, what did he want from marriage?