An Improper Proposal (38 page)

And then the tears did start up again. Dammit, and she’d thought she’d cried enough, this past week, to dry her tear ducts out. Apparently not. Apparently, there were still a few gallons or so left.

Sighing, Georgiana picked up the breakfast tray and left the room, taking care to look the door behind her, as her husband—rather unnecessarily, Georgiana thought—had ordered. There was a large balcony off Payton’s room, from which the girl could climb down any time she pleased without a bit of trouble, nimble as she was. So why bother looking her bedroom door? If she wanted to escape, she’d have done it already.

But Georgiana hadn’t bothered mentioning this to her husband. It would only cause him to board up the French doors to the balcony, which would quite destroy the charm of the house from the outside, and would inspire more gossip than the youngest Dixon had already managed to engender.

“Well?”

Georgiana nearly dropped the tray. But it was only Connor Drake, eagerly awaiting her reappearance in the breakfast room.

“Nothing’s changed,” Georgiana said, letting him take the tray. “She still won’t budge.”

“Did you show her my letters?”

“Of course I showed her your letters. She won’t touch them. I told you she wouldn’t.”

Georgiana didn’t like to disappoint the man, as he already looked quite wretched enough, with his split lip, and the jagged wound in his right eyebrow where her husband’s wedding ring had left a gash. Still, she thought him every bit as much to blame for the problem as Ross. After all, he ought to have been able to have restrained himself on that island. A gentleman always could.

“Why can’t I see her?” Drake spun around to face the men who would be his brothers-in-law. “Just let me go up there. I’ll be able to talk some sense into her.”

“No!” Ross pushed himself up from the chair in which he’d been lounging. “Gad, no. We can’t let her know we’ve forgiven you.”

“Speak for yourself,” Hudson grumbled, from the confines of his own chair.

Ignoring his brother, Ross went on. “If she thinks we’ve forgiven you, then she’ll never marry you.” Ross shook his head. “You have to understand the way a woman thinks, Drake. That’s your problem. You’ve never understood how they think.”

Georgiana had to bite the insides of her cheeks to keep from smiling at the thought of her husband pontificating on the intricacies of the feminine mind.

“What you ought to have done,” she said gently, “was forbid her from marrying Sir Connor. Angry with you as she is right now, Ross, she’d have found a way to elope with him at her earliest opportunity. The way you’ve got things, refusing to marry him is the only way she can think of to punish you.”

“Me?” Ross bleated. “What did I do?”

“Well, you are the one who beat her lover into a bloody pulp,” Raleigh reminded him, from the thick stone windowsill on which he lounged.

“Pardon me, Ral, but weren’t you standing right there alongside me? I saw you get in a good blow or two.”

“Right. But I didn’t enjoy doing it. I heartily dislike bloodshed.”

“That’s not why she’s angry with you,” Georgiana said.

“What do you mean, that’s not why?” Ross glanced sharply at his wife. “What else has she got to punish us for?”

Georgiana sighed. “Everything. The fact that your father’s business is called Dixon and Sons, instead of Dixon and Sons and Daughter. The fact that all of you encouraged her to shoot and climb and sail, then denied her the right to do those things. The fact that any of you, on that island, would have acted exactly as she did, and yet you feel the need to loc k her in her room for it.”

“That’s not why she’s locked in her room!” Ross bellowed. “She’s locked in her room because she won’t marry the blighter!”

“She didn’t eat.” Hudson was examining the tray Georgiana had brought down. “Look at this. She just moved the food around. She didn’t eat any of it. Why didn’t you make her eat, Georgiana?”

“I can’t force her to eat, Hudson.”

“She hasn’t eaten since she got here.” Hudson lifted a hand and dragged it through his disgracefully long hair. Really, as soon as Georgiana got a chance, she was going to go after that fellow with a pair of shears. “What does she plan on doing? Just wastin’ away? Is that the plan? To punish us all by starving herself to death?”

“Look,” Ross said, leaning forward. “This’ll all be over next month, after the trial. Once she’s testified—”

Georgiana sucked in her breath. “Must she? With as much publicity as all of this has already garnered, what with us thinking she was dead, and then finding out she wasn’t … Goodness, this will only make things worse. Wouldn’t Sir Connor’s testimony alone suffice?”

