Scandalous (29 page)

He turned away, feeling faintly troubled. He admitted to himself that one of the main reasons he had come back after all these years was to see Anne. Now he was beginning to wonder if the love affair he remembered would have grown shabby with time, as the surroundings had. Would he find Anne nothing like the girl he had loved? Would he see that what he had thought was grand passion had been only fleeting lust?

For a moment he was tempted to turn back, but he urged his horse forward, skirting the edge of the manor's yards and coming out on the cobblestoned drive. He felt odd as he dismounted. He had almost never come in this way, except once or twice before he had fallen in love with Lady Chalcomb. Somehow, he still felt a little furtive as he looked around.

No groom came running to take his horse, so he tied it to a post and went up the front steps. He knocked at the door and waited, and after a few moments it was opened by Anne herself. Damon had expected a maid or a footman to open it, so he was caught off guard when Anne appeared. He stood for a moment, staring, unable to say a thing.

She had aged, but gracefully. Her red-gold hair,
arranged neatly on her head, was streaked with strands of white, and her skin had softened with time. Tiny lines from smiling fanned out from the corners of her eyes and mouth. But her form was slender and graceful, and the girl she had been still shone out of her clear amber eyes.

Damon swallowed, finding himself too choked with emotion to say anything. It was Anne who was the calmer one, who said quietly, “Damon. I wondered if I would see you again.” She stepped back, adding, “Would you like to come in?”

He nodded, wordlessly following her through the high, old-fashioned entryway and into a sitting room a good distance back from the door.

“I'm sorry,” Anne told him with a polite smile. “I am afraid I haven't kept the front drawing rooms open since Henry died. I so rarely get formal company these days.”

“I would not have thought I was formal company,” he said, his throat freed at last from its paralysis.

She smiled faintly, sitting down and motioning him toward another chair. Anne hoped he would not realize that she had rehearsed this little scene throughout last night, all the while telling herself that there would be no opportunity, that he would not come. Yet here he was. As tall and handsome as ever.

Her eyes ran over him as she tried to look as if she had not been inspecting him, taking in the breadth of his shoulders, the shape of his face, the sharpness of his pale blue eyes. There was little of her slender, lithe boy in him; this was a man who had lived and worked hard. Yet here, too, was all the promise that the nineteen-year-old boy had held: the power and strength, the assurance,
intelligence and maturity. Was there kindness there, as well? She was not sure. She wondered, too, what he saw when he looked at her, whether he saw a weathered, dried-out old woman in place of the girl he had loved.

“Well,” she told him in reply to his comment, “it has been thirty years. People change in that time.”

“You think I have?”

“Of course. I am not sure exactly how. One thing has changed, certainly. You are a duke now.”

He shrugged. “I am less of a nobleman than when I was a marquess, I assure you. Thirty years in the United States tends to knock a little snobbery out of one.”

“You were never a snob.”

“No? I think I was often arrogant.”

She remembered his arrogance well—in the tilt of his head, the way he carried his shoulders, the smile that flashed across his face. “You were merely aware of your position in life.”

“Too certain of it, I think. I've learned how little it matters when one is struggling to survive.”

“Was it…very hard after you left here? I mean, living in the United States, working and…all that.”

“The work was the least of it. I got used to hard physical labor rather quickly. I found it was something even a lord could easily do, if he was young and strong enough. The brains took a little more oiling to run smoothly, but eventually I managed.”

There was a small silence. Anne looked down at her hands. “I see you have a family. I met your son.”

“Yes, Bryan is a good lad. Not a lad, anymore, though. He's twenty-eight now.”

“He reminded me a little of you when I met him. But I thought I was imagining things.”

“I have a daughter, also. Delia. She is in New York. She has a husband and two children.”

“So you are a grandfather?”

He chuckled. “Yes, I have to admit, I am. Devilishly cute rascals. But they make me feel old.”

“You must have married young.”

He nodded. “I was always in a hurry.”

“I remember.” There was another long pause. Anne hesitated, but she had to ask. “And your wife?” she asked quickly, not looking at him. “Did she accompany you?”

