Wedding of the Season (18 page)

He stood up.

“Careful,” Julia admonished at his abrupt move. “You took quite a blow.”

“I’m all right.” He started toward the ladder.

“What are you going to do?” she called after him.

“Make things right,” he said over his shoulder. “If that’s possible.”

H
e found Beatrix on Angel’s Head. She had changed her clothes, donning a frock of marine blue that seemed brilliantly vibrant in the twilight. Her hat was in her hand, and as she stared out over the sea, the breeze stirred the wisps of gold hair at her temples.

She seemed lost in thought, and she didn’t notice his approach. When he was less than a dozen feet away, he stopped and gave a cough to draw her attention. She glanced in his direction, scowled, and immediately looked away again, staring out at the sea. “Leave me alone. If you don’t, I will find a pistol and cheerfully shoot you.”

Not an auspicious beginning for the purpose he had in mind, and though it was a fate he undoubtedly deserved, he hoped she didn’t really mean it. “Paul’s already hit me on your behalf. Is that good enough?”

“Hit you, did he? That explains why you look as if you have a toothache, but no, that’s not good enough. Go away.”

He ignored that. “Paul is quite the pugilist. Knocked me unconscious. I only tell you that to make you happy.”

She didn’t answer, but in profile, he saw her lips twitch just a little, and that gave him hope.

He came to stand in front of her, blocking her view, forcing himself into her line of vision because for what he wanted to say, he had to be able to look into her face. There was only one way to say something like this. He took a deep breath and said it. “I think we should get married.”

“What?” She blinked. She shook her head as if thinking she must have heard him wrong. “I beg your pardon?”

“I think we should get married.”

She scorned that suggestion with a snort, turned away, and started back toward the house. His voice called after her.

“I take it you don’t agree?”

She didn’t even bother to answer, and he started after her. “Look, Trix, I know I behaved abominably, but—”

“You won’t hear any argument from me on that score!” she interrupted, still striding toward the house.

“I have absolutely no defense to offer. I know I’ve wrecked your life again, and I’m more sorry than I can say, and I know an apology can’t make up for what I’ve done. Offering marriage is the only way I can think of to repair the damage I’ve caused.”

“Repair the damage?” She stopped so abruptly, he almost cannoned into her from behind. Without thinking, he brought his hands up, grasping her hips to steady them both, but the moment he did, he felt desire flaring up inside him again. Cursing himself, he jerked his hands down.

“Repair the damage?” she repeated again, her voice rising as she turned around to face him. “I am not a broken fence or a smashed motorcar! The damage you’ve done can’t be repaired.”

He could see tears glistening in those big brown eyes, making him feel like even more of a cur. “Christ Almighty, Trix, please don’t cry.”

“Why shouldn’t I? Would that make you feel bad? Would that be another burden on your conscience? Sorry, but your sense of guilt is not my problem.” Even as she spoke, she was blinking as if to keep the tears back. “And I won’t marry you. I don’t love you. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

“From your point of view, how valid an argument is that? You didn’t love Trathen, yet you were going to marry him.”

She made a sound of contempt through her teeth. “So you think you can just step into his shoes? You think I believe one groom is as good as another? I may not love Aidan, but I care for him a great deal. It could have grown into love, if you hadn’t come back and ruined everything.”

He rubbed his hands over his face, searching for something to say, but he couldn’t defend himself or his actions. “We had love once, Trix. We might be able to have it again.”

“I don’t want it again! Not with you. It took me five years to forget you. And then, just when I finally succeeded, you came back, caused my fiancé to break our engagement, and ruined my life for the second time. And you think stepping up and marrying me now will wipe the slate clean and make everything all right?”

“No, of course not, but marriage is all I have to offer you. And besides . . .” He paused, knowing he was about to skate out on the thin ice. “There’s still something between us, Trix. You can’t tell me you don’t feel it, too.”

“Oh, I feel something for you, Will,” she said, her voice deceptively sweet. “Indeed, I do. It’s called loathing.”

