The Scandal Before Christmas (4 page)

It was not news, this assessment of her timidity, but no one had ever forced her to acknowledge this truth. Within the busy confines of her mind, she had merely thought of herself as private. Deeply, persistently private. And perhaps secretive.

But she could no longer be secretive—not if she were to be married. Here was her chance standing before her—the only chance that fate had ever been kind enough to drop into the sand in front of her—to become a new version of herself.

“No.” She forced the words over the hammering of her heart. “I sometimes have difficulty in speaking. But I will overcome it.”

“I don’t mind if you’re shy. I’m not.” The lieutenant observed pleasantly. “As I said, I’m … Well, whatever I am, I’m not shy.”

“No.” Another whispered, astonished agreement. But it was impossible for her not to agree with such self-deprecating openness.

He turned from the sea, moving a step away, and then back, looking about in a rather restless fashion, as if he found it as much of a trial to keep still as she did to keep busy. He gestured back the way they had come down from the house. “So this is my home, Gull Cottage. It is, of course, much prettier in the spring. The wood above is full of daffodils and such.”

“Yes. But I like it as it is now.” She tried to speak normally, as other people did, but her voice was still barely a whisper, because he had to bend his head down to hear her before he straightened back up.

“Do you? I’m very glad to hear that. Because if you like it now, at its worst—well, let’s say ‘less than best’—you’re sure to love it the rest of the year.” He gifted her with another dazzling smile, all shining white teeth and charming, crinkled blue eyes. “And I’m sure the house would look all the more charming if you wanted to take your hand to it. Spruce it up for Christmas or some such.”

As if he thought she would be staying all the way until the feast of Christmas. And beyond. As if he thought they should be married.

Oh, Lord help her, but he was handsome. As handsome as they came. Too handsome for his own good. Far too handsome for
her
good.

He was all shining, bright blue eyes and gleaming mahogany hair that curled across his forehead just so, as if he had only a moment ago risen from his valet’s chair. But he hadn’t. The wind was buffeting them both, but it only made him appear more tousled, and effortlessly handsome. And only served to make her feel even more like that small, insignificant brown wren he had named her.

Anne felt the return of all her insecurity and insignificance. Heat gathered at the back of her throat, and prickled behind her eyes. She turned to walk on, away from him, completely flustered by his appearance and flummoxed by his attention.

But he fell into step beside her. “I hope you don’t mind if I join you?” He carried on pleasantly, as though she had answered. As if he were actually interested in their one-sided conversation. As if he didn’t think her dull as dingy dishwater.

He forestalled her descent into helpless, frustrated rage with more of his strangely cheerful honesty. “I am sorry if my thoughtlessness drove you from the house.”

“No,” she lied before she made herself stop, and pause to gulp down another dose of new-found courage. “Yes. I needed the air. After the carriage and…” Her voice strangled away into nothingness.

“Can’t abide closed carriage rides myself,” he rambled on, easy and breezy—her complete opposite in every manner and way. “I’d much rather be out-of-doors, sailing, riding, or driving. But I didn’t suppose ladies felt that way.” He smiled again with the air of someone comfortably sure of his charm.

“No!” she breathed, determined to resist his charm, and determined to assert herself. “I much prefer the air. I rode up top with the coachman when I could.”

Let him make of that what he would. But when she peeked up at him to gauge the effect of such an opposition to his ideas, she was astonished to find him still smiling down at her with that amused, charming smile.

“Did you?” he asked, with the same easy grin. “Well, we’ve plenty of air here at Gull Cottage. Have you visited the seaside before?”

Anne shook her head. “No.”

But she couldn’t go on giving only the briefest of answers. She knew that she needed to exert herself, and actually add to the conversation—entertain him. And because he was so tall and gleaming and worldly and sophisticated, despite her self-admonitions, she could not bear to have him think she was a graceless simpleton as well as provincial. So she ignored the hammering in her chest and admitted, “I have never been from home, from Somerset, before.”

