And Then Comes Marriage (32 page)

Gossip. Years. The words rang distantly in Miranda’s mind. She knew she ought to care, but all she could see were his hands touching someone Not Her.

Cas.

She would not weep. Castor Worthington would not make her weep. She wouldn’t allow it.

With her eyes fixed desperately on Button’s kindly ones, she breathed.
In. Out. In. Out.

At last her body began to relax. Air became air again.

Miranda let them ply her with tea and biscuits, consuming them numbly, for they tasted of sawdust.

Finally, she turned her attention on Button. “I would give anything to get out of this bloody gown,” she told him, her voice flat and empty of feeling.

In seconds Button had a maid bringing in a nightdress and soft wrapper and slippers.

She allowed the girl to strip her of the scorched, torn gown on the spot, while Button and Cabot conferred on the other side of the room. What did it matter?

When she was cradled in the softness of fine wool and silk, although cut in a masculine style, with her slipper-clad feet pulled up next to her on the chair, a freshly steaming cup of tea in her hand, Miranda felt a fraction less miserable, on the outside anyway.

The Turkish-blue gown was whisked out of her sight.

Button and Cabot moved chairs closer and sat down facing her. From somewhere Cabot had acquired a shirt that more or less fit him and Button had taken a moment to dress.

Their normality offended her. She’d preferred the chaotic state of emergency. Miranda turned her face from them and fixed her eyes on the fire.

“How could you allow them to do this?” she asked, her voice dull. “How could you all just
watch
?”

Button edged closer, holding out one hand helplessly. “Miranda, until earlier this evening … last evening … I thought you liked them both.”

That surprised her out of her cold place for a moment. She turned to gaze at him. “You thought I was the sort of woman to trade off twin brothers as if changing my shoes?”

He rubbed at the back of his neck. “Well, that was a bit of a problem for me, I admit. I knew that there was something odd.”

Miranda snorted. “I should say so!”

Cabot intervened for Button. “Mrs. Talbot, the Worthingtons are very well known in London. Their oddness is common knowledge. The twins have been given a sobriquet, the Double Devils. They are known womanizers and—”

Button held up a hand. “You’re not helping, Cabot.”

Miranda looked down at her teacup. “Womanizers.” Was that what she had been? A piece in a game? A wager, Poll had told her. Wagers and bargains and conspiracies.

I wish I had never met the Worthingtons.

Button’s jaw was hard. “Until last evening I would have sworn there was no true harm in them. Now, I am not so sure of that.”

Miranda let out a short, bitter bark of laughter. “Harm.” She closed her eyes against the cheerful flickering of the coals and tried not to let the pain sweep her away again. “I feel most definitely harmed.”

“I—” Button hesitated. “I have made it worse in my attempt to find you more appropriate suitors. At one time, you were invisible enough that you might have simply slipped away unnoticed from the fire, anonymous until the stories faded. No one would have likely cared. Until last night.”

Miranda turned her face from him. “As of last night, I am an Original. As of last night, all of Society will watch my every move.” She let out a long breath. “Button, I don’t think I can survive much more of your help.”

Cabot stirred. “Mrs. Talbot, that isn’t fair—”

Button hushed him. “It
is
my fault that I didn’t investigate my own instinct that something was not as it should be. Neither Miss Atalanta nor I truly believed you were an evil seductress, bent on shattering the bond between brothers—”

Miranda made a tiny sound of pain. “Attie, as well?”

“—And I certainly ought to have remembered how the twins used to play their careless games with people.” He sighed. “I never would have thought
this
of them. Never.”

“Oh heavens!” Miranda opened her eyes to send him a look of exhausted horror. “Cas. I thought myself in love with—but that Cas doesn’t exist, does he? I am in love with a mirage.”

Her breath came faster. “He is gone, as surely as if he had died—yet how can I mourn losing him? He is nothing but a bit of trickery, a shell game!” She grabbed Button’s hand. “It hurts so that I will never see him again—even as I loathe the man who deceived me!” Real tears flowed at last.

Button wrapped his arms about her and let her weep. Cabot looked at him with alarm at the force of Miranda’s sobs, but Button reassured his assistant with a nod. Fury and rage and pain might be dangerous, but true grief was something that would help heal Miranda’s wounds.

If anything ever could.

*   *   *

It lacked but an hour before dawn when Cabot closed the door of the room where he’d settled Miranda and sent Button’s little housemaid back to her usual duties. He found his master still in the parlor, sitting before the fire, gazing thoughtfully into the glow of the coals.

Button looked up as he entered. “Is she sleeping at last?”

Cabot nodded. “I put her in the yellow room.”

Button leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. Dropping his head, he rubbed both hands over his face wearily.

Cabot ached for him. “You should try to get some sleep. I can manage your morning appointments.”

Button raised his head and smiled slightly. “Ah, to be young. You’ve had even less sleep than I.”

Pain laced through Cabot, a needle he’d felt too many times to count. “Don’t do that,” he said with an edge to his tone.

Button widened his eyes. “Don’t do what, pray tell?”

“Don’t take advantage of every opportunity to mention how young I am, or how young you are not.” He needed to stop. He needed to stop talking right now!

Button stared at him warily. “Cabot, I—”

“Stop.” Cabot astonished himself by striding across the room and dropping to his knees next to Button’s chair, his hands gripping the rosewood arm until his knuckles went white. “
You are not an age.
You simply are, as I simply am, and age is what we make of it.” A wild desperation would not allow him to shut his mouth. “Sometimes I would even swear that you are the youth and I am the elder!”

