Victoria and the Rogue (19 page)
night. You can have your clothes in the morning, when the damage is already done.”
Victoria still didn’t understand. “Damage? What damage? And I cannot spend the night, Lady Malfrey,
though your invitation is very kind.”
“Oh, for the love of God!” cried the dowager Lady Malfrey, not laughing at all now. “Are you dense,
girl? I’m not inviting you to spend the night! I’m keeping you here overnight so that your reputation’s
ruined, and you’ll have no choice but to marry my Hugo!”
Victoria blinked. “But… I don’t understand. Why on earth should I have to marry your son?”
“After disappearing all night with him, then being found next morning, without your clothes on, in his
rooms?” The dowager let out an unpleasant cackle. “You’ll have to marry him, all right.”
Victoria thought that perhaps Hugo’s mother had suffered a fall and struck her head against something.
There really was no other explanation for the very odd things she was saying.
“Lady Malfrey,” Victoria said as slowly and as patiently as she was able. “Are you quite sure you
haven’t fallen down? And hit your head on a piece of furniture? Or the stairs, perhaps? I do think I’d
better send for a surgeon—”
“Good Lord.” The dowager Lady Malfrey glared at Victoria. “Can you really be as stupid as that?
Don’t you know what’s happening to you, child? You’re alone, in a man’s house, half-naked. And no
one knows where you’ve disappeared to.”
Victoria shook her head. “Lady Malfrey, that simply isn’t true. My aunt and uncle know exactly where I
am. They know that Hugo and I got caught in the rain, and that I came to your rooms to dry off.”
“No, they don’t,” the dowager said.
“Yes, Lady Malfrey, they do. Because I sent them a…”
Victoria’s voice trailed off as she noticed the piece of folded parchment Hugo’s mother now shook from
her sleeve. It was the note she had written, hours ago, to her aunt.
“You…”Victoria shook herself. She could not quite believe what her eyes were telling her. “You didn’t
send my note to my aunt?”
“No,” the dowager said with a grin that revealed all of her teeth… which, while even, were rather gray in
color. “No, I didn’t send your note to your aunt.”
Victoria glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. The hands pointed at ten after ten.
“But,” Victoria said dazedly, “she’ll be terribly worried by now, wondering where I’ve got to. She might
think… she might think I’ve suffered an accident or something.”
“She might,” the dowager said. “And come morning, she’ll probably send someone—your uncle
perhaps—to come here looking for you.”
Slowly—very slowly—Victoria began to realize what was happening.
“And my uncle will find me,” she said through lips that had begun to felt numb… and, sadly, not because
Jacob Carstairs had been kissing them. “He’ll find me here, half naked….”
“With my son,” the dowager said with another broad grin. “What do you think he will have to say to
that, my lady? I can’t imagine it will be anything good. No, nothing good at all. In fact, I’ll wager your
uncle’ll demand the two of you wed on the spot. Don’t you?”
Victoria felt as if something were clutching at her throat—rather the way she felt when one of the
younger Gardiners demanded a piggyback ride down the stairs, then held her in a stranglehold all the way
down.
“But surely…”Victoria shook her head, as if trying to clear it. “Surely when I tell my uncle the truth…”
“He might even believe you,” the dowager Lady Malfrey said with a shrug of her plump shoulders.
“Who knows? But even if he does, it won’t matter. No one else will, you see. There’ll be talk. You
won’t be welcome at Almack’s anymore… or anywhere else where polite society gathers…. It really
was very obliging of you to agree to meet my son, and even more obliging of the weather to rain. Not
that it would have mattered if it had stayed dry. He’d have found a way to get you here someway or
other.”
Victoria stared at Hugo’s mother in horror. She could not believe what was happening. It was like
something out of one of the books Rebecca was always reading, the ones she kept under her bed and
that Mrs. Gardiner knew nothing about, in which innocent young maidens were ravished by foreign
gentlemen or held captive in pirate caves.
Only this was no book! This was really happening, and not to an innocent young maiden, but to Victoria!
Lady Victoria Arbuthnot!