“And I have been to the ends of the earth, and I can assure you that this stretch of beach is one of the prettiest places on all the globe.” He smiled again as he said it, and gestured around. “And I like to think that Gull Cottage is rather pretty itself. What do you think of it so far?” He turned the invitation of his easy grin and twinkling eyes toward her.

She ducked her head away from his almost overwhelming glamour. “I find it very pretty, sir,” she said, and then, unaccountably she blurted, “I like to walk.”

“Do you?” he asked in that strange, amused manner that didn’t seem to need any response. “Well, I daresay there are any number of picturesque walks hereabouts. I haven’t walked much myself. Do you ride?”

“Yes, sir.” She was a country girl, and every country girl with some pretension to gentility could ride. Did he still think her simple? Or too awkward and ungainly for such sport?

She could find no answer in his response. “Mmm,” he mused. “But you didn’t bring a horse?”

“No, sir. My sisters and I shared.”

“Ah. Yes, of course. And what about sailing? I have a small ketch—very small mind you—that I use to sail to Portsmouth and back.”

“I’ve never been in a boat, sir. Except a rowboat once. On the River Parrett. Near home. In Bridgwater.” But Anne didn’t think a drifty little rowboat would count with a seagoing navy man like the lieutenant.

“Do you think you should like to learn?”

She glanced up at him, and noted that although he smiled, he appeared to be serious enough. Though why he should ask, she had no idea, except that perhaps, just perhaps, he was trying to hold out a sort of olive branch. An olive branch she could ill afford to refuse. “Yes, I should like to try it sometime, sir.”

“Look.” He stopped, and stepped directly in front of her. His blue eyes were a stunning, exact amalgamation of sea and sky.

He reached out, and laid his hand to her elbow. The press of his bare fingers through the stout wool of her cloak was a jolt of something new and entirely different that made her breath seize up in her chest.

“I know it’s not the done thing,” he was saying, “but do you think, given the circumstances, that you could stop calling me ‘sir’? You make me feel quite ancient, like my father.”

“No.” There wasn’t an ancient thing about him, a foot away from her and towering over her like a tall yew tree.

“No? Do I overstep the proprieties? But see here, Miss Lesley, I’m not one for flummery. You do know why you’ve come, don’t you? To see if we can get on. To see if, despite everything I’ve said, we can be married. And made to become as one.”

Chapter Five

As one.

The words echoed down from her ears, through her chest and deep into her bones, until Anne felt her resolve begin to give way beneath the relentless sunniness of his smile.

“We are contemplating marriage, you know, Miss Lesley, not just a couple of country dances at an assembly. Some … informality is called for.” He smiled at her in a way that was probably meant to knock her knees out from under her—very slowly, with the corners of his mouth slowly curving upward until his eyes warmed. And just as slowly, his eyes dropped to stare at her bottom lip.

And despite herself, despite her determination
not
to be charmed, his smile made her insides turn little cartwheels of unbridled delight.

Informality is what he said, but
intimacy
was what he had meant. Anne knew it as plainly as if he had said it out loud, because she felt a shiver of something prickly and not altogether uncomfortable skitter down the length of her spine. Despite all his easy, almost boyish charm, he was clearly a man. A man who lived alone, said what he wished, did as he pleased, and arranged for a wife as casually as if he were buying a horse from the marketplace on a three-day trial.

“Forgive me.” The all-too-familiar admixture of indignation and embarrassment made her tone pert. “I will address you however you wish, sir.”

“Will you?” His smile spread wider, making his eyes crinkle in mischievous delight. “Good. But as you’re clearly loath to give up ‘sir,’ I’m going to make a bid
against
lieutenant, and
for
just plain Worth, if you can manage it. I can see that it will be quite some time before I can convince you to attempt ‘Ian.’”

This, then, must be his version of teasing. But was he was laughing at her as well? It was hard to tell from his steady smile. She had been acquainted with him for less than an hour, but it seemed to her that he smiled rather easily—as though his mouth were completely at home relaxing into a ready grin. As if he were quite
used
to being happy. As if he
expected
to be.

