Promise Me Heaven (36 page)

“I hear you offered for Cat,” Thomas turned.

“This morning,” Strand said, tossing his hat onto an inlaid desk and yanking off his gloves. “That’s why I’ve come to see you.”

“Really? I never would have taken you for the gloating sort, Giles. I really do not think I can stand here and listen to an enactment of that tender tableau.”

“Tender?” snorted Strand, obviously overset. “In a way. Tell me, Thomas, why haven’t you offered for the gel?”

Thomas scanned Strand’s urbane figure. Giles looked angry. Thomas shrugged tiredly. “I don’t believe even our friendship allows you that intimate knowledge.”

For a long moment, Thomas held the elegant blond man’s gaze. Strand did not look away. Strand was one of the very few men whom Thomas trusted, whose judgment he valued and whose friendship he revered. He trusted him and so, finally, Thomas answered his unvoiced concern. “She has certain knowledge of me that precludes any possible attachment.”

“Thomas.” Strand’s smooth brow furrowed in consternation. “I have known you since we were at school together. There are chapters in your past which are displeasing, but the offenses you committed in your youth were just that, a matter of youth. Many of the proclivities of our peers are far more onerous. Surely Cat would have forgiven you your past?”

“Perhaps,” said Thomas, “if the past had not intruded on the present.”

“What do you mean?”

“Cat had the misfortune of witnessing the culmination of a little seduction between Daphne Bernard and myself.”

“Bloody hell. How could you?”

“Fool that I am, I thought the price worth the information it garnered.” His smile was humorless. “I didn’t even get the bloody information.

“And too, there are certain things in my past that might just be unforgivable to someone like Cat,” Thomas murmured, his thoughts on Mariette Leons. Giles was scowling at him. Giles knew nothing of Mariette and her son.

“You see, Strand,” Thomas went on, “long ago I bartered away something irreplaceable: the right to declare myself to Cat Sinclair. But I would have done it anyway, had you not beat me to it. I was going to.” Thomas fell silent, battling his inner anguish. Purposefully he gathered his resolve. “Tell me, when are the nuptials to take place? No doubt I’ll be called upon to give the bride away. What’s the saying? ‘Those whom the gods would destroy, first make mad?’ ”

“For God’s sake, Thomas,” Strand said, snapping his gloves into his open palm. “Cat refused me. I know my proposal was precipitate. I would never have rushed my fences were it not for the situation you have gotten her into.”

Thomas scowled uncertainly at Strand.

“It is all over London, thanks to that degenerate Satan spawn, Barrymore. Her name is being bandied about everywhere. I had even purchased a special license in hopes of staving off the majority of the tattle mongers. I had hoped to be allowed the honor of protecting her,” Giles said bitterly. Perhaps he, too, knew the feeling that he’d had something irreplaceable within his grasp and had lost it, because his voice was hard. “I swear, Thomas, if you allow her to be ruined by this, I will call you out myself. You are a bloody fool, but it appears you are the bloody fool she wants.”

Snatching up his hat, Strand strode from the room with no further word.

Thomas stood frozen in place, hardly daring to believe what he’d been told.

There was no other situation that could have conspired to make Thomas offer Cat his tarnished name. No other set of circumstances that would allow him to beg for her hand. That it had occurred nearly made him believe in a merciful God. He might have an opportunity to protect her, shelter her—bloody hell, he would not lie to himself—
love
her! It was a boon so munificent, it staggered him. And it really was her only practical recourse. She would simply have to wed him.

He grinned.

He hadn’t the least idea why Cat had let him think she had accepted Strand’s proposal, or any clue as to the reason for her all-too-obvious anger. Perhaps it was his neglect, an inner voice suggested. Perhaps she had missed his company. Anything seemed possible right now.

He thrust the provocative idea away. Whatever the reason for her reception of him, he would have to address it later. Right now he had to formulate some convincing speech, some immutable argument, to persuade his enticing pragmatist to become his wife.

Slumping down into a wing-backed chair, Thomas steepled his fingers in front of his lips, considering the tack he might take. A soft rap broke through his concentration.

“Yes, yes, Bob, do get on with it! The marquis is gone, and there’s no one here to impress with your redoubtable valeting.”

The door swung open. Cat stood framed within it, her chin thrust out belligerently. “Why?” she asked in a voice that was a full octave higher than her usual one. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew Giles Dalton?”

“Cat?”

She took a few steps into the room. Her color was high, her eyes sparkling like dew-shimmered leaves.

“Don’t you dare ‘Cat’ me!”

Thomas strode toward her, his hands rising as he approached her. She glared at him. His hands dropped.

“I reiterate, why didn’t you tell me you knew Giles Dalton? That he was a confidant of yours?”

“Strand?”

“And why is it that each time today I have mentioned his name, you echo me, but for the past seven months you were unable to choke out even a near approximation of his name? How you must have laughed behind your hand at me.”

“Well, yes. I did,” Thomas admitted slowly. This must be the reason she had allowed him to believe she’d accepted Strand. She thought he’d been mocking her.

“I knew it!” Cat stomped past him, kicking out the flounced hem of her gown as she went. She wheeled around. “Well, sir, I think that was unspeakably caddish of you!”

“I can see how you would consider it so.”

“Anyone would!”

“Cat. Lady Catherine, might I send Bob for some tea? You appear somewhat overset—”

“Bob?” Cat scowled, bewildered. “What the devil are you mumbling about?”

Thomas jerked his head toward the door. “Bob. The cur with the overlarge ears and wriggling nose. The fellow lurking about in the shadows of the doorway. I’m sure he would be only too happy to fetch you some refreshment. I would even hazard to wager he returns with it in record time.”

