Читать книгу Beauty and the Baron - Deborah Hale - Страница 8

Angela could not decide whether she was sorry or relieved that she’d left her gloves back on the footstool with her bonnet. If she’d been holding them in her hand when Lord Daventry had baited her with yet another riddle, the urge to strike him with them might have been too fierce a temptation for her to resist.

He was playing blindman’s bluff with her! Keeping her in the dark about his intentions and his feelings. Swooping in close to tease her with a tiny kernel of information calculated to set her lurching after him. Then dancing out of her reach once again, while she groped a fistful of air.

“Did you wake up this morning, sir, and say to yourself, ‘This looks like a marvelous day to go vex my neighbor!’?”

His lordship laughed again, clearly oblivious to his increasing danger of being throttled. “If that notion had entered my mind, I can assure you, Miss Lacewood, you’d be at the very bottom of my list of potential victims. Forgive me for not being more plainspoken. My years spent in polite society did little to foster that commendable ability.”

He sounded genuinely contrite in a wry sort of way. His green eyes, previously hard, cool and impenetrable as jade, had softened until they beckoned her like the garden on a dewy summer morning at sunrise.

Against her will, Angela felt herself relent. “I should have known better than to presume you were proposing marriage to someone like me, my lord.”

“On the contrary.” A harsh note crept into his hypnotic voice. “Someone like me would not presume to propose marriage to you, Miss Lacewood.”

“But you said…?”

“I asked you to be my fiancée, not my wife. And before you accuse me of vexing you intentionally again, I beg to point out that one need not follow the other as a matter of course.”

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it did, though, unless a couple wished to bring scandal on themselves and their families.

Once upon a time, Angela had indulged in childish fancies of marrying a man like Lucius Daventry—titled, wealthy and so very handsome. A sort of fairy-tale prince to whisk her away from Netherstowe, where she often felt of little more consequence than a scullery maid.

Since then, she’d experienced enough of the world to realize how unlikely it was that any man would offer for a dowerless, unaccomplished country girl who had never ventured out in society. She’d also come to understand that marriage might not be the refuge she’d once imagined it to be. For those reasons, she’d resigned herself to a life of placid spinsterhood, making herself sufficiently useful to her relations that they would not grudge her bed and board.

While sunshine, fresh air, music and friendship were still free for the taking, she would be content. If only Lord Daventry had not come with his unorthodox proposal to stir up the embers of her silly girlhood longing for some-thing more.

“Intentional or not, I fear you are confusing me again, sir.” Not only with his words, either.

Never before had she felt herself so aggravated by a person one moment, then so powerfully drawn to him the next. Really, it was enough to drive a girl straight to…the pantry! How she would love to soothe her wrought-up feelings with a thick slice of pound cake, so rich as to be nearly indigestible.

“Whatever you want from me, Lord Daventry, I seem unable to grasp it.” Her mouth watered so much at the thought of cake that she had to swallow before continuing. “No doubt there are plenty of other young ladies who’d be delighted to oblige you.”

Her guest parted his lips to speak, but Angela cut him off. “I bid you good-day, my lord. Remember me warmly to your grandfather.”

She pivoted on the toe of her slipper to dash off. Before she could stir a step, his lordship caught her hand to detain her. A curious sensation rippled up her arm—hot and cold at the same time. Rather like her bewildering reaction to the baron himself.

Before she had a chance to withdraw her hand from his, Lucius Daventry blurted out the words she had prevented him from speaking a moment before. “Please, Miss Lacewood, stay and hear me out. I need your help. My grandfather is dying.”

His words struck Angela a harsh backhand blow. She flinched from it at the same instant her knees grew weak. If his lordship had not held her hand in such a tight grip, she might have wilted to the floor.

“Dying?” She raised her free hand to her brow in a vain effort to stem the chaotic whirl of thoughts in her mind. “That can’t be. When I visited Helmhurst yesterday he looked better than I’ve seen him in some time.”

But the earl was not a young man. And he’d been mildly ailing for as long as Angela could remember. “I must go to him at once!”

Another notion reared up from the tempest of her thoughts.

“Why did you not tell me straight away?” Wrenching her hand back from Lord Daventry’s, she was surprised to find the warm air of the sitting room chilly against her skin where he had touched. “It was most unfeeling of you, subjecting me to a litany of paradoxes while keeping me in ignorance of your grandfather’s condition!”

The baron clenched his jaw tight, but some subtle shift of his brow betrayed the injury her reproach had inflicted upon him.

