The Forbidden Lord (28 page)

He was staring at her now as if she were some loathsome insect. Releasing her shoulders, he tore her clenched hands from his coat, then fell back in the seat. “‘Things?’ What kind of ‘things’ does Nesfield know about you that are so heinous you’d offer to be my mistress to keep from having them exposed?”

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll get married, and then perhaps he won’t…” She trailed off. “What am I saying? He hates you. If we marry, he’ll be even more likely to use what he knows against me.” Jordan was looking at her with such wariness, her heart twisted in her chest. “Besides, you don’t want a wife with dark secrets, do you? It’s one thing to lower yourself to marry a mere rector’s daughter, but God forbid you should marry a woman who keeps things from you, who might be a thief or a…a murderer.”

“That’s enough!”

“I’d ask you to trust me,” she whispered. “But you won’t do that, will you? Not the mighty Earl of Blackmore. No, you must know everything, have control over everything. You would never be so foolish as to trust somebody else.”

“Damn you, Emily, shut up!” His eyes blazed like two torches in the blackest night. Then he
rapped sharply on the ceiling. “Go on to the rectory, Watkins!”

The coach rocked, then rumbled forward. She stared at Jordan. “What are you going to do?”

He didn’t answer. A disquieting stillness had come over him, tense and frightening.

“You’re going to speak to him anyway. Even though I’ve asked you not to. Even though you promised not to if I gave myself to you.”

That made him flinch. “I should never have made that promise. Nothing good has come of it.”

“You’re going to break it then.”

“Don’t you see? I have to. It’s for your own good. Nothing you’ve said has changed my mind about this situation. I’m leaving you at your father’s and returning to London.” He glanced away. “But I’ll be back. No matter what you think of me, Emily, I won’t abandon you. I don’t need the tie of some dubious emotion to do right by you. We’ll be married, no matter what Nesfield says or does or—”

“If you speak to him on my behalf, there will be no marriage.”

“What do you mean?”

She had meant that Lord Nesfield’s attempts to destroy her and her family would put an end to any thoughts of marriage. But now something else occurred to her. He wanted everything his way. He made promises, but broke them if he deemed it necessary. All the control must be on his side, because if he gave it up to anyone, then he was revealing the chink in his armor. And she couldn’t marry a man like that, no matter what happened.

“I mean, I won’t marry you. I don’t blame you for warning your friends—that’s to be expected. But your only reason for going to Lord Nesfield is to ‘help me,’ or at least that’s what you claim. What
gives you the right to decide what’s best for me when you don’t know the entire story? You refuse to trust my judgment. You refuse to honor your promises. Well, if you can’t do something as simple as that, then I don’t see how we can marry!”

He gave a dismissive gesture. “Your father will make you marry me once he hears—”

“That you’ve taken my innocence? No, he won’t. Not all men are like you, Jordan. Some of them actually care about what their women want or need or—”

“I care, devil take it! If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have offered marriage!”

“Yes, but you don’t care enough to honor my wishes or keep your promises. So I will not marry you!”

“You’re making me choose? Between speaking to Nesfield and marrying you?”

She nodded.

His voice grew bitter. “I thought you said you loved me.”

“I do. I love you enough to want us to have a real marriage, not one where you run everything and I merely play the adoring wife.”

“So you love me only as long as I do what you wish!”

“No. I love you no matter what you do. But I can’t marry you if you won’t consider my wishes, too.”

The carriage halted in front of the rectory, and she glanced out at it, thinking how strange it was to be home with everything still in such a turmoil. She thought of her parents’ love, strands of caring woven into a magnificent cloth heavy enough to withstand any tempest.

“This is absurd,” he was saying. “Our marriage has nothing to do with such matters. It’s merely a
practical way to deal with the fact that you’ve been compromised. Love has no place—”

“You know something, Jordan? You’ve spent your entire life avoiding love. You say it’s because your father ruined his life by loving your mother when she wasn’t worthy of it.” She drew in a ragged breath. “But you’ve got it all wrong. Your parents’ marriage wasn’t a disaster because your father loved your mother too much. It was a disaster because your mother didn’t love your father in return. It’s not love that destroys. It’s the lack of it.”

