Chapter 6 #2
Lord Wrenworth set aside his plate. “Had I known how excellent your Madeira cake is, Lady Balfour, I would have presented myself at every one of your at-home days this Season. But you are right. I did come with a different purpose in mind.”
Lady Balfour’s voice rose perceptibly. “And that is?”
Another small silence. Louisa, her eyes fixed firmly to her embroidery frame, imagined him turning toward her, studying her with that sometimes inscrutable look of his.
“With your permission,” he said, “I would like to speak privately with Miss Cantwell.”
She neither dropped her embroidery frame nor poked herself with the needle. Such clumsiness would have required the ability to move. She only stared straight ahead, unable to believe what she was hearing.
“Louisa, Lord Wrenworth wishes for a word with you.” Lady Balfour’s voice boomed in her ears. “Show him to the morning parlor, won’t you?”
And then, to Lord Wrenworth, “We expect her restored to us in ten minutes, sir.”
Louisa carefully set aside the embroidery frame and rose. Looking only at the floor before her—a proper display of modesty, she was sure, except she did not feel bashful, only flabbergasted—she preceded Lord Wrenworth to the morning parlor.
The moment he closed the door, she spun around.
“Have you lost your mind? What do you think you are doing? Those women in the drawing room are expecting a proposal. Of marriage. What am I to tell them when you leave? ‘No, ladies, his lordship does not wish to take me for a wife. He merely wanted to hear me recount another one of my unseemly dreams.’ ”
He drew close—she noticed for the first time the understated swagger of his gait, that of a man who’d always had everything he wanted.
“Have you been having more of those dreams?” he asked, speaking into her ear.
She shivered as his breath brushed her skin. And the woods-after-a-thunderstorm scent of him—she wanted to bury her face in his neck and inhale for all she was worth. “Of course I have. But that is not the point. The point is that—”
“Narrate one of your unseemly dreams.”
Was that the pad of his thumb tracing the line of her collar? She could barely feel it for the electricity racing along her nerve endings. “Now?”
“We still have a good few minutes. Why not?”
“Why not? I will tell you why…” Her voice trailed off as he undid the top button of her blouse. She gawked at him, her throat closing with both fright and thrill. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing? Do as I say or I’ll keep opening your blouse.”
She blinked, not sure whether she wanted him to stop.
He laughed softly. “My God, don’t tell me you want me to go on.”
“When have I ever given you the idea that I wouldn’t want you to go on?”
He shook his head. “You give me no choice. Fine. I’ll ask nicely. Please tell me one of your dreams, my dear Miss Cantwell.”
She swallowed. “That isn’t nice enough. You have to say ‘my dear Louisa.’ ”
He looked at her strangely for a moment. “Won’t you please, my dear, dear Louisa?”
Her name on his lips was pure music. She wanted to hear it again and again.
My dear, dear Louisa.
“For the past three nights I have dreamed that we are riding in a carriage together, a town coach not unlike yours, except it is made entirely of glass, even the floor. And…and I’m naked.”
His eyes were a deep, dark green, almost wintry—like a pine forest in December—yet his gaze was all volcanic heat. “Go on.”
“I…I fret about my nakedness. So you fashion a blindfold from your necktie and tell me that if I cannot see out, then I will not worry about those who might be peering in.”
“Impeccable logic, that. What happens next?”
“Once I’m blindfolded, you touch me with something. You say it’s your walking stick, but I’m not sure I believe you.”
“Why the doubt?”
“Because…it is hot.” Her face scalded. “And please don’t ask me what happens next. There is no next.”
In her dreams, she simply carried on in that state of horrified arousal.
He smiled slightly. “Do you like it when I touch you with my not–walking stick?”
She could see her hand reaching up, but she could not quite believe what she was doing, even when she had a lock of his hair between her fingers. “In my dreams, there is nothing you do that I do not like.”
“It’s worth abducting you from Lady Balfour’s drawing room, before a full crowd of onlookers, just to hear that.”