Stifling a qualm of guilt that squirmed in her belly, Angela turned away from him. She must get to Helmhurst, and her dear friend the earl, as soon as possible.

She had scarcely taken a step toward the door before Lord Daventry loomed in front of her. “I cannot let you go, Miss Lacewood.”

“You had better.” she tried to duck around him, but he caught her in his arms.

“Let go of me this instant!” she cried, ignoring her ridiculous desire to linger in his hold, which felt oddly like an embrace.

“I cannot let you go,” he repeated, “until you have calmed down. My grandfather is in no immediate danger, and I do not want him to guess what his doctors have told me.”

Angela eased her token struggle to free herself, yet her breath came fast and shallow, as though she had wrestled against him with all her might. “How can you say the earl is dying one minute, then claim he is in no danger the next?”

“No immediate danger,” Lord Daventry corrected her. His respiration seemed to have picked up tempo, too. “You should pay more careful heed to my words, Miss Lacewood. Though my grandfather does not appear in any worse health than usual, his doctors assure me he has, at most, three months to live.”

A bank of dark, tearful clouds suddenly shadowed the coming summer that had stretched ahead of Angela with such promise only moments ago.

Lord Daventry relaxed his grip on her.

“I do not want that time blighted for him in any way by the knowledge of how grave his condition is. If you wish to see him again, I must have your word that you will honor my wishes.”

She wanted to feel some sympathy for the baron, but he made it impossible. Planting her hands against the breast of his well-tailored coat, Angela pushed herself out of his grasp, despising the passing flicker of disappointment she felt when he let her go with so little resistance.

“If the earl knows nothing of this, you may rest assured I would not speak of it to him, even without your bidding.”

“You need not say a word to betray everything, Miss Lacewood. Your face is an open book for anyone curious enough to read it, your eyes even more so.”

A cold wave of dismay washed over Angela.

Was Lord Daventry telling the truth or only baiting her again? And if the former, might he decipher the contrary, far too intense feelings he provoked in her?

Lucius Daventry’s emotions had been a seething stew bubbling in a tightly lidded pot. Angela Lacewood had jarred that lid more than once during their interview—each time venting a scalding blast of steam. For all Lucius hated anyone unsettling his composure, he had to admit those momentary discharges of pressure had probably kept him from exploding.

Now if only the searing imprint of Miss Lacewood in his arms did not make his body burst into flames!

She lowered her gaze, perhaps to protect herself from his searching scrutiny. “I am able to put on a cheerful face when I wish, sir, and your grandfather’s sight is not what it once was. I would never do anything to cause him distress.”

“I believe that, my dear.”

The last word slipped past Lord Daventry’s censor. He hastened on, hoping she would not pay it any heed. If he succeeded in convincing her to help him, which seemed unlikely at present, he would have to accustom himself to uttering such endearments.

A spasm of alarm gripped his heart at that thought.

“What I need to know is how far you would be willing to dissemble in order to make my grandfather happy in his last months?”

The words stung his throat as he expelled them. It had taken him several long nights staring into the cold, dark beauty of the starry sky to cultivate his present stoic acceptance of the situation. Perhaps his ruse with Miss Lacewood would provide a welcome distraction for him in the weeks to come.

If only he could convince her to help him.

Her eyes widened and her gaze flew back to meet his. A flicker of triumph in their golden brown depths told Lucius she had finally reconciled all the contradictions of his strange proposal.

“You want to pretend we’re getting married, to please the earl?”

“Just so. Grandfather has been remarkably unsubtle in his quest to bring us together.”

The glimmer of a smile bewitched her lips for an instant. Evidently the earl had been making a nuisance of himself matchmaking with Miss Lacewood, too.

“There is nothing else he wants so much in this life,” Lucius continued. “Until now I have turned a deaf ear to his constant litany of your virtues, for I have no intention of marrying. Not even for my grandfather’s sake.”

The young lady could not disguise her relief. “But you would become engaged to me?”

Lucius nodded. “With the understanding that you will break the engagement once…it has served its purpose. In exchange for your cooperation, I will assist your brother in gaining the commission he desires.”

She stared at him in silence for a moment. Despite his earlier protestations, Lucius could not divine what she was thinking or how she might respond.

“I require no such inducement from you, my lord,” she said at last. “If I choose to do what you ask, it will be because I also wish to make the earl happy.”

“Nevertheless, Miss Lacewood, I would insist.” Lucius declined to insult the young lady by telling her it would be a kind of insurance, to guarantee that she’d break the engagement once it had outlived its usefulness.