“No. She died two years ago.”

“Oh. I'm sorry.” A knot in her chest loosened, though she told herself that she was foolish to care.

“She was a good woman. But,” he added softly, “she was never you.”

Anne glanced up at him quickly, then away, afraid that the instant delight she felt at his statement probably shone in her eyes. “But I'm sure you did not expect her to be.”

“No,” he agreed. “Fortunately for my marriage, I did not. I realized that that kind of love happens only once…if you're lucky.”

“Oh, Damon…” Her voice choked. “I am so sorry for what happened.”

He frowned. “You mean my leaving? Going to New York?”

She nodded. “It was my fault. It never would have happened if it had not been for me. You would have been at home. Your father would have known where you were. He would have trusted you. You should have let me tell them where you were. I should have gone to the authorities even though you did not want me to.”

“It is not trust when he sees it with his own eyes. What was important to me was that he believe me even though he had no proof. That was what cut—that he did not.” He stood up and began to pace, too restless and pent-up to sit still. “You are not responsible for the fact that my father and I could not get along. We could not before I ever met you. We were like oil and water, always had been. Until I had Bryan, I thought that was the way it was supposed to be between father and son. Anyway, no one was responsible for my being accused of murder. It was sheer circumstance.”

“I am responsible for what happened between us.”

“No.” He turned and faced her, his eyes boring into her. “No more responsible than I.”

“I was older.”

He smiled fractionally. “A year.”

“I should have been wiser. I was married. I should have held off….”

His smile turned grim. “Do you honestly think that you could have? That I would have let you? That first day, when I saw you, sitting there so serene and lovely, so beautiful that it made my insides ache, I knew I had to have you. I knew that there was nothing and no one else for me.”

Anne's breath caught in her throat at his words. “Damon…” Her eyes shone, their amber light glowing. She rose slowly, as if pulled up by some outside force. “It was that way for me, as well.”

She could remember vividly the way he had looked, wild and young and full of strength, sitting on his magnificent bay, sweat plastering his shirt to his chest and dampening his hair. He had been out riding and had met Lord Chalcomb, who had invited him home. She had
been in the garden, picking flowers for a table arrangement, and she had walked over toward the horsemen when they arrived. She had been unaware of the way the sunlight played upon her hair, tousled by the breeze, and caught the unusual color of her eyes. She had not realized the picture she presented, flowers held to her chest, a spill of color beneath the creamy perfection of her face, her light spring dress caught by the breeze and flattened against her form.

Damon strode over to her in a rush and took her hands. Old feelings pushed up in him, fierce and chaotic, as if the past were at once immediate and yet strangely long ago, part of a different life. “Why would you not go with me?” he asked harshly, his eyes searching her face. “Why did you stay here with him? Why wouldn't you go with me to a new life and forget all this?”

Her hands trembled in his; his touch made her tingle, as if she were coming alive once more after years of a sleeping death. Her eyes filled with tears. “I don't know!” she cried softly. “I was such a fool. I cursed myself a thousand times after you left. I was too scared. I felt guilty about what we had done, about betraying my husband. No matter how awful he was and how much I regretted letting my parents push me into marrying him, he was still my husband. And I was committing adultery. Sometimes I felt so wicked and guilty. When you came and told me about the fight with your father and him thinking that you murdered that girl, I was so confused and frightened. I didn't have your courage, to throw everything aside, to say that my vows didn't matter, to give up everything and start a whole new life.”

The tears spilled out from her eyes and down her
cheeks. “I'm sorry, Damon,” she told him shakily. “I made such a mess of everything, of both our lives. I have lived with such regret.”

“Don't.” His voice was soft as he wiped her tears from her cheeks with his hands. “Don't be sorry. You did not ruin my life. And it was not courage that made me run. It was because I was too weak to stay and watch you as his wife. I couldn't give you up. I couldn't let you go. When you would not come with me, it seemed the only path left to me, to get as far away from this pain as I could. People thought I ran because of the murder charge, but that was never it. It was not even because of the fight with my father, not really. We had quarreled countless times. It was because I wanted you and knew I could never have you. I could not face that.”

