The Wedding Game (18 page)

“Fourth or fifth at least. I rather suspect that somewhere down the line of Farrells there was a barber's pole and a knife-wielding barber who called himself a surgeon.” He laughed lightly and bent to pick up a shiny horse chestnut. He polished it on his sleeve and held it up for inspection. It was a perfect round, glowing richly burnished in the gray light. He presented it to Chastity with a half bow and all the gravity of a man bestowing a precious jewel and Chastity received it in the same manner, offering a half curtsy in acknowledgment. “It's too pretty to play conkers with,” she said, tucking it into her muff. “Did you ever play as a child?”

“Of course,” he said. “I had one that was unbeatable one year. We soaked them in vinegar to make them hard. And mine was definitely the champion.” His smile at the reminiscence was rather endearingly smug, as if that childhood triumph still gave him pleasure. Chastity smiled with him.

“Tell me about your family,” she said.

Douglas glanced up at the overcast sky, pursing his lips. “Do you want the long history or the potted?”

“The long, of course.”

He inclined his head. “You may well regret it. It's hard to know where to begin, but I'll try.”

Chapter 10

S
ix sisters,” Chastity said, some while later, sounding awed. “I always thought two were plenty.”

“I'd have settled for two myself,” Douglas said, stopping at a wrought-iron bench overlooking the Serpentine. “Shall we sit for a little?”

Chastity sat down with some relief. They had walked a long way during Douglas's recital. She was thinking that his family story put paid to any idea that he had been disowned. Quite the opposite. He seemed to have been swaddled in love and attention from the moment of his birth. And there was no other explanation either for why he appeared strapped for cash. His background was both wealthy and titled. It seemed she was no closer to the mystery of what really lay behind this sudden removal to the London slums. Not to mention the need for a rich wife.

“Something on your mind?” he inquired.

“I want to ask you a very personal question and I'm trying to come up with the right words,” she said frankly.

“Ah.” He regarded her with a smile in his charcoal eyes. The cold air had reddened the tip of her nose and he had the absurd urge to kiss it. Ridiculous, of course. “Well, why don't you just come out with it? I usually find that's the least complicated way of getting personal. It avoids misunderstandings, at least.”

Chastity smoothed her skirt over her knees and approached the issue from a rather oblique angle, but one that was somehow uppermost in her mind. “I was wondering why you didn't mention a wife, or a fiancée. Surely there must be or have been some woman in your life.” She watched his expression, afraid that if she'd trodden too close to an invisible line, Mr. Hyde would reappear.

Douglas realized he should have expected the question. It was a perfectly natural one in a truth-telling session. He tried a sidestep, saying with a slightly exasperated laugh, “My dear girl, I am surrounded by women. I have more women in my life than any one man should be expected to handle.”

“You know what I mean. I wasn't talking about sisters or mothers. Have you ever been married, or thought of being married?” She sat back with a decisive air. “I can't be more straightforward than that.”
And now let's see how you answer that, Dr. On the Hunt for a Rich Wife.

Well, the sidestep hadn't worked, but he hadn't expected it to.
“No, true enough,” he agreed rather briskly. “To tell you the truth, I haven't given the matter much thought. I've been far too busy.” Before she could pursue the subject, he said quickly, “Tit for tat, Miss Duncan. What about you? I see no evidence of a husband, but is there a fiancé? A particularly close friend . . . Viscount Brigham for instance?”

Chastity shook her head and accepted defeat. He wasn't going to reveal to a mere social acquaintance an ambition confided to a professional matchmaking agency. “No, no one special. I have plenty of close friends of both sexes, but . . .” She shrugged. “Marriage doesn't loom anywhere on my horizons.” Her stomach suddenly growled too loudly and insistently to be ignored. They'd been out a lot longer than half an hour. “I'm ravenous,” she confessed unnecessarily, sniffing the air.

There was a most succulent smell wafting towards them, and then she heard the bell and the loud cry of the barrow boy announcing his wares. “'Ot pies . . . 'ot pies . . . come an' get 'em. Steak-an'-kidney pies . . .”

“It's a pie man,” Chastity said, jumping to her feet. “Where is he?”

