If Wishes Were Earls (9 page)

Oh, bother!
This was going to be harder than she’d realized.

Composing herself, Harriet smiled blandly at the viscount’s compliment, sitting with all the precision that Lady Essex had drilled into the Kempton Society members.

Posture
, Lady Essex liked to say,
is what marks one a lady even when a situation is most dire.

She supposed this evening counted as “most” something.

Aggravating, perhaps?
No.

Horrible?
Getting there.

Heartbreaking?
Decidedly so.

She pressed her lips together. Roxley just couldn’t marry this Miss Murray.

She stole a glance over her shoulder where her adversary sat, all excellent posture and precise manners, the markers of a miss with a superior education.

And an heiress to boot. Harriet glanced down at her own gown, remade from one of her mother’s, and sighed. She might not have even noticed such a thing once, but it came with being friends with Daphne. Eventually the difference between a made-over gown and one sewn of fine silk by a London modiste became evident even to Harriet.

And much to her chagrin, Miss Murray wore what could only be described as a perfect gown. Harriet grimaced as she glanced again at the fine point lace and the little brilliants sewn into the sleeves.

Make that
very
well off.

Harriet shifted in her seat as jealousy wiggled down her spine like a worm.
An heiress
. Bath educated. All the requisites of a future countess.

Of course, he loves you not
, that horrible voice of doubt whispered at her.

Yet when she stole one more look at her adversary, something about this perfect nonpareil seemed wrong. Not that Harriet could put her finger on anything precisely, but everything about Miss Murray was too right.

Harriet shook off such a musing, for it was nothing more than her envy talking. Leaning toward the viscount, she whispered, “My lord, tell me more of Roxley’s misfortunes. I had no idea—”

The man brightened, because apparently sharing another’s misfortune was his favorite diversion.

Better than admitting to his own failings.

The viscount lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Roxley’s always been a lucky devil. Pockets of vowels on the most unlikely of wagers. Luckiest demmed fellow who ever lived.”

Harriet nodded. Roxley, for all his capering ways, always landed solidly on his feet. But then again, he wasn’t the fool he pretended to be. Something only his closest friends understood.

“But when he came back from Preston’s last summer, it seems he left Lady Luck at Owle Park.”

“Last summer?” she echoed. “After the duke’s house party?”

“Yes. You might not have noticed, but he made a rather abrupt departure after the masquerade ball.” The viscount waggled his brows at her. “You recall the night?”

She remembered. Even now she could recall the press of Roxley’s body against hers, the eager claiming of his lips, his hands caressing her, exploring her. She might have started the kiss—yes, she’d been that brazen—but oh, how the earl had carried off the night.

Even now, with the earl just behind her, their chairs nearly touching, she could smell a hint of his cologne, that subtle combination of rosemary and lemon and something very masculine, so unique that it could only be described as
Roxley
. How she’d inhaled deeply as he’d held her that night, the very scent of him intoxicating.

Fieldgate, meanwhile, had continued pattering on about the earl’s bad luck. A mortgage to cover debts, bad investments, some unsavory rumor about his man of business, and now he was being dunned at every turn. “His title is all he has left.”

Which would fit neatly into the plans of an upstart heiress with her sights set on a countess’s coronet. What else did an heiress of sketchy connections wish for but an earl down on his luck?

Look how Miss Edith Nashe had fared last Season. And that conniving minx was as low as they came.

“Yes, well, shall I fetch us something to eat?” the viscount asked. “If I don’t hurry, all the beef will be gone.”

“A most excellent idea,” Harriet said, favoring him with a smile. “Oh, and a glass of champagne, if you can manage?” This would delay his return, and leave her with more time to consider all the viscount had revealed.

Fieldgate rose and bowed and then moved toward the supper line.

Roxley done for? She shook her head. Had he truly mortgaged Foxgrove—the house that had been Lady Essex’s home since birth? She took a steadying breath, not so much for the earl but for his dear great-aunt.