After all, it was a woman’s prerogative to change her mind in matters of this nature. A mild local scandal might result, but little more. When a gentleman jilted a lady, on the other hand, it became the tattle of the ton—likely to end up in the law courts or, worse yet, the newspapers.

If what his grandfather had told him about Angela Lacewood were true, Lucius doubted she would betray him by insisting they go ahead with a marriage he did not want. A nobleman with a comfortable fortune could never be too careful, though. He would feel less uneasy about the whole enterprise if he had some influence he could exercise over her when the time came.

“Now that you understand my intentions, Miss Lacewood, is it possible you might oblige me?”

As he awaited her answer, it seemed to Lucius that all of his internal organs had contracted into one tight, heavy ball such as might blast from the mouth of a cannon. Finding that his palms had begun to sweat, he thrust his arms behind his back.

“It is…possible, my lord,” she said at last.

Lucius expelled the breath he had not realized he’d been holding.

“But I will need more information upon which to base my decision,” she hastened to add. “What would this engagement of ours entail, exactly?”

“How in blazes should I know!” Lucius flared.

This whole business had wound him far too tight. His struggle to project an unruffled facade had not helped.

“Whatever it takes to make grandfather believe we mean to get married, I suppose.” He was vexed with himself for failing to plan beyond this interview, which had not gone at all as he’d expected.

“Would we have to go out in society together?” Miss Lacewood looked as though she were wringing her hands. At second glance, Lucius realized she was twisting a slender ring on her little finger. “I mean, such society as one finds in this quiet corner of the country?”

Since he wasn’t certain what answer she wanted, Lucius gave her the one he preferred. “I don’t see why we should have to. I seldom get invited anywhere these days and almost always decline when I do. I don’t expect that to change simply because I’ve acquired a fiancée.”

A certain stiffness in her posture seemed to ease. Had she approved of his unsociable answer? Perhaps they might get along well enough after all.

“Would I be allowed to visit Helmhurst even more frequently than I do now?” This time there could be no question what she wanted to hear.

Though the notion of sharing the last few precious months of his grandfather’s company with another person did not appeal to him, Lucius made himself nod. “As much as you wish.”

Miss Lacewood made no effort to hide her bittersweet satisfaction with his answer.

It was beginning to look as though he might just succeed in winning her cooperation. The prospect made Lucius light-headed and off balance.

“Anything else?” he asked. The corners of his mouth arched upward and he could do nothing to stop them.

She greeted his question with a blush so intense Lucius could see it in spite of the dim light in the room.

“Kiss?”

The tremulous murmur of her query hit him like a hard, unexpected blow to the belly. Lucius ordered himself not to stare at Miss Lacewood’s wide, full lips. Under no circumstances should he imagine what it might be like to kiss her. Or speculate whether she’d been kissed by another man.

All at once, Lucius fancied he could hear bugles in the distance sounding retreat.

“I should never have come here.” He wheeled about and strode for the sitting room door, snatching up his cloak and wide-brimmed felt hat from the back of a chair where he had left them.

“This was a ludicrous idea—quite unworkable. I’m sorry to have troubled you, Miss Lacewood. I will see myself out.”

As he marched toward the entry hall, Lucius flung his cloak around his shoulders and jammed his hat on, pulling the broad brim low to shade his face.

Behind him he heard footsteps hurrying to catch up.

“Please, Lord Daventry, will you wait a moment?”

Lucius did not slacken his pace, though he fancied he could hear the Iron Duke bellowing, “The little baggage has you on the run, eh, Daventry? Stand and take it like a man, why don’t you.”

When he reached the front door, Lucius wheeled to face his pursuer.

Clearly Miss Lacewood had not anticipated this, for she failed to curb her headlong chase. As he pivoted toward her, she barreled into him. If the door had not been at his back, they might have crashed onto the floor of the entry hall in a tangled heap. Instead, Lucius felt his arms rise to enfold her for the third time that afternoon.

Her wild tumble of curls tickled his nose. They smelled as fresh and sweet as the garden from whence she’d been summoned by his call. If sunbeams could have substance and texture, surely they would feel like Miss Lacewood’s golden tresses.

She raised her face to his, and for one mad, fleeting instant Lucius wanted to give her the kiss she’d asked about. The kiss her lips had been made for.

But before he had the chance, words gushed from between those provocatively parted lips. “I’m sorry!”

It brought him back to his senses with the cold shock of ice water.

