Читать книгу Scandalous Regency Secrets Collection - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 18
ОглавлениеCOOP WAITED UNTIL she had seated herself, neatly arranging her skirts around her and then folding her hands in her lap, as if he might be about to tug on some imaginary bellpull and the old man would immediately appear, bearing a tea service and cakes.
Some, he imagined, might see this as acquiescence. Even this early in their relationship, Coop was certain acquiescence was not in Daniella Foster’s vocabulary.
Her action was not an eagerness to please, but what she probably believed the shortest route between what she wanted to know and what he would say, a curiosity that would soon turn to—what? Shock? Outrage? Lord help him—amusement? Certainly not meek acceptance, of that much he was certain. He’d known her for less than a day, less than a few hours actually, but he’d already realized that another thing he could count on with Miss Daniella Foster was her unpredictability.
He wandered across the small chapel, either to put a safe distance between them or in search of some sort of inspiration in the faded fresco he stopped in front of, he wasn’t sure.
He wasn’t accustomed to feeling so helpless, so under the control of circumstances.
He didn’t like the feeling.
If it weren’t for the woman, for the Prince Regent, Coop would have ignored the blackmailer’s threat to call him out as a despoiler of innocent women and much worse, and damn the consequences. But he’d passed beyond that option the moment he’d accepted Prinny’s offer in exchange for his silence.
Even if refusing that offer, he’d realized at the time, meant he would have most likely suffered an unfortunate fatal accident within hours of leaving Carleton House. He wouldn’t have been invited to the Prince Regent’s residence at all, but simply and quietly dispatched, had not the man wanted the reflected light of the hero of Quatre Bras shined upon him, to bolster his own reputation among an increasingly hostile populace.
Coop’s mind went back to the conversation he’d had earlier with his mother and Darby. Neither knew now more than they’d previously known about the happenings at Quatre Bras, except that the Prince Regent himself would not be best pleased if the blackmailer penned another chapbook that would reveal “Shame That Rises to the Highest Reaches of the Crown Itself.”
But Minerva did now know about the Countess of Cockermouth’s predicament, about Daniella Foster...and her bedchamber...and after that, well, everything his mother and Darby hatched between them had become a bit of a blur in Coop’s mind.
He just knew he’d agreed to do what they said. For his sins...
They’d convinced him to agree to this current mad course of action, or at least he’d allowed them to think they’d convinced him. He’d kept the hope alive that there could be another way, even as he’d drawn the bays to a halt in front of the chapel.
Inspiration had not struck.
But the hour soon would.
And then there were Darby’s cheerful parting words to him as he’d mounted his curricle outside the Pulteney, still ringing in his ears: “Buck up, man, put a smile on that hero face. Our Miss Foster is the key to your salvation, remember. It’s either you convince the girl, or you can help me pen your eulogy.”
There was such solace to be found in the heartfelt concern of one’s friends...
Coop took recourse to his pocket watch. Ten minutes. He had ten short minutes to come up with a better idea. Any idea at all. Ten minutes. An eternity. A single heartbeat in time.
He’d thought their fairly inane conversation since entering the chapel had eaten up a good ten minutes all by itself, but it had in reality only taken less than five. And then he’d run out of anything to say, any reason to keep her here, until Dany’s mention of Mrs. Yothers had most probably taken away his last option, that of grabbing her hand and getting the two of them the hell away from the chapel.
So was this it? In less than a space of a day, was he about to irrevocably alter the perceived course of his life? He, Cooper McGinley Townsend. The steady one. The commonsensible one. The one who thought before he acted. Except for that moment at Quatre Bras when he saw children in danger...and again on the flagstones of Bond Street, thanks to a pair of mischievous indigo-blue eyes.
It was time to face facts. There’d been no escape, no real way back, ever since he’d ushered Dany inside the chapel. Probably not since he’d first looked into those same indigo-blue eyes, if he was honest with himself. From that moment, he’d known that somehow she was going to be a part of his life, and him a part of hers.
He had at least partially accepted that. He’d heard of similar blows to the heart from other men, most particularly his friends Gabe and Rigby. He’d come to London to look for a wife in any case. In any other circumstances, having Dany stumble into his arms that morning could have been seen as a sort of less than gentle tap on the shoulder from some helpful gods.
In any other circumstances.
“You know something, don’t you?” Dany asked from behind him. “Oh, did I startle you? I’m certain you don’t mind, as I’d decided I’d sat long enough. You know something, something bad, and you don’t know how to tell me. That’s why you brought me here, and that’s why you’ve been dancing about this whole time, attempting to find a way to say what you don’t wish to say. It’s about Oliver, isn’t it? You’ve heard he’s returning home sooner than expected.”