He caressed her face with his fingers, outlining her cheeks and jaw and forehead. “We did the best we could, Nan. It's pointless to have regrets.”

She smiled tearily. “No one else ever called me that.”

Damon brought her hands up to his lips and kissed them tenderly. “Do you think it is possible to start again? Do you think that after all this time, there might be a chance for us?”

“I don't know,” she answered shakily. “Perhaps we're too old for all this.”

He bent, and his lips brushed hers, then lingered. Her arms crept around his shoulders, and their kiss deepened. And all time was lost.

P
RISCILLA FOUND THAT
B
RYAN
was a man of his word: He spent the next two weeks taking every opportunity to woo her. He seemed to regard her refusal as only a minor setback. He came to call on her, bringing flowers and candy. He appeared at almost every function she attended, even church, and he always found an opportunity to sit with her and be quite obvious about paying attention to her. When the new Duke sent the Hamiltons an invitation to a small dinner in honor of Alec's birthday, she seriously considered not going. Bryan would probably be by her side all evening, making it extremely difficult for her to stick to her resolution. However, Miss Pennybaker felt she could not attend unless Priscilla went, also, and it seemed rather unfair to Alec not to go to the party celebrating his twenty-first birthday. He had been far less cheerful than usual since the Duke's arrival, even though he was getting his dearest wish, to join the army. Priscilla suspected that it had something to do with his mother's hasty departure from Ranleigh Court only two days after the Duke arrived. However, Alec had never said anything about it, and she did not wish to pry.

So, in order not to disappoint Penny and Alec, she told herself, she went to the dinner at Ranleigh Court. It was a rather small group, just as Alec had said it would
be—only Lady Chalcomb, Mr. Rutherford and a few other guests in addition to the Hamilton party and Alec's new family. Bryan greeted her with a polite bow over her hand, brushing his lips across the back of her hand in a way that made her flesh tingle, though she struggled not to show it. He had managed to arrange the seating so that she was next to him during the meal, flirting with her so outrageously that it was almost impossible not to flirt back.

She was somewhat distracted, however, when she glanced up the table and saw Anne and the Duke talking together in an almost intimate way, their voices low and their heads close together. It surprised her. She had not known that her friend even knew the Duke of Ranleigh. Anne had never spoken of him before. And he had been here only a couple of weeks! Of course, she reminded herself, it had not taken her any longer to fall in love with the Duke's son. Still, it seemed odd to her. She continued to glance back at them from time to time throughout the meal. She generally found them conversing or smiling at each other. Even if they were talking to the people on their other sides, they would glance back at each other now and then, exchanging a look that Priscilla could only describe as loverlike.

After dinner, Priscilla managed to escape Bryan's attentions, finding an unoccupied room on the first floor where there was a large window seat in which she could sit almost hidden. However, it was probably not more than twenty minutes before Bryan stuck his head in the room and saw her.

“Hello. I wondered where you had gotten to,” he said cheerfully, coming across the room toward her.

“Would you stop it?”

“Stop what?” he asked innocently, glancing around as if to see what he had done.

“You know what,” she snapped. “Following me around. Showing up everywhere I go. Talking to me. People have noticed and commented on it.”

“Have they?” He sat down beside her companionably on the window seat. “People love to gossip, you know.”

“It is because you are paying such particular attention to me.”

“That is usually the way a man acts when he wants to marry a woman,” he pointed out reasonably.

“Bryan…please. I have told you time and again that I will not marry you.”

“Not that many times. Haven't you noticed that I have ceased asking? I decided I was making a nuisance of myself.”

“You are.”

“So I haven't asked in some time. But can we not be friends? Can I not enjoy your company?”

Priscilla looked at him a trifle warily. She was not sure that mere friendship was something she was capable of sharing with Bryan. Besides, it seemed highly suspicious that he was suddenly willing to give up his campaign to convince her to marry him.

“I suppose we can,” she said slowly. “What does that entail?”

“Doing what friends do, I suppose. I have tried to woo you, and that obviously is not working. You seem unusually immune to charm, and flowers appear to move you not at all.”

