Undoing of a Lady (3 page)

She overturned the table, blocking his path and sending the candle flying, and then she was running down the stone spiral stair, reeling off the wall as she almost fell in the darkness. She heard Nat swear and saw a flare of flame behind her as the wall hangings caught fire from the candle, and then she was in the guardroom, groping for the key on its ledge, and for a split second she could not find it and the panic clawed at her chest. She heard Nat beating the flames out and hoped it would hold him for a precious few seconds. The door…It seemed to take forever for her to open it, whilst her cold and shaking fingers slipped on the key, and then she was out in the night and she could hear Nat’s steps on the stair behind her and smell smoke on the air.

Where to run? Where to hide
…

The wood closed about her. It was dark, deep and anonymous. That comforted her. She could hear Nat calling her name and there was an edge of fear to his voice as well as anger, but the sound was fading as he moved away from her. The relief washed through
her. He would not find her now; would not find her again until she was ready to be found. She did not need anyone to help her. She could put herself back together, good as new. She could pretend that this had never happened.

Nat did not love her. He had never loved her. She had made a terrible, terrible mistake.

The thoughts jostled through Lizzie’s head, dark and menacing like monsters in a nightmare. She pushed them away. She had to forget what had happened. And now that Nat was at liberty to attend his wedding, he, too, could join in the pretense. He could marry Flora, just as he had intended, he could gain the fortune he needed, and neither of them would say a word about this night ever again.

Except that Nat had never been very good at pretending. Lizzie had always said it was because he had no imagination, but Nat had always had a nasty habit of facing his demons and of making her face hers as well.

Not this time
…

“Nothing happened,” Lizzie said aloud. She smoothed the torn remnants of her bodice and wondered why her fingers were still shaking. “Nothing happened at all.”

N
AT
W
ATERHOUSE STOOD
in front of Fortune Hall, stared up at the darkened window of Lizzie’s bedroom and tried to think. What would Lizzie do now? Would she run? Would she hide? Where would she go? He should know the answer to these questions. He had known Lady Elizabeth Scarlet for ten years, since she was eleven years old, and he a youth of eighteen. He had seen her grow from a child into a woman. He had thought he knew everything there was to know about her. How wrong he had been.

Where was she?

His mind did not seem to be functioning as clearly as usual. He could not seem to focus on the practicalities of his situation, what to do, how to put matters right. All he seemed capable of thinking about was Lizzie.

What the hell had he done?

Pointless question. He knew precisely what he had done. He had seduced a woman who was not his fiancée on the night before his wedding.

He had ended over a year’s celibacy by making love to the one woman he should never, ever have touched.

He had ravished a virgin.

He had been too weak and too lacking in self-control to resist.

None of the above actually did justice to the heinousness of the situation, though. He faced it squarely.

Lizzie. Hell
. He did not love her. He had not even liked her very much for the past few months. Once upon a time they had been friends but she had been getting under his skin recently, trying to persuade him not to marry Flora, provoking him, using him, taking him for granted. He had already been aggravated almost past bearing when he had received her note that night. He had almost ignored the summons and only habit and that damned sense of responsibility he had always felt for her had prompted him to go to meet her. He wished he had not.

Regret speared him, painfully sharp. That was pointless, too. It was done. Lizzie had goaded him, pushed him beyond bearing but he was not going to blame her. The truth was that she could not have provoked him into doing anything unless he wanted it, and he had wanted to make love to her. He had been
desperate
to make love to her. He still was. It shocked him that he could be in such a godforsaken mess and all he could think about was Lizzie’s beautiful silken white skin beneath his hands and her body, unbearably hot and tight about him, and the
dazzling, blinding pleasure of taking her. He was no saint when it came to women, but nor was he a rake. And Lizzie was the last woman whom he would ever have imagined wanting. How could he when he had always seen her as in need of protection? From the moment he had first known her he had sought to make up for the fact that the two men who should care for her—her half brothers Montague and Tom Fortune—were a feckless idiot and a dangerous wastrel respectively.

He was worse than both of them.

Damn it all to hell and back.

The chimes of the church clock wafted over the fields from Fortune’s Folly village. One o’clock. Less than an hour for his whole life to change…

Where was she? He had to know she was all right.