He must truly be an optimist, he decided, and an incurable one at that, because her words only served to send his hopes up a notch. “That’s a lie,” he said softly. “You don’t loathe me. You should, no doubt about it. You want to, because I deserve it. But you don’t. You’re too soft to hate anybody.”

Her narrowed eyes told him she didn’t think that was a compliment.

He tried another tactic. “When I kissed you, I know you were remembering how it used to be with us.”

She opened her mouth as if to deny it, but when she didn’t speak and tried to turn away instead, he grasped her arms and pushed his advantage. “See? You can’t deny it because that would be a lie, and you can’t lie worth toffee. You never could.”

She shrugged, trying to get him to let go. “Leave me alone.”

“Admit it, Trix. You felt the same desire I did. Even after six years, it’s still there.”

“Desire is not love!” she cried, wrenching free of his hold. “It’s not. You never loved me. If you did, you would never have left me in the first place!”

“And I could say that if you loved me,” he shot back, “you would have come with me instead of staying home.”

“Thank you for proving my point! We were never in love. “Now will you leave me alone?”

“No. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving you alone ever again. Instead, I’m going to win you back.”

“Win me back?” she echoed. “Good Lord, haven’t you done enough to torture me?”

“I can see I’m going to need to take a more romantic approach to this whole thing.” He drew a deep breath, grasped her hands, and dropped to one knee. “Marry me.”

Words failed her. She shook her head, staring down at him, feeling dazed, as if she were lost in some sort of strange dream. Maybe, like Alice, she’d gone down a rabbit hole or through a looking glass, because nothing, absolutely nothing, made sense anymore. Will was once again proposing marriage to her?

It wasn’t possible. It was as difficult to imagine as . . . as pigs taking flight. And yet this scenario was not new to her imagination. In fact she had envisioned it many times, secretly, in the back of her mind.

When he’d gone off to Egypt, she had run the gamut of emotions—disbelief, shock, rage, grief, hope, and many others. But there had also been times when she’d dared to think that he might, just might, come back, admit he was wrong, and grovel on his knees. She’d had plenty of daydreams about that, especially the groveling part. And though the details of this fantastic, impossible scenario had been different each time she’d imagined it, one thing had always remained the same—the pleasure and delight she felt whenever she imagined just how she would turn him down.

Never had she thought she would have the opportunity to actually do it.

Remembering all the times she’d dreamed of a moment such as this, Beatrix smiled and looked into the gorgeous green eyes she had once loved so much. “No,” she said, and found that word every bit as sweet in reality as it had always been in her imagination. “I will not marry you.”

“Beatrix—”

“You had your chance,” she cut him off, relishing each word. “And for you to come crawling back now—”

“Crawling?” That actually made him smile, the cad. He tilted his head to one side, slanting her a considering glance. “If I did crawl, would that persuade you to marry me?”

“No.”

“Not even if I did it on my belly? In the mud? In my best evening suit?”

She pressed her lips together and looked away, hating the fact that even in these ghastly circumstances, after he’d been a cad beyond belief, even now, he could still—almost—make her want to laugh. But when she spoke, her answer was firm and her will was resolute. “No.”

“I could beg, too,” he suggested, but when she shook her head, he stood up, relaxing his grip on her hands enough that she was able to pull free.

“I will never marry you,” she declared. “Not now, not ever. Not in a thousand years. Not for all the tea in China. Not,” she added, loving the act of refusing him too much to stop quite yet, “if you were the last man on earth.”

He studied her face for a moment. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” She widened her smile, savoring it. “I confess, I am.”

“You don’t encourage me to hope? That way,” he added as if being helpful, “you could increase my agony by suspense and enjoy it longer.”

“Hmm . . .” She paused, pretending to consider it. “That is a tempting thought,” she said after a moment, “but no. I am not encouraging you to hope.”

“I see.” He nodded, but if he was disappointed, he didn’t show it. “Then there’s only one thing I can do.”

She crossed her fingers. “Go back to Egypt?”

