The Sherbrooke Series Novels 1-5 (123 page)

“You arrogant young puppy, you believe yourself so
powerful, but I can break you, I can send you to oblivion, I can—”

It was so subtly done that it took Gray a moment to realize that both Douglas and Colin had moved to stand directly behind Sir Henry. Douglas Sherbrooke lightly laid his hand on Sir Henry’s shoulder. “I should take care what I said if I were you,” he said very quietly. “My brother-in-law and I are both larger than you, Sir Henry. We also hold Gray a very good friend.”

Sir Henry jerked away from him. “Damn you all, I will come back here, and I’m going to bring men with me to remove that bitch from here.” And Sir Henry was gone.

Jack, Gray saw, after he’d told her of the interview, was perfectly white. “No,” he said, “I wanted you to know exactly what your stepfather said, what he threatened, because it’s your right to know. But don’t be afraid.”

“He’s a vicious man.”

“It won’t matter,” Gray said. He stared off toward the shadowed corner of the Ellen Chamber. “Tell me, Jack, must we invite him to our wedding?”

11

J
ACK JERKED
up, flung back the blankets, and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She stepped off the bed, tripped, and fell to her hands and knees on the carpet because the bed was raised a good three feet off the floor.

“No,” she shouted at him as she scrambled to her feet. He was already halfway out of his chair to help her.

“No! Don’t you move.” And then she was standing over him, pushing his shoulders back down, staring at his upturned face, her nightgown billowing about her ankles, now shaking her fist under his nose.

Her very nice eyes were dilated. The woman, Gray realized, was seriously perturbed. She leaned close, as if she thought that if she spoke any distance at all from him, he wouldn’t understand her. “No, don’t you move or say anything more. No, don’t you even consider towering over me and believing you’ll automatically get your way.

“Now, what you just said, why that’s preposterous. I think you’re cruel and not a whit amusing. No, don’t say a word. I don’t want to hear anything you have to say.
Nothing, do you hear me? Just be quiet. What the devil did you mean, anyway?”

“As Aunt Mathilda the orator would say: Marriage. Me.”

“It’s ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous, is it? Well, perhaps you’re right. It wasn’t all that romantic a marriage proposal, was it? Lie down, Jack. I don’t want you making yourself ill again. I spent four days leaning over you, wiping your brow and many other parts of you as well. My back hurt. You wore me out. I don’t want a relapse.”

She sat on the side of the bed, her narrow white feet dangling. He smiled at her. All in all, this marriage business was easier than he’d thought it would be, although it still felt quite strange to ask a girl to marry him whose last name he’d discovered only ten minutes before. She was silent, staring down at her hands, folded in her lap. He waited, but she remained silent.

“All right,” he said at last. “If you won’t marry me, then I have absolutely no recourse but to give you over to your stepfather. How old are you?”

“Nearly nineteen.”

“Eighteen, in other words. You are under his control, Jack. I’m sorry to tell you this, but Lord Burleigh wouldn’t have been able to protect you. He’s your guardian, in charge of your money, but Sir Henry is your stepfather. At the very least it would be a mess, possibly a scandal.”

She was shaking her head frantically, but what came out of her mouth was a whisper. “Life couldn’t be so unfair, could it?”

“Life is frequently the very devil. Now, it’s time for you to face up to things.”

“No.”

She was getting perturbed again, perhaps even more
seriously this time. He didn’t imagine that any more pathetic whispers would be coming out of that mouth. She hadn’t braided her hair and it was tangled around her face. He liked the way one long, curling runner trailed down the side of her face and made an interesting twist just above her left breast.

He wasn’t at all surprised when she said, her brow furrowed, her eyes mean, “You told me you weren’t a womanizer. Stop looking at me as if I were a horse on the block.”

“You saw me staring at you, did you? Well, why shouldn’t I? I’ve seen you as naked as the day you came from your mother’s womb. I’ve taken complete care of you, Jack. I’ve bathed you, washed your hair, wiped you down with cool cloths, pulled you away from the window all white and naked so the men below wouldn’t see you. I held you tightly against me when you were freezing from the fever.