He looked as if she’d slapped him. “You know nothing about it!”

“Oh, yes, I do. I can spot a man who’s starved for love when I see one. But love requires trust and a willingness to give as much as one gets.” She reached for the door handle. “What a pity those are beyond you.”

Opening the door, she climbed from the carriage.

“Emily, wait—” he protested as he climbed out after her, but she turned around to block his path before he could take two steps up the walk.

“What do you plan to do? Go in and tell my father that you’ve compromised me, that I’ve engaged in all manner of wickedness? Then trot off to London and ruin my life while I endure his lectures? No. Leave me some dignity at least.”

“Come now—”

“No. Go back to London. Talk to your friend. I wouldn’t want to be the cause of any harm to him. Just remember that if you speak to Nesfield, that is the end of anything between you and me.”

He glared at her, his face ashen, but she simply crossed her arms over her chest and continued to block his path.

“All right,” he finally said coldly. “If that’s the way you want it.”

Turning on his heel, he climbed back into the carriage and ordered the driver to drive on.

She held her breath until the carriage was out of sight, wondering if Papa was watching out of the window even now. It didn’t matter. She would have to tell him everything, no matter how much it hurt him. He was her only hope. If she impressed upon him the seriousness of the situation, he would surely help her return to London.

If she could reach London before Jordan, she might find a way to convince Lord Nesfield that this mess wasn’t her doing. And she might actually beat Jordan there: Jordan and Watkins were exhausted, and they wouldn’t share her sense of urgency.

Hurrying into the house, she fumbled about in her mind for how to tell Papa why she was here. But she stopped short at the sight of not only her father, but Lawrence sitting in the drawing room.

Surprise gave way to relief. “Thank God! Lawrence, you can take me back to London. How did you get here? On your horse? I can ride. If we hurry—”

“Slow down, child,” her father interrupted. “What are you doing here? How did you come? Lawrence has been telling me the most astonishing story—”

“There’s no time for that, Papa!” She turned to Lawrence. “We must leave for London at once!”

“What’s wrong?” Her cousin’s face grew drawn. “Is it Sophie? My God, what have they done to her? If that beast of a father has hurt her, I’ll…”

He trailed off as he saw the confused expression on her face.

“Sophie?” she whispered. “You’re concerned for Sophie?”

Color suffused his face, and that’s when she knew. Dear heaven. “You. You’re the one.”

“The one?” Casting her father a helpless look, Lawrence mumbled, “I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, yes, you do, devil take you!”

“Emily!” her father said sternly. “How dare you use such language!”

She wanted to laugh. If only her father knew…All the things she’d done, the words she’d spoken, and for what? Because she hadn’t seen what had been right under her nose all this time. Lawrence’s dramatic response to Sophie…Sophie’s dramatic response to him. She should have realized they were attracted to each other.

Granted, Lawrence had claimed to despise the “snobbish” Lady Sophie. Yet after the ball, he’d not been so vehement in his dislike. He’d even asked a casual question or two about Sophie and her family, but she’d assumed…

“How did you manage to court her when her father keeps her so secluded?” she asked, trying to make some sense of it. “I know he never allowed it.”

“Court her?” her cousin said in feigned surprise.

“Curse you, Lawrence, stop this foolish pretense! I know you tried to elope with Sophie!”

It was her father’s turn to be confused. “Lawrence tried to elope with Lady Sophie? But when? How?”

“In London a few weeks ago,” Emily explained tersely. “Lord Nesfield caught her as she was leaving the house, and Lawrence was forced to flee.”

All this time, and it had been Lawrence. She might as well put the noose around her neck her
self. Her own cousin! Lord Nesfield would never believe she’d had no part in Lawrence’s plans.

“Lawrence,” her father demanded in his most ministerial voice. “Is this true?”

Lawrence looked from her to her father. Then he crumpled. “Yes.”

“May God have mercy on us all,” her father muttered. “Lord Nesfield will have my hide for this.”

He’ll have more than that
, Emily thought morosely. “Oh, Lawrence, if you only knew what trouble you have caused—”

“I don’t care,” he said with all the selfishness of a man in love. “I love her. She loves me.”