A hoarse clearing of a throat drew Cat’s attention to the doorway.

“I brung the tea for Lord Strand already, sir,” Bob said equitably, walking into the room with a silver platter laden with a china pot of tea, a toast holder, and various containers of jam, butter, sugar, and cream.

“
Lord Strand
?” Cat exclaimed in a shrill voice. Apparently, she divined some sort of conspiracy.

“Yes, ma’am,” Bob said as Thomas groaned. “He must’ve gone then, sir?”

“Yes, Bob. Gone. Like you should be.”

“I’ll just go into your bedchambers then and tidy up a bit—”

“No, Bob, you will not. You will go away. Far away. Now.”

Cat stood in barely contained anger as the foiled Bob sketched her a bow and retired, grumbling, from the room. She counted to ten. There was no perceptible lessening of her anger. She tried twenty. No good. So she shouted.

“Of all the callous, manipulative, deceitful and… and… childish things I have ever heard! Tell me, did you and Strand keep a daily correspondence concerning my amusing presumptions?” She stomped her foot. The delicate china service jingled on the table.

“Cat,” Thomas approached her warily, as though she might at any moment launch herself tooth and nail at him. “Cat.”

Did the blackguard actually sigh in relief when it became obvious she wasn’t going to physically attack him? She must reconsider that particular option. He motioned for her to take a seat. Cat flopped down. Merely, she told herself, to see what further horridness he would own up to next.

He poured her a cup of tea, liberally ladling in cream and sugar before handing it to her. “It will take more sugar than the world presently produces to sweeten my estimation of you!” she muttered, snatching the offered saucer and sloshing tea onto her skirts. It proved the final straw.

Tears welled up in her eyes. Angrily, she tried to blink them away. Jumping up, Thomas grabbed a napkin and knelt before her, industriously blotting away at her soaked lap. She slapped ineffectually at his hands. A wave of pure physical longing defeated her. She wanted nothing more than to feel those strong hands upon her, holding her, caressing her. Gazing helplessly down at his dark head, she noted the bright tracery of silver woven among the silky black curls. Her tears fell.

Finally flinging the soaked towel away, Thomas sat back on his heels and peered up at her from behind his ludicrously thick black lashes. He reached out his strong brown hands and captured her own. She tried to pull away, but his grip, though gentle, was intractable.

“When you first came to me,” he said, “you were to no end filled with the exemplary qualifications of Giles Dalton as a potential husband. You were also bursting with ill-concealed doubts concerning my own qualifications as a desirable, ah, suitor. It pricked my pride, Cat.”

She sniffed, half in misery, half in contempt.

“And because of that, it was simply irresistible to tease you.” He grinned, his teeth a white gleam in his dark face. It was a smile that invited her to join him, without derision or mockery. A beautiful smile.

“Because I was so insolently unappreciative of you?” she asked. “And what about the conniving you did in Paris? Setting Strand up as my beau?”

“Your
beau
?” Thomas’s expression was one of comical confusion. “I did no such thing. I knew, because of my connections with the foreign office, that Paris might be on the brink of another occupation. I asked Strand, as my friend, to watch out for you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I did not think, at the time, that you would read any letter I had written. And I knew you had certain hopeful expectations of your relationship with Strand. I did not want to further intrude on your life,” he finished quietly.

Cat, however, seemed heedless of her destroyed prospects regarding Strand. “You are right; I would have consigned
any
missive from you to the fire.”

Thomas laughed, rocking back on his heels, though his hands still clasped hers firmly.

How could she not return his humor when so much of it was self-deprecatory? She would look a churl if she did not offer him at least something of a smile. His hands tightened on hers.

“And later,” he hurried to continue, “I simply forgot. And in Paris the subject of Strand, and whether or not I knew him, could not have been further from my mind. There were other things I felt I needed to tell you.”

“Mariette Leons?” Cat said quietly. “How long will you flay yourself for that tragedy, Thomas? You were in a war. War does not ask which of its victims deserves to die and which does not. It is indiscriminate. Innocent as well as guilty fall before it. You were trying to make sure that fewer of the innocent felt its deadly touch.”

She heard his breath catch. “My dearest.”

Something cold and tense, something that had begun to thaw when Thomas mopped the spilled tea from her skirts, melted completely in Cat’s heart.

“Cat, I would never
knowingly
hurt you.”

Just as she began to believe in his sincerity, a new doubt sprung up to eclipse the brief communion Cat felt. “But you have avoided me.”

He shook his head in denial, his eyes never leaving hers. “No. I deemed it best not to hover.”

“Hover? Well, you made a right good job of that. No one in their right mind could accuse you of having ‘hovered.’ ”

“Cat, my reputation is such that a young, unmarried woman of unexceptional birth could not associate herself with me and go unscathed.”

“But last summer you had no such qualms…”

“Last summer I labored under the ridiculous assumption that I’d been absent from society long enough to assuage a long-spent notoriety. You yourself encouraged that particular delusion.”

Cat frowned, perplexed. Turning over her hand, Thomas rubbed Cat’s soft palm with his thumb, an unconsciously comforting gesture. It did not comfort her; it excited her.

“You went on, ad nauseam, I might add, about my agedness. But while I am not in my first flush of youth, I have not yet attained the years necessary to distance myself from past transgressions. That realization was borne in on me acutely when we arrived in Brighton and almost immediately the snickers began. I had hoped to save you from the gossip mill.

“Cat, you must listen to me. It is essential that you not allow emotions to overrule your good sense.” His tone was serious, compelling. “Barrymore has sought to ruin you. He has somehow found out you were with me, unchaperoned, overnight in Dieppe. He has spread tales which no one, no matter how blameless a face they presented, could hope to overcome. Including you.”