Granted, there were no foreign gentlemen involved, and certainly no pirates. But Hugo’s mother’s plan
was diabolical just the same! Why, the woman intended to hold her captive overnight, and make out in
the morning that Victoria had stayed there willingly for some sort of romantic tryst with Lord Malfrey.
When word got out (and it would; the dowager would see that it would) that Victoria and the earl had
spent the night together alone—for the dowager would be sure to let Mr. Gardiner know that she had not
been home—Victoria would have no choice but to marry the earl… marry him or be branded a scarlet
woman, a hussy, a…
Victoria, instead of fainting like the heroines of Rebecca’s favorite novels usually did, demanded of her
captress rather sharply, “Where’s Hugo?”
The dowager Lady Malfrey did not look at all miffed by Victoria’s tone. She replied, affably enough,
“He’s next-door. And if you’re hoping to appeal to his gentlemanly nature, don’t bother. This was all his
idea.”
Victoria simply did not believe the dowager. She said, “I want to see him. Send him to me now.”
The dowager laughed. “You, my dear, are hardly in a position to be making demands. And may I
remind you to whom you are speaking? I am going to be your mother-inlaw. You had best start treating
me with the respect I am owed. After all, once you are married to my son, your fortune will be his.”
Victoria realized, with a sinking heart, that what the dowager said was true. Sadly the law dictated that
any wealth or property a woman possessed became, upon her wedding day, her husband’s.
Which was why Victoria suddenly shouted, “I’d sooner die than marry that poncey git!” and thrust an
extremely unladylike elbow into the dowager’s clavicle.
Then, while Hugo’s mother struggled to catch her breath, Victoria started barefoot down the
hallway—for she had given up her shoes, as well, to have the mud scraped from them—intent upon
finding her clothes, donning them, and leaving this horrible house forever.
Sadly, however, she did not get very far. A door opened, and none other than the ninth Earl of Malfrey
himself emerged from behind it, looking not a little surprised to see Victoria bearing down upon him in
nothing but her underclothes and a blanket.
“Here, here,” Hugo said, catching Victoria by the arm as she attempted to dart past him. “Where do you
think you’re going?”
“I’m going home,” Victoria said, twisting to be free of his hold. “And if you dare to try to stop me, I’ll…
I’ll call the Bow Street Runners on you!”
“I’m certain you would if you could,” Hugo said with a laugh. “But I don’t think they’ll be able to hear
you calling from here.”
Victoria, struck to the core by this betrayal, narrowed her eyes at him and said, “It’s true then. You are
on her side.”
Lord Malfrey glanced at his mother, who was still attempting to recover from the blow Victoria had
given her, and was breathing hard and clutching her throat.
“Yes,” Hugo said. “Of course. Mama and I are a team—Ah!” The earl snatched his hand out from
between Victoria’s teeth, which she’d sunk into it with all her might. But he did not, as Victoria had been
hoping, release her. He caught her up around the waist instead, lifting her halfway off the floor as she
kicked and clawed to free herself.
“Now, Vicky,” the earl said with a chuckle. “Don’t take on so. I know this is a damnable way to go
about it, but you and I were always meant to marry. You know that. There was a time when the idea was
hardly repugnant to you. Try to remember—ow, now that hurt!— how you used to feel about me, and
we ought to get on fine.”
As he spoke, the earl half dragged, half carried Victoria back to the spare room. Victoria put up a
valiant struggle, but in the end, Hugo—who was apparently immune to pinches, kicks, scratches, and hair
pulling—was simply stronger and bigger than she was. He deposited her unceremoniously on the bed,
then, before she could beat him to it, flung himself out the door, slamming it hard behind him— even
worse, he thought to snatch up Victoria’s reticule on the way out, and take it with him. So now she did
not even have a hope of bribing a servant to free her! Wretched man.
“Vicky,” the earl said from the other side of the door as Victoria fell upon it, beating it with her fists. “Be
reasonable. Will being married to me really be such a hardship? We’ll have a jolly time, I promise you.
And it isn’t as if there’s some other fellow you like better.”