Emily gave a shaky, nearly hysterical laugh. “Young love. A pity Lord Nesfield doesn’t understand the concept. He thinks a fortune hunter has put her under a spell.”

“That bastard! I don’t care about his money. He has the sweetest daughter in Christendom, and he doesn’t even know it.”

“That’s the trouble—he does know it.” Emily sank into a chair, more weary than she could express. Her masquerade, her foolish masquerade, had all been for nothing. The lies and the games and her shattering night with Jordan…all of it, pointless. She was completely ruined, her reputation in a shambles and her life soon to be at risk, and all because she’d been blind to her cousin’s change in affections. And her friend’s.

“When did this happen?” she whispered. “You seemed to dislike her so.”

Lawrence began to pace the room, his hands clasped behind his back. “I thought she was beautiful, of course, from the first. Even then, I envied the man who would have her. But she seemed too haughty, too cold. Then at the ball, when you told
me all those things about her shyness, I began to reconsider.”

Another mad laugh escaped her lips. Wonderful. She could thank herself for that.

“Then I lost sight of you for a while. I thought we were going to leave the ball, but I couldn’t find you.”

Emily sat up in the chair, casting her father a nervous glance. That had been when she was with Jordan in his carriage.

“Since the last person you’d talked to was Sophie,” Lawrence continued, “I went in search of her to ask where you were. I found her alone and very distraught.” He stopped, anger marring his features. “Some fool had joked within her hearing about the scene on the dance floor with her father, and she was mortified, nearly in tears. I…I did the only thing I could think of to cheer her up. I asked her to dance.”

Emily sighed. She could almost imagine it. Lawrence, struck by gallantry at the sight of Sophie’s distress, and Sophie, grateful to him for his kindness in the wake of other people’s cruelty.

Her cousin’s face softened into the dreamy countenance of a lover. “We danced two dances. They were utter bliss.”

Lawrence dancing twice? And calling it “utter bliss”? Her cousin truly had been shot by Cupid’s arrow to bring about this transformation.

“And on the basis of two ‘blissful’ dances, you eloped?” she said in astonishment.

“No, of course not.” Lawrence averted his gaze. “When I returned to London, I knew she was there for her coming out. So I…er…tracked her down.”

“Tracked her down?” her father said, eyes narrowing.

“I hired a Bow Street Runner to find out where she was staying. Then one day when she went shopping with her maid, I followed her and—” He glanced guiltily at his uncle. “I pretended to…accidentally meet her on the street.”

“You mean, you lied to her.”

Lawrence squirmed under her father’s accusing look, and it was all she could do not to cry. Lawrence’s pretense paled compared to what she’d been doing for the past few weeks. When her father found out, it would probably send him to an early grave.

“It was a small lie, and the only one,” Lawrence said defensively. “She wanted to see me as much as I wanted to see her, so after that, we met regularly.”

“And when did you get it into your head to elope with a woman far above your station and out of the range of your purse, young man?” her father growled.

Lawrence straightened, towering over the older man. “I’ll have you know that I make a very tidy living. And she doesn’t care about all that anyway. She loves me. That’s all that matters.”

“You think so?” Papa shook his head. “We’ll see if you’re so certain when she’s complaining about not having her own carriage and begging you to buy her some expensive bauble. Like is meant to stay with like, my son.”

Truer words were never spoken
, Emily thought bleakly.

“I don’t care what you think, Uncle,” Lawrence said haughtily. “I shall marry Sophie. When I find her, that is.” He approached Emily, a determined expression on his face. “I’ve had the London house watched, and I’ve questioned the servants there and here, but I can discover nothing.”

Kneeling before her, he startled her by grabbing her hands, his face the very picture of a tormented man. “Please tell me where she is, dear cousin! You’re her closest friend—you
must
know! The servants said she was in the country, but she’s not here. And I didn’t for a minute believe that tale of Lady Dundee’s about the house party you were both attending. What have they done with her? Is she truly engaged to be married as Lady Dundee claimed?”

Emily sighed. Curse the fool, he was so distraught, so deeply in love that it hurt to look at him. If only Jordan felt that for her…No, it was just as well he didn’t. By the time Lord Nesfield finished with her, there would be nothing left for him to love.