“However, if you wish a more subtle, sensitive approach, then let me say it this way: Jack, you’re a very nice stretch of land that I’ve thoroughly mapped.”

“I don’t know if that’s more sensitive or not. It’s embarrassing, is what it is. As a metaphor it makes me want to laugh. Goodness, I don’t even remember why I ran to the window. It’s all very odd. I don’t understand this.” She shivered, frowned at herself, and got back under the covers. “Now you’ll marry me in order to save me from being forced to marry this Lord Rye? You’re truly willing to sacrifice yourself?”

“No, that’s not it at all. My fate was already well sealed before I heard about Lord Rye, who is a complete rotter, and, to be honest here, it makes my stomach turn to think of him touching you, having the right to do whatever he wishes to do to you.”

She turned as pale as the white satin counterpane, swallowed convulsively, and said in a voice so thin it was nearly transparent, “I never thought of that. That would be dreadful. You mean he would—no, never mind that. My imagination doesn’t want to go in that direction. I’d rather think about being a stretch of land.”

“It would be his right to do with you as he wished. I daresay nothing he would do to your fair person would send you to heights of delirium.

“Now, the truth of the matter is that once you were with me for four days, alone, my fate was sealed. If you don’t marry me, I’ll be cast out of my very pleasant life here in London. No one will speak to me. No one will ride with me in the park. It’s possible that my friends will spit in my direction rather than acknowledge my presence. It’s an unpleasant future I’ll have, Jack.”

“That makes no sense. No one even knows about me. Even if they did, it wouldn’t matter. I’m a nobody.”

“Not true. You’re quite a somebody. You’re Thomas Bascombe’s daughter and Lord Burleigh is your guardian. Ah, yes, in case you’ve still got questions about this, let me tell you just the way our world works. Ladies must be protected since they’re helpless to protect themselves from men who are twice their size and have twice their strength. Men don’t want other men to ravish ladies they perceive as heir-producing material because it would severely undermine their confidence in succession.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that a man couldn’t trust the male child born of his woman to be of his seed. It could be that another man had taken her. Do you understand? Thus a lady has to be protected.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“Tell that to men who’ve been killed in duels, all for a lady’s honor.”

She actually shuddered. She began swinging her feet. “Very well. Because of this seed business, you’ve got to marry me?”

“Yes. Because of this seed business, when a gentleman dishonors a lady, or when he’s perceived to have dishonored a lady, he’s made to pay. Since neither of us is married, I won’t have to fight a male relative. I’ll just have to give myself to you for life.”

“A long time, life.”

“Yes, hopefully. Now, Jack, you’re still uncertain. Think of it this way: you’ll be saving yourself from Lord Rye, and I’ll be saving myself from being ostracized for debauching you, a young lady.”

“Does holding me naked mean that you debauched me?”

“Well, no, but no one would ever believe that I had a naked young lady next to me for four whole days and didn’t take complete and ruthless advantage of her, since I am a man and thus weak of flesh.”

“But I was sick. Who would want to debauch a sick naked young lady?”

“If you were conscious and looked as nice as you do at this moment, most any man who was still breathing would want to debauch you.”

“Then why didn’t you debauch me?”

“Well, I can’t say that I didn’t consider what it would be like—debauching you—but I didn’t carry through with it because you were really very sick. You weren’t all that conscious. You weren’t arguing or laughing. Your hair wasn’t tousled all over your head, all soft-looking. No man would have wanted to debauch you in the eye of your illness, just perhaps on the periphery.”

They stared at each other. She licked her lower lip. He stared at that lower lip as she said, “You didn’t debauch me on the periphery either. Why?”

“This isn’t a bone. Stop chewing. Let it go.”

“What if I were older than you, what then?”

“It would depend, I suppose, on how much older than me you were. Ten years? No, I’d probably still have to hie myself and you to the altar. By the way, I like older women,” he said and smiled. “I also like the way your mind works, like a wheel that backs up when one doesn’t expect it to.”