A small smile played about her lips. She could rarely
keep from being charmed by Bryan, however well he might say she hid it.

“I am a hard woman,” she admitted.

“I have something better to offer you than flowers. A mystery.”

“What mystery?” Then she thought of his father. “Oh. Rose's death?”

“Father and I have been mulling over ways to discover whether his cousin Evesham actually killed that woman thirty years ago.”

“And?”

“And we have not come up with much of anything. Father has talked to the constable about the case. It is not even the same constable, after all this time, and the case was filed away unsolved. Father finally got him to open up the file and let Father look at it. But it did not do much good. What little evidence they had all pointed to Father.”

“Why is the Duke convinced that it was his cousin?”

Bryan explained his father's theory, and Priscilla listened, nodding now and again. Finally Bryan stopped abruptly and said, “You don't believe it, do you?”

“What?”

“That my father did not do it.”

Priscilla shrugged. “I do not know, Bryan. I know very little about the case, really, only what gossip has said for thirty years, and everyone seemed pretty convinced that he did it.”

“He could not have. I know it.”

“He does not seem the sort who could commit murder,” Priscilla admitted.

“He is not. It is absurd. He can be tough sometimes,
but I have seen him sad because he had to fire one of his workers, even though the man was a well-known drunk and egregiously bad at his job. But the man was supporting seven children, and Father hated to do it.”

“However, I suppose that even good men can be goaded into killing.”

“Not Father.”

“Because he is your father, and you love him, you would feel that way. I understand that. I would never believe such a thing about Florian, either.”

Bryan had to chuckle at the thought that Florian could ever be distracted from his chemical equations long enough to even think of killing someone.

“All right. ‘Tis a poor example, I know. However, I am inclined to believe him simply because he is your father. It seems unlikely that he would be that different from you. You would not murder someone, especially, I think, if she was carrying your child.”

“Good God, I should hope not. It sounds even worse, doesn't it, when you look at it that way? He not only killed her, he killed their child.”

“Nor, I think, would you have led the poor girl on, making her think there was a possibility that you might marry her when you knew that you could not.”

He glanced at her suspiciously. “Is that just a remark, or are you trying to make a point?”

Priscilla shrugged.

“It is a far different case from you and me, if that is what you mean. But you are right, I would not try to make a woman think I would marry her if it were not possible. But there is no impediment in our case. When I say it will happen, it will. There is nothing to stop it.”

“I should not have spoken of this.” Priscilla turned
away, starting to rise, and Bryan grasped her wrist, holding her down on the window seat.

“What holds you back?” he rasped. “Damn it, Priscilla, there is nothing against this match except your stubbornness. Why, even this precious ‘reputation' that seems to mean so much to you would demand that we marry. We did, after all, spend that night together in the woods.”

Priscilla whirled to look at him. “Is that why you pursue me so? Because you think you have to? Because my reputation is ruined?” Her heart ached. It seemed the worst that could happen that she should want him so much and have to refuse him, and all the while he was pursuing her only out of duty.

His mouth twisted bitterly. “Of course that is not all. But that seems to be the only thing that matters to you. You think only of appearances and nothing of substance.”

Priscilla recoiled. “That is not true!”

“No? Then why do you hold back?”

“You don't understand….”

“No. How can I, when you won't tell me anything?”

“I cannot. I fear you would hate me.” She looked at him, wanting to tell him, aching to unburden herself and hear him say that it did not matter. But what if it did? He had not spoken of love. In all the times he had asked her, though all the cajoling and demanding, he had not said the simple words “I love you.” He wanted her; she knew that. She could tell that from the way he watched her whenever they were together. But that was not the same as love, real, abiding love. Desire could easily be destroyed.

He made a frustrated noise and jumped to his feet. “Damn it! What could be so awful? Is your grandfather mad? Locked up in an attic somewhere?”

“No. Don't be silly.”

“Then are you actually somehow related to me?”

“Bryan…”

“You wrote a feminist tract—or you have been arrested parading for women's suffrage.”

“That is ridiculous.”

“This whole situation is ridiculous.”