Anxiety ran through his blood. Of course she was not all right. How could she be? He had ravished her, ruthlessly seduced her. He had known that she must be a virgin, still innocent despite her wild, wayward behavior. What gently bred debutante of nearly one and twenty was not? And she had shown her inexperience when her shameless provocation had disintegrated into shock and she had run from him, appalled and fearful in the end. It was true that Lizzie was outrageous. She frequently went too far but this time she had frightened even herself. And she was no longer innocent and it was his fault.

He had to speak to her.

He looked again at the blank, dark windows of Fortune Hall. He could raise the whole house, of course, and wake everyone up looking for her. It would cause outrage, scandal. If she were found to be missing that would cause even more. Lizzie was already known to be wild. If word went around that she was not in her own bed in the middle of the night, gossip would simply speculate on whose bed she
was
in. Her reputation would be in tatters.

He laughed mirthlessly. Reputation? Lizzie was ruined. If there was to be a child…

His blood ran cold. He could not leave her to face that alone. He had never abandoned her before and he would not do so now. For the first time he thought about his rich marriage of convenience. He should have thought about it before since he was so desperately in need of money, but somehow his concern for Lizzie had blotted out all other thoughts. His marriage had been the perfect solution to all his financial problems. And Miss Flora Minchin would have been the perfect refined, biddable wife. She was Lizzie’s opposite in almost every way. He had never had the remotest desire to rip Flora’s clothes off and make love to her. No doubt she would have been utterly aghast if he had expressed such a desire. But Flora was rich—so very, very rich—and he needed the money so desperately. He was in a trap. People depended on him, his parents, his sister Celeste…The anger and fear tightened within him
when he thought what might happen to Celeste if he let her down. He would never in a thousand years have thought himself the kind of man to succumb to blackmail and yet when his sister’s life, her future and her good name, were in the balance, he had not even hesitated. He knew he could not. It was his responsibility to protect those who relied on him. So he needed a fortune…

Lizzie was rich, too.

The thought slid into his mind and the relief flooded through him.

He had to marry Lizzie.

It was the perfect solution. It would put matters right. It would save her reputation, solve his need for money…

Lizzie would be the wife from hell
.

The thought came swift on the heels of the others. The devil was in Lizzie, always had been, since she was small. Perhaps it was because she had had such a ramshackle childhood with a neglectful mother who had run off with a groom and a father who indulged her like a pet for half the time and forgot she was there the other half. When her father had died and she had come to Fortune Hall at the age of eleven to live with her half brothers, the sons of her mother’s first marriage, matters had barely improved for her. Neither of her brothers had any interest in her. Monty Fortune had engaged a governess for her to absolve his conscience. Lizzie had put mice in the woman’s
bed and the governess had left. None of her successors stayed long, stating that Lizzie was unruly, undisciplined and out of control, a state of affairs that Tom Fortune in particular encouraged. Nat could still remember the first time he had met Lizzie when, as a university contemporary of Tom’s, he had come to Fortune’s Folly and seen a truculent girl in a grubby white dress, all tangled red hair and huge green eyes, climbing the trees in the home park like a tomboy. She had fallen out of an old oak tree and Tom had laughed and Nat had been the one to offer her a hand to help her get up again. And so it had started, with Nat easing Lizzie out of the scrapes she had got herself into, always there for her because neither Monty nor Tom cared a whit.

But this…This was more than a scrape. This was a full-blown disaster. Yes indeed, Lizzie would be the most difficult, intractable, headstrong wife imaginable, the most unsuitable countess and in the fullness of time the least appropriate duchess in the kingdom. Marriage to her might well be a living hell. But hell was precisely where he was heading. He knew there was no escape.

L
IZZIE HAD CLIMBED IN
at her bedroom window, scaling the ivy, reaching for the handholds that only she knew were there in the old stone of Fortune Hall. She had climbed in and out of the house this way for as long as she could remember, coming and going as
and when she pleased, avoiding the discipline of her chaperones, such as it was, and with her half brothers in blissful ignorance of her behavior. Tonight Monty was still awake—when she had slipped past the window she had seen him drinking on his own in the library. There had been no sign of her other half brother, Tom, although the presence of another glass beside Monty’s on the table suggested that someone else had been there earlier that evening. Lizzie’s half brothers had patched up their quarrel now that Tom was no longer a wanted man. Monty had conveniently forgotten that he had disowned his brother and Tom had seemed prepared to forgive him. Lizzie thought that their rapprochement was largely convenience, since no one else in the village of Fortune’s Folly would give either of them the time of day now. Everyone hated Monty for his unscrupulous greed in applying more and more of his medieval taxes to fleece the populace, but people hated Tom more for his ruthless seduction and abandonment of Lydia Cole. Lizzie would not have set foot back in her brother’s house if it had not been for the fact that Monty had threatened legal proceedings against anyone else who gave her shelter. He had then neglected to find a chaperone for her with the result that Lizzie had no one to account to on nights like this. Or alternatively, Lizzie thought, one could say that no one actually cared what she did.