“No.” He gave her that wicked pirate smile. “Change your mind.”

Lifting her eyes heavenward in exasperation, she gave it up. She stepped around him, and as she continued toward the house, she wondered if Marlowe had a pistol anywhere in the house.

Chapter Eleven

W
ill studied her as she marched toward the house, her foamy white petticoats flouncing up from beneath the hem of her blue dress like stormy ocean waves, and he appreciated that winning her over was going to be a much harder, much more difficult task than it had been the first time around.

After all, by the time he’d proposed to her the first time, she’d already been in love with him most of her life. In fact, he couldn’t remember a time when Trix hadn’t been in love with him.

The door slammed behind her.

Until now.

He let out his breath in a sigh, staring at the closed door. He’d taken her love for granted back then, accepted it as an inalterable fact, something that would always be, like laws of physics or the opening of Parliament. Even after he’d read that she was marrying someone else, he still hadn’t quite believed it was possible. That, he realized, was the reason he’d kept her wedding announcement within easy reach for the past eight months. To help himself accept the impossible.

He’d taken her love for granted six years ago, and then he’d thrown it away as part of the rebellion that had caused him to go to Egypt in the first place. Barely twenty-three then, and already his whole life neatly laid out for him—estates, position, beautiful, adoring girl all handed over easy as could be, when he’d done absolutely nothing to earn them.

He thought of Beatrix’s angry eyes and wounded heart, and he knew that this time around, at least when it came to winning the beautiful girl, nothing was going to be easy.

M
uch to her consternation, Beatrix found her enjoyment at Will’s expense rather short-lived. She was passing the drawing room on her way to the stairs when Aunt Eugenia’s voice called to her. “Beatrix? Darling, come in here.”

She stopped with a grimace. After the fuss Eugenia had made a short time ago about the breaking of her engagement to Aidan, the last thing Beatrix wanted was another round of Auntie’s tearful theatrics. Still, there was nothing for it. She’d been seen.

Reluctantly she backed up a few steps to the drawing room, where Eugenia was gathered with Marlowe’s mother, Louisa; his grandmother, Antonia; and Lady Debenham. They were already dressed for dinner, sipping glasses of sherry and—undoubtedly—speculating about what could have prompted Beatrix and Aidan to part.

“Yes, Auntie?” she asked, bracing herself for another discussion of how they would have to explain this to all their friends, and how there would be gossip about it that would go on for months, and how Eugenia had never thought she’d live to see the day when a relation of hers would break not one, but two engagements, and how she’d never seen any woman of her acquaintance manage to be both jilted and jilt in a single lifetime.

To her surprise, however, Eugenia seemed to have recovered from her earlier woeful shock. In fact, at the sight of Beatrix in the doorway, she actually smiled.

“My dear, dear niece!” Setting aside her teacup, Eugenia rose to her feet and came bustling forward, hands outstretched, looking inexplicably pleased about something. “Now I understand everything.”

Beatrix frowned. “You do?”

“Of course.” Eugenia clasped both her hands and leaned forward, kissing her astonished niece’s cheek. “Why didn’t you simply explain before how it was?”

She glanced past Eugenia, and the other ladies were smiling, too, looking at her indulgently. Even Antonia was beaming at her in uncharacteristically benign fashion. She gave them a polite but puzzled smile in return and murmured, “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Aunt.”

“Not that it’s precisely
comme il faut
,” Eugenia added with a tinkling little laugh.

“Most certainly not,” Antonia said, tapping her folded lorgnette against her knee for added emphasis. “Not at all.”

“But is it terribly romantic,” sighed Louisa. “Even you must admit that, Mama.”

“True,” Antonia conceded, expression softening again. “Very true.”

“Romantic?” Beatrix echoed, eyeing them all with doubt, feeling utterly at sea. What could be romantic about a second broken engagement? And how on earth had Eugenia’s complete turnaround on the subject come about in the space of half an hour? “I wouldn’t be inclined to view it as romantic myself,” she said. “Chaotic, perhaps. Difficult.”