Priscilla drew breath to answer him. It was at that moment that they heard the shot.

 

P
RISCILLA AND
B
RYAN BOTH FROZE
. In the next instant, he was tearing out the doorway, with Priscilla right behind him. He headed for the main stairs, but Priscilla grabbed his arm.

“No, this way!” she called, and ran down the hall to their left. A small servants' staircase there led up in a steep, rather dizzying way to the floor above, emptying out into a back hall.

Furiously they ran down the hall toward the sound of voices—no, a single voice, raised in anger, and, unless Priscilla was mistaken, more than half drunk, as well. They crept around the corner, moving closer to the blue room, a formal room where most of the guests had gathered this evening after dinner. They stopped beside a massive mahogany breakfront decorated with porcelain figures, squatting down so that it concealed them from view.

The wide double doors of the drawing room were open, and a roughly dressed man stood just inside them. He was weaving a little on his feet, waving a
large revolver around wildly. All of the guests stood across the room from him, white-faced, watching him with great concentration. The Duke stood, with his friend Mr. Rutherford and Lady Chalcomb, in front of the mantel. The others had drawn a little away, for it was to Ranleigh that the pistol kept returning. A large Chinese vase beside the fireplace was shattered, mute testimony to the man's poor aim.

Bryan looked at Priscilla, his brows rising in an unspoken question. She leaned closer and whispered, “Rose's brother.”

“God.”

“What did you care?” the man was now ranting. “You had money, you had power. ‘Course you got away with it. And now you're back, never a lick of punshi—punch—punishment for what you done to Rosie. She never hurt nobody. Nobody. Just fell in love with the likes of you.”

“I assure you, Childs, Rose was not in love with me. I had nothing to do with her death. Whoever she was talking about, it was not I.”

“Sure,” the man returned scornfully. “There bein' so many ‘gentlemen' around here. ‘Twas one of the others.”

“Or someone who convinced her that he was.”

Childs snorted. “No. It was you, all right, and I'm going ta see that ya pay for it. My Rosie's been lying in her grave thirty years now, cryin' out for justice. And I'm goin' to get it for her.”

“This is not the way,” Sebastian Rutherford began. “You will only get in trouble yourself. Think, man. What will happen to your mother and your farm if you
get arrested for murdering a peer of the realm? Do you think they will go easy on you?”

“Not likely,” Childs snorted. “The likes o' me they'll throw in jail, good and proper. It's only high-and-mighty ones like ‘im what get away with it.”

“That is my point exactly. It will do you no good.”

“It will ease my mind!” he roared back at Rutherford. “It will bloody well ease my mind.”

As the two men talked, Bryan bent and whispered in Priscilla's ear, “When I give you the signal, pick up a figure and crash it on the floor, then duck down immediately behind the breakfront.” He jerked his head toward the massive piece of furniture beside him, on which stood various ornamental figures and vases.

She nodded her understanding. He slid silently down the hall, creeping behind the man until he was past the door. For an instant, Ranleigh's eyes flickered past his accuser to his son, then immediately back.

Childs raised his other hand to the one that held the pistol, steadying it as he took aim. Ranleigh faced him expressionlessly.

“At least do not put these other people at risk, Childs,” Ranleigh said. “You cannot want to murder innocent people. Let them leave.”

“And have them walking between you and me to the door? I ain't as stupid as you think, Your Grace.”

“Then allow Mr. Rutherford and Lady Chalcomb to move away from me.”

“All right.” Childs jerked his head to the side. “You can move, my lady. You, too, Mr. Rutherford. Neither one of ya deserve to die, and he's right. My aim ain't too good tonight.”

“Certainly not,” Rutherford retorted. “I am not budging. Although Lady Chalcomb should—”

“Wait,” that lady said firmly, stepping forward. “Mr. Childs, I cannot let you do this. You would be making a grave error.”

“Anne!” Ranleigh snapped. “Don't say anything else.”

“I am not going to let this man kill you just to save my reputation, Damon,” the lady replied coolly, all the while keeping her eyes on the man with the gun. “Mr. Childs, do you know me to be a truthful woman?”