The Reluctant Rake Read online

  The older Deveres, embarrassed by this effusion, muttered incomprehensible replies.

  “Such a handsome man, too,” continued the countess. “A fair match for Julia there as well, eh?” She turned twinkling blue eyes on Julia.

  Julia Devere showed no signs of discomfort. Her answering smile was lovely and unselfconscious. “Thank you for your good wishes, Lady Leamington,” she replied. “We mustn’t keep you from your other guests any longer.” And gathering her parents with a glance, she walked on into the ballroom.

  Behind her, the countess shook her head. “That girl deserves her success if anyone ever did; she has the sweetest temper on earth. Take a lesson, Alice.”

  “Yes, Mama,” murmured her daughter again, and they turned to greet the next arrival.

  Lady Devere, on the other hand, was deploring the manners of the aristocracy. “I shall never understand it,” she complained to her daughter. “Sometimes it seems that the higher their rank, the greater their vulgarity. I shouldn’t dream of speaking so to Lady Alice, should she announce her engagement.”

  “Their ideas are different from ours,” agreed Julia absently. Her thoughts were focused on the party ahead. She would be the center of attention this evening, she knew. Any newly engaged girl was the object of congratulations, and envy, and she had the added luster of having won one of the most eligible bachelors of the haut ton. She looked forward to the furor with some trepidation, but her main emotion was happiness. She had liked Sir Richard Beckwith from their first meeting, and everything she had learned about him since then had strengthened her regard. She knew herself to be very fortunate—to be creditably settled in life with a man she could wholeheartedly admire.

  The Deveres were indeed surrounded by well-wishers as soon as their arrival was noticed. In the flood of congratulations and questions about the wedding, Julia missed the first set, and she was led into the second only after her partner pointedly excused her from a pair of talkative dowagers.

  “That was very rude, Mr. Whitney,” Julia told him as the waltz began.

  “Rude? You accuse me of petty sins when you have broken my heart?” he retorted.

  Julia laughed. “You know I have done no such thing.”

  “I shall never recover,” protested her partner. “Where is the infamous Sir Richard tonight, by the by? I should think he’d be much in evidence, flaunting his triumph in our faces.”

  “He had business to see to. He won’t be here.”

  “The cad. Leaving you alone to face all these congratulations. Don’t you wish to reconsider your acceptance of him under these conditions?”

  “No, Mr. Whitney. But I am beginning to wish I had not accepted your invitation to dance. Do be serious.”

  “Ah, you and Richard, always so serious. I do wish one of you would fly up in the boughs just once. A wild adventure, a tempestuous scene. Don’t you wish for it sometimes?”

  Laughing again, Julia shook her head. Mr. Whitney heaved a dramatic sigh and turned the subject.

  The ball continued much in this vein for Julia. During the supper interval, she was the center of a lively group of young people, and afterward she danced with a variety of partners. If she wished that one of these was Sir Richard, she did not let it show, and when one of her admirers went to fetch lemonade late in the evening, she awaited his return with a serene smile. She didn’t even notice the arrival of two latecomers, one a young man whose handsome face was marred by chronic worry and the other the middle-aged roué who had bid against Beckwith an hour before. The two separated at the door, the latter stopping to scan the crowd, then moving with calculated nonchalance to a position just behind Julia, though partly screened from her by a curtained doorway.

  “I must tell you the most extraordinary thing, Seldon,” he said in a penetrating voice to an acquaintance he had taken in tow as he moved across the ballroom.

  Julia’s head turned slightly, and she started to move away as she recognized one of the most notorious libertines in London.

  “What’s that, Lord Fenton?” answered Seldon.

  “Beckwith came to the Chaos Club tonight,” was the reply. Julia froze.

  “I don’t believe it! Propriety Dick?”

  “I tell you, he was recognized. And not only that, he laid down two thousand guineas to buy himself the loveliest little lightskirt I’ve seen in fifteen years.”

