To Love a Lord (27 page)

“Well?” Waterson questioned as a servant came over with an empty glass. He accepted it and then took the liberty of pouring himself a healthy drink.

Do not ask. Do not ask. Do not…
“Well, what?” he gritted out and then downed his brandy.

Waterson swirled the contents of his drink and reclined in his seat. “Do you know with your absence at the clubs these past days—?”

“I was here but three days ago,” Gabriel felt compelled to point out.

“
I
had attributed it to brotherly devotion,” Waterson continued over him. The demmed annoying grin on his lips widened. “Not that you are not the most devoted of brothers, you are.”

“Shove off,” Gabriel commanded as he picked up the bottle. He splashed several fingerfuls into the glass, thought better of it, and then poured it to the rim.

The earl widened his eyes. “Oh, you are in a bad way, my friend.”

Do not ask. Do not ask.
He swallowed the dry bite. “In what way?”

The room echoed with Waterson’s thunderous laughter, earning them curious stares. “And now lying?” He made a tsking sound and then glanced about, seeming at last mindful of the attention being shown them. When he returned his attention to Gabriel, a mocking grin pulled his lips up in the corners. “I say, don’t you have brotherly obligations to see to? Attending Lady Chloe and all that?” he asked, with a wave of his hand.

Except the knowing glint in his friend’s eyes indicated that Waterson knew precisely why Gabriel was here. Waterson knew. Hell, everyone knew. Following his meeting with the duke, he was in ill-humor and didn’t have time for the always-affable Waterson’s games. “Say whatever it is you intend to say,”
and be done with it.
There was Jane’s situation to sort through. He tightened his grip upon his snifter so hard, his knuckles turned white. The same agonized disquiet that had besieged him since his meeting with the duke coursed through him and he took a much-needed sip of brandy.

Waterson set his glass down and then folded his arms at his chest. “I just thought, considering our friendship, you would speak on anything new or that might be of import to your life. Oh, say, that you’ve been so ensnared by a lady you’d ruin her at Drury Lane.”

“The London Opera House,” he muttered under his breath.

Waterson leaned across the table and angled his head. “Beg pardon?”

“I said, oh, go to hell,” he finished as Waterson exploded into another round of laughter. “I am not ensnared by the lady,” he said at last when his friend managed to get his hilarity under control.
No, you only think of her kisses and dream of the satiny softness of her skin and…

His friend guffawed. “Regardless, you are now thoroughly trapped.”

Not even his only friend in the world knew of Gabriel’s sworn disavowal of marriage. Waterson, just like the rest of the world, saw a marquess so devoted to his title that he’d put responsibility before all else. How little they knew. Jane, however, had seen that glimpse of truth he’d hidden from all—that he had fears and desires. His heart sped up. And that she knew him as she did, terrified the hell out of him.

For now, with the duke’s rejection and Jane’s absolute lack of funds, there was no recourse as they’d both believed…. Hoped? Other than marriage.

Marriage.

A dull humming filled his ears and sucked the breath slowly from his lungs. He dimly registered his friend’s mouth moving as he spoke, but for the life of him could not string together a single clear utterance from the other man. Horror and terror sucked away all logical thought and robbed him of speech.

Concern replaced the amusement in his friend’s eyes and cut across his rapidly expanding panic. “Waverly?”

Incapable of anything else, Gabriel managed a jerky nod. This is how the legendary King and Queen of France had surely felt on their final day. Waterson spoke of marriage to Jane and in this, the earl was indeed correct. There was no other recourse. The slender, sometimes insolent, always passionate young woman as his wife. Forever. For that was, after all, what a wife was. A person he would be eternally bound to for the remainder of his days. He shoved back his chair and leapt to his feet.

“Waverly?” his friend looked up at him, worry stamped on the lines of his face.

“Fine, fine,” he said and moved out from behind the table. Only he was not fine. Nausea twisted in his belly. He had no choice but to wed her. Society saw her as a companion—beneath him in station. She was illegitimate and, by their vile standards, they’d found her unworthy of entry into their world. “If you’ll excuse me.” He sketched a bow and before his friend could utter another word, Gabriel started through his club and to the exit.