Dear God, Lady Balfour and all her friends. “Please tell me that wasn’t what you came for.”
“Of course not. I came to tell you that I have decided to rescind my offer. The idea has run its course—and expired.”
The contents of her skull imploded. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t breathe.
He wasn’t a good man and she hadn’t cared. She was willing to overlook any number of staggering faults, as long as he felt at least something of what she felt for him.
When he had been toying with her all along.
As if from a great distance away, she heard herself say, “You might as well, I suppose. I never would have cheapened myself by accepting that particular offer.”
It was a lie. She would have hated to become his mistress—because it would mark the beginning of the end—but she had never, at any point, eliminated the choice from consideration.
“You don’t look as righteously vindicated as you ought to,” he pointed out, his voice insidiously soft, insidiously close.
“Rest assured my immortal soul is pleased. It’s only my vanity that is crushed.”
And her pathetic heart.
“My poor, darling Louisa,” he murmured, the evil, evil man.
“It is still very ill done of you to come here and single me out, just to tell me you’ve thought better of your nefarious plans. What am I supposed to tell Lady Balfour in”—she glanced at the clock—“precisely forty-five seconds?”
And once those forty-five seconds flew by, once he walked out Lady Balfour’s door, she might not ever see him again. Who else would like her for her scheming ways? Who else would applaud her for thinking of herself? And who else would ask her about the telescope she had loved and lost?
He touched her face—but to her horror, she realized he was only wiping away her tears.
“You may tell Lady Balfour that in exactly three weeks, you will be married.”
She stared at him through the blur of her tears. “To whom?”
He only looked at her as if she were a very slow child who couldn’t grasp that one plus one equaled two.
“I don’t understand,” she said, though understanding was beginning to penetrate her woolly brain.
“What is there to understand? I have made you an offer of marriage. Will you take it, or must I rescind that offer, too?”
Suddenly she felt as if she’d drunk an entire gallon of coffee. Her fingertips shook. “Of course I will take it—I came to London to marry the largest fortune I could find, and there is none available larger than yours. But why would you marry me?”
“Because young ladies who confess to pornographic reveries ought to be rewarded with riches beyond their dreams?”
But that made no sense at all. “I don’t—”
“Our ten minutes are up,” he said, buttoning her blouse and wiping away the rest of her tears, his fingers sure and warm. “I will not allow any eclipsed second to besmirch my sterling reputation. Time for us to return to the drawing room, Louisa.”
He was already turning away when she gripped his hand.
Kiss me. Shouldn’t you at least kiss me when you propose to me?
But when she opened her mouth, out came, “I still want my house and my thousand pounds a year—for the duration of my natural life. And I want those conditions written into the marriage settlement.”
He tilted his head. She could not tell whether he was vexed or amused. “You do?”
She gathered her courage. “If something seems too good to be true, then it probably is. For all I know, you are secretly readying your solicitors for an annulment as soon as you’ve tired of me.”
“Such a cynic.”
“Better be unromantic than thoroughly used and still poor.”
He took her chin in hand. “And if I refuse?”
“Then I will tell Lady Balfour that I turned down your proposal.”
She could scarcely believe it, but she was extorting the most eligible bachelor in London.
“I will give you a house and five hundred a year,” he countered.
Her heart was in her throat. “I won’t marry you for a penny less than eight hundred. And it had better be a house with at least twenty rooms.”
His fingers cupped her cheek. The pad of his thumb rubbed against her lips. His gaze was cool and severe, and she was suddenly in a panic.
No, no, it’s quite all right. I will marry you for five hundred a year and a hovel. In fact, take my mother’s pearl brooch. Take my great-aunt Imogene’s jet pin. And you can also have the emergency money I’ve hidden away at home, all eleven pounds and eight shillings of it.
He smiled. “You will pay for this. You know that, right?”
The way he looked at her, so much wickedness, delight, and camaraderie. If she hadn’t been born with the constitution of a horse, she would have fainted from both relief and a tsunamic surge of sheer happiness.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”
A thousand yeses.