  “No!”

  “I saw it myself.”

  “But he’s never mounted a mistress. He’s always deploring the morals of the ton.”

  Lord Fenton smiled slightly, his eyes on the rigid shoulders of Julia Devere a little distance away in the ballroom. “Perhaps his decision to become leg-shackled gave him pause,” he said very clearly. “That certainly makes a man think of what he’s missed.”

  Julia moved away, returning to her parents, numb with shock. She had not been able to resist listening once she heard her fiancé’s name, but what she’d heard was so unbelievable that she couldn’t even think just yet. She fled instinctively to the protectors of her youth and sat down beside her mother. Julia’s hands were trembling, and her skin felt icy; a void seemed to have opened inside her.

  “You are very pale, Julia,” said Lady Anne. “Are you feeling ill?”

  “Only very tired,” she managed to reply.

  “All these congratulations are fatiguing. Shall we go home?”

  Julia nodded emphatically, and her mother turned to speak to Sir George. As the three of them rose and looked for their hostess to say good-bye, Lord Fenton watched from across the room. His lined face showed both malicious satisfaction and an almost diabolical glee. He gazed about the ballroom as if wondering what he could do next to sustain the entertainment.

  On the carriage ride home, Julia was silent. Her parents, chatting desultorily about the evening, noticed nothing amiss. When they reached the house they had hired for the Season, Julia stepped down first and went directly to her room, submitting to the ministrations of her maid mechanically and allowing herself to be put to bed without speaking a word. The maid, who was new to her service, fell silent also after her first few remarks were ignored and simply did her work as quickly as possible.

  When she was at last alone, Julia gazed up at the canopy above her bed and allowed an unaccustomed tide of emotion to surge through her. Its strength was such that she had to clench her hands and jaw to keep quiet.

  Julia Devere had been reared with loving, but strict propriety by middle-aged parents. Her principles were high, her ideas somewhat rigid, and her life up to this point had offered no upheaval that put these views to the test. With her engagement to Sir Richard Beckwith, it had appeared that this serene state would continue, unruffled.

  Now, her certainty had been swept away with a suddenness that left her breathless. Even more unsettling was her reaction. Instead of calmly reviewing the circumstances and judging them by the measures she’d been taught, Julia was swinging wildly from scandalized condemnation, to hot anger, to hopeful disbelief. She’d never felt such turmoil. It was as if her mind had filled with a chorus of alien voices, and she was shocked to find that she could surprise herself this way.

  Julia had been carefully educated in many subjects, but not in the lore of feelings. These, to her parents at least, were things to be kept under sedate control. A civilized person did not indulge. A proper young lady did not even acknowledge their existence. For the first time since early childhood, Julia failed to rein in her emotions.

  Silently, she struggled with herself. Stories like Lord Fenton’s malicious gossip circulated constantly among the haut ton, Julia knew. And though as an unmarried girl she was not told any of them directly, only the most unobservant or stupid deb failed to pick up scraps of information, and Julia was neither of these.

  It was the connection of Richard with scandalous behavior that set her pulse pounding with a muddle of emotion—hu
miliation at the idea that Richard should find a mistress on the eve of their engagement and make her the butt of vulgar jokes, anger that he had deceived her about his character, amazement that she could have been so deceived, and overriding all else, an astonishing, fierce possessiveness that urged Julia to rise and fight for the man she intended to marry, and not to let some doxy steal him away.

  The latter feeling surprised Julia most. If she had been asked earlier in the evening whether she loved Richard Beckwith, she would have replied, with a mildly reproving glance, that she admired and respected him, that she found in him her ideal of manhood, that she enjoyed his company and conversation. The hot emotion she felt now had no connection to any of those phrases. Julia wondered if she’d fallen prey to some kind of madness. There seemed no other logical explanation for the sudden, radical change in her character. Had some lunacy been growing in the hidden parts of her brain, she wondered, only to burst forth full blown now? But even as this fear surfaced, she dismissed it. She was furious, not insane.