With each footfall, he recognized, in light of his meeting with the duke, those were also the reasons he had no choice but to wed Jane. A woman of her origins, shamed and scandalized, would never find respectable employment.
You can provide her the funds
, a voice whispered.
Tell her they are from her father, put her aboard a carriage, and be done with her forevermore
. He braced for the rush of relief at the prospect. Except…he slowed his stride. Jane would never be able to retreat to any corner of England to set up her finishing school. Which families, noble or not, would entrust their daughters to the care of a woman with her history who’d also been discovered locked in a man’s embrace at the Opera House? And she would still be alone.

The noose tightened all the more. He’d spent his life trying to care for others but now, there was not another person more in need of his protection than Jane. That ugly idea of her dependent upon the Montclairs of the world entered once more and drove back his own selfish fears. What other course would she have?

An image flitted through his mind. Jane lying with some other man, her golden curls draped in a curtain about her silken, naked frame—Rage slammed into him and sucked away all reservations.

When presented with the possibility of turning her out with no one to care for her, there really was no other option. He reached the front of the club and a servant hurried to the open the door. Gabriel strode through the exit, grateful to be free of the whispers and stares.

His friend, for all the nuisance he’d made of himself, had been unerringly accurate in this. There was little recourse but for him to wed her. And with their union, she would become one more person whose happiness and safety he was responsible for. Gabriel scrubbed his hands over his face. There would be the expectation of children, just additional tiny human beings who would also become figures who would forever look to him. More people to fail.

God help him.

For with one moment of weakness in an alcove with Jane in his arms, he’d consigned himself to this eternal hell that forever reminded him of his previous failures. With wooden movements, he accepted the reins of his horse from a waiting boy in the street. Now, it was a matter of convincing Jane.

J
ane sat at the edge of the window seat and looked down into the streets and scanned the quiet cobbled roads below. Her open book lay at her feet. The dark clouds of night had ushered out the afternoon sun.

She’d expected him hours ago. Of course, that idea had only come from her own opinion. Gabriel had not told her when he intended to meet with the duke or when he’d visit. She’d just assumed. And now, she sat, a stranger in a new world, the ruined lady taken in by his benevolent family.

Gabriel had no obligations where she was concerned and yet, even so, had met with her father in attempts to secure her funds and had enlisted the help of his family to protect her. In the crystal pane, her lips twisted in a melancholy smile. He seemed to be the only one who believed she merited protection.

She stiffened as her benefactress, Lady Imogen Edgerton, appeared in the doorway. Jane swung her attention around. “Lady Imogen,” she greeted. She glanced past the woman’s shoulder and some of her eagerness dipped.

“No need to rise,” she assured as she strolled over. “And please, just Imogen.” She came to a stop at the edge of Jane’s seat and peered around her shoulder into the streets below. “I daresay you’re wondering where Lord Waverly is?”

She mustered a smile. “Have I been so very obvious?” After all, she’d closeted herself away in their parlor with her book and claimed the very same seat by the window for the past nearly six hours.

A light twinkle lit the other woman’s kindly eyes. “Just a bit.” Some of the gentle teasing lifted and she sank into the seat beside Jane. “For my friendship with Chloe and my marriage to Alex, I do not know the marquess, hardly at all. I venture no one truly knows Lord Waverly.” A loose tendril escaped her neat chignon and she brushed back a crimson curl from her cheek. “He’s a rigid, formidable gentleman who invokes fear, but a loyal brother.”

Rigid, formidable, a man who invoked fear. Is that how the world viewed him? But for that last, very important, telling statement by Lady Imo—
Imogen
, she rather suspected it was. How could they not look past the rigidity and coldness to see the person she’d known these past seven days?

Imogen plucked at the fabric of the window seat. The other woman wished to say more. That much was clear. Alas, Jane had spent too much time with her own company and could not fill the uncomfortable voids the way Imogen, Chloe, or any other lady of their respective station might. Gabriel’s sister-in-law stopped suddenly. Jane followed her gaze to the book beside them. “May I?” the woman inquired. However, she’d already retrieved the small leather volume of Mary Wollstonecraft’s work. She trailed her fingers over the gilt lettering.

