A Most Unladylike Adventure (11 page)

‘What a spineless fellow I am, to be sure.’

‘No, but you probably need to prove to
yourself and my sister that you’re not, if you’re ever going to be happy together. I trust you do intend making Louisa happy, by the way?’

The question was suddenly sharp and Hugh reminded himself exactly who he was dealing with and how ruthless Christopher Alstone could be, as he considered that question as soberly and honestly as he had it in him to manage at the moment.

‘I would be honoured to wed your sister, if I thought she wouldn’t suffer by such a close association with me,’ Hugh admitted cautiously, not willing to look deeper into his feelings whilst it seemed such an unlikely outcome.

‘Good, I’ll let you live until morning so you can ask her properly then,’ Kit said casually and held open the parlour door so that Hugh had no choice but to take the candle thrust at him and go up to bed as well.

L
ouisa awoke the following morning in the bedchamber that was fast becoming familiar and wondered what Mrs Calhoun would have to say about that state of affairs, once she arrived back at her post to find Louisa living in such close proximity with dissolute Captain Darke. Not quite sure what to make of it herself, she climbed out of bed and found a can of cooling hot water on the washstand she only hoped her brother had brought in, instead of the man she must learn to think of as Hugo Kenton. Somehow the idea of Hugh seeing her asleep and unguarded made her shiver and she told herself it was because she wasn’t yet so committed to the man she wanted him to
know how she looked first thing in the morning, either asleep or barely awake.

The Kenton baronetcy went back a good deal further into history than the Alstone family earldom and, since she recalled hearing that the current baronet only had two sons to his name to begin with, Hugo Kenton would be a baronet one day, whether he liked it or not. Or he would if he was cleared of suspicion for his wife’s and brother’s murders, since no murderer could gain from his crime. She didn’t feel like the future wife of a potential baronet. She didn’t feel much like daring, mysterious Captain Hugh Darke’s bold and brassy lady either.

Except for the odd twinge of soreness at her most intimate core, she didn’t feel much different from the Louisa Alstone who’d risen from this very bed only yesterday morning. Yet she knew deep down that she was drastically different all the same and not just physically either. As she washed and dressed in garments much more suited to a young lady than Charlton’s silly dressing-up clothes or the cast-offs she’d bought yesterday, she considered that difference distractedly. What if she was in the process of becoming a mother at this very moment? Could the tiny seed of a
new human being, hers and Hugh’s child, be growing in her belly right now?

She rubbed a wondering hand over her flat stomach and felt awed by the very idea of taking responsibility for something so much greater than herself. The idea of a tiny being, partly from her and partly from its potent father, was too much to even think about when it might only be alive in her imagination. Yet the possible product of that hasty, driven coupling between her and Hugh Kenton might dictate her future—all their futures. Odd that love and consideration for a being that might not even exist should drive two such unlikely people into marriage. But what if there really was to be a child and she refused it a father as strong and brooding and torn by ridiculous self-doubts as her impossible, piratical lover?

Pushing all such possibilities and questions aside for consideration later, she wound her hair into a simple knot on the back of her head, decided she was as neat as she’d ever be without the help of a maid and went downstairs to find out if she had to cook breakfast again this morning.

Apparently she was to be spared the task as Mrs Calhoun had miraculously reappeared, obviously from somewhere much closer than
Maria and Brandon’s rectory, and was directing operations with a long ladle in her hand, as if she fully expected to conjure something remarkable at any moment.

‘You two can go and sit in the breakfast parlour and wait for Miss Louisa to join you like a pair of civilised gentlemen for once,’ she scolded as Hugh repeated his trick of the morning before and stole a piece of crisp bacon from the dish she was preparing for what looked like a formal banquet rather than a simple breakfast.

Louisa felt a clench of something dangerous squeeze her heart at the intimacy of coming to know her lover in so many ways other than the obvious. A smile she sincerely hoped nobody saw curved her mouth while she wondered what it would be like to learn as many of his odd quirks and habits as he’d ever let anyone know as his wife. If he didn’t feel any more for her than a passing lust and a guilty conscience at having seduced an over-eager virgin, then she was never likely to know more about him than she did right now. The very idea of that brutal separation from a man who was already beginning to mean too much to her killed her smile before she hardly felt it on her lips, ready to betray her.

