Lord of the Rakes (32 page)

B
y the simple expedient of driving like a madman, Philip was already waiting on the steps of the Crowne Hotel by the time Jarrett Delamarre, Earl Keenesford, emerged from his mud-spattered, old-fashioned traveling carriage. The man was so busy giving detailed instructions to his driver and postilions, he didn’t even see Philip at first. When Keenesford started up the stairs, he kept his eyes rigidly ahead, looking for all the world like a man praying he could get off the street before he was noticed.

“Lord Keenesford,” said Philip quietly.

The earl’s head jerked around. Philip held himself very still. Caroline’s brother was not a large man, and he might not be physically adroit, but he was dangerous all the same.

“I have nothing to say to you.” Keenesford started up the steps again.

“I think you do,” replied Philip. “As regards your sister.”

Keenesford eyed the doors in front of him, and the street behind him. His face had turned entirely white. Even his lips had taken on a pallid gray tone. “You can have nothing to tell me about her that I do not already know.”

Philip took one step forward, very careful to keep his hands at his sides. “Actually, I think there is a great deal you don’t know, about your sister, and about yourself.”

The corner of Keenesford’s pale mouth twitched, but there was a look close to panic in his watery eyes. “You are not only reprehensible, sir, you are delusional.”

In return, Philip shrugged in the approved French style. “As I realize we are neither of us at our best, I will let that pass. I’d like to offer you a proposition, Lord Keenesford. Come with me now, to hear an explanation of the circumstances of your parents’ . . . situation. I believe this will offer you an understanding of what brought you and Lady Caroline to your impasse. Once the secret is broken open, you will perhaps be able to make your peace with her.”

“What gives you the right to interfere with my personal business, sir?”

“Because I love your sister, and I intend to marry her.”

Jarrett stared. Philip had never actually seen the shade referred to as “white as a sheet” on the face of a living man, but he was looking at it now. “Even were I to believe you to be serious”—Jarrett’s voice was low and trembling with fury—“nothing could induce me to hand over my sister’s fortune to a man such as you.”

“I will let that pass as well, although I think it’s better you said it to me than to Lady Caroline. I ask you again, will you come hear what’s to be said? For the sake of your own peace of mind as well as hers?”

“You can have nothing to say that will change my mind. You are the worst kind of rogue and I reject any proposal you might have out of hand. Now, sir, you will get out of my way.”

Philip sighed. “No, sir. I won’t.”

His punch landed squarely on Jarrett’s jaw before the other man could move.

Jarrett crumpled into Philip’s arms. The bystanders were staring. Fortunately, Philip had his own man standing ready, and they scooped Jarrett up quickly and placed him in his phaeton. Philip swung himself up into the driver’s seat and cracked the whip over the horses’ heads as the shouts and cries started up on the street behind him.

 • • • 

Keenesford was awake by the time Philip pulled up in front of Aunt Judith’s and handed his man the reins. Fortunately, it soon became clear the earl had not been in the company of as many belligerently drunken companions as Philip had. The man had not the least idea how to struggle effectively as Philip wrestled his arms behind him and forced him up the stairs.

Unfortunately, he did have his voice back.

“What are you doing! Unhand me! Let me go, dammit!” Keenesford then added a string of profanities Philip was fairly sure he would later deny even knowing.

With such an entrance, Philip couldn’t blame Aunt Judith’s man Levett for staring, openmouthed. Philip wrestled the outraged earl across his aunt’s tiled foyer. Rather vaguely, he heard laughter and conversation breaking off in her large, closed drawing room. It occurred to Philip, belatedly, that it was Wednesday, and Aunt Judith’s salon would be under way.

Can’t be helped.
Philip shoved Keenesford through the study door and drew it swiftly shut. The earl immediately started pounding on the other side, demanding exit in a highly colorful manner.

“The keys, Levett!” called Philip.

The ingrained habits of a lifetime made the man pull the ring from his chain and hand the house keys across. Swiftly Philip locked the study door. Keenesford must have at least heard the sound of the latch snapping shut, because the pounding from the other side abruptly ceased.

“Philip Armonde Montcalm.” Aunt Judith’s cold, clear voice rang through the foyer. “What on
earth
is all this?”

Philip turned to Levett. “Thank you,” he said as he returned the keys. Only then did he face his aunt.

Aunt Judith stood on the threshold of her drawing room, dramatically holding the double doors open. She looked entirely resplendent in a grand dress of indigo blue with trimmings of black lace and jet beads, not to mention entirely formidable.

“What are you doing?” she inquired. “And what is that atrocious noise?”

Philip bowed to his aunt with all the formality at his command. “That’s Lord Jarrett Delamarre, Earl Keenesford, and he is an atrocious noise. At the moment he’s also locked into your study.”

Aunt Judith drew herself up to her grandest height and folded her hands in front of her. “The expected form here is to inquire whether you have lost your mind, but I think we can take that as read. I will, however, ask why have you chosen my private room as a prison for a peer of the realm?”

“Because you are the one person I know who will keep him there until his sister arrives.”

It took a moment, but Judith was able to make all the necessary connections, as he had been confident she could. “His sister would be your Lady Caroline?”

“She is not my Lady Caroline,” he said, and the pain that came with this admission burned with the bitterest fire. “Which is entirely my fault.”

“Of this I have no doubt. Did she authorize this astounding imprudence?”

“No. But I am hoping she will shortly arrive to alleviate the situation.”

“You could not simply have invited them both to luncheon at your rooms?” asked Aunt Judith drily. Jarrett had begun pounding again, and rattling the knob for good measure.

“She would not have come.”

“Why?”

“Because that atrocious noise threatened to lock her in the madhouse if she did not marry one Lewis Banbridge.”

At this, Aunt Judith fell silent for a full five seconds.

“And when you have successfully achieved what I have no doubt will be a touching family reunion in
my
private study, then what?”

“Then, my very dear aunt Judith, I will need you to tell both of them everything you know about what happened between their mother and father.”

Again, Aunt Judith lapsed into thoughtful silence. At last, she sighed, and nodded. “I begin to comprehend. Well. I promise you, Philip, if your noble abductee thinks to smash out a window and shout down into the street, I shall be sending you the glazier’s bill.”

A rail-thin, dark-haired man with an untidy cravat and a coat that had surely been the height of fashion during the reign of some previous king sauntered out of the drawing room.

“Everything all right, Judith?” The untidy man lifted his quizzing glass to better inspect the scene. “Oh, hello, Montcalm.” Philip bowed in silent acknowledgment, entirely unable to remember the fellow’s name.

Aunt Judith turned, and laid on her most charming smile. “Oh, it’s all fine. Just a little sport between club members. I am given to understand there is some sort of wager involved. Honestly, I don’t know what’s gotten into our young men. In my day there
at least
would have been a woman. Please give me your arm, my dear
comte
. I am quite faint. Don’t worry. Philip will take the fellow away shortly.”

Philip bowed as Aunt Judith swept past him with the anonymous comte, returning to her guests, doubtless to regale them with further tales of her wayward nephew. He turned to Levett.

“Do you have pen and paper? I need to write a letter.”

And pray she will answer,
he added silently to himself.
Or all this will have been for nothing. Nothing at all.

 • • • 

Unfortunately, sudden flight involved a great deal of packing. Then there were the servants to be paid off, and Mr. Upton had to be contacted with instructions, and drafts and coins had to be fetched from the bank. Douglas had to be sent to hire a carriage roomy enough to convey Caroline, and Mrs. Ferriday, and their baggage to Dover, and arrange for the changes of horses on the way.

It all left Caroline alternately laughing and in a near panic with frustration as she counted up her preparations. She tried four separate times to write to Fiona, but ended only with sheets of crumbled paper scattered about the desk and floor.

I can write to Fi when I reach Paris. I can send Mr. Upton my address there. We can make arrangements for a hotel once we reach Calais. Where’s the letter of introduction Fi wrote me for Madame de Lacy?

All these thoughts and a thousand others thronged across the surface of her mind. But what she was most acutely aware of was that each thought, each order and action, all took her farther from Philip.

I must not think of that. It is already done. I sent him away. I had to. He is already gone. He is already gone.

Tears threatened to blind her again, and she had to stop, with her hands dug into her writing desk, until she could blink her eyes clear once again.

I must not think on that. I must keep moving forward.

Because if she did not keep moving, Jarrett would bring the doctors. Jarrett would lock her away and take her income, her only independence.

Marry me,
whispered Philip’s voice from memory.

Did he have any idea what he did to her with those words? No erotic command he had issued held out such dangerous temptation. She could not marry, not him, not anyone. She could not put herself into the control of any man again. Her whole goal of life had been to gain her freedom, but that freedom was proving as durable as thin ice underfoot. Jarrett had found the crack, and now she must run, and keep on running. To hesitate one single instant only meant Jarrett could lock her up. But his tame doctors could not declare her mad if they could not find her.

Marry me,
whispered Philip from memory again.

“He’s already gone!” she cried out loud. His blue eyes, his laugh and his smile, his tender, knowing hands, and the body she had come to love as much as she loved the soul within it, they were all gone. She could not bring them back. It would be better if she could pretend he was dead. It would be best of all if she could remember what marriage would actually mean. Marriage changed people. Once he had her, Philip would hold her tightly, not to keep her safe, but to make a possession of her. That was the way it was.

Except that was not the way it was for Fiona. Did she really believe everything she’d seen between Fi and her James to be a lie? Upon the conclusion of their vows, would the pair of them instantly turn into strangers and sink into some kind of jealous misery?

Perhaps not, but Philip was not James, and she was not Fiona. He was Lord of the Rakes and she was . . . who she was.

She was sitting and staring again. Her memories of Philip, and the longing they brought, left her stupefied. Caroline gritted her teeth and pulled her letters from her writing desk. She forced herself to sort through them, one at a time, laying them into neat piles.

Philip did not love her. Not really. His proposal had been brought on by a combination of impulse, pity, indulgence, greed, lust. Anything but love. She must remember that. She must believe it with all her heart and soul. Because if she believed Philip loved her, as she loved him, she would never have the strength to leave.

Mrs. Ferriday’s entrance broke her paralysis, and Caroline’s hands returned to sorting the cards and documents she could no longer see clearly.

“A letter for you, my lady,” Mrs. Ferriday held out the folded paper.

“Not now.” Caroline dashed away the tears that had so unaccountably formed in her eyes. “Put it on the table.”

Mrs. Ferriday didn’t move. “It’s from Mr. Montcalm.”

“Then you may put it on the fire.” Caroline stood. She must not hesitate. She must keep moving.

“No, my lady,” said Mrs. Ferriday.

Caroline whirled around. “I beg your pardon?”

Mrs. Ferriday met her gaze without flinching. “I said no, my lady. I will not burn this letter until you have read it.”

Caroline could scarcely believe what she heard. “Mrs. Ferriday, I have given you your instructions.”

“And I have given you my response, my lady.”

This could not be happening. On top of everything else, she could not be facing the rebellion of the woman who had so faithfully stood by her, and her mother. But Mrs. Ferriday still did not move. Unable to think what else to do, Caroline broke open the letter and read.