“Oliver?” It took a moment for Coop to absorb that one, even as he continued his feigned interest in the fresco. “No, this isn’t about Lord Cockermouth. Not directly, although it does remind us that our time to locate the blackmailer is limited.”
“For you, as well,” she pointed out. “You haven’t really told me much about the nature of your problem with the blackmailer.”
“We’re after the same man. That’s as much as you need to know.”
“Probably. But not as much as I want to know. I’m sure the details are much more interesting than Mari’s.”
“Hardly. Contrary to my anonymous biographer’s skewed version of my life, romance is not involved.”
“Then it has nothing to do with the woman? How lowering to my expectations. I doubt you’re protecting yourself, no matter what you might say to the contrary. And not the nonexistent owner of the signet ring, surely, as that’s too much of a tarradiddle for anyone to swallow, that the woman would have turned over any such thing by way of a thank-you to a servant. The Prince Regent, then? I know you’re a hero, but a title, an estate? That’s quite the reward. Or is reward the proper word?”
He turned to face her, nearly bumping into her, for the love of heaven. One of the problems he’d have with Dany was that she was too intelligent. He opened his mouth, and the most ridiculous question came out: “How old are you?”
She didn’t so much as blink. “Seventeen. I’m a bit late in making my come-out next spring, by which time I’ll be the ripe old age of eighteen, but it was thought I’d needed some seasoning before my Season.”
The answer had come quickly, without protest. Without guile. With a smile on her face.
Coop was amazed at how much he’d learned about her in one short day.
“I don’t believe you.”
She rather melodramatically slapped her hands to her cheeks. “Why? Do I appear as if I’m at my last prayers? Hagged? Fagged? Perhaps there’s a wrinkle somewhere I haven’t noticed?”
Coop felt his own cheeks coloring. “No, not that. My apologies. You just don’t—it’s difficult to believe you’re so young. When you speak, that is. Again, my apologies. In my defense, it has been a rather trying day.”
“Don’t apologize.” Dany shrugged. “I told them nobody with more than half a brain would swallow any such a crammer, but they would insist. Is the truth important?”
“Not to the world, no.”
“But to you?”
“Probably not, except for my own satisfaction. Unless you’re actually sixteen.” God, wouldn’t that just put the capper on it?
“Really. How interesting. A year makes that much difference?”
“I’m told even an inch is a lot, in a man’s nose,” Coop shot back, still trying to regain his usually unshakable composure.
Her eyes rather crossed as she attempted a peek at her own nose (lovely nose, quite perfect). “Eating soup and sipping wine could become quite the logistical dilemmas, couldn’t they? I see your point. So it isn’t the age, not in general. It’s where that age is applied.” Then she frowned. “No. I really still don’t understand. But if it helps, my papa gambled a bit too deep and in the time it took for him to recover enough to launch me in anything more than Mari’s cast-off gowns, I’d had the temerity to become two years older.”
Coop began to relax. “So you’re nearer twenty?”
“One and twenty in January actually, as I also lost a year to a broken leg. Mama’s, not mine, and Mari was so newly married Mama felt she couldn’t foist me on her, unattended. Now, frankly, I believe she’s gone past caring. Do you really believe age means anything? My parents, and Mari as well, have sworn me to secrecy, saying it would put paid to my matrimonial chances should anyone know. Which also explains why Dexter—my large-mouthed brother—has been sent to tour the Continent with some of his ramshackle friends.”
Cooper smiled. “You can’t keep him overseas forever.”
“Exactly! And may I say, another argument totally lost on my parents. Am I really wise beyond my years?”
“Wise? I don’t recall saying that,” he said facetiously. “I’d say you’re much more of a trial than I’d expected from a debutante.”
“Oh? And what attributes do you believe commendable in a debutante?”
“The usual, I’d imagine. Sweet. And biddable. Shy, not at all forward.”
“Simpering? With a tendency to giggle? Smelling of nothing more than bread and butter, as Byron wrote? Proficient in discussing the state of the weather, as in it is fair, or coming on to rain, or beastly hot? No, not beastly. Horridly hot.”
Even with the fraying cord holding a figurative sword of Damocles dangling over his head, Coop realized he could speak nonsense with Daniella Foster for hours, heartily enjoying himself. “Warm. Ladies of quality don’t know the meaning of hot.”
“Yes, I remember now. And moist. Ladies, even if lost in a desert, would get no more than moist. However, under the circumstances, I think you’re much better off with me.”
“Yes, in the end, that was the deciding factor,” Coop murmured just as the heavy chapel door swung open, followed closely (too closely, really) by a woman’s voice. “Aha! Basil, get yourself in here! Look what I’ve found. Oh, the shame, the shame.”