‘No need, Mrs Calhoun,’ she said brightly enough as she stepped forwards, ‘I’m already here, so why can’t we all eat together as we did in the old days?’

‘I know what’s due to a lady, even if she doesn’t seem to have the least idea herself,’ Mrs Calhoun informed her sternly.

‘And if we agree to take that old argument of yours as a given, dear Mrs Calhoun, why should we three sit apart from the rest of the household like a trio of bodkins? If you’re intending to tell me Kit sits in lone state whenever he has no visitors to entertain, then you must have become a lot less truthful since last we met,’ she told her mother’s one-time cook-housekeeper with an affectionate smile.

‘You’re as bad as that one yonder,’ Mrs Calhoun told her with another wave of that expressive ladle of hers towards Hugh, who did his best to look innocent and failed, as well he might.

‘Oh, no, I challenge anyone to turn your kitchen into a midden quite as quickly as Captain Darke managed to do when you were gone,’ Louisa said with a militant frown he pretended not to notice.

‘There you are, Master Kit, I told you he was a heathen.’

‘Did I argue with you?’ her employer asked as if it was nothing to do with him what went on in his own household, so Louisa scowled at him as well.

‘No, but only because you know I’m right. Just as I was right to take Midge away for a while as well, for all he’d not lay a finger on her, even when he’s in his cups. I wasn’t having a lot of nasty-minded gossip about my girl doin’ the rounds, just because she’s not as clever as she might be and his nibs is as handsome as the devil and almost as bad.’

‘Why, thank you, ma’am,’ Hugh said with a would-be modest smile. ‘I thought you were immune to my charms, but you know very well that you will always have my heart,’ he added with a soulful look and his hand theatrically over the place where it ought to be, if only he had one.

‘My cooking has your heart you mean, you black-hearted rogue, you. Now get along to the breakfast parlour like I told you to and take Miss Louisa with you, for I’ve no time to put up with either of you under my feet this morning when Midge and I already have more than enough to do getting this place set to rights again.’

‘I can help you,’ Louisa offered.

‘That you can’t, young lady, and it strikes me as how you’ve got more important things to do than pretend to be a housemaid this morning,’ the formidable dame told her ominously and Louisa wondered if her ex-virgin status was written across her forehead for all to see, then told herself it was just a guilty conscience that made her blush and do as she was bid.

‘You are in deep disgrace with our domestic tyrant,’ Hugh told her unhelpfully.

‘Not as deep as you must have been when she first set eyes on the state you got her precious house in while she was gone. She must have wanted to skin you alive then, even after my efforts to improve matters a little.’

‘It’s not her house, but your brother’s.’

‘Believe that if you must,’ she muttered as her brother followed them into the room and all chance for a satisfying private argument about nothing in particular was lost for the time being as they ate their meal in uneasy silence.

‘A word with you both, if you please,’ Kit said shortly, once Hugh had thrown down his napkin and Louisa gave up even pretending to eat more than a few bites of her breakfast.

Since she thought Hugh as intent on avoiding
those words and drifting on with everything unresolved as she was, she categorised both him and herself cowards and strolled towards Kit’s book-room without an argument. The disadvantages of having fallen among gentlemen occurred to her as they bowed her ahead of them and she could almost feel Hugh whatever-he-was-calling-himself-today eyeing the sway of her hips and wolfishly appreciating any glimpses of her slender legs afforded by her soft muslin skirts brushing against her body as she walked. She let herself marvel at such an unlikely fashion pertaining in modern Britain, when it was far more suited to somewhere much hotter and more leisurely, to distract herself from the thought that it felt powerful to know she held Hugh’s attention so completely it was almost something she could reach out and touch.

‘What is it now, Kit?’ she asked impatiently when they reached his comfortable study and she lost the advantage.

‘You two,’ he said abruptly and she raised her eyebrows. ‘You will stay in this room together until I have a decision one way or the other out of you about your marriage. Hugh—you will forget your late wife for a moment and consider what you and my sister can have
instead and whether you truly want to live without it. Louisa—you will stand and listen to what he has to say like a grown woman and not a little savage just dragged in off the streets against her will, then you will answer him only after some of that mature consideration you keep telling me you’re capable of, at least if you wish me to ever take a single word you say seriously ever again.’

‘Oh, I will, will I?’ she flamed, but it was wasted because he hadn’t waited for an argument and shut the door on them with a decided snap instead.

