The Lady Most Willing . . . (12 page)

Marilla on his arm, Byron followed her sister through the door. Marilla’s figure showed to exquisite advantage in her evening gown, the high waistline emphasizing her breasts, which were magnificent by any man’s measure.

In contrast, Fiona’s gown was conservative. Her evening gown was a sober blue, with long sleeves, and without even the smallest ruffle to relieve its austerity.

Still, you knew with one look that her breasts were luscious as well. And sensual, and feminine, and all the things that he hadn’t felt or tasted in months. Just because Marilla’s were on display didn’t mean that—

With a start, he wrenched his thoughts back into place. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking down at the bright curls of the girl at his side. “I didn’t hear what you said.”

“I
said
that the storm is worsening,” Marilla repeated, an edge of disapproval in her voice. Clearly, she was under the impression that he ought to hang on her every word.

He cast her a glance that conveyed a censorious view of her pretensions. That look—he’d been reliably informed—was feared throughout London. Oakley was one of the oldest earldoms in the country, and Byron had learned at his father’s knee not to tolerate impudent and overfamiliar mushrooms.

Marilla didn’t even flinch. She merely patted his arm and dimpled up at him. “But I will forgive you, Lord Oakley. I know you must have any number of very, very serious matters on your mind. Men are so given to that sort of thinking.”

“I do not think it is necessarily a trait of the sex,” came a quiet voice in front of them. Fiona was waiting for her sister at the newel post. “Marilla, it is time that we bid the company good night.”

Marilla did have a very pretty pout. “No, don’t bow again!” she said gaily to Byron, who had no such intention. “We should not be on such terribly formal terms here, don’t you agree?” She pointedly looked behind them. Bret and Miss Burns had made it as far as the drawing room door before they started kissing again. “Obviously,” she added, “at Finovair we are not obligated to adhere to the very, very silly rules that London society requires.”

“Exactly,” Taran chortled, coming up from behind to beam at the girl. “We are all friends here.”

Byron shot him a silent snarl.

“I would contest that,” Fiona stated, putting a hand under her sister’s arm.

Marilla jerked away in a somewhat ill-tempered manner. But her face betrayed nothing but sweetness when she looked back up at Byron. “I think we should all be on familiar terms, don’t you?” she asked. “My name is Marilla.”

She had melting eyes, the color of cornflowers in spring. Ridiculously, Byron felt an overwhelming urge to flee, but stilled himself. It wasn’t her fault that her eyes were the same color as Opal’s.

“You’re asking the wrong person,” Taran said with his usual blustery cheer. “My nephew Robin, now, who will someday own this fine castle,
he
will be on the easiest of terms with a lovely lass such as yourself. Byron here is a bit stuffy. Always has been. He got it from his father. I tell you, I thought I’d seen it all when me other sister got married to a Frenchie, but Byron’s da was even worse. When she brought the earl—the old earl, that is—back to Finovair for the first time, I almost fled to the Lowlands. He was a humorless, obstinate old bastard who acted as if every Scotsman should kiss the toes of his withered slippers. I never blamed her when she flew the coop.”

Byron gritted his teeth. He’d heard the story a hundred times . . . from both points of view.

“Course, it only took a Scotsman one well-placed blow to lay the earl out flat,” Taran said, chortling. “Marilla and Fiona’s father did the honors. Took out that Englishman with a doubler to the jaw. No . . .” He paused. “I’ve got a detail wrong, I do believe.”

The company waited, some of them even looking faintly interested.

“It wasn’t a doubler,” Taran finished triumphantly. “It was a roundhouse. We didn’t ever see that pompous fart again in God’s green country. The man never met a Scotsman whom he didn’t find beneath his touch, and the same went for Englishmen. Didn’t have a friend in the world, to my mind.”

“My father had numerous friends,” Byron stated.

“Not one,” Taran contradicted. “Even sadder than that was the fact that Fiona’s da took him out with one blow. The man didn’t even get his hands in position.”

Byron heard a little moan. His eyes met Fiona’s. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who was finding Finovair Castle less than idyllic.

“My father was not given to common fisticuffs.” But he didn’t stop when he should have. “And I am not stuffy,” he heard himself saying. “As a matter of fact, I am on familiar terms with my
many
friends. My Christian name is Byron, and I invite you all to use it.”

Bret had one eyebrow raised now, and his face radiated compassion. Byron gritted his teeth again.

“As I said before, my name is Marilla,” the blonde chirped, patting his arm once more. “Now we will all be comfortable with each other! I shall look forward to seeing you tomorrow morning,
Byron
.” She said it with a breathy emphasis that made his jaw tighten.

Don’t be narrow-minded
, he reminded himself, as Fiona grabbed her sister’s arm and hauled her up the stairs with what seemed unnecessarily forceful disapproval. True, Marilla was a lively girl.

His father would reject her on those grounds.

“Good work, boy,” Taran said approvingly. “Not that I want you to steal an heiress from under Robin’s nose. He needs the blunt more than you do. Pretty as a picture, ain’t she? I thought she was best of the bunch. Lady Cecily has a bundle of the ready as well. Why don’t you take Marilla, and we’ll reserve Cecily for Robin. Dang that lad, he’s missed all the fun.”

Byron headed up the stairs without taking leave of his uncle. There are limits to a man’s patience, and he had reached the limit of his.

He wasn’t pompous, he told himself. Or stuffy, or narrow-minded. That was his father.

He was just . . . irritated.

Chapter 10

The following afternoon

“I
know it’s exciting to find yourself in a household with two eligible bachelors, even after the Duke of Bretton made that surprising proposal to Catriona,” Fiona said to Marilla, blocking their bedchamber door so that her sister couldn’t push her to the side and rush downstairs in hot pursuit of those very bachelors. “But you
must
play this right, Marilla. Neither of the other two gentlemen would be interested in a minx. Your behavior at blindman’s buff last night did you no credit, and you already have a mark against you as a Scotswoman.”

Marilla scowled at her. “I’m not the trollop;
you
are.”

“Just don’t play your hand too obviously.”

“If they think I’m a minx, it will be because your reputation ruined my chance at a good marriage before I even left the schoolroom,” Marilla said shrilly.

Fiona took a deep breath. “I am not under the impression that my lost reputation has, in fact, affected your eligibility for marriage. Your fortune has outweighed such concerns.”

“No one could possibly forget what kind of woman
you
are,” Marilla retorted. “I would likely be happily married by now if it weren’t for you.”

It was certainly true that there are some events from which no woman’s reputation can recover. An immodest kiss? Perhaps. A lascivious grope? Perhaps not. A fiancé falling from her bedchamber window to his death? Never.

Fiona had been labeled an uncaring trollop throughout her village by sunset on that fateful day; by week’s end, she was known throughout Scotland as a reckless fornicator. If not worse. The mother of her former fiancé spat in her path for a good three years at the merest glimpse of Fiona, and she wasn’t the only one.

No one seemed to care that when he fell, the lumbering oaf Dugald Trotter had been climbing up to her window without the slightest encouragement on her part. They were too busy being scandalized by her shameless ways—not to mention the fact that she had, in their version of events, “callously neglected” to inform Dugald that mere ivy cannot hold a man’s weight. Even those inclined to excuse frolicsome behavior between betrothed couples couldn’t seem to forgive her for not warning him.

Of course, any man with a functioning brain could have taken a look at the ivy below her window and come to his own assessment of its strength. But that was how stupid her fiancé had been, at least in Fiona’s uncharitable recollection.

Dugald apparently didn’t think of it, and she hadn’t warned him because—as she kept trying to point out, to no avail—she never planned to welcome him or anyone else to come through her window.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, she often found herself outraged at the universal rejection of her account of the event. Her own father had racketed about the house for months, moaning about how she had besmirched the family name.

“So
you
say,” he would bellow, in response to her protests. “What was poor Dugald doing at your window, then? Sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a female child! He wouldna climbed your ivy, you silly goose, if you hadna turned a carnal eye in his direction. Ach, poor Dugald, poor, poor Dugald.”

