To Win a Lady's Heart (The Landon Sisters) (5 page)

“You know why I had to refuse you all those years ago, don’t you?”

“It became obvious enough later when your father passed and everyone knew how badly things had unfolded for him in those final years.”

“How could you have trusted me? What if we’d married before he died and you learned of everything he’d done after you were bound to me for eternity?”

“Is that what you would have done? Kept silent?”

“It’s what I did do. I couldn’t tell you, so I turned you away.”

“I understand why you did. You couldn’t have confided such things to me. I would hardly have expected it. We didn’t know each other in any meaningful sense.”

“That’s because you never spoke to me.”

He smiled. “That’s an example of what I mean when I say we ought to set the past aside. We’re speaking now.” He went grave. “And if I’d had any real honor, I would have applied myself to you the minute I’d heard what had become of your father’s estate.” Or the crumbling ruin that was left of a once-proud legacy.

“Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps it’s better if we don’t speak of the past.”

“Would you have taken me if I’d renewed my interest after your mourning?”

“Would you have wanted me if I had? You’d never have known whether I saw you as my partner in life or a means to a comfortable end.”

“In your first refusal, I think I had my answer to that question spelled out plainly enough.”

“So many things stand against us. Now more than ever.”

First he wanted to refute her. Then he wanted to tell her to forget them—to forget them all. But discounting her fears would have been grossly unfair.

“People are going to say I planned to trap you for no other reason than I wanted your fortune. A marriage begun in scandal—”

“If we break the engagement, that will be scandalous, too. Especially considering the manner in which we found ourselves engaged.”

“I know. That can’t be helped.” Lady Grace sighed. “But breaking the engagement keeps you free.”

“Free?” He didn’t want to be free. Not if it meant being without her. Should he tell her as much, or would doing so only frighten her away?

“You don’t want to connect yourselves with the likes of my family. Not after what my father did. Not after what we’ve become as a consequence of his ruination. He was so very different from you. To connect yourself with the likes of him…” She shook her head. “It’s unthinkable.”

“Not to me.”

“My lord, I don’t think—I don’t think this is what I really want. I have an offer—”

He froze. “What?”

“Not a marriage offer, an offer of employment.” Her slender brows furled. “Abstractly, yes, sometimes I did dream of marrying, but in the particulars of the matter—well, suffice it to say, these past weeks have given me time to reflect deeply. I mean to remain alone, to earn my own way, and rely on nobody else to provide for me.”

“You don’t believe you’d be happy with me?”

“Happy with you?” She rubbed her brow as if never having before considered the question. “I can hardly say.”

“Then you also can’t imagine yourself unhappy with me.”

Her words fell with quiet sincerity. “Your kindness, my lord—I will never forget it. But I must ask that you agree to end the engagement. Even if you don’t, I won’t remain bound, be the consequences what they will. I made no promises, I break no faith. We were thrown together, and I was obligated before I knew what was happening.”

In the shattering silence following her pronouncement, everything he’d meant to say became nullified.

“Is that the best solution? One scandal begets another.”

“Yes, I realize there is no easy way about that. There will be talk, but I’ve endured talk before, and I’m sure I can endure talk again. But yes, I do believe this to be the best possible solution. You can’t give up everything for me. And for what? Because of the accident of being locked together in the storeroom?”

If only she knew what he would give up in order to have her.

“So you believe releasing me from the engagement does what, precisely?”

“Well, you can’t want to be tethered to the likes of me, not a man like you. You want a wife with connections. I’m used to living under the shadow of infamy and scandal.”

If she thought breaking the engagement would be good for him, she was in error. “If you think I care for what others might think, you’re very much mistaken.”

“Honorable to a fault, my lord.” She smiled, her eyes warm. “And I thank you. But you don’t know what it’s like to be forever haunted by another’s doings. You think you could endure it, but down the years, you will come to resent me.”

“Ridiculous. The man’s been dead for how long now?”

