Joan Wolf (19 page)

Lord Rutherford sighed and showed his quality. “Don’t worry about the money or the social embarrassment. I will take care of that.”

“Thank you, William.” She smiled at him, a little tremulous with relief. “You are so utterly decent and good-natured and sweet. I feel like a wretch for putting you in this position.”

A small muscle flickered next to his mouth. “A lot of good my virtues have done me.” He sounded bitter. “When are you going to marry him?”

She bent her head, refusing to look at him for the first time since the interview had begun. “I don’t know.”

There was a pause. “Perhaps I ought to have said
are
you going to marry him?” He had come closer to her, his feet silent on the thick grass.

“Probably,” she said.

“Probably? Has he asked you?”

“Not yet.”

“I see.” He turned her face up so he could look into her eyes. “Is he likely to ask you?”

Julianne returned his look, and then, because he was so sweet and decent and because she felt in his debt, she told him the truth. “He will ask me to marry him, but I do not think he will stay with me. John is not a man for the joys of domesticity. He will probably settle me at Lansdowne and come back periodically to renew his acquaintance.”

“I see. And you won’t like that.”

“No, I won’t like that.”

“Then perhaps I ought to ask if
you
are planning to marry him.”

She smiled a little wryly. “I’m afraid, William, that I’ve come to the point where any crumb from the table will be better than nothing. Yes, I will marry him.”

His face looked very bleak. “I don’t at all like the idea of your being at Lansdowne. My head tells me you are right to cry off from our engagement, but the rest of me isn’t so sure.”

She exhaled a long, slow breath. “You will be. And I’m really not sure what John will do. I shall just have to wait and see.”

“What does a girl like you see in a man like that?” He spoke with a mixture of bewilderment and anger. “I grant you he’s good-looking in an uncivilized sort of way, but he’s an adventurer—a man with no sense of patriotism or social responsibility.”

It was not possible to explain to him what it was she saw in John, so instead she smiled. “I am an adventurer myself, William. I loved being out in Africa. I’d like nothing better than to trek off with John on a search for the source of the Nile.”

“Good God! Certainly he wouldn’t allow
you
to do that!”

“No, I don’t think he would. He has a very poor opinion of the inconvenient habit women have of producing babies. That is just the sort
of
behavior that would slow up an expedition.”

He stared at her for a
minute in silence
and
then said tightly, “Shall we go back to
the
phaeton?”

She agreed and when they were once again trotting along the wide avenue he began to speak of some new ideas his father had for expanding the stables. She listened and replied, grateful to him for his chivalry and his courtesy. When they reached the house and he came around to the carriage to assist her down, she said only, “Thank you, William. You are indeed ‘a verray parfit gentil knight.’ “

He stood for a minute, his hands on her waist, looking up into her face. Then he swung her down. “Yes,” he said and the note of bitterness was very audible. “I know.”

Chapter Twenty-five

When I was gonn shee sent her memory

More stronge than weare ten thousand

    shipps of war. . .

—Sir Walter Ralegh

Julianne and the dowager duchess returned home to Crewe two days after Julianne’s conversation with Lord Rutherford. He had advised her to say nothing to her grandmother until after they had left Minton, just as he would say nothing to his parents.

“It seems so cowardly of me,” she said doubtfully when he proposed this course of action to her.

“It may be cowardly, but it is far more considerate of others,” he replied firmly. “It will precipitate an extremely awkward situation if we announce our broken engagement while you are still here. The social strain would be enormous.”

Julianne had bowed to his superior knowledge of social propriety and had gone off with warm farewells from the Mintons and promises to see her shortly. She felt utterly hypocritical, but it could not be helped.

Her grandmother had first been stunned, then incredulous, and finally furious when Julianne had told her the truth. She too had said almost immediately, “It’s Denham, I take it.” Julianne had not been aware that her partiality for John was so obvious. It didn’t help her pride to realize that the whole world had apparently seen her wearing her heart on her sleeve.

And where was he? One week went by and then two, and still there was no word from him. Life at the Dower House was hardly pleasant. The dowager duchess barely spoke to her granddaughter and when she did it was only to make remarks such as, “You’re a fool to throw away a man like Rutherford,” or “You’ve thrown away one of the best positions in the country, do you know that?” The dowager duchess had little use for the Earl of Denham. “He hasn’t even asked for you,” was the comment that hurt Julianne most. She was all too aware of that distressing fact.

It was a golden day in September when he finally came. Julianne was cutting flowers in the garden when she looked up and saw him striding down the path toward her. For a moment her heart seemed to stop, and she knew, as she watched his oncoming figure, that never would she feel this way about anyone else. She met his eyes, so brilliant and blue in his dark face, and knew also that she would do whatever he wanted, and on his terms. She loved him so much.

He smiled at her but there was an odd, grave look in his eyes. “Your grandmother is not pleased with me. She just informed me that if I were going back to soldier in Egypt she would not allow you to come with me.”

“What did you say?”

“I told her that I would not ask you to do such a thing.” He looked at her reassuringly. “Why do you think I have been in London? I wrote you I would arrange things for us.”