  She made a heroic effort to gain control of herself. She did not know that Lord Fenton’s vicious story was true, a prim inner voice pointed out. Fenton was certainly not a trustworthy person. He had been pointed out to Julia at her first ton party as someone she should not know, and she had never even spoken to him in the course of the Season that was now waning. Was she, she asked herself, ready to take such a man’s word about the conduct of Sir Richard Beckwith, whom she knew so well and trusted absolutely?

  Of course not! She’d been distressingly unsteady, Julia realized, to allow this incident to overset her. It could not be true. And from what she had heard of Lord Fenton, it was likely to be a cruel jest. Julia flushed in the darkness of her bed, ashamed of herself for falling victim to such a hoax. Nothing had changed, she told herself; she would wake tomorrow to discover that Richard was the same as ever. And they would marry in six weeks as agreed and settle to a life much like her present one.

  Thus reassured, Julia was finally able to close her eyes and fall asleep.

  Three

  “Come here,” said Sir Richard.

  Bess Malone moved toward him across the silent kitchen, a smile curving her full lips. As she walked, she unfastened her cloak and let it fall to the brick floor.

  Sir Richard made an impatient sound. “No, no. Sit down. There.” He indicated one of the chairs that clustered about the wide wooden table.

  Bess hesitated, frowning a little.

  “And pick up your cloak,” he added.

  Petulantly, she snatched it up and cast herself into the chair, her expression sulky. Beckwith turned to poke the coals into life and add wood from the box beside the hearth. Then he faced her, hands clasped behind his back. “Now, then,” he said, “we must decide what to do with you.”

  Bess’s blue eyes went wide, and her dark brows rose.

  “I think a position in some respectable household,” he continued. “As a housemaid? Or perhaps you could serve as companion to—”

  “Here, what are you saying?” interrupted Bess, now rigid with amazement. “You bought me fair and square. I don’t—”

  “I did so,” explained Sir Richard, “to save you from the clutches of men such as Lord Fenton. You cannot have realized the fate in store for you. I will find you employment in some suitable—”

  “No, you blinking won’t!” exclaimed Bess, springing to her feet and glaring at him. “I want a house of my own and a carriage, and gowns and jewels and…a box at the opera!”

  “What?”

  “Are you deaf? Or daft? Why do you think I went to that disgusting place and sold myself to the likes of you? To make my fortune, that’s why. I mean to be one of them ladies who drives herself in the park of afternoons and smiles when the gentlemen bow to her.”

  “You don’t understand what sort of woman that is,” objected Sir Richard.

  Bess looked utterly exasperated. “Do I not? Did you think I was meaning a ring on my finger and standing up before the priest? I sold myself to be your fancy lady, and that’s what I want to be. In proper style, mind! A regular high flyer.”

  “But I am offering to save you from such degradation. I can find you respectable employment, where you will not be forced to—”

  “Respectable!” Bess spat the word. “Now, you listen to me, Mr.… You haven’t even told me your name.”

  “Beckwith,” he responded automatically. “Sir Richard Beckwith.”

  Bess continued to glare. “Let me tell you something about ‘respectable employment,’ Sir Richard Beckwith. I came to London six months ago to look for work. There was none at home, and my family was too poor to keep me. I found a place as a housemaid—rising up before dawn and lugging great, heavy water cans and scrubbing floors till my hands bled; falling into bed every night so tired I couldn’t sleep, and not such a very comfortable bed at that. And the master of the house considering me his lawful property and catching me behind the parlor door for a bit of a touch. That’s your respectable employment.”

  “But I could—”

  “And so I left that post,” continued Bess inexorably, “thinking I’d try something outside domestic service. I got a place in a milliner’s shop—a fine one, too. Just off Bond Street.” Her eyes flashed. “Well, it was nothing better than a fancy house, let me tell you. The owner said since I was pretty, I should work in the shop, and not sit in the room behind and sew in the heat. She took care to present me to all the men who came in, too. And none of them was shy in asking for what he wanted.” She glared. “It wasn’t hats, either!”