“No. For God’s sake, Georgiana, Marcus Tyler is standing trial for his life. He’s been accused of piracy, for which alone he could hang. But there’s also charges of abduction, attempted murder, and conspiring to kill Drake’s brother. Payton’s a key witness. Her testimony is crucial.”

“Still.” Georgiana shook her head. “I don’t like it. Payton isn’t at all … well, herself.”

“What do you mean?” Drake demanded sharply.

“Just that … well, I’ve never seen her like this. I hardly recognize her. You’ve kept her locked in that room for a week, Ross, and she hasn’t once tried to escape. The Payton I know would have broken out in half an hour, and then laughed in your face about it.”

Ross looked troubled. “You’re right. By God, you’re right!”

“I just find it very hard to believe that the girl who lived for a month aboard a pirate ship disguised in boy’s clothes and that girl upstairs weeping into her pillow are one and the same,” Georgiana said. “Why, she’s acting so strangely, I’d almost think—”

She broke off quickly. Good Lord, what was she saying? And in front of men, too! Why, she was turning into Payton, there was no doubt about it, since she felt comfortable enough to say these sort of things in mixed company.

“You’d almost think what, Georgie?” Ross asked curiously.

Georgiana knew she was opening and closing her mouth, rather like a fish with a hook through its jaw. But she couldn’t help it. Every time she thought of something to say, she realized she couldn’t, absolutely couldn’t, say it. She hadn’t any proof. And it wasn’t as if Payton had been ill. True, she wouldn’t eat, and she hadn’t tried to escape, but she had been through quite a traumatic experience, so that was only to be expected.

Or at least it would have been expected, in any other girl but Payton. Payton had always seemed to take traumatic experiences in stride, as if, for some reason, she believed they were her due.

“Well,” she said finally, aware that everyone in the room was staring at her expectedly. “I was just thinking that one explanation for her rather, er, uncharacteristic behavior—the not eating, and all the weeping, and the fact that she won’t see Drake—I mean, Sir Connor—and that she hasn’t tried to escape, might be that she’s, um …”

“She’s um what?” Ross shouted. “Out with it, woman! What is she?”

“Well,” Georgiana said, with a gulp. “Expecting.”

“Expecting what?” Ross had leaned forward in his chair, but now he threw himself back into it again, disgustedly. “An apology? Well, she’ll be waitin’ a long time for it. I’m not apologizin’ till she does. After all, nobody asked her to save Drake. He could have bloody well saved himself. He’s done it a thousand times before.”

“Um,” Georgiana said. “That wasn’t what I meant. I meant she might be expecting, um, a baby.”

Georgiana felt her cheeks turn crimson. She couldn’t believe she’d just said what she’d said. It was quite unheard of, speaking of such things in front of men, even if the men were family—well, for the most part, anyway. Heat was rising into her face, which was uncomfortable considering it was very hot in New Providence anyway, despite the wide-open seven-foot windows, and the thick stones the villa had been built with. If she didn’t have to keep discussing these embarrassing topics, she wouldn’t be half so hot.

“Expecting a baby?” Ross blurted out, after a moment’s silence, during which she’d heard, quite distinctly, the sound of the gardener outdoors, snipping away at the bougainvillea. “Payton?”

It irked Georgiana a little, that he should look so incredulous. Why, perhaps Payton had a point. They had treated her like a fourth brother her whole life, and now they expected her to behave like a dutiful sister. And yet whenever any sort of evidence arose that suggested Payton to be a member of the fairer sex, they still balked like donkeys.

“It would,” Georgiana said mildly, “be a natural consequence of what you yourself accused her of doing with Drake. I mean, Sir Connor.”

“But—” Ross looked about the room. She didn’t know what he was looking for, unless it was some sort of assurance that what she’d said couldn’t possibly be true. “But then why won’t she marry him?”

“Perhaps she doesn’t know it herself. I don’t know. I only suspected it this morning, when she still wouldn’t eat. It would explain her moodiness.”

“But not why she won’t marry him!” Ross thundered.

“But of course it does. Don’t you see? She told me she doesn’t want him to think of her as another Miss Whitby, whom he felt obligated to wed.”

“Miss Whitby?” Ross exploded. “Miss Whitby? Still Miss Whitby? When am I ever going to hear the end of Miss Bloody Whitby?”

“When she’s hanged?” Raleigh suggested.