“My point precisely. He’s been gone for quite some time, and we still haven’t shaken the scandal of his misdeeds. Society never forgets.”

Corbeau drew himself to his full height. He wasn’t desperate. He wasn’t shaken. He wasn’t rattled.

No. His internal landscape was calm. Rational. Ordered.

Too rational. Too ordered. The calm before a storm powerful enough to sink a fleet of ships. He knew what he had to do—what he had to say, and he would say it. It was his one chance. She was right. He couldn’t force her to marry him. Nothing good would come of that, and he’d rather let her go than chain her to him in a life of misery.

But he had to take his chance.

She’d made things clear, and in so doing, she’d illuminated his path. “I’ve realized something, Lady Grace.”

She blinked, shifting, seemingly uneasy in the way the air had begun crackling with charge. “What’s that?”

“Give me until the Christmas Feast.”

“Until the Christmas Feast for what?”

There was only one way to have her. He had to prove himself. He had to find a way to capture her heart as she had captured his. Then she would see nothing else mattered.

Unfiltered words came from his lips unbidden. He spoke from a different place—a place wholly unexplored, a place wholly real. “Because I’ve realized that I have you. But I haven’t won you.”

She blinked at him, brows partially raised, eyes wide. “Won me?”

“Precisely. I haven’t won you. And winning you is exactly what I’m going to do.”

Chapter Eight

It was a damp day, the world beyond the drawing room windows made soggy by an application of rain upon snow.

“You smell a bit singed.” Hetty was giving Grace’s hair a suspicious grimace.

The two were taking a turn of the room, the ladies of the party once again sequestered for an afternoon of amusing themselves.

“My hair was dressed with a hot iron this morning.”

Hetty’s soft curls had no need of anything more than an upsweep and a few pins to make her appear as if she were a fashion plate come to life. As a consequence, her maid, whom Hetty had given use of to the Landon sisters, was unpracticed with the art of styling straight hair.

Besides, she couldn’t have met the earl last night wearing rags upon her head. The alarming state in which she’d appeared when they’d gone to the stables had been horrific enough.

“It looks stiff and pulled too tight.”

“It
feels
stiff and pulled too tight.” The weight of what had to have been a vast surplus of pins wasn’t helping, either.

Hetty gave a sage nod. She turned to the gathered ladies. “Eliza, may we see you a moment?”

As Lady Eliza made her way across the room from where she’d been sitting making garlands with Phoebe and Jane, Hetty inclined her head toward Grace, voice low. “I’ve always wanted you and she to become better acquainted and now is your chance. You mustn’t think about how my brother and she were supposed to have been linked for a short while, there was never any truth to it.”

Grace started. Had Corbeau been interested in Lady Eliza? Hetty said it wasn’t so, but Grace had never caught even the slightest hint of such a rumor. But someone had thought there had been reason to speak as though they had been, and rumors were rarely without some hint of truth.

She’d always been peripherally aware of the woman. Eliza’s mother, Lady Rushworth, being an inexplicable part of Lady Bennington’s wider circle. Eliza and Grace were nearly the same age, though Eliza had the advantages of having come out one season earlier and of being the sole heiress to thirty thousand pounds.

Hetty brightened as Eliza drew near. “I’ve decided something simply must be done about Grace’s hair.” She turned to Grace. “You wouldn’t know it by looking at her, but Eliza’s hair is even straighter than yours.”

“I hardly see how that could be possible.”

Eliza smiled. The woman was possessed of a sort of refined beauty. Though she wasn’t small, there was a porcelain kind of delicacy to her features further enhanced by her gentle poise. Her hair was the exact shade of black that the heroines of novels were described as possessing, and she looked as though she couldn’t conceive of the concept of a freckle, much less ever suffer from having one mar her skin. “I thought the very same.”

“Here’s what I propose.” Hetty’s eyes were bright with the look she had when she was particularly pleased with herself. “Tomorrow morning, we both bring our maids into Grace’s room. Then yours can teach mine how to properly dress straight hair.”