Dany whirled about to see the intruder, or she would have if Cooper hadn’t grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her against him for a kiss. The kiss he was to have stolen just as the timepiece in his pocket chimed out the hour, which it had not yet done.
A kiss, he would later tell Darby when he recounted the scene, as being as inspiring as pressing one’s lips against a block of wood.
“Basil, do you see them? Minerva’s Cooper and some hapless gel, as I live and breathe. The hero of Quatre Bras—I recognized him immediately from the chapbook. Locked in a clandestine embrace.”
“Yes, dear, I see them,” the Duke of Cranbrook said, puffing only a little from his small climb up the stairs, as neither duke nor duchess would see sixty again. “Nothing we haven’t done a time or three, eh, Viv?”
“Not now, Basil, not when we’re being decorous,” the duchess scolded, abandoning her husband to all but float across the stone floor in a compilation of skirts and scarves that, were it any darker in the chapel, would have put most in the mind of a ghost. If ghosts wore ruffled, tule-wrapped bonnets.
By now Dany was standing stock-still, her eyes all but popping out of her head, and Cooper had dropped to one knee, her hands held tightly in his.
So she couldn’t run away. Or pummel him heavily about the head and shoulders, which he wouldn’t dismiss as impossible. Not from the look on her face.
“Miss Foster,” he said hurriedly, squeezing her fingers to get her attention. “Under the circumstances, it would indeed be my honor and privilege to ask for your hand in marriage, in front of these witnesses.”
“You hear that, Viv? We’re witnesses,” the duke said, catching up to his wife and slipping his arm about her waist. “I’ve always wanted to be a witness.”
“Basil, hush. Pretty little thing, isn’t she? Minerva was worried about that. Oh, dear, she hasn’t answered yet. Go on, dearie, it’s your turn now. Say yes,” the duchess prodded, leaning in as if to not miss a word.
Cooper watched Dany as she looked to the pair of seeming cherubs beaming at them, actually dropping into a brief curtsy before redirecting her attention, and indigo eyes gone close to black, to him.
Suddenly, he felt himself transported to Bond Street.
Those eyes, like a mirror into her soul, told him her every thought, each rapidly transitioning emotion. Wide-eyed shock. Embarrassed innocence. Questioning. Recognition. Amusement, almost as if she was laughing at their situation, perhaps even at him.
“Just say yes, all right?” he whispered. “I’ll explain later.”
“Oh, my, yes, you will be doing that, won’t you?” she answered just as quietly.
“Viv, I can hear them talking, but I can’t quite make out what they’re saying,” the Duke of Cranbrook complained.
“She said yes, Your Grace,” Coop told him, rising to his feet before raising Dany’s hands for what he hoped resembled chastely devout kisses.
“Well, good, then,” the duke chirped. “Good on you, young lady, and good on my nephew’s chum. Oh, and good on me, because now I won’t be late to dinner.” He tucked his wife’s arm within his. “Come on, sweetums, let’s leave these two lovebirds alone, to continue their billing and cooing—and whatever else they might put their minds to, eh?”
The duchess tapped on her husband’s arm. “You’re so bad. Come along now.”
As they turned to make their exit, the duke leaned down and whispered something in his wife’s ear that had her giggling like the worst of debutantes all the way to the door. “Oh, Basil, of course there will be time before dinner, you randy old goat.”
“The Duke and Duchess of Cranbrook, aunt and uncle to their heir and my good friend Gabriel Sinclair,” Coop said once the door was closed behind the pair. “Under the circumstances, I thought I’d leave introductions to some other time.”
He let go of her hands.
“Miss Foster? You’re not saying anything.”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” she told him, and left him where he stood, returning to the bench to retrieve her gloves as he followed her. “Oh, wait, I suppose I do.”
And with that, she went up on her tippy-toes and employed those gloves to slap his face.
“That’s for bringing me here under false pretenses.”
Coop kept his hands at his sides, fairly certain she was only getting started.
He was right.
Slap.
“That’s for being so harebrained that you’d let the viscount talk you into this.”
“In all fairness to Darby, my mother was in on it, as well. I was outnumbered at least ten to one.”
“You said the viscount and your mother.”
Slap.
“You’re right. Make that outnumbered twenty to one. You’ll understand when you meet Min—my mother. I had no plan—she and Darby did. We were running out of time, and it was and is plain as day that you’d involve yourself, anyway, and that was the end of that.”
“We are leagues from the end of that, Cooper Townsend.”
Slap.
“Ow. There are buttons on those gloves, you know.”