“I’m so sorry I bumped into you.” She sounded thoroughly rattled. “And I’m sorry if I embarrassed you with my question.”

She lifted her hand to his face.

Lucius flinched at the soft, pitying caress of her gentle fingers.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated in a whisper as her hand strayed closer to his mask, making the mangled flesh beneath it burn.

Though part of him longed to thrust her away with all his strength, Lucius exercised every crumb of his considerable restraint to detach Angela Lacewood from him.

“That, my dear, is precisely the problem.”

Sorry? Angela fumed as she watched Lord Daventry ride away, the wide brim of his hat pulled low to his brow and his dark cloak billowing behind him. She was sorry, to be sure.

Sorry that insufferable man had come calling with his distressing news, his bewildering proposal and his abrupt departure! Yet it was only when he had disappeared altogether from sight that she marched back into the house.

For the first time in her life, Angela slammed the heavy front door of Netherstowe behind her. She had never been given to venting her feelings. Indeed, she’d spent most of her life trying to avoid strong emotions of any kind. They served no purpose but to cause a variety of unpleasant physical sensations—racing heart, breathlessness, bilious stomach, headaches.

In the past hour, Lord Daventry had whipped her emotions to such a pitch it was a wonder she hadn’t broken out head to toe in bright red spots!

From below stairs wafted the comforting aroma of freshly baked gingerbread. Angela gulped a deep, soothing breath of it and immediately felt her agitation begin to ease. Determined to put Lord Daventry out of her mind, she followed the mouthwatering smell down to the kitchen.

There, true to her nose, she discovered two large pans of gingerbread cooling on the counter, permeating the air with their spicy sweetness. The cook, a tiny scrap of a woman, was endeavouring to wrestle a large roasting pan into the oven.

“Here, Tibby, let me help.” Angela scrambled to bear some of the pan’s considerable weight. “What’s for supper?”

“A roast of mutton and batter pudding,” replied Mrs. Tibbs as she shut the oven door. She pushed a few lank strands of grizzled hair back up under her cap. “It’ll be a while yet. Do you fancy a cup of tea and morsel of gingerbread to stay your stomach until then, my pet?”

Angela nodded readily as she pictured Lucius Daventry buried beneath a sweet, stodgy mountain of gingerbread, seed cake and lemon tarts. She fetched cups and saucers, while Tibby cut her a morsel of warm gingerbread that would have satisfied a starving field laborer.

“I hear tell Lord Lucifer ventured out in broad daylight to call on you,” said Tibby a few moments later, as she poured the tea. “I told Hoskins he ought to have stood guard by the sitting room door to see that no harm came to you. He just laughed, the old fool. Won’t hear a word against his lordship.”

“While you never have a good word to say about him,” Angela reminded the cook, as if she needed to. In an effort to distract Tibby from the subject, she added, “This gingerbread is heavenly! Just what I needed after working up a sharp appetite in the garden.”

Never would she admit, least of all to a notorious tattle like Tibby, that it was not her hours digging in the garden but his lordship’s unexpected call that had sent her scurrying for the kitchen.

“What did Lord Lucifer want with you?” The cook peered over the rim of her teacup at Angela, her small black eyes glittering with curiosity.

“I wish you wouldn’t call him that,” Angela protested. She should have known Tibby would not be diverted easily from her favorite subject of gossip. This quiet corner of Northamptonshire provided few quite so piquant. “The poor man was wounded in the service of his country. We should take pity on him, rather than pay heed to all that ridiculous talk about deviltry.”

She had never quite managed to reconcile the dutiful grandson of the earl’s fulsome accounts or the brave but sardonic cavalry officer of his own letters with the sinister reputation Lord Daventry had acquired since retiring to Helmhurst.

Their meeting this afternoon had only perplexed her further.

“Humph! You wouldn’t call it ridiculous if you’d ever met him walking abroad after dark.” Tibby shivered. “Mrs. Hackenley vows he put a curse on their well and the Babbits had two swine disappear without a trace.”

Angela’s mouthful of tea sprayed out over her gingerbread in a fine mist. “Tibby! Surely you aren’t accusing the heir to an earldom of being a common pig thief, on top of everything else?”

The cook raised her sharp, thin shoulders almost to her ears. “I don’t say he is, and I don’t say he ain’t.”

Her eyes narrowed to mere slits and her voice dropped to an eerie whisper. “But I hear tell pigs’ blood and entrails is used for…sacrifices.”