“Coming along the path,” Douglas said, standing with her. “Let's see what he's got.” He waved at the pie man, who carried a laden tray balanced on a thick round pillow on his head.

“Whatcha like, guv, pretty lady?” the man said cheerfully, swinging the tray down and setting it on the bench. His wares rested on a rack above a bed of hot charcoal. “A nice muffin 'ere, or a nice bit o' steak an' kidney . . . just right fer a cold day.”

Douglas glanced at Chastity, who, mouth watering, pointed at a golden-crusted pie. “That one,” she said.

The man wrapped it in a sheet of newspaper and handed it to her. “I'll have the same,” Douglas said, reaching into his pocket for coins. He gave the man a shilling and took his pie. Chastity had already retreated to the bench and was biting deeply into the hot, gravy-filled pastry crust, trying not to dribble juice down her chin.

Douglas laughed and reached into his pocket for a large, crisp handkerchief. “Napkin, madam?” He presented it to her with a flourish.

“Thank you,” she mumbled through a mouthful, taking the offering and wiping her chin. “This is so good, even though it's messy.”

They ate swiftly and in silence. It wasn't the kind of meal to encourage conversation, but finally Chastity scrunched up the newspaper and gave a little sigh of satisfaction. “That was wonderful.”

“It was,” he agreed, taking the newspaper from her and going to throw it in a litter bin with his own. “Can I borrow the handkerchief back? Thanks.” He took it back and wiped his hands and mouth, then thrust it into his pocket. A flake of snow drifted to the grass at his feet, and then another.

“Alfresco dining in December is somewhat eccentric,” he observed. “Let's start walking back. I don't want you to freeze to the bench.”

“I'm warmer now I've eaten,” Chastity said, but she got to her feet, tucking her hands into her muff. She'd learned a lot about his family but she still didn't know the answer to the most important question and she wondered if perhaps he was now regretting the decision to confide in her and hoping she had forgotten the reason for this little outing.

They started to walk towards Cumberland Gate and after a few steps she said directly, “You were going to enlighten me about yesterday afternoon.”

Douglas had been hoping the recitation of his family history had put the other issue out of her mind. He was enjoying her company, as he had done the other evening, and he wanted to keep this light and friendly ease between them. He realized with surprise and dismay that now if she responded in the wrong way to what he had agreed to tell her, it would indeed matter to him, and their present burgeoning friendship would be destroyed. It didn't seem possible any longer to dismiss her as just another spoiled, privileged, Society lady. Something had changed his view of her and he had no idea what. But it was suddenly very important to him that he had mistaken her reaction to his clinic and his patients, that she hadn't been showing the instinctive and immediate revulsion he had automatically expected and therefore assumed.

It would be so much easier not to tell her and therefore not risk the wrong reaction, but as he looked down at her determined expression, the firm set of her full mouth, the glinting lights in the depths of her hazel eyes, he knew she was going to hold him to his agreement. So be it. “Did it strike you as unusual that I would have a medical practice in the city slums?” he asked.

“Well, yes, of course it did. You told me you had an office on Harley Street.” She had stopped walking and was gazing up at him, her eyes fixed upon him with a mixture of curiosity and wariness. Snow dusted her hat and the ostrich plume was beginning to look a little bedraggled.

“Keep walking,” he said, taking her arm and urging her forward. “Answer me this, Chastity. Can you imagine why a doctor would choose to serve those people?”

Chastity frowned. This was clearly some kind of test and she had the sense that rather a lot depended upon her passing it. “Someone has to,” she said. “Just because they're poor doesn't mean they don't get sick—quite the opposite, from what I saw.”

“What kind of doctor should they have, do you think?”

Chastity's frown deepened. She felt as if she were on trial here. She gazed down, watching her feet stepping through the light coating of snow on the grass. “A regular one, I suppose,” she said. “Are there other kinds?”

“Unqualified ones.”

“Ah.” She thought she was beginning to get the point. “I don't imagine it's a particularly well-paying branch of the medical profession.”

He smiled but it was bitter rather than humorous. “Not only that, medicines don't come cheap.”

“Ah,” she said again, remembering how she'd noticed almost all the patients had emerged from his office with medicines of some kind. Now she knew she had complete grasp of the point. “So, in order to provide them you have to supply them.”

