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The young lady wanted to know why he’d come. The longer he delayed telling her, the less likely she would be to oblige his request. And he must win her cooperation.
If only he could secure his own!
Lucius Daventry was not accustomed to being of two minds about anything. He’d always prided himself on setting high goals, then committing all his energies to achieving them…until today.
Miss Lacewood was the problem. He had come to Netherstowe expecting to find the poor little pudding of a child he remembered, grown into stout, dowdy womanhood. Such a creature would surely have been eager to accept his offer without placing his heart in jeopardy.
Instead he’d found the dumpy little caterpillar transformed into an exquisite Regency butterfly. When she’d fallen into his arms, Miss Lacewood had reminded him of how long it had been since he’d held anything so soft and fragrant. Her tantalizing beauty and her charitable nature posed a grave threat to his lordship’s hard-won peace. Though it shamed Lucius to admit it, even to himself, the lady frightened him worse than a unit of French cavalry at full charge.
For the sake of his grandfather, Lucius was prepared to brave his worst fears. Though perhaps he might not have to…
“No doubt there are gentlemen much younger than my grandfather who also value your acquaintance, Miss Lacewood. I hope you will pardon my curiosity for inquiring if there is any one in particular paying you his addresses?”
For a moment she made no reply. Lucius wondered if he had trespassed too far on her privacy.
When it came, her answer held none of the indignation he’d armed himself to repel. Instead, Miss Lacewood spoke in a tone of gentle reproach that slid beneath his defences.
“Must you mock me, sir?”
“Indeed, I do not!” Lucius sprang from his chair, retreating to the deepest shadows of the drawing room, where he paced in the restless manner of a wild beast caged. “Why would you suppose I mock you?”
“Why would you suppose I might have an admirer?”
Pulling off her bonnet, Miss Lacewood set it on the footstool that had launched her into his arms. Then, she rose from her chair and withdrew to the opposite side of the room, where a few stray sunbeams had pierced small gaps in the closed curtains. One lit on the crown of her head, like the magic wand of a fairy godmother, gilding her tawny tumble of curls.
The answer to her question was so manifestly obvious Lucius could only stand dumb and gaze.
If he’d had to choose a single word to sum up her appearance, it would have been generous. Eyes large and luminous, the warm brown of a yearling fawn dappled with golden sunshine. Lips so lush they fairly demanded to be kissed. Features with a rounded softness that put him in mind of peaches ripe for the plucking.
Her beauty cast a spell over him, lulling to sleep the stern guard he had set to govern his tongue.
A bemused whisper of his true thoughts escaped. “I only wonder that you do not have a hundred.”
Her eyes fixed on him then and something stirred in their russet depths, a power that made him fear for his cherished self-control. “I would say you flatter me, sir, but I do not think you are much given to flattery. Unless there is something you want from me?”
Her wariness called to his own, whispering vain promises of sympathy. Promises Lucius knew he dared not trust.
“I do want something from you, Miss Lacewood.”
He had roused the slumbering censor. No further word, inflection, gesture or look of his must convey to this woman any more or less than he wished to convey. The thoughts that sang like cold steel in his mind and the emotions that seethed in his heart must be his alone to know.
“I want something, and I am willing to compensate you handsomely for it.”
“Indeed?” She tensed. “I suspected as much. What is it you desire?”
Her alarm was so palpable his lordship’s nostrils flared as though greedy to catch the subtle redolence of it. Try as she might to hide behind a mask of bravado, she feared him.
What woman wouldn’t?
Better fear than pity. Since Waterloo, that had become Lucius Daventry’s creed.
“Let us first speak of what I will give you in exchange.”
“As you wish.” Miss Lacewood took a step nearer the window. Perhaps she planned to blind him by ripping the curtains open if he menaced her. “I must warn you, though. My situation may be modest, but so are my needs. I doubt you have anything with which to tempt me.”
I wish I could say the same of you. The words prickled on his tongue like lemon juice, demanding he spit them out. By an act of will, Lucius managed to swallow them, only to find they had a seductively sweet flavor.
“Judge for yourself, my dear.” The latter word had a toothsome taste as well. If he did not exercise some restraint soon, he might become a glutton for such dainties. “I believe your brother wishes to take up a commission in the cavalry.”
A tremor ran through Angela Lacewood such as his lordship had seen soldiers give when they tasted cold steel in the belly. She managed to answer with a steady voice, however, which Lucius could not help but admire.
“Your information is correct, sir. Ever since he was a young lad, Miles has longed to return to India, as an officer in our father’s old regiment.”
“Commissions are costly.” Lucius leaned against the back of the chair on which he’d been seated earlier. “As is the proper kit to outfit an officer bound for India.”
“So I have discovered, sir.”
“Lord Bulwick will not support your brother’s ambition?” Lucius knew the answer well enough. He asked merely to enhance the value of his offer in Miss Lacewood’s eyes.
“His lordship is only a relation by marriage.” Clearly Miss Lacewood was parroting back the answer her entreaties to her uncle had received. “He feels He has fulfilled his obligations by taking my brother and me into his household after our parents died. He wishes Miles to find a post in the city.”
Lucius nodded. He’d expected no better from the odious Lord Bulwick. “I would purchase a commission for your brother and see that he is suitably outfitted for it.”
“And what would you expect from me in return?” Angela Lacewood squared her shoulders.
Lucius found himself wishing he could see those shoulders bare and admire their contours, for he had no doubt they would equal her graceful neck in beauty.
How might Miss Lacewood react if he approached her with slow, deliberate steps, then raised his hands to push down the brief sleeves of her gown?
Swoon dead away perhaps? Run screaming? It was a dangerous weakness for him to entertain such fancies.
Dangerous? Perhaps. But he had once courted Lady Danger and been seduced by her lethal charms.
“I would ask only one favor of you, my dear.” Emerging from behind his fortress of furniture, the baron approached Miss Lacewood with slow, deliberate steps. “A trifle, really.”
Some subtle cant of her posture and a rapid sideways glance told Lucius the young lady wanted to retreat from his steady advance. Yet, she managed to hold her ground. “One man’s trifle is another man’s treasure.”
“So it is.” Lucius halted his advance.
There was not much distance between them now. If he held out his hand and she held out hers, they might touch.
“Your words are most apt in this case,” he added. “What I require from you will cost only a little time and less effort on your part. But it will bring a treasure’s worth of pleasure to someone else.”
“To you?”
“No.” At one time it might have, but those days were past.
“To whom then?”
“Perhaps you will guess when I tell you what I want.”
“I shall be glad to hear…at last.”
Balancing on the balls of his feet, Lucius sank slowly to his knees. It was a ridiculous and unnecessary bit of ritual, but he felt compelled to it all the same. “Miss Lacewood, I am asking you to become my fiancée.”
The lady did not move, speak or even blink. She stood there like a golden statue, staring down at him.
Her eyes were alive, though. Alive with wariness and aversion and other things the baron could not so easily identify. It took every crumb of his considerable will to hold her gaze in his, issuing her a mute challenge to accept his offer.
At last she drew a deep breath and wet her bountiful lips with a dart of her tongue that made Lucius ache with sensations he struggled to ignore.
“I am sensible of the honor you do me by proposing, my lord.” She shook her head. “But I cannot marry you.”
Lucius heard himself laugh for the second time in half an hour. It must be some sort of record. For a moment all the cares that weighed on him eased.
“I understand, Miss Lacewood.” As slowly as he had sunk to the floor, the baron rose again until he looked down into her eyes. “But, you see, that is not what I am asking.”
Chapter Two
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?