Jane stared blankly at that poor volume, forgotten more times in this past week than the course of her life. For years those words had filled a void. They’d given her a belief in a world she thought she desired for herself. It was a world in which she was dependent upon no one and found contentment in her own accomplishments. And though there was the dream of a school for women such as herself, there was all this never before confronted desire for more—a family, a connection. She closed her eyes a moment—love.

“It is a cruelly harsh world oftentimes for young women, isn’t it?”

“It is,” she said softly. Until Jane had slipped into the fold of the Edgerton family she would have scoffed at Imogen’s words. What did lords and ladies know of the trials and uncertainties that came in being born on the fringe of their glittering, opulent world of perfection? But it wasn’t perfect. Gabriel and Chloe’s life spoke to the same struggles known by so many and, in that, Jane’s unfair lumping of all the peerage into one self-absorbed category had proven incorrect. If she’d been so very wrong about that, what else had she been wrong in?

The young lady fanned the pages of Jane’s book. “I once believed the
ton
was horrible and cruel and all things unfair where young ladies are concerned.”

She recalled Montclair’s tepid breath against her lips. “Aren’t they?” she asked, unable to keep the bitterness from creeping in.

Imogen stuck her finger on a random page of the book and looked down at the words. “Yes, yes they are often that,” she said matter-of-factly.

They. She’d not consider herself a member of the world to which she rightfully belonged?

Gabriel’s sister-in-law placed her hand on Jane’s and she started at the unexpected contact. “I was…” She wrinkled her nose. “There was a scandal that involved me,” she substituted.

“Oh.” For what really was there to say, with realization after realization she was not as unlike these people as she’d believed. Once more, it was harder than ever to resent the whole of them for the crimes of a few.

“You won’t ask me about that scandal.”

“Never.” She shook her head. “I’ve been gossiped about by too many,” she said with a bluntness that brought the young woman’s eyebrows shooting up. “Most of the things whispered about me were untrue.” She thought of her father, the powerful duke, and then the scandalous discovery of her and Gabriel last evening. “But some of them are not. I would not ask you to share the stories which belong to you.”

The woman gave Jane’s hand a slight squeeze and a gentle smile wreathed her cheeks. “I would not have volunteered unless I wished to share.” Which was, once again, all the more terrifying. “My betrothed jilted me for my sister.”

She blinked several times.

“I swore to never wed for any reason but stability and order, to a gentleman who inspired no grand sentiments. Do you know what happened to that pledge?”

Jane recalled all of Chloe’s words about her brother, Lord Alex—the infamous rogue. “I do not,” she said for politeness sake.

The gleam in the woman’s eye indicated she knew as much. “I fell in love.” How often had Jane scoffed at that emotion that had so weakened her mother? And yet, there was nothing wrong about Imogen, or Lord Alex, or Chloe, and Gabriel and the entire Edgerton family who loved so passionately. “So, there are scandals,” Imogen said bringing her to the moment. “And they are awful when they are happening, and some of them are disastrous and horrible in every way, but sometimes, just sometimes, good comes from them. As it did for me.” She touched her neck, as though searching for something. Then, she let her hand flutter back to her lap. “And I suspect as it will be for you.”

Of course. The lady believed Jane would wed Gabriel. Even with her own scandal, Imogen had not disavowed marriage. She’d merely sought to avoid a match based on the volatile emotions that Jane herself feared. A lump formed in her throat and she swallowed several times. “Why are you being so nice to me?” she asked, desperate to understand why these strangers were so different than all others she’d known. They’d shared parts of their lives with her, an outsider, an interloper, and thief.

“Mrs. Munroe—”

“Jane,” she corrected.

“Jane, kindness costs us nothing, but brings us everything.” She squeezed Jane’s hand once more. “And you must call me Imogen.”

Footsteps sounded in the hallway, calling their attention to the front of the room just as Gabriel stepped in. His brother, Lord Alex, stood at his side. He favored his wife and Jane with one of those charming smiles that had likely earned him the reputation of rogue and then looked to his wife.