That the Marshom family with all their freewheeling ways hadn’t gambled away the estate generations ago was a bit of a miracle.

Now it might be lost? Harriet didn’t know what to think. However would the earl continue to support Lady Essex, not to mention his other aunts—the ones he complained of frequently, but she knew he loved dearly—if he was so deeply encumbered?

The answer struck her squarely between the eyes: by making a quick and hasty marriage of convenience.

If she didn’t like Miss Murray for her stunning gown and distinctive education, she quite despised her now for the fortune she held. The one that would rescue Roxley.

No less helpful in the other lady’s favor was her apparent friendship with Lady Kipps. The countess and her husband had joined Roxley’s party. After a few moments of levity, the countess had taken Miss Murray off to visit the retiring room.

When Harriet was certain that Miss Murray and Lady Kipps were well out of earshot, she leaned back in her seat.

“Roxley,” she whispered. When he didn’t respond, she tried a little louder. “
Roxley!
”

She hated that it sounded like a plea, as if she were begging, but in truth, she was. Her heart was breaking—to be this close to him and unable to turn around and clasp his face in her hands and press her lips to his as she had in the garden at Owle Park.

Convince him that no matter the circumstances he didn’t have to do this . . . this terrible thing.

“Oh, Roxley,” she said once more.

“Aye, Harry,” he said, the resignation in his voice tearing at her heart.

Harriet was never one to beat around the bush. She was a Hathaway after all. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you write?”

“You know I’m terrible about those things. Just ask my aunts.”

He could quip at a moment like this? She didn’t know whether she wanted to dash him over the head with the nearest plate or overturn his chair.

But she’d promised, vowed, to be a lady tonight.

And ladies did not cause scenes.

Drawing a deep breath, she stuck to her course. “Last summer . . . I thought . . .”

She just had to know.

“Thought what, Kitten?”

Not Harriet. Not Harry. But Kitten.
His Kitten
.

Goose bumps ran down her arms even as tears stung at her eyes. For nothing could have told her more than that precious endearment.

He loved her still. She just knew it.

“Is it because I have no fortune?”

He laughed. “I’d rather have you without one.”

“Without?” Practical in the ways of money and fortunes, she couldn’t imagine why he would want her as she was . . . penniless.

“Of course. If you came to me with a fortune in hand you’d lord it over me until the day I died.”

“I would not,” she protested, but they both knew that was a lie.

And Roxley made a rather inelegant snort to put an exclamation point on his opinion.

Yes, well, he had her there.

“Better me than her,” Harriet told him, arms crossing over her chest.

Definitely better.

“Kitten, can we forget last summer? Can you set aside that night and forget?”

Harriet shook her head. Forget?

Forget Roxley kissing her, his lips teasing hers to open up to him. His hands exploring her, slowly sliding her costume from her until she was naked, his skin against hers. Her fingers curling into his shoulders, clinging to him as he brought her . . .

“Go back to Kempton,” he continued. “Tomorrow if you can. Then forget me.”

“How can you ask such a thing?” she said, exhaling the words in a rush.

“Because I must,” he told her.

Harriet turned around. Oh, damn her vow, she’d make a scene if she must, she couldn’t let Roxley do this.

And when she turned, she found Miss Murray and Lady Kipps coming up toward them.

Miss Murray’s gaze seemed fixed on Roxley, a calculating look that rang with the clarity of a shop’s bell.

And then the girl turned her astute eyes on Harriet and the look that followed was one of pure calculation and then in a blink of an eye, dismissal.

Just like that. She was dismissed as unworthy of Miss Murray’s concern. But there was something else, something worrisome in the girl’s measured glance that sent a chill down Harriet’s spine.

Something is very wrong
, a chorus rang out, and Harriet began to push her chair out, some wild, nonsensical plan forming in her head, when she realized that not far behind Miss Murray stood Lady Essex.

Lady Essex, who would lose her beloved home, her place in society if Roxley was ruined. And Harriet owed the dear old girl so much. Not for all the dratted lessons in how to curtsy or dance a quadrille or pour tea, but Lady Essex was her friend. Her dear and beloved mentor.