“Drake,” Ross shouted, spinning around. “This is all your fault. I told you not to—”

But his voice trailed off, because Connor Drake had slipped from the room some time before.

They found him easily enough, however. His cursing could be heard all the way down the stairs, when, a few seconds later he opened the door to Payton’s bedchamber and found the room empty, the French doors to the balcony swaying lazily in the afternoon breeze.

Soon as Georgiana was gone, Payton lifted her face from the pillow she’d smashed it against. Really, she thought to herself. She was getting quite good with the theatrics. She was starting to be able to turn the tears on and off with an aplomb any actress would envy. Smiling bitterly, she pushed back the sheet that had been covering her.

She was, of course, fully clothed beneath it. While that in itself probably wouldn’t have startled her sister-in-law very much, the fact that the clothes Payton was wearing belonged to Georgiana might have caused her some consternation. Georgiana was generous to a fault when it came to lending personal belongings, but she might have asked why Payton felt compelled to borrow, of all things, her most voluminous pelisse. It fit Payton so ill that it made her look several stone heavier, and the train dragged rather more than was considered fashionable.

But all this was of course necessary, if the plan Payton had hatched during the night was to work.

It was not a p
a
rticularly good plan. It was certainly not one of her best. It did not offer a single solution to any of the myriad problems Payton had wakened that morning to face—for instance, the fact that her brothers were trying to force her to marry a man who had only just escaped a forced marriage to someone else. It was, however, the only problem Payton knew of that she had the wherewithal to solve. And since she could not solve her own problems, it struck her as advisable at least to try to solve someone else’s.

Scrambling from the bed, she went to reach behind a couch for a bonnet that she’d also taken from her sister-in-law’s room. Donning it, she tied the wide yellow ribbons very securely beneath her chin, then lowered the white muslin veil that hung from the silk band. It wasn’t impossible to see through the muslin, just not very easy, and Payton wondered why in the world any woman would consent to wear such a thing, except to ward off mosquitoes.

Still, she managed to find her way through the French doors to her balcony. It was only the work of a moment to swing her legs over the balustrade, then climb down the bougainvillea that grew so copiously alongside the villa. Her landing was not the most graceful, and gave her a bit of a jolt, but she soon recovered. She was not, she supposed, quite as young as she’d been the last time she’d jumped from this very same balcony. Not as young, nor anywhere near as innocent, either.

But despite her past innocence, Payton had always known her way around the teeming, pirate-infested town of Nassau. As a young girl, her main entertainment while in port in New Providence had been wandering about the docks, poking into crates containing cargoes from the holds of strange, foreign ships, listening to the far-fetched yarns the sailors tossed back and forth like India rubber balls, and generally getting herself into mischief. Which was how she knew, with perfect assuredness, the location of the Nassau jail, and how she ended up in front of it a mere ten minutes after leaving the confines of her brothers’ villa.

The jailers were enjoying their midday meal when Payton knocked. Every bit as hard-bitten as their prisoners—they had to be, otherwise, considering the kind of scum of humanity that ended up in the Nassau jail, outbreaks would have been the norm, rather than what they were, the exception—they did not take kindly to having been disturbed. But when they saw their visitor was a lady—and what’s more, the most famous lady in Nassau, the one who’d come back from the dead, and brought with her more than a hint of disrepute—they were a good deal more cordial.

And when the famous lady-who-was-no-longer-dead stated the purpose of her visit, they were downright courtly. The lady wished to visit a prisoner? But of course! The head jailer himself personally escorted Payton to the cell. Due to the special circumstances surrounding the prisoner Payton wished to visit, this personage had had to be housed not in the jailhouse proper, but next door, in the town stables. There had, of course, been considerable outcry that even this was not proper, but, as the head jailer explained to Payton, there was nowhere else to put this person … not unless the prisoner was housed in the jailer’s own home, and, as he joked, his wife had refused to allow it!

The stables did not seem too bad to Payton. They smelled a good deal better than the jailhouse, that was certain. And the faces that pressed against the bars in the windows, while just as hairy, were considerably friendlier. The guard who’d been posted outside the prisoner’s cell door was a pleasant fellow with impressive manners, who leapt up when she entered and gave a low bow, all before learning that she was the Honorable Miss Payton Dixon (“Yes,” her escort assured him, “the one what was thought dead.”)