Her adjectives were ignored.

“Romantic, yes,” Lady Debenham put in, “but still, the practical aspects must be considered.” She set down her cup and looked at Eugenia. “One can’t simply substitute one name for another and carry on, my dears. After all, some of their things have been monogrammed.”

Beatrix shook her head, certain she must be Alice, for this was beginning to seem eerily similar to the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

“I’m sure that Beatrix will manage to be very subtle in her explanations, and our friends will be understanding about it. They know Beatrix, after all.”

Beatrix grimaced at that, but Eugenia didn’t seem to notice. She sighed. “Oh, dear niece, to think that he’s loved you all this time, suffering from afar, and that only now, after your engagement to Trathen has been broken and Trathen has left, has he felt free to speak—”

“Auntie,” she cut in on this lurid, utterly fictional account, “what are all of you talking about?”

Eugenia blinked at the blunt question. “Sunderland, of course. His proposal. We saw it all, my dear,” she added, waving toward the open window, “and we couldn’t be more thrilled. Though we were a bit surprised—”

“What?” Beatrix looked in the direction her aunt was pointing, and as she stared out the window to the clear, unobstructed view of Angel’s Head in the distance, comprehension came in a flash. She pressed her fingers to her forehead with a groan.

“We couldn’t hear your conversation from here, of course,” Eugenia went on, “but when we saw him fall to his knee, we understood everything. After all, first love is always the strongest.”

They all sighed.

Beatrix knew this muddle had to be dealt with at once. She lifted her head. “Aunt Eugenia, ladies . . .” She took a deep breath. “Will and I are not engaged.”

There was a stunned little silence in the wake of this announcement, then Eugenia spoke. “But Beatrix, we saw him fall to his knee. We saw him take your hands.”

“I know what you saw, and yes, Will did propose. But—” she added, interrupting a chorus of satisfied ahhhs, “all of you seem to have taken my acceptance of his proposal as inevitable.”

“Well, of course, darling,” Eugenia said, sounding surprised by her statement. “He is a duke.” As if that explained everything, she turned to the other ladies. “Could Beatrix and Sunderland keep the same date, do you think? So much simpler for our friends—”

“For the last time, Will and I are not engaged! I have refused him, and I will continue to refuse him until he gives up and goes away. There is no engagement, and there isn’t going to be a wedding!”

With that, she turned her back on four disappointed elderly faces and departed from the drawing room. “Heavens,” she added under her breath as she ran up the stairs. “I feel as if I’ve just told a group of two-year-olds there isn’t going to be a Christmas!”

“T
rix?” Julia’s voice came through her closed bedroom door, along with a soft knock. “Trix, dearest, are you in there?”

“Come in, Julie,” she called, rising from the bed as her cousin entered the room with her canvas bathing bag.

“Geoff asked me to bring your things up.” She paused, then gave Beatrix a rueful grin. “All right, I confess, I volunteered. I wanted to apologize. I was a beast earlier, and I’m sorry.” She tossed the canvas bag onto the bed and stuck out her hand. “Pax?”

Beatrix smiled a little at the word, their way of making up ever since their girlhood. She came forward and clasped Julia’s hand in hers. “Pax.”

They sank down onto the edge of the bed side by side. “Well,” Julia said after a moment of silence, “bit of a to-do, what?”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“If you’re worried that what happened might get about, don’t. None of us will say a thing about what we saw. We’ll all keep mum.”

“I know.” She paused, then added, “How did all of you come to be standing up there anyway?”

“When I drove back to the house, I ran into Paul and Aidan, who were just leaving to go for a walk. I gather they’d reached a sort of stalemate in their chess game—staring at the board for hours, you know—and decided a walk would clear their heads. Aidan asked where you were, and I said you were down at Phoebe’s Cove, and we decided to walk down and join you. None of us had any idea Will was down there.”

“Neither did I,” she added with a sigh. “You know Aidan and I have broken our engagement?”