For her, Harriet would do anything.

Even sit down and silence her heart.

Which she did.

And in that moment of silence, she swore she heard Roxley whisper one more thing.

I’m so sorry, Kitten. Ever so sorry.

Chapter 4

If I were to kiss you, Miss Darby, it would be the most dishonorable thing I have ever done.

Lt. Throckmorten to Miss Darby

from Miss Darby’s Daring Dilemma

R
oxley steeled his heart as he heard Harriet settle dejectedly into her chair.

Perhaps there was still a chance, he mused. And then it was an opportunity lost, for here came Miss Murray.

“My lord,” she said as she sat down beside him. “You had mentioned earlier that you had something you wanted to discuss with me.”

Roxley looked over at the girl and knew what he was supposed to do. Propose. Charm her into accepting him. To save his aunts. To save his estates.

But out of the corner of his eye, he saw Harriet, or rather her riotous ebony curls cascading over her shoulders and falling nearly to the middle of her back, and something inside him shifted. He saw that hair as he’d seen it once before, loose and long. So very inviting. He knew what it felt like sliding like silk through his fingers.

And he heard her.

You’d come after a lady, if you ruined her. You’d never abandon her.

In an instant, he remembered that night, how her faith in him had been unshakeable.

It had all begun that very night, this madness in his heart. It had begun with naught but a kiss.

Harriet’s kiss. Binding him to her.

Then. And still.

Roxley glanced over at Miss Murray. “Discuss? Hmm. I fear I’ve forgotten what that might have been.”

For his thoughts were far too full of visions of a moonlit London garden. A night so very unlike this one.

Half foxed, he’d stumbled into Sir Mauris Timmons’s garden with nothing but a dodgy plan to cast up stones at windows, searching for what he knew not, but discovering everything he’d ever desired in a kiss.

London, one year earlier

I
t had been the most scandalous night of the Season, and one would think that the Duke of Preston’s example of getting himself entangled with Miss Timmons and ruining the gel in the middle of Lord Grately’s ball would be enough to warn Roxley off from his current course of action.

Actually, it was because of the quagmire from this evening that he was here—in the garden behind Sir Mauris Timmons’s London house—tossing stones at the windows hoping to find Harriet, or at the very least, Miss Timmons, to see how the poor lady fared.

Oh, bother, if he was being honest, he’d readily admit he was looking for Harriet. And Harriet alone.

What with her long dark locks and emerald eyes . . .

No! No! No! That wasn’t going to do. She was Harry. He chided himself to remember that.

Roxley shook the lingering vision of a lithesome, utterly desirable woman from his memory and reminded himself why he was really here. Given how furious Sir Mauris and Lady Timmons had been when they’d left the ball with their disgraced niece and her friends in tow, Roxley wouldn’t have put it past the rather furious baronet to have locked them all in the attics or worse.

Yes, that was it. He wanted to ensure that Harriet was safe and sound. His moonlight and most scandalous visit was not the least bit motivated by how her dark lashes fluttered so demmed invitingly. Or the way she’d looked tonight in that new gown—lush and tempting.

He shook his head and picked up another small stone. Lush and tempting, indeed! This was Harry. Harry Hathaway. That wretched little minx who always tagged along after her brothers, all scrawny elbows and knees and always demanding her fair share of whatever trouble her brothers and Roxley had managed.

And then, just before he was about to cast up yet another hope-filled stone, like a wish into a pond, the door from the kitchen down below opened and out she stepped.

Still trouble, yet now ever so tempting. He blinked and looked again. More so.

Like a nymph she came up the steps, wearing a pink wrapper over a white muslin night-rail that peeked out at the hem. Her hair was simply bound in a long braid that fell over her shoulder down nearly to her waist.

Squeezing past came Miss Timmons’s wretched brute of a dog, the infamous Mr. Muggins.