Button was pulling back, leaning back in the chair, regarding him with that terrifying expression on his face, the one Cabot had seen years before, the one that had kept him from saying these things for so damned long.

The expression that said,
I should send you away.

Icy fear did what self-control could not. Cabot dropped his forehead to rest on his rigid knuckles and stopped talking, biting his cheek so hard, he tasted blood.
Breathe,
he’d told Miranda, as if he knew what he was speaking of, as if he had any idea how to survive an impossible love.

Breathe.

He felt Button stir, then inhale as if to speak.

Cabot flinched. “Don’t say it.” His voice felt like shards of glass in his throat. “Don’t.”

Before he could hear the terrifying words, he leaped to his feet and strode from the room, his long legs outracing the sound of Button’s voice.

Button leaned back into the cushions, his heart pounding. The hand that had hovered over Cabot’s shining head, not daring to touch, fell to the arm of the chair.

It was a good thing that Cabot had left the room before he’d given in to temptation.

It was a good thing.

It was.

Chapter Twenty-nine

In her drafty little house in her unfashionable neighborhood, Constance sat drinking her morning cup of tea and reading the London scandal sheets piled next to her plate. She’d sent that lazy slattern of a maid out all over the city to find them.

Constance cackled with glee at the description of the brothel in flames and fairly swooned with pleasure when the gossips described the “disheveled” and “indecent” condition of a “certain Wicked Widow” who was named after Prospero’s daughter.

Usually, Constance didn’t hold with plays and theaters and other useless fripperies, but even she knew that Miranda had been named after some wanton stage creature by her no-better-than-she-should-be mother!

Oh, it was all coming along just as she’d planned, except even better!

All had come to fruition, better than Constance’s wildest dreams. Since Miranda had done nothing to blackmail, despite Constance’s well-placed spy, Constance had been forced to grow resourceful and create a trap.

Of course, only idiotic Miranda would take a simple indiscreet appearance at a place of ill repute and turn it into a roaring public scandal!

Of course, it didn’t reflect well upon the Talbots, but the family name could withstand it.

After all, Miranda had only married into it. She wasn’t born a Talbot. She’d been one of those … what was their name? Oh yes, such a story in the day. It would help to remind Society that Miranda wasn’t really a Talbot after all. It was too bad the tale couldn’t come out all over again.

Unless, of course, it did.

Constance drank her tea, an uncharacteristic smile creasing her round face. Such a lovely morning

It was only too bad that Gideon couldn’t know that his wise older sister had been right all along—it would serve the idiot right for leaving everything to Miranda in his will.

Her teacup clanked onto its saucer. Constance gazed straight ahead, unholy joy rising within her.

The will!

*   *   *

Miranda sat in the small, sunny morning room where she managed her accounts. It had once been draped in stuffy brocade and was dark as a cupboard. When her sister-in-law had taken her own little house, Miranda had stripped the draperies and removed the heavy, carved furnishings that hadn’t been attractive even when new.

It was a welcoming room now, with its polished wood and the pale blue figured-paper on the walls. Her desk was delicate and feminine. It was the first new piece she had purchased and it was still her favorite.

Today she felt no pleasure in the pretty room, or in her view of the verdant garden. There was no solace to be found in flowers or foliage or in balancing her accounts. She’d once taken pleasure in it, in her independence and her good management.

Her mind could make no sense of the columns. The numbers swam before her, blurring, becoming the shadows and lights of a man’s muscled chest or shimmering glints she saw behind her eyelids when she exploded into orgasm.

Her body didn’t understand the shattered heart or the tormented mind. It longed for what it used to have: the ecstasy, the satiation. It hummed and throbbed, driving her to sexual restlessness, as if she weren’t miserable enough.

The ache in her heart, however, rang constant and hollow, a black bell tolling with every beat of her pulse. The humiliation and the anger welled and exhausted themselves in a recurring cycle, but the pain itself, the Cas-shaped hole in her soul, the powerful void where love had dwelt, that simply echoed on and on.

A tap on her door snapped her out of her dark thoughts. “Come!”

Twigg entered the room with a letter on a tray. “The post, madam.”

Miranda glanced at the salver without interest.

“And madam? That family came again, a great lot of them this time. Even the little one was with them at the door.”

Miranda shrank back. “Was he—they—?”

“No, madam. There was no sign of them. That upstart tailor and his little friend were here as well.”

Miranda sighed. “Mr. Button and Mr. Cabot, please, Twigg.” Simply because Cabot had failed to soothe Twigg’s insecurities! The butler’s prickly defensiveness felt like spikes to Miranda’s raw nerves.

Twigg looked at her with a face suddenly lacking in expression. “There’s a letter from Herself.” He held out the salver once more.

Miranda recognized the thick, old-fashioned stationery that Constance favored. Her spidery script on the address was unmistakable. Since she was quite sure that she could not feel any worse today, Miranda did not delay opening Constance’s missive.

She could not have been more wrong.

Miranda,
I write you incensed and indignant!
It seems that my worst suspicions about you have been correct after all, and that you are too ill-born and ignorant of your advantages to properly appreciate the respectable circumstances my brother provided for you.
Therefore, I am forced to abandon my retirement and return forthwith to the home of my family to defend its honor, if I must, with my last breath!
Be prepared, Miranda! You will not succeed in ruining the Talbot name!
There was no closing, friendly or otherwise. The letter was simply signed with a large swooping
C
that made Miranda think of a butcher’s meat hook. It had been written with such indignant force that the thick paper had taken a deep scratch from the quill.

The paper was quivering. Miranda realized that her hands were shaking with reaction and rage. She let the letter fall to the desk, where it lay, radiating accusation.