Julia nodded. “After you went after Aidan, Paul marched down to have it out with Will. Hit him with a knockout blow.”

Beatrix smiled, thinking of Will’s swollen face and taking a great deal of satisfaction in it. “I’ll have to thank Paul for that.”

“Yes, well, after Paul went stomping off, I stayed behind. Someone had to. Will was unconscious, poor man. Lying in the sand, dead to the world, waves washing up only a foot away. If it had been high tide, he might have drowned.”

Beatrix gave a sniff, unimpressed.

“Anyway,” Julia went on, “we were still down there when Geoff came for your things and told us about you and Aidan calling things off. I’m sorry, darling.” She paused a moment. “Did Will . . . umm . . . say anything to you?”

“Oh yes. He said plenty of things, all of which were absurd.” She saw Julia waiting expectantly, and she gave a sigh. “Oh, you’ll hear about it soon enough, I suppose. He proposed.”

“I knew it!” Julia bounded up from the bed with a delighted squeal. “Why didn’t you say so straightaway? When’s the wedding?”

“You sound like Eugenia.” She rubbed a hand across her forehead irritably. “I refused him.”

“You did?”

“Of course I did! Why does that surprise everyone?” She jumped to her feet, feeling prickly as a chestnut. “Do all of you think I’m some sort of desperate, grasping spinster, ready to marry any man who comes along?”

Julia smiled at that, making her feel even more irritable. “Of course not, darling. But we aren’t talking about just any man. We’re talking about Will.”

“Exactly so. Will, the man who jilted me six years ago,” she reminded and began to pace, feeling her anger flaring back up. “The man who decided to come back after I was over him, the man who accosted me when I was alone and compromised me in front of my family and my fiancé, the man responsible for both of my broken engagements. Oh yes,” she added, halting to glare at Julia, “we are definitely talking about Will, because only Will could cause that much chaos in one woman’s life!”

She watched her cousin pressing her lips together as if to hide a smile. “Don’t you dare laugh!” she ordered and started pacing again. “This is not amusing. He said he wants to make things right between us. Can you believe it? As if that were possible.”

Julia settled back down on the edge of the bed. “You don’t believe him?”

“Of course I don’t! Why should I? He’s doing this to ease his conscience. Now that I’ve refused him, his conscience is clear and he can leave.”

“Ah, but what if he doesn’t leave? What if he doesn’t give up?”

Beatrix made a sound of derision, turned and started back across the room. “What do you mean? Of course he’ll give up. It only took three days of discussion on the issue for him to give up last time!”

“But what if he doesn’t? Would you give him a second chance?”

“He doesn’t deserve a second chance.”

“That’s rather ruthless, darling, and I might add, not at all like you.”

“Yes, I’m soft as butter, or so I’ve been told.” Beatrix set her jaw, remembering how Will had said she was too soft to hate anybody, but she disagreed. She hated him a great deal, actually. More important, she didn’t feel soft at all. Quite the opposite, in fact, for within her was a sense of resolve that was quite new to her—new, frightening, and curiously liberating. “I’m not being soft anymore,” she assured Julia. “From now on, I intend to be hard as nails, at least when it comes to that man.”

“Hard as nails, hmm?” Julia smiled. “Fair enough. But answer my question. What if Will doesn’t give up? What if he decides to stay and work to change your mind? Then what will you do?”

He’d threatened to do that very thing, but she wasn’t any more impressed by it now than she’d been before. She stopped pacing. “We are talking about Will,” she reminded. “Expecting that man to stick to his promises and act responsibly is more foolish than waiting for pigs to sprout wings.” When Julia continued to look at her as if waiting for a serious answer, she shrugged and gave it. “I’ll just refuse him again.”

“Yes,” Julia said, nodding as if that was the answer she’d been waiting for. “That would be the next move in the game, wouldn’t it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“How can I explain? You and Will are a bit like . . . like peas and carrots.”

She scowled, folding her arms. “More like oil and water.”

“Because you’re always quarreling? But my darling, you two like quarreling.”

“What?”