She desperately wanted a bath. She was aching,
her body sore
there
, between her legs, and sore inside. Not so raw as her heart, though. She could smell smoke on her clothes and in her hair. She could also smell Nat’s scent on her body like an imprint, but perhaps that was a trick of her imagination. She did not want to remember him holding her close enough to put his mark on her. She did not want to remember him inside her. She shuddered, closing her eyes, closing her mind.

Cold water would have to do. She would have jumped into the moat when she had got back had it not been for the fact that she was terrified Nat would find her. Instead she lit one pale candle, making sure that the curtains were drawn so close that no light would show outside, and then she stripped off her tattered clothes. Usually she dropped her gown and underclothes on the floor for the maid to pick up but these were ruined, the laces torn, the hooks ripped out. That would cause gossip. That would be difficult to explain.

Such passion. Such pleasure
…

She had thought that she would die from such pleasure. She had never imagined it, never dreamed it. Such bliss at Nat’s hands…She had felt as though her very body would melt, honey-soft, with satisfaction and fulfilment.

She had felt a soul-deep contentment as well, but that had fled fast enough when she had seen the expression on Nat’s face. Some pain stirred deep inside
her and she soothed it quickly back to sleep. No need to think of that. It was over. It was her secret and it would remain so.

She bundled the clothes up carefully and hid them under a pile of blankets in the chest. She would take them out and burn them when she could, and watch the memories drift away on the smoke and ash. Nat would be married by then and gone from Fortune’s Folly with his bride.

Avoiding her reflection in the long mirror, she started to wash herself with the cold water from the ewer and the cloth that was on the dresser. Her hair would have to wait until the morning. There was nothing she could do about that. She started with her face, the ice-cold water from the bowl shocking her a little, wakening her. Neck, shoulders, the curve of her arms…She paused as she raised the cloth to her chest, the irresistible memory intruding of Nat’s mouth at her breast, tugging, nipping, licking…Her body tightened, aching inside, wanting him again. It was impossible to erase that knowledge now. The hand holding the cloth fell to her side and she turned slowly to examine her body in the long pier glass.

She did not look the same. There were marks on her body, faint bruises that indicated the intensity of their lovemaking and also showed the loss of her innocence, the extent of her experience now. She stared at them whilst her body resonated with the knowledge of what she had done. She waited for feelings
of shame or regret. None came. That must prove she was as wild and brazen as everyone claimed. She had no shame for the act of making love. All her regret was saved for the terrible mistake she had made in loving where her feelings were not returned.
That
humiliated her beyond bearing.

There was a small smear of blood on her inner thigh. She scrubbed it away, vigorous now. Her virginity was lost. This was the proof. Some faceless, unimagined future husband would probably cut up rough about her lack of chastity. Men were so often odiously hypocritical about such matters. She found she did not care. Perhaps she should. But she had never been able to imagine herself married. Marriage required compromise and maturity and she was painfully aware that she was not very good at such things. Truth was, she had never wanted to be. Now the possibility of marriage seemed more remote than the moon.

She put on her nightdress but rather than getting into her bed she sat down on the velvet cushioned window seat. Was Nat out there in the shadows of the darkened garden? She felt an almost irresistible urge to pull the curtain back and look. The thing that stayed her hand was the knowledge that if he were there it would be for all the wrong reasons. He would not have followed her because he loved her. He would have followed her because of a sense of responsibility. He would want to make sure that she was safe home and to put matters to rights.

He could not.

Nat cared about her. She knew that. But caring was so mild an emotion compared to the wild love she had for him. Caring was for infants and the old and the sick. Nat did not share her passion. He had shown her lust and she had confused it with love. It was an easy mistake to make, a naïve mistake, she supposed. She felt a boundless love for him. He cared for her. She had poured out her feelings in their lovemaking. He had met her love with his desire. The disparity between their feelings for one another was enormous.

Her hand had crept up to pull back the curtain, driven by the need she had to see Nat again and the crumb of comfort that his caring would offer her. She deliberately let it fall. For her it was all or nothing. Crumbs were not good enough.