“I don’t care. I was to obey you. You were in charge. ‘How old are you, Miss Foster?’ Old enough to be compromised, or must I find another way? You couldn’t simply ask? Does it feel more comforting to you to have been forced into marriage with me? I couldn’t be trusted to have a brain in my own head?”
Slap.
It wasn’t the force of the slaps, but the buttons, and the repetition, that were beginning to grate on Coop’s nerves. That and the fact that she was right, all the way down the line. “We need to be able to be in each other’s company at all times, and there’s no time to devote to putting on a show of courting you, not while the blackmailer could be closing in on us, and probably many more like us. There are surveillance limitations to my current residence at the Pulteney. I need access to Portman Square. I need to be left alone by ambitious mamas and silly young ladies throwing themselves in my path, getting in my way. And once more, because it’s important, you’d be in the way no matter what, so at least this way I could have some small chance of controlling—of watching over you. Our betrothal is a convenience. Don’t worry. Once this is over I’ll say you came to your senses and cried off. It’s not going to come to marriage.”
Damned if she didn’t drop the gloves, and punch him square in the jaw.
“Why did you do that?”
“You can’t mean you don’t know.”
The force may have been what finally drove some sense into Coop’s head. For a man of five and twenty, he’d had little interest in the ladies, and probably less experience. He’d been too busy being a soldier. From the moment the blackmailer had delivered his threat, he’d been almost exclusively occupied in finding the man before he could publish and Prinny had decided to bring back neck-chopping as a form of royal sport. He hadn’t considered all of the consequences when he’d finally bowed to Darby and Minerva’s plan, as long as it might work.
He hadn’t put all that much thought into Dany’s reaction. He was doing so now. In spades.
“You want to marry me? Why on earth would you want to do that?”
She bowed her head, avoiding his gaze, and his question. “I didn’t say that.”
He rubbed at his jaw. “Then I apologize, but I really don’t understand. Although I’m certain I deserved it.”
Now she looked up at him again. Those eyes. Damn those soul-bearing eyes. “I don’t know why I did it, not precisely. I suppose I felt insulted.”
Coop put a crooked finger beneath her chin and leaned in, gently kissing her on the lips before retrieving her gloves and handing them to her. Her lips were soft this time, not at all wooden, and he rather enjoyed the brief experience. He may have to try it again. Soon.
“Why did you do that?” she asked in that slightly husky voice that had intrigued him nearly as much as those eyes.
“I don’t know, precisely. I suppose I felt an unexplainable urge. I think I’ve already established that I haven’t been thinking all that clearly today. Are you going to slap me again?”
“No. I think I’d like you to take me back to Portman Square so that I can inform my sister of my new status as the betrothed of the hero of Quatre Bras. That ought to serve to catapult her out from beneath the covers. And you, sir, need to pen a note to my father, begging his forgiveness for presuming to take my hand before asking his permission to do so. I suggest a crate of fine claret accompany the note. Papa would forgive most anything for enough good claret.”
Coop was astounded at her level of calm. He felt as tightly wound as a watch spring. Kissing her had only increased the tension. Maybe he should try punching something.
He helped her up onto the curricle seat, tossed another coin to the boy he’d charged with minding the horses and they set off for Portman Square.
Dany was once more sitting with her hands meekly folded her in lap. That couldn’t be good.
“You’re thinking, aren’t you? I suppose you’ll want me to post our betrothal in the newspapers?”
She answered without looking at him. “If that’s what one does, then one who compromises ladies of quality probably does it, yes. I doubt the protocol for compromise is listed in the book Mari gave me. Is there a corresponding tome for gentlemen?”
“Probably. But I’m fairly certain I know what to do.”
Coop knew he could have mentioned Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman. Minerva had given him the compilation of the letters on his fifteenth birthday, saying that since his father wasn’t alive to instruct him, somebody else’s father might serve as well, and probably do the job better.
She’d consigned the book to the fire a year later, after reading his lordship’s observations on women being no more than children of a larger growth, devoid of real intelligence or good sense and prone to indulging themselves in silly little passions.
“Good. Then you know, as I know, that the side door will be left unlocked at a quarter to twelve tonight, and my maid will be waiting there to bring you to my bedchamber. Not that my romantical sister would blink an eye, anyway, now that you’ve compromised me. In fact, she’ll probably be over the moon to assist us in any assignation. You’ve certainly gone to a whole lot of trouble to do what I’d already suggested you do.”
There was probably something Coop could say to all of this, but he’d be damned if he could think of a thing. By the time they’d returned to Portman Square he’d half convinced himself that, no matter how the world may see him—soldier, patriot, hero, baron—when it came to managing the women in his life, he was a sad case indeed.
