Chapter Twenty-Three
Malcolm was sitting in his room, staring out into the ink-black summer night, when he heard the knock on his door.
Earlier that evening, he had been called away from the party by Ezra.
A few of the sheep had escaped from the paddock, and Ezra wanted to know what Malcolm advised to recover them, but it was not his way to merely issue commands in these instances.
After riding around the estate for an hour with Ezra, he had been able to locate all the missing sheep.
He knew where the escaped ones liked to hide, where they ran to, and he had always been good at finding them.
The interlude had reminded him of his true purpose at Parkhorne. And it wasn’t sitting at table, flirting with beautiful women and being catered to by servants. It wasn’t drinking fine wine and wearing a silk cravat.
Nevertheless, all the while, as he had canvassed across the land searching for lost sheep, he had been unable to stop thinking of what Scarlett had told him at dinner.
She was not with child. Not with his child. Her courses had arrived. Their mishap, that first night of pure absurd coincidence, had not resulted in any inconveniences. She would not have to yoke herself to him for life to avoid disgrace and ruin.
He should be relieved. He knew that.
And yet, receiving this information had carried all the comfort of a knife in his gut.
He hadn’t realized how much he had hoped that somehow, someway, they would be forced together.
Of course, he didn’t want an unwilling bride.
But it was difficult to think of Scarlett as truly unwilling when yesterday she’d begged him to put his cock inside her.
Which was foolish. Because bedding and marriage, he well knew, given the origins of his own existence, were two very different matters.
Now he stood and crossed to the door, sure that he would encounter a maidservant on an errand or another messenger from Ezra.
But no.
It was her.
Scarlett.
Despite what had transpired between them yesterday, she had seemed so remote and beautiful to him at dinner. Whenever he saw her at dinner or with any of the other members of the party, she felt as untouchable to him as she had the night they first met.
“Come in,” he said, realizing that she should not stand in the hallway for a moment longer than necessary. Even a maid glimpsing her outside his door could spark a scandal.
She followed his command with a quick step. Then he closed the door and turned around to take her in.
“Are you well? Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. “My sister is going to marry your brother. I heard them discussing it tonight. It’s decided between them.”
Malcolm raised his eyebrows. It wasn’t a surprise, and yet still, something about this news felt monumental.
It meant a great deal for Parkhorne, of course, that George had selected a wife.
And it still shocked him that his little brother, the boy whom he had first gotten to know as a bright-eyed eight-year-old, was grown up enough now to marry.
“Have they told Mrs. Salisbury?”
“No. They want to wait until the end of the party. Out of respect for her wishes.”
“It is only ten days,” he said, uncomfortably aware of how little of the house party remained. “They will not have long to wait.”
He wondered if that was all she had come to tell him. It was important news, surely, but…
His next thought evaporated as he took her in.
Her cheeks were only slightly flushed, and he yearned to make them more so.
Her gaze was eager, open. She was wearing the same frock she had worn at dinner, a light red evening dress that put her bosom on display.
He wanted to bury his face in her breasts and not resurface until—
“I want you to ruin me. Still.”
He shook his head. He had been lost in his wanting. It took him a moment to realize that she was asking him to make those very desires a reality.
“You do?”
Somehow, despite yesterday, her request surprised him. Overwhelmed him, even.
“As soon as possible, preferably.”
“Scarlett, I—It isn’t—We have discussed why … we shouldn’t.”
“You’ve practically done it anyway! And I’ve told you I have no wish to marry.”
“You didn’t say that you didn’t wish it. You said you thought you wouldn’t.”
Her eyes flashed. “Are you trying to humiliate me?”
“No. Of course not. It is only that you didn’t say you were against matrimony, but rather that you thought you wouldn’t find a husband in London.”
“I return to my previous question.” She crossed her arms and glared at him.
“What if you meet a man in the future, and want to marry him, and wish you hadn’t bedded me?”
“That won’t happen.”
“You can’t know that! Christ, Scarlett, you can’t be more than—what? Six-and-twenty?”
“Eight-and-twenty. Far past marriageable age.”
“You can’t believe that rot. Women who are eight-and-twenty marry all over England every day.”
“Not in Grosvenor Square.”
“Please, Scarlett, even there!”
He didn’t precisely know the statistics on women’s marital ages in Grosvenor Square, of course. But he was sure it happened.
Especially when they are as beautiful as you. Especially when they make men go out of their heads imagining what they would do if they had you in their bed.
“It isn’t about marriage. Or at least my marriage,” she snapped.
“It’s that my sister is getting married.
And I’ve spent the past four years chaperoning her around London, and managing her social visits, and making sure she didn’t step out with the wrong gentlemen—it’s been my life! A life that is about to be over.”
He reeled back. While he was flattered, under any circumstances, to be wanted by her, he couldn’t exactly say my sister is getting married was the most gratifying framework for her professed wish to bed him.
“You want to bed me because your sister is getting married?”
“No, that is not why. It’s just that I realized I am at a precipice—and I have very little of my own to show for the last four years.”