“Roxley, what the devil are you doing here? Do you mean to get me in more trouble than I already am?”

He grinned. He couldn’t help himself. When she scolded him like that, it warmed his heart in ways he didn’t understand. “That’s why I’m here. Wanted to make sure Sir Mauris hadn’t drowned the lot of you in the Thames like a litter of unwanted mongrels.”

Mr. Muggins walked him past him and slanted a glance at the earl that said all too clearly there would be no talk of mongrels. Not in his hearing.

Roxley was still watching the dog amble deeper into the garden when Harriet came alongside him and caught him by the hand, saying, “Drowned us, indeed! Truly, Roxley, it is nothing like that.” She pulled him through the narrow garden to an alcove in the back, where they could stand in the shadows and not be seen from the house. “But he and Lady Timmons are furious.”

“Is that regret I hear in your voice?” he asked.

“For helping Tabitha?” Harriet shook her head most adamantly. Of course she didn’t regret her part in the scandal.

Any more than he regretted coming here.

At least not yet. Then he realized she was still holding his hand, her warm fingers wound with his. This wasn’t the first time they had stood so—with their hands entwined, bound together—but why, how had everything changed? The heat from her hand moved through his limbs, and with it came this sense of belonging.

For someone who always held society and life at arm’s length, the sense of coming home left him a bit breathless.

“We are all to return to Kempton tomorrow,” she was saying.

That caught his attention. “Tomorrow? Whatever for?”

Harriet let out a breathy sigh. “Because Tabitha is ruined.”

That hardly made any sense. “Isn’t Sir Mauris planning on calling on Preston first thing on the morrow? Though I wouldn’t recommend it, for when I last saw the duke, he was headed in the direction of White’s—he’ll still be half-seas over at dawn. Not that it will matter either way. He won’t marry her.”

She scoffed at this. “He will indeed. The duke loves Tabitha. Any nobcock can see that. Besides, it is how it is done—she’s ruined, after all—he’ll ask her to marry him, even if he must follow her to Kempton to do so.”

“Oh, Harry—” Roxley began, not knowing how to tell her that not all men were so honorable. And a man of Preston’s reputation  . . .

Harriet scoffed at this. “You’d come after a lady, if you ruined her. You’d never abandon her—”

Roxley shifted uneasily at this, for all she had to do was change that sentence a bit.

You’d come after me, if you ruined me. You’d never abandon me.

For it wasn’t her confidence in him—that unwavering faith that he wouldn’t disavow her—but his desire to test her theory that left him shaken.

Kiss her, Roxley, and find out.

What the devil was he thinking? Ruin Harry? Good God, no.

He straightened and tried to look impervious to her prodding. “Since I have no intention of ruining anyone in the immediate future—”

“You’d follow,” she said as if she knew him better than she knew herself.

And it struck him that perhaps Harriet Hathaway was the only woman in all of England who knew him just that way. Always had.

She glanced over her shoulder at the house. “However did you know which window was mine?”

“I didn’t,” he told her. “I just kept tossing up stones until you arrived.”

Harriet swatted him on the shoulder playfully. “You’re lucky it is me out here and not one of Tabitha’s loathsome cousins. I doubt you’d want to be found in the gardens with one of them.”

Roxley shuddered. “No, not in the least.” Especially given Sir Mauris’s infamous temper, and Lady Timmons’s well-known desire to see her daughters rise up in society. He’d be in the parson’s trap before dawn.

“Remember when you thought my window was Chaunce’s and you sent that rock right through it?” Harriet was saying. “I don’t know how you mistook the matter—”

“Yes, perhaps I was a bit squiffy,” he murmured, caught by the way the moonlight cast her dark hair with an almost bluish hint. And it hadn’t been a mistake—he had come over from Foxgrove that night looking for Harriet. He’d hoped then . . . Well, never mind what he’d thought. Not that he’d tell her. It would only give her ideas.

As if Harry needed the help—good heavens, she was out here in her night-rail, which was giving him terrible ideas. Devious notions. Ridiculous temptations.