There the argument would stop, because Fiona didn’t allow herself to comment whenever the chorus of
poor Dugald
reached deafening proportions. She knew perfectly well that she had not thrown Dugald any come-hither glances. In fact, she wasn’t even sure what such a glance would look like.

She wouldn’t have learned it from Dugald. He seemed to regard her as a pot of gold rather than a nubile woman, at least until the last evening of his life. In fact, she’d thought him more in pursuit of her fortune than her person.

But that night she had refused to kiss his whiskey-soaked mouth, only to find herself shoved against a brick wall and forcibly dealt a wet kiss accompanied by a rough squeeze to her breast. The very memory made her shudder. She had slapped Dugald so hard that he reeled backward, after which she had run into the ballroom—with every intention of breaking her betrothal on the morning.

As for what he was doing climbing up to her window later that night . . . she could only think that he had decided to take matters into his own hands. Presumably, he had planned to force her to accept the marriage, and the only thing that had saved her virtue was the fragility of the ivy.

She certainly could not suggest such a terrible thing aloud. God forbid she would dishonor a man’s name after death by suggesting he might have had something so sordid as rape in mind.
Poor Dugald
had killed himself, to her mind.

Besides, she came to think of herself as lucky. What was ruination compared to being married to a beast of a man? She proceeded to shape a life that was happily husband-free, regularly offering prayerful thanks to her late mother for leaving her the fortune that made such a decision possible.

By five years after the “incident,” as her father called it, most people had stopped crossing the street when she approached. The last two seasons she had even ventured to London as Marilla’s chaperone; her half sister seemed likely to cause a nasty scandal if she wasn’t closely watched.

And though Fiona was not precisely fond of her sister—it was hard to imagine who could be—she did love her. Somewhat.

In short, during the last five years Fiona had arrived at the conclusion that the fatefully flimsy ivy had preserved not only her virtue, but her happiness.

A wealthy, unmarried woman has all the time she likes to read whatever she wishes. She can learn cheese making and experiment with medicinal salves for the pure pleasure of it. She can brew dyes from red currants, and then try making wines from the berries instead.

Freed from the need to hunt and catch a man, she could eschew crimping irons and chilly, yet seductive, gowns. She need not blunder around a ballroom pretending that she has perfect eyesight; instead, she can balance a pair of spectacles on her nose and accept the fact that she resembles someone’s maiden aunt.

Which status she would presumably attain, someday.

She was
free
.

“Please do not spontaneously offer either gentleman a kiss,” she said now. “From where I stood, Oakley looked mortified rather than flattered.”

“Kissing means very little.” Marilla tossed her curls. “You’ve been out of society too long, Fiona. I can assure you that
he
understood it as a jest, even if
you
did not.”

Fiona silently counted to five. Then: “If kissing means very little, I still think it would nevertheless be better to allow a gentleman to kiss you, if he shows the inclination, rather than chasing him yourself.”

“As if I would do something that fast!” Marilla caught a glimpse of herself in the glass and froze for a moment to coax an errant lock into place.

She was extraordinarily beautiful; you had to give her that. Fiona crossed the room and picked up a hairbrush to shape the long lock that fell down Marilla’s back. Her sister accepted the attention as her due; she was smiling at herself with a tilt of her head that she likely considered sophisticated.

Indeed, Marilla was so exquisite that men could hardly stop themselves from falling at her feet . . .

Though they seemed to fall out of love just as quickly, once they came to know her. As Fiona had bluntly told their father on Marilla’s debut, he should have matched her quickly, before news of her temperament circulated among eligible men.

Regrettably, that hadn’t happened, though Marilla was only beginning to notice the lack of offers; her vanity was such that she deemed virtually all potential suitors beneath her notice.

“We have only a few days before the pass is cleared,” Fiona told Marilla, giving her hair a little tug to get her attention. “Perhaps three or four . . . five at the outside.”

“I know that,” her sister said, twitching her curl free.

“I have no doubt but that Rocheforte or Oakley will fall in love with you. But I would suggest that you make sure of the man before the three days are up.”