She strode over to the window and plumped down on the seat cushions to stare moodily out over the small garden beyond and waited to hear what Hugh had to say with a sinking heart.

‘He’s right, you know,’ Hugh told her moodily.

‘I know,’ she said with a sigh, ‘but don’t expect me to like him very much for it just at the moment.’

‘Which will make a change from disliking me, I suppose.’

‘I don’t dislike you.’

‘That’s a start, then, so perhaps we can
proceed to the business in hand without the accompaniment of raised voices or fisticuffs?’

‘No, I don’t wish to be an item on a business agenda.’

He sighed. She remembered Kit ordering her to be reasonable and sighed herself, before meeting his unreadable gaze as serenely as she could make herself. Not her best move so far, since she only had to look into his eyes for the intimacy of last night’s dark loving to ambush her with all sorts of possible futures. Having little experience of deep emotion between a man and a woman, she couldn’t tell if it was only lust that burned under the acute intelligence in Hugh Darke’s silvered gaze.

‘No, I don’t suppose you do,’ he conceded, ‘but we must decide what to do anyway.’

‘At this exact minute?’ she asked, not sure why she wanted to procrastinate when the very thought of him ever marrying anyone else was unendurable.

‘Yes, and a great deal hinges on your reply to my proposal, Louisa.’

‘Hugh Darke for one,’ she said, feeling oddly cast down by the idea of losing a man who never was. ‘If I don’t agree to marry you, then he will have to disappear, will he not?’

‘His days are numbered, whatever you decide,’
Hugh said, with a rather bitter twist to his supposedly careless smile at the idea of losing his alter-ego.

‘Because of your association with me?’

‘No, because of the choices I must make, Eloise or no.’

‘Please don’t try and comfort me with clever words, Captain. If not for what happened last night, you would be able to sail under Kit’s colours for as long as you chose to do so, would you not?’

‘Maybe I would, but how honest would that have been of me, I wonder?’

‘Oddly enough, honesty and honour don’t figure high on my list of priorities, Captain. I’d choose survival and as small a lie as necessary over them any day.’

‘Witness your blatant inability to walk away from a friend in trouble, or not lay down everything you are for any stranger who happened to be in trouble? Don’t make yourself out to be someone you’re not to me, Louisa. At least grant us that much honesty with each other, even if there’s to be nothing more.’

She paused and watched him cautiously, alert for any hint of mockery or doubt in his suddenly very austere countenance; she could
see nothing but sincerity there, so she let herself ask the question at the heart of all this.

‘We really shouldn’t marry though, should we, Hugh?’ she said very softly at last. ‘Not people like us,’ she added with real regret.

‘People like me, you mean? What have you ever done wrong, Louisa?’

‘I’ve always been difficult and intransigent and I don’t suffer fools gladly or fake laughter when I only feel boredom, and that’s just to start with,’ she confessed.

‘Sounds like heaven to me,’ he quipped and suddenly she felt a deep shaft of pain open up at the idea that their marriage could indeed have been wonderful.

‘No, because if you were to marry me, it would make re-establishing yourself in society twice as hard as it would be with a better wife,’ she warned.

‘Now you’re being ridiculous, and mawkish with it,’ he condemned roughly, as if he truly believed it.

‘Then I’m astonished you want to marry me, but I was forgetting, wasn’t I? You really don’t want to marry me at all. We got carried away by propinquity and now you feel honour bound to wed me, despite the fact that I deliberately misled you about my virgin status.’

‘I might have restrained myself a little more if I’d known,’ he told her in that dark-velvet voice that sent hot shivers racing down her spine like little splurges of lightning, ‘but not to the extent of letting you find an excuse to leave me, not once I knew this damnable wanting was mutual.’

‘Does it have to be damnable?’ she whispered, achingly aware that this incessant need of each other felt very far from it to her.

‘What do you think?’ he murmured back as they stared into each other’s eyes as if their very lives depended on reading the right answer to that question.

‘I have to hope that it doesn’t,’ she managed, refusing to drop her eyelids and shelter her thoughts and dreams from his gaze. ‘It doesn’t have to be paradise, I won’t beg for love or even offer it until I know if that’s what I feel for you, but it can be more than hellish between us, don’t you think, Hugh? It’s certainly more than I ever imagined feeling for any man already.’

‘Oh, you sweet idiot,’ he said with a twisted smile she could feel as much as see from such close quarters.