Anne didn’t know when she had last felt like that—happy. Or when she next expected to be. The anticipation of the journey there had only made her feel hopeful, however fleetingly. “Pray tell me, lieut— Pray tell me if what my father says is true … that you mean to return to the sea?”

“Yes. In three days’ time.” This time he looked much less sure of himself, those smiling blue eyes sobered with apprehension. “It is my intention to return to the sea, to my career in His Majesty’s Navy, if we marry—indeed, even if we do not. That is the life of every sailor. And every sailor’s wife. The colonel said he thought you would not mind. Would you? Do you think, even alone, you could be happy here?”

The admission was exactly what she wanted to hear—and everything that she had been too afraid to hope for. “Yes.” She
was
determined to be happy in her own way. She did not need to smile easily, or laugh out loud to be happy.

Yet it was seductive, his laughter—his breezy way of seeing the world.

But his breezy laughter and charm would wound her as easily as his careless words, were she not careful. So she would be careful. She would keep reminding herself that a man like him—a young man, handsome and carefree, and in possession of his own fortune—was only seeking her for a wife because he had no other choice. He was ready to marry her to suit his own ends, just as surely as she would marry him to suit hers.

The thought gave her something to use as a shield while he accompanied her in blessed silence on the rest of her walk down the cold, windswept beach; the only sound accompanying the wind was the simple rhythmic crunch of their boots in the ever shifting sand.

*   *   *

Miss Anne Lesley spoke only eight words at dinner. Ian counted.

God’s balls. If they continued to have this little to say to each other when their every topic of conversation was fresh and new, what on earth would they have to say years from now, when his store of suitable topics had already been canvassed? She had spoken with him this afternoon, although not quite easily, then at least clearly, but at dinner, she seemed to fade before his eyes. Whatever her declaration about overcoming her shyness on the beach, she had reverted to type in the presence of her parents.

Of course, it could have been the mother. The confounded woman nattered on endlessly, asking all sorts of inquisitive questions about the house and the income from the property. “And do you entertain often, Lieutenant Worth? Such lovely porcelain plates,” Mrs. Lesley praised in between bites. “I see that this dining room is large enough to accommodate a larger party. How many have you been able to seat here for an evening dinner?”

Ian was sorely tempted to shock the dear old biddy right out of her overstrained stays with an account of the long-ago night his friend Marcus Beecham, and half a dozen other assorted rogues and rascals, had turned this very dining room table into a live buffet of young, nubile opera dancers. The entire
corps de ballet
had been served up as hot, fresh, and steaming as any Christmas pudding.

Having fortified himself with ample whisky before dinner, and sufficient claret throughout, Ian had nearly persuaded himself to recount the whole of it, with special attention paid to the stout construction of the mahogany table. But that was also the very moment when the little brown wren chirped up.

“I understand you have traveled quite extensively, sir.”

Eight elegantly breathless words, all at once.

He rewarded her with an encouraging smile, and re-doubled his effort to be charming. “Hard not to in the navy. Isn’t that true, colonel? Well, let’s see. All over the coast of France and Spain—Brest, Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle. Beautiful and treacherous, the coast of France is, especially the Finistère, in Brittany. Then Lisbon, Cádiz, Cape Trafalgar, and Gibraltar—and into the Mediterranean in old
Audacious,
under Captain McAlden. But it was nothing compared to the lush green islands of the West Indies and the Bahamas, where I went on several cruises under Captain Colyear. Marvelous days, those. Do you remember, colonel, the night Will Jellicoe nearly set the old
Audacious
ablaze with his illicit fireworks? And when
she
caught fire as well, and Captain Col grabbed her up and went right over the side? Famous night.”

“Oh, my. I’m sure we ladies don’t want to hear such colorful tales,” Mrs. Lesley cautioned.

Ian thought differently. Ian thought the look on Miss Anne Lesley’s face—a narrowing frown above her wide, dark eyes, and the open “o” of her mouth when her mother interrupted his narrative—was surely disappointment. For a moment there, when he had leaned back in his chair and relaxed into telling her his tales, she had appeared almost animated—her dark eyes had sparked with keen curiosity as he had described the wonders of the wide, unseen world beyond her experience.