  Sir Richard started to speak, but she cut him off once again.

  “More than that, some of the ladies who spent their money in that shop weren’t the least bit respectable. They dripped silks and jewels, though. So I made up my mind; if they wanted to be buying that, I’d sell it dear. One of you fine gentlemen was bound to have his way sooner or later, so I decided to make you pay. I mean to get enough money to support myself, and then I won’t have to have any employment at all.”

  “You cannot understand what this means.”

  “No?” Bess smiled derisively at him. “I grew up in the country, Sir Richard Beckwith. And I have nine brothers and sisters. I understand very well. It’s not such a great thing as you gentry make of it, you know. And it’s far easier than hauling hot water cans.”

  Sir Richard was profoundly shocked. “You don’t realize—”

  “It’s you that don’t understand,” Bess insisted. “Look at this house.” She gestured at the walls around them. “You have no notion what it’s like to be starving or half-dead with cold. You’ve never felt helpless and friendless and worn out with drudgery.” She bared her teeth at him.

  “I had a fine plan. I heard about that club, and I found one of the members and made him listen. I wanted a rich gentleman who would treat me fine and give me things. I’m quite ready to treat him fine, too.” Bess looked at Sir Richard sidelong, then moved quickly and unexpectedly to twine her arms around his neck, pressing her body against him and stretching on tiptoe to fasten her lips on his.

  Sir Richard’s arms closed about her reflexively, to keep his balance at this onslaught. And something in him responded automatically to the sensation of a warm and willing girl pressing eagerly closer. His brain protested emphatically, however, and he was just about to push Bess away and scold her when the kitchen door opened and his young brother walked into the room.

  For a moment, the scene was frozen, the two men staring wildly at one another. Then Richard thrust Bess from him and Thomas began backing hastily out of the room, blushing and muttering incoherent apologies.

  Bess stood, arms akimbo, and glared, first at Sir Richard, then, following the direction of his gaze, at the younger Thomas. “Who’s that?” she demanded.

  “Just going,” stammered Thomas. “Beg your pardon. Didn’t realize…”

&nb
sp; “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Sir Richard. “That is my brother, Tom. Tom, this is Bess Malone. You may as well come in.”

  “No, no,” protested Tom hurriedly.

  “Come,” commanded Sir Richard. “This is not at all what it appears.”

  Bess stamped her foot on the brick floor.

  Curiosity began to contend with the embarrassment on Thomas Beckwith’s face, and he came a bit further into the room. As he looked from Bess’s infuriated face to his brother’s harried, self-conscious one, his bright green eyes began to twinkle, and he regained some of his usual nonchalance.

  The brothers did not much resemble each other. Sir Richard had their deceased father’s height and breadth of shoulder, along with his dark blond hair and cool gray eyes. Thomas was the image of their mother, with a delicate frame and brown hair. He had also inherited her sense of mischief, which surfaced now. “What’s all this then?” he asked.

  Bess had turned her back on both of them and gone to gaze angrily at the fire. Sir Richard briefly reviewed the events of the evening. As he spoke, his brother’s green eyes grew wider. Before he was halfway through, Thomas was biting his lower lip to keep it from quivering with laughter. The thought of the staid head of his family in the situation he described struck Thomas as irresistibly funny. And when the end of the story came, and Bess’s reactions were touched upon, he could stand it no longer. He burst out laughing so hard he had to sit down.

  Both Bess and Sir Richard frowned at him.

  “I’m sorry,” gasped Tom. “I can’t help it. The thought of you, Richard, in such a place. I can just see you rigid with distaste. And then being told by a chit of a girl that she doesn’t care to be respectably employed. If I could only have seen it!”

  “I thank you for your support,” answered Sir Richard dryly.