It was decided in a blink. Eliza was called back to her original task, leaving Hetty and Grace once again alone.

Grace wanted to ask about the connection between Corbeau and Eliza. What could she say to broach the subject? She wasn’t jealous—she couldn’t possibly be, not least because she had Hetty’s own assurances of the rumor being unfounded—but there seemed no way of managing the task without danger of raising the suspicion that she was.

…

“What might you do were you going to try to win a woman?”

Max couldn’t have given Corbeau a stranger look had the latter announced he lived on a strict diet of dog meat. “Was I dreaming, or did you find yourself in the last few weeks inopportunely engaged? Not that I blame you, mind.” He clapped his friend on the back as he went to take his position around the billiard table. “But I always thought you’d consider keeping a mistress immoral.”

They were the only two left at the game, the other gentlemen having gone to pore over the collection of firearms in the gunroom. Finally Corbeau could relax as only he could in the company of an old and trusted friend.

“Of course I do. And you should, too.”

“We could discuss the matter.” Max, in his shirtsleeves, leaned over the table, took his shot, and missed. “Damnation.” He straightened and tugged the bottom of his waistcoat. “Anyway, the question of a mistress doesn’t apply to me, because I’m never going to marry.”

“I wish you’d discussed your feelings on matrimony with your mother before she threw the house party.” His tone was dry, but he could not have been more insincere. Had the countess not stuffed the old manor house with a dozen eligible ladies, with Corbeau added to the ranks of Lady Maxfeld’s house party strictly to even out the ratio of gentlemen to ladies, he’d never have been locked in the storeroom with Grace.

Poor woman, throwing that house party in the all but barren hope that her son might find a bride, only to suffer the engagement of her son’s friend.

“You think I haven’t told her?”

“Why don’t you want to marry?”

Max’s smile turned wry. “Any woman who’d want me couldn’t be worth the having.”

“You don’t hold females in very high esteem, do you?”

“On the contrary.” Max’s expression displayed marks of sincerity so rare on his face. “I hold them in such esteem that I’d never curse one into a marriage with me.”

“What about your line?”

“The Maxfeld line will continue well enough through my cousin, as well it should, which is more than could be said for you up until a few weeks ago.” His eyes narrowed. “Just what happened between you and Lady Grace in that storeroom, anyway?”

Corbeau leaned over the table and took aim. “Nothing.” The word was punctuated with the sharp crack of the billiard balls snapping against each other.

His ball sunk into the correct pocket.

“Nothing?” Max lowered his head to better give Corbeau an incredulous look, his tone flat.

“We talked. It was all very innocent.” He took his next shot, the ball stopping at the brink of where it should have fallen.

“Would it have remained innocent had you not been discovered?”

Corbeau bristled. “Of course it would have.”

“You wouldn’t even have tried for a kiss?”

The idea of what it would be like to kiss Grace was always close. In his dreams he’d done far more.

But that was the licentious male in him, untamed and feral and completely unfit society if he tried to act on such base impulses. Moreover, he wouldn’t be worthy of Grace if he did. He’d have to strip away all his honor to dare such a thing. Oh, he teased. But he wouldn’t act on the impulse. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t dare. “Not before we’re married.” And as to that, they couldn’t be married soon enough.

Until then, he would do everything in his power to fight his base instincts.

“We’re talking about Lady Grace, aren’t we? I mean about the ‘winning a woman’ business?”

“Of course.”

“And I’m correct in understanding that she’s less than keen on the idea of the marriage?”

“You are.”

From where he’d been hunched to study the geometry of the current arrangement on the table, Max straightened. “And you haven’t kissed her?”

“Like I said—”

“There’s your mistake. You must kiss her.”

“How do you know the family, by the way? I didn’t know you did. Come to think of it, what were they doing at Sutterton Grange that week, anyway?”

“Ah. Mother and Lady Bennington were at school together. They needed a place to stay, and—”

“Needed a place to stay?”

“Mmm. Worn out their welcome with the relations that begrudgingly keep them, it seems. You didn’t know?”

“I didn’t.”

Max gave him a suspicious look. “How are things going between you and Lady Grace?”

Corbeau leaned over the table to take his shot, not looking his friend in the eye as he spoke. “She wants to break the engagement.”

“Forgive me, but I think I like this woman rather more than I thought I did.”

Corbeau went dark. “I’m not forgiving you for that.”

“All I meant was that she certainly isn’t after you for your pocketbook. That’s always something to admire in a woman. And if anyone were ever in need of a fortune, it would be one of those girls. Such a pity about their father. They’re exactly the type of people who should have remained firmly respectable their whole lives.”

“What would it say about me if, after what happened, I allow her to cry off?”

“I’d say it’d make you the luckiest man all of England over.”

“Unlike you, I’m familiar with a concept known out in the wilds of the world as honor. It might be a bit of challenge for someone with your intellectual capacity, but I can recommend some books for further study.”

“Developed a bit of a tendre for her, have you?”

If only Max knew.

No, much better that he didn’t.

Thankfully, Max continued, saving Corbeau a reply. “I see it as my duty as your friend to remind you that marriage can be a very, very long time. It’s a lot to take on for a momentary…I was about to say indiscretion, but it wasn’t even that. It was an accident. Now if she’d connived to lure you into the storeroom—”

“It’s my duty to protect her reputation.”

“After what you’ve already been through, that will be difficult if you’re discovered kissing her, so mind you’re careful on that score.”

“I’m not going to kiss her.” He turned his attention back to the game, his mood about level with the heavy gray cloud cover outside. “I regret having asked. Forget I said anything.”

A minute passed in heavy silence. “First tell me why you haven’t yet kissed her.”

“She doesn’t want me to.” Corbeau didn’t quite believe his own words.

“She wants to, but she doesn’t know it yet.” Max’s eyes were full of mischief. “You must make her know it.”

Corbeau wasn’t going to respond. Truth of it was, there were times he thought she wanted him to kiss her, only she wasn’t about to admit it to herself. The subject had to drop.

Asking, however, proved irresistible. “How?”

Max stood with his billiard stick pointed at the ceiling. His brows came together as he concentrated, looking off into nothing. “How? Yes, well, that’s a question. You’d think someone would have had the sense to write a treatise on such an important subject.”

“You manage it.”

“Yes, but, now that it’s put to me, I don’t think I’m much of an instructor.”

It would have been easy to say that his lack of ability to instruct was a direct result of his lack of ability as a student, but that wasn’t altogether true. Though Max had shown no inclination in his studies, he’d breezed through Oxford the way a leggy thoroughbred flies over a short hedgerow—as if it were nothing.

“Kissing a woman can’t be the first step in winning her.”

“I thought you acquired the special license so you could marry just after Christmas.”

“I did.”

“Then kissing is the first step, no mistake. You’re already engaged, after all, and you have five days.”

“Four.”

Max shrugged. “Still plenty, mind.”

“It’s utter nonsense. Knowing what I now know, I contend you aren’t unmarried by choice, but by the fact that in spite of what I’ve heard described as your manifold charms, in the end, ladies are actually repulsed by you.”

“With but four days remaining, do you have the time to bet all on the chance I might be wrong?”

“You are.” In one horribly unfair sense, Corbeau had already dishonored Grace simply by being caught alone with her in that dashed awful storeroom. He wasn’t going to attempt to dishonor her again with a kiss. Being alone with her at odd times and places was enough of a risk as it was. It was the only way he could really talk to her, however.

Four days… The enormity of what must be accomplished in so short a time loomed before him.

He couldn’t have been more daunted if Sisyphus had appointed Corbeau temporarily in his place while the cursed figure took a week at Brighton.