“And in order to do that I have to have an alternative source of income,” he said.

Chastity pursed her lips in a silent whistle of utter comprehension. “Hence Harley Street.”

“Hence Harley Street,” he agreed.

Chastity's frown deepened, drawing her arched eyebrows together as she considered the implications. She said finally, “Are you saying that those poor souls in Earl's Court are your primary concern, Douglas? That you take care of the rich only in order to take care of the poor?”

“In a nutshell.” He couldn't tell yet how she was really reacting to this revelation, but he liked the way she seemed to be looking at it from every angle, reflecting before she spoke.

Now she looked up at him and her eyes were filled with a warm light and her lovely full mouth formed a smile of such genuine pleasure and sympathy that it made his heart sing.

She took her hand from her muff and slipped it into his. “I think that's wonderful, Douglas, really splendid.” She was aware of a distinct prickle of discomfort when she thought how she'd disliked him, how she'd talked so contemptuously about him to her sisters. This was a
good
man. A truly good man. Oh, he was awkward and arrogant and confrontational, but that did nothing to blunt the knowledge that she had been wrong, so wrong. Of course he would be a little skeptical of rich hypochondriacs when he worked with such passionate commitment among the truly needy, and of course he had to have a rich wife in order to complete his mission.

And she was going to get him one.

Douglas smiled and tightened his clasp of her hand. “You understand now why I asked you to keep my confidence.”

“I always understood that,” Chastity said. “What I didn't understand was what you were doing there in the first place. You hadn't exactly given the impression of an altruistic mission-bound man.”

“I don't think I would lay claim to such a grandiose description,” he said. He glanced at his watch. “We need to take a hackney back. I have a rich patient coming at three and it doesn't do to keep paying customers waiting.”

“No, I suppose not.” Chastity took back her hand. She shivered suddenly despite her wool coat and reached behind her to turn up the collar.

Douglas unwound the thick muffler he wore and stopped, turning her to face him. He wrapped the scarf around her neck, tucking the ends into the neck of her coat, his movements deft and swift, a little frown of concentration on his brow. He settled the material of her coat over her shoulders, smoothing it out with what seemed a rather lingering gesture. And then he bent his head and very lightly kissed the tip of her nose. Chastity realized she was holding her breath as she tried to pretend it wasn't happening. He raised his head and laughed down at her.

“Your poor little nose is red with cold. I've been wanting to warm it up for a long time,” he said.

“Well, that's no way to go about it,” she retorted, moving away from him even as she inadvertently rubbed the tip of her nose with her gloved palm. A warm tingle ran down her back, his scent and the warmth of his skin was on the scarf around her neck, and her cheeks were suddenly flushed with more than the cold.

“I thought it might help,” he said with a grin that had no remorse in it at all. He turned his head and gave a two-fingered whistle in the direction of a hackney. He opened the door for Chastity, who climbed in before he had a chance to put his hands to her waist. He sat on the seat opposite her.

“I was forgetting you don't like helping hands,” he said.

“I don't like overly familiar helping hands,” she corrected with an attempt at hauteur that didn't quite come off. Douglas merely smiled and Chastity felt a stirring of annoyance that rather dissipated their earlier harmony.

“One question you haven't answered,” she said, her eyes narrowing a little. “Just
why
were you so rude to me? It was more than simply because I stumbled upon your secret, wasn't it?”

He looked across at her. Her mouth was set and he would swear there were little sparks of fire amid the golden flecks in her hazel eyes. She wanted an answer. And in fact he had one. But it was one he was fairly positive Miss Duncan would not appreciate.

“It's a habit,” he said.

She stared at him. “A habit? Being rude like that. A habit? That's it? That's the only explanation you have?” Her tone was incredulous and needled him sufficiently to provoke the truth.

“Very well,” he said crisply. “If you must know, I made an assumption about your reactions, and because that assumption angered me, I'm afraid I took it out on you.”

“What kind of assumption?” She leaned forward to watch his expression more closely.

He sighed. “I am just so accustomed to challenging the preconceptions of the women in my family—in fact, to a certain extent those of almost everyone in the social circles I move in—that I assume most people in general, but women in particular, are complacent, prejudiced, and utterly lazy in their thought processes.”