“So you think bedding the nearest gentleman willing to slaver after you like a dog will suffice to fill the void?”
“That is not what I said. Why are you willfully misunderstanding me?”
“I am not misunderstanding anything. Perhaps you do not understand what you are saying.”
“I shouldn’t have spoken of Tilly. It isn’t about her or her marriage, either. It isn’t about marriage in any respect! It is only that the prospect of Tilly wedding your brother makes me realize I have my whole life before me!”
Was she suggesting that now that her sister was respectably wed, she might bed any number of gentlemen quietly and discreetly?”
“I am sorry, Scarlett, if I do not delight in being merely the first of many.”
“That is not what I mean.”
“What do you mean?”
He had never intended to quarrel with her.
In fact, before this moment, he had not thought it possible that he would quarrel with Miss Scarlett Perkins again.
Yes, they had sniped at one another upon their first meeting, but that had been because they had misunderstood each other.
And yes, they had argued after their initial mishap, because it had been a trying, confusing situation.
But for this quarrel, he could locate no easily blamable extenuating circumstance. And yet quarreling they most certainly were.
“It is perfect, don’t you see?” Scarlett said. “We are drawn to one another. You can’t deny that we are. We keep coming together, even though we know we shouldn’t.”
“I am not going to stand here before you, Scarlett, and pretend that I don’t want you.”
She looked at him then for a hot, terrible, interminable second. He could feel all that he wanted from her in that moment. He could feel how easy it would be to sink to his knees and take her into his arms.
When she spoke again, her voice was softer.
“We can’t resist each other. And yet we are capable of using our reason.
Our lives are not at all compatible. I have lived all my life in London—it is all I know.
And you belong here in Somerset. With your family and your duties.
Our marriage would be impractical, particularly with regard to fortune.
You are not a man of independent means, and I have not a cent to my own name.
My stepmother keeps me completely. You have probably deduced that.
I have no dowry to speak of. I can bring you no advantages.
Yet we are both used to living decently.
Together, it is doubtful how we would live.
Therefore, marriage is desirable to neither.
We can bed one another and part as friends. ”
At her words, he felt a terrible pain somewhere near his chest. She saw him as a convenience—worse, she thought he saw her in the same way.
She understood their marriage to be an impossibility.
Her assessment of his monetary situation was not, on its face, wrong, although he wasn’t quite as penniless as she supposed.
Still, he couldn’t give her luxuries. Only an independent establishment and a plain gentility.
Nevertheless, it stung to see himself accounted for in such dry terms, to have his small stature in the world named so nearly.
She would never leave London to settle into provincial, homely Somerset, no matter what daydreams might preoccupy him at idle, fanciful moments. He was a fool.
“And who even knows,” she murmured, hardly audible in the thick air of the room.
“The future will bring us together again, surely. When George and Tilly marry, I mean. It would not have to be an end if we did not want it to be. If we found ourselves in the same place, even here at Parkhorne, in the future … we might enjoy each other as we have these few weeks.”
Malcolm Brown had, perhaps, never been in a situation as lowering as this one. Scarlett had spoken of her humiliation, but he did not know, at this moment, how she could not see the depth of his own.
“Miss Perkins,” he said, affront edging, he knew, into his tone. “I cannot accept such a proposition.”
Her face went white. “Oh,” she said. “Are you—very sure?”
“Yes,” he answered, not totally aware, however, of what he said.
“I don’t understand—last night—”
“I forgot myself,” he said brusquely. “I should have never touched you in such a manner. I am sorry for what I did. I can only be thankful that I did not take an even more fatal step.”
She looked at him, a crease of confusion between her brows.
And then an ashen look of horror fell over her features. “You want to marry,” she said, covering her mouth with her hand. “You love another. Or at least you want to marry another. Perhaps it is not a matter of love. Perhaps the match has other attrractions. It hardly matters, of course.”
She was wrong, so wrong, of course. As if he could think of another with her around him constantly. As if he had ever regarded another woman as he did her.
But what good did it do to disabuse her of this notion? The why behind his answer was not for her to know. And it was too embarrassing for him to say aloud. He did have some pride, after all. He wasn’t without feeling.
He couldn’t say to Miss Scarlett Perkins, I refuse you because I want you to choose me, I want you to love me, I want you to want to be my wife.
She would regard him as a lunatic. She had proposed an arrangement as cut-and-dried as any between a man of leisure and his courtesan.
She had no interest in his futile longings.
She had no interest in permanency or constancy or any of the homespun virtues that came naturally with his devotion.
Instead of confirming or denying her accusation, he said nothing. It was easier that way. The silence stretched and stretched until he was almost at the edge of speaking just to break it.
But there was no need.
“I won’t harass you any longer, Mr. Brown.” She moved toward the door.
He did nothing to stop her.
When she had gone, he sat on the bed. He found that he was shaking. His hands, which had so wanted to hold her, needed to be clenched together to be kept still.
Now that she had departed, he wasn’t sure that he had made the right decision.
She was gone, but her citrus scent still lingered in the air.
And his pride seemed a cold companion without her in the room.