He was going to leave her at Lansdowne. In her deepest heart she had known that that was what he would do. He misinterpreted the look on her face and said, holding out his arms to her, “I put you in a position where you would feel you had to marry me. I know that, and I did it quite deliberately. But I don’t mean to coerce you into a way of life that would not be suitable for you.”

She went to him and buried her face in his shoulder, feeling the strength of his arms around her. “Do you mean you wanted me to marry you?” she asked, her voice muffled by his hard shoulder.

He put his cheek against her hair. “I have wanted nothing but you, almost since the first moment I saw you. It was only when I saw you with Rutherford, though, that I realized how deeply I felt. I knew then that I had to break that engagement, that it was I you were going to marry. It was the accomplishing of that plan that proved so difficult.”

She was conscious of deep surprise as she listened to him. She moved her face away from his shoulder and looked up. “You said you would never marry.”

His mouth twisted. “I shouldn’t. I can’t offer you the life you want. It wasn’t Rutherford I was afraid of, you know. It was his father. And his home. You told me once you would never marry a man like me, a man incapable of settling down. And I just can’t live the rest of my life at Lansdowne, Julianne.” He sounded a little desperate. “It will be our home, I promise you that. It will always be there for us to come back to. And we will spend a part of every year there, I promise you that as well. But I am not a Lord Minton. It would drive me wild to try to become like him.”

Julianne scarcely heard the last part of his speech. It was the “we” that she focused on immediately. It sounded as if he did not mean to leave her behind after all. “I knew that if I made love to you, you wouldn’t marry Rutherford,” he was saying now. “It wasn’t fair, perhaps, but then I couldn’t afford to be fair. I couldn’t afford to lose you.”

She stared up into his vehemently masculine face, a face that was graven forever on her heart. “Oh, John.” Her voice was low and shaky. “I would have married you in an instant. Minton lost all its attraction the day I saw you again. I don’t care about settling down. I don’t care about being safe. I only want to be with you.”

“Is that true?”

“Yes.”

They looked at each other for a long, silent moment and then he said, quite softly, “We’ve both been fairly caught, haven’t we, sweetheart?”

She nodded, mute under his gaze, and then he was kissing her eyelids, her mouth, her throat, her mouth again. After a minute they moved to one of the stone benches and continued what they were doing. It was Julianne who finally pulled away. “There’s no place we can go,” she said huskily.

“Damn.” He was trembling almost as much as she was. “We’ll get a special license and be married next week.”

“All right.” Prudently, she moved a little away from him on the bench. “You haven’t told me what arrangements you made in London.”

He took a deep steadying breath and spoke almost normally. “I’ve been appointed special ambassador to the Sublime Porte.”

He smiled at her look. “It’s true. It looks as if the sultan is going to be at war in Serbia shortly. And he is trying, inefficiently I fear, to modernize his empire. There are a few things that Castlereagh wants me to find out for him.”

Julianne began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” he asked equably.

“Somehow you are not my idea of an ambassador,” she said, looking at his lawless face.

He was unperturbed. “I was ambassador to the Porte for the pasha in 1810. I know the sultan and his advisers rather well.” He grinned at her and held out an arm. “It’s safe to come back now.” When she had nestled in the crook of his arm, he continued. “Turkey may be rather enjoyable. We can do a bit of traveling—across the Aegean to Greece, across the Black Sea to Russia. You should find plenty of material for another book.”

She closed her eyes for a minute. She was so blissfully happy it hurt. “Are you planning on making a career out of being a special ambassador?”

“Possibly. There are plenty of problem spots in the world that could use my attention. It has its attractions. It is even respectable, and if I am to be a husband and a father I had better resign myself to being respectable.”

“We ought to learn some new languages. It would be grand to see St. Petersburg and Moscow.”

He laid his cheek for a minute against her hair. “And South America.”

She sat up, her eyes luminous. “South America! Think of the birds, John!”

His eyes narrowed as they looked at her glowing face, but before he could reach for her again Julianne said, “Here comes Grandmama.”

He turned to watch the martially erect old lady coming toward them down the garden path. “Do you think she’ll approve of my making you the wife of an ambassador?” he asked.

“I think so.” She slipped her hand into his and they both rose to their feet. “If she doesn’t,” said Julianne with great sweetness, “we shall just have to elope.”

“I’m afraid you are an adventuress, Miss Wells,” he murmured softly and she looked up at him and grinned.

“Yes,” she said cheerfully, “I’m afraid you are quite right, my lord.” And so, linked together, they stepped forward to greet the oncoming dowager duchess.

Copyright © 1983 by Joan Wolf

Originally published by Signet (ISBN 0451123832)

Electronically published in 2008 by Belgrave House/Regency Reads

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

No portion of this book may be reprinted in whole or in part, by printing, faxing, E-mail, copying electronically or by any other means without permission of the publisher. For more information, contact Belgrave House, 190 Belgrave Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94117-4228

     http://www.RegencyReads.com

     Electronic sales: [email protected]

This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.