The back of Angela’s neck rose in gooseflesh, but something compelled her to scoff, “Nonsense! His lordship doesn’t go out much in the daytime, because his eyes are sensitive to strong light.”

Tibby digested that scrap of information. “You still haven’t told me what he wanted with you.”

If she didn’t tell Tibby something, it would probably be all over the neighborhood by tomorrow morning that Lord Daventry had been recruiting her to join his coven, or something equally daft. Though Angela herself had sensed a dark, even dangerous, side to the man, she knew he could not be as evil as ignorant gossip painted him.

“Did I not mention it?” She tossed the words off in the most casual tone she could feign. “His lordship came to ask for my hand.”

Tibby’s pointy little chin fell, leaving her mouth agape. Her eyes looked in grave danger of popping out of their sockets and rolling across the table.

Angela struggled to keep a sober face as she ate more of her somewhat soggy gingerbread. The mellow sweetness on her tongue and the warm weight of it in her stomach were providing their accustomed comfort. Or perhaps it was Tibby’s excessive suspicion of Lord Daventry that made her own earlier misgivings about the man seem so foolish.

Whatever the reason, Angela found herself becoming more favorably disposed toward Lucius Daventry by the minute.

“Lord-a-mercy!” The cook crossed her flat bosom. “What did he say when you refused him? I heard him stomping off, then the door slam shut. He hasn’t put a curse on Netherstowe, has he?”

“Calm yourself, Tibby.” Angela washed down the last of her gingerbread with a mouthful of tea. “His lordship didn’t say a word about a curse.”

Mrs. Tibbs blew out a shuddering breath.

Some unlikely impulse of devilment made Angela ask, “What makes you so certain I refused him?”

“You can’t mean to wed such a creature?”

“Why ever not?” Was she trying to convince Tibby…or herself? “It isn’t as though I have my pick of suitors. I haven’t a penny in the world. I’m not clever or accomplished or beautiful. This could be my only chance to have a home of my own.”

Why was she talking as if Lord Daventry had offered her a real marriage? Angela wondered. Certainly she dared not tell Tibby the truth and risk word finding its way back to the earl.

“Not beautiful?” sputtered the cook. “Do you never look in a glass, girl? You’re clever enough to suit most men, and you’ve the kindest heart in the world. If her ladyship would only take you to London or Brighton as she ought, you’d soon have your pick of swains.”

Angela shook her head, “You’re too partial. I know my own shortcomings well enough.” Her aunt and cousins had made her well aware of them over the years. “I’m sure there are plenty of young ladies who’d be delighted to tolerate Lord Daventry’s eccentricities for the chance to be mistress of Helmhurst.”

“More fools, them,” muttered Tibby.

“I think his lordship would make an ideal sort of husband. Sleeping most of the day, then wandering abroad at night.”

Angela’s conscience warned her she should not tease poor Tibby, who’d been a better substitute mother to her than Aunt Hester ever had. Yet, she had never been able to keep herself from defending anyone under attack. Not even if that one was the powerful Lord Daventry and the attack nothing more than silly gossip.

“Don’t fret yourself, Tibby. I didn’t accept him. In any case, I’m not altogether certain he still wants me. I must have offended him somehow, for he said proposing to me had been a ludicrous idea. That’s when he stomped off.”

What had provoked him so? Angela wondered. She’d only asked if their sham engagement would involve the odd kiss. Did he consider the possibility so very unpleasant?

“Well, that’s all right then.” Tibby dismissed the whole matter with a wave of her hand. “As long as there’s no curse, and you didn’t accept him. Now tell me everything he said.”

Angela scarcely heard Tibby over the sudden uproar of her own thoughts. Had Lord Daventry assumed her question indicated distaste on her part for the possibility of kissing him, because of his reputation…or his injuries?

She shot to her feet. “I must speak with him, at once.”

“No, you mustn’t!” cried Tibby. “You said he’d changed his mind. You don’t want to risk offending him worse, do you?”

“I’ll be back in time for dinner,” Angela called over her shoulder.

As she dashed up the stairs, Tibby called after her, “Don’t do anything foolish, now, because you feel sorry for him. You’ve too soft a heart for your own good!”

A soft heart? Angela popped back into the sitting room to retrieve her bonnet and gloves. She hadn’t shown Lucius Daventry much sympathy this afternoon.

Just because he hid his hurts behind a facade of cool irony did not mean he felt them less keenly or deserved less compassion than others who freely bared their wounds. She of all people should know that.

If only she could convince Lord Daventry to give her another chance.