Victoria, upon hearing this last, gave the door a kick with her bare foot that succeeded only in sending
jolts of pain up her leg. The door itself didn’t budge.
“Vicky,” Lord Malfrey chastised her from behind the door. “Really. Is that any way for the daughter of a
duke to behave? I do hope you’ll have calmed down by breakfast. I’ll bring it up to you myself, if you
like. One egg or two?”
“Don’t”—Vicky went to the mantel and picked up the ormolu clock—“call me”—she threw the clock
with all her strength against the door—“Vicky!”
The clock didn’t even break. The glass faceplate shattered, but that was all. And behind the door, Lord
Malfrey only laughed harder.
“Oh, Vicky,” he said. “At least life with you will never get boring.”
And then Victoria heard a sound that made her blood run cold—a key scraping in the door’s lock.
And that was that. She was locked in. She would not, she knew, be released until morning. Morning, at
which point the name Lady Victoria Arbuthnot would be synonymous with…
Well, mud.
Perfect. Just perfect. Victoria sank down upon the bed and found that she was trembling. With rage, she
told herself. She was weak with it. White-hot rage, not fear. For Victoria was not afraid. She wasn’t.
She…
Was. Who wouldn’t be? She was trapped in her undergarments in a stranger’s bedroom, and come
morning her reputation would be in ruins, her good name worthless.
Well, one thing Victoria knew for certain: she would never marry Hugo Rothschild, no matter what her
uncle or anyone else said. She’d sooner go back to India than marry that blackguard, that mountebank,
that…
…rogue.
But even as she told herself that all was not lost—she could, after all, simply say no when the preacher
asked if she took this man to be her husband—she realized that if she refused to marry Hugo, it wouldn’t
be just her own reputation that would suffer. No, the Gardiners would be irrevocably hurt as well. Would
Charles Abbott want to marry the first cousin of so brazen a girl as Lady Victoria Arbuthnot? And what
of Clara? What were Clara’s chances of ever finding her one true love, when her family would lose their
tickets to Almack’s because of Victoria’s refusal to marry the man in whose home she spent a
chaperonless night?
It was one thing permanently to destroy her own life. It was quite another to destroy the lives of the
people she’d come to love. Yes, love. Victoria loved the Gardiners, for all their faults, from Uncle Walter
and his harumphs to Cook and her tureen of beef.
For their sake, she was going to have to marry Hugo.
Victoria felt, for the first time all evening, sick to her stomach.
Marry Hugo! Marry the earl! Only a week before she’d have laughed giddily at the suggestion. Of
course she was going to marry Lord Malfrey! She loved him, didn’t she?
But Victoria knew now that what she’d felt for the earl hadn’t been love. She had admired him,
certainly, for he had cut a very dashing figure on the deck of the Harmony. She had been attracted to
him, because he was so very handsome, with his blue eyes and golden hair. And she had certainly
allowed herself to be flattered by him… something at which he’d definitely excelled. Flattering her, that is.
Certainly no one else on the Harmony had ever bothered to mention her emerald (well, hazel, actually)
eyes, or highly kissable mouth….
But love? She had never loved Hugo. She had only said yes to his proposal in the first place because
she’d known it would annoy Jacob Carstairs. Yes! She was willing to admit it now, the shameful, horrible
truth of it all. She had said yes to Lord Malfrey’s proposal because she’d known Jacob Carstairs had
overheard it, and that her saying yes would irritate the captain no end.
What kind of reason was that to agree to marry a man? Even the most generous of souls would have to
agree: an exceptionally poor one.
And what kind of girl did that make her? What kind of girl said yes to a man’s marriage proposal
because she was hoping it would make another man—yes! Yes, she admitted it!—jealous?
For she had hoped against hope that Jacob Carstairs would be jealous that she was marrying the earl,
and would beg her to marry him instead.
Not that if he had, she’d have done so! Perish the thought! Jacob Carstairs was a thoroughly provoking,
completely irascible man, with his Miss Bees and his snide remarks and his always thinking he knew
better than she did.
And stubborn! The height at which he wore his collar points certainly proved that. The man was