Then he laughed. “It’s late at night, you’re sitting here in your nightgown, we’re quite alone, which simply isn’t allowed, you know, yet I didn’t even think twice about coming into your bedchamber, and we’re talking about all the particulars of debauchery.

“No hope for it, Jack, we’ve got to marry, and soon. Since your stepfather isn’t your legal guardian, which is a very good thing, and since I also know Lord Burleigh very well indeed, I don’t believe I’ll have much difficulty obtaining his permission to be your husband. Oh, incidentally, your father might be dead, but Lord Burleigh isn’t, and he’s a very powerful man. Were he to find out—and he would—that I was alone for four days with his ward, he’d be on my doorstep with the ink on the marriage agreements scarcely dry.”

“I have sixty thousand pounds. That’s a lot of money.”

“I believe Sinjun was a greater heiress, but you’re right, it’s nothing to raise one’s brows at.”

“So, you spend four days alone with me and you earn sixty thousand pounds.”

A dark blond eyebrow shot up. “Is that how you translate this mess? Into groats for my coffers? Let me tell you, Jack, I don’t want to marry you any more than you want
to marry me. My life was pleasant, blessedly predictable, until Mathilda and Maude came trooping in, claiming disasters so they could stay.”

“What disasters?”

“As Aunt Mathilda would say: Featherstone—fire and flood.”

She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “I heard them arguing over the excuse they’d give you, but they never told me what it was. That’s very inventive.”

“Yes, it was well done of them. Quincy didn’t buy it for more than a minute, but I really didn’t care enough to question them closely. I knew I’d enjoy having them here. I really have no other close family, you know. Actually, I would have welcomed them without a whimper if they’d just asked to visit me for a while. On the other hand, I can see their need to protect your innocence. They couldn’t have known I was a saint among gentlemen.”

It was quite fascinating, really, just watching the myriad expressions on her face ranging from absolute terror to rage to even a brief smile that showed the dimple in her left cheek. He sat forward and said, “No, Jack, I’m marrying you because as a man of honor I have no choice. Your money doesn’t matter in the least, at least it doesn’t matter in terms of being the catalyst to matrimony. No, your ill-planned thievery of poor Durban is what precipitated this whole thing.”

“It wasn’t ill-planned.”

“You would have ended up in Bath, if some malcontent hadn’t robbed you, then tossed you into a ditch. I call that ill-planned, at the very least. If I were more honest and less sensitive to your female feelings, I should possibly refer to your debacle as the end result of brain fever, a supposed common ailment amongst females.”

To his surprise, she laughed, actually laughed in the face
of his amusing insult and her unamusing situation. She said, shaking her head, “It wounds me to have to say this, but you do rather seem to have the right of it. Oh, dear. It was ill-planned.”

She rolled off the other side of the bed and shrugged into one of Mathilda’s dressing gowns, a particularly odd affair because it was completely black, the neck a swatch of black feathers. It dragged the floor. She tied the sash, then turned to face him. “Actually,” she said, a good fifteen feet between them, “if I want to keep you at a distance from me, I need to light more candles. You’re all shadowy over there by the bed.”

“True enough,” he said. He watched her light the eight candles on a very old gold candle branch and set it on a circular table in the center of the room. The corners were still hidden in deep shadows, but they could see each other clearly enough. “So you want to see me? My face?”

She was twisting a hank of hair around her fingers. “Yes, I want to see you, particularly your face. I’m coming to know what your various expressions mean. Listen to me, Gray. I have quite ruined your life, and the truth of it is that I don’t know what I would have done even if I had managed to sneak into Carlisle Manor, grab Georgie, and escape undetected. I’m an idiot. I thought I’d rescue Georgie, then sneak over to Featherstone, cozy the servants there into hiding us until my stepfather gave up on finding me, then sneak both Georgie and me to London, to Lord Burleigh. I don’t know him. I can’t begin to imagine the look on his face were I to arrive at his front door with my little sister. I wouldn’t have come back here. Your good nature never would have extended that far.