Couldn’t she have tossed on some old cloak over this gossamer bit that clung to her willowy form and left a man with no doubt what his hands, his lips, his body would find beneath.

He glanced up and realized she was looking at him—an amused little smile playing on her lips, pursed as they were and so ready for . . .

Don’t look at her lips.

So Roxley did his best to change the subject. “Actually Chaunce is why I’m here. He was busy, so I offered to come by and check on you.”

Her brow furrowed almost immediately. “How kind of you to do a favor for my brother. Now that you’ve checked, I suppose I should go back inside.” She turned to leave.

But he didn’t want her to go just yet. Demmit, this was ridiculous. This was Harry Hathaway, and yet . . .

“At least you look like yourself again,” he said aloud without thinking.

Harriet stilled. “Myself?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder. “Whatever does that mean?”

Roxley moved to block her escape. “Not all done up,” he told her, waving his hands at her hair and the length of her lithe, willowy form that was so perfectly outlined by her wispy night-rail and wrapper.

The rise of her breasts. The curve of her hips. The line of her collarbone that was so temptingly kissable . . .

Good God, man! Don’t look at her that way. This is Harry.

Oh, but Harry had changed. Ever so much.

And while he was gazing at her, doing his best to ignore the way her night-rail dipped down to reveal the rising tops of her breasts, she was gaping at him. “Are you bosky?” she asked, hands now fisting to those tempting hips.

“What a terrible thing to ask a fellow, Harry,” he admonished. Because, yes, he was. Slightly.

Pot valiant, one might say. That, or stark raving mad.

He had to be mad because he was seeing Harriet in an entirely new light. A tempting one. A ruinous one.

Gads, this was the same sort of foolish thinking that had gotten Preston all tangled up with Miss Timmons . . . and here he’d ridiculed the duke for haunting the park in search of the vicar’s daughter and following her about at balls and soirées, and now he was making the very same mistake.

Harriet, unaware of his inner turmoil, had continued on unabashed. “My mother always says if you have to ask a man if he’s drunk, you probably already know the answer.” She leaned in and sniffed, and immediately had her evidence.

“Your mother is a wise woman,” Roxley agreed, not willing to admit it had taken a good half a bottle of brandy to get his courage up and come over here.

Not when he knew that one false move, one wayward kiss and the entire Hathaway clan would be hunting for him. Including Lady Hathaway, a veritable Amazon when it came to her children. She might count him an honorary Hathaway, but if she discovered he’d been dallying with Harriet, he wouldn’t put it past her to flay him alive.

“Wise?” Harriet shook her head. “Maman is determined, you mean. When I left, she was measuring my room for repapering. She said once I went to Town, I’d never come home again. And now . . . it will be all roses and gilt and she’ll have invited Cousin Verbena to come stay indefinitely. I’ll be sleeping over the stables.”

“She couldn’t have meant it,” Roxley told her.

“I do believe she was counting on me falling in love and running away like she and Papa did.”

Roxley had to stop himself from turning and looking at her right then. For if he did, he didn’t know if the suggestion behind her words—
run away
—would become reality.

Instead, he saved himself with a lighthearted quip. “Would save your father the expense of a wedding.”

Not that Harriet was about to let him off the hook. She moved closer to him. “Are you offering, Roxley?” she whispered softly, the way a woman did when she wanted to touch you but hadn’t quite the nerve. Yet her softly spoken words were like a lure; they drew a man closer.

Tempted him to do the reaching.

Where the devil did these chits learn how to do these things?

He could hardly blame her wiles on some Bath school. Then again, her mother had been a bit of scandal herself if all the old gossips were to be believed.

Indeed, Harriet Hathaway came by her siren manners naturally—though luckily for him she had yet to discover them—completely.

The earl held his ground and kept up with the lighthearted banter. “Offering what? To pay for your wedding, Kitten?”

Her gaze flew up at that. Not Miss Hathaway. Not Harriet. Not even Harry.
Kitten
.