Beguiling the Beauty (26 page)

“I will see her here,” he said, “in five minutes.”

He needed at least that much time to put himself together.

V
enetia was faintly surprised Christian agreed to see her—faintly as she was not capable of feeling much else besides terror, a bloated thing with claws in her stomach and tentacles up her throat.

Her days away from London had been good for her health—a more Spartan diet had quieted her stomach and averted further episodes of morning sickness—but her mind had grown increasingly troubled as she considered her choices.

She was fortunate to possess both funds and freedom of movement. She could choose to spend autumn and winter somewhere abroad, give birth in secret, and find a good foster home for the child here in England—if, that was, she could bear to be parted from the child.

She’d thought with great seriousness of begging Fitz
and Millie for help. Millie could go away with her and then return to England pretending the child were hers. It was as good a solution as could be found under the circumstances. She trusted her brother and sister-in-law to be good parents, and she herself, as the doting aunt, could visit as often as she wanted and watch the child grow up.

Were the baby a boy, however, he’d be considered Fitz’s heir. And Fitz and Millie’s own firstborn son, should they have one in the future, would be robbed of his rightful inheritance. Other seemingly infertile couples had produced children after long droughts, and it would be selfish of Venetia to assume that Fitz and Millie wouldn’t.

Which led her to the option of marrying, herself. Finding a suitable groom should not be an impossible task. There were other men like Mr. Easterbrook. Failing that, perhaps a widower with sons of his own, sufficiently enamored of her to not mind giving his name to someone else’s child.

But her thoughts always came back to the duke. The child was his. He might not want his flesh and blood raised in another man’s household. And perhaps, just perhaps, he deserved to know that he was about to become a father.

Except, for him to know, she’d have to confess everything, the prospect of which had caused her to flee as if he were Mount Vesuvius and she a hapless resident of Pompeii. How could she voluntarily face his wrath?

And yet here she was, in the anteroom of his house, her palms damp, her stomach pitching, her heart beating so hard she was nearly cross-eyed.

The footman reappeared. “This way, please, Mrs. Easterbrook.”

She walked, but couldn’t quite feel her feet. It was not
yet too late to turn around and take flight, reasoned the voice of her self-preservation. The duke was not going to chase her out into the streets to find out why she’d come to see him.

Run. You only believe you can do it because you have not thought this through. This confession is not some short-lived pain to be endured for half an hour. You have no idea what he is going to do. If he chooses to, he could make you miserable for the rest of your life.

The footman opened the door to a study. “Mrs. Easterbrook, sir.”

Her throat tightened. She couldn’t even swallow. She teetered upon the threshold—two seconds or a hundred years?—then suddenly she was inside, the footman leaving, closing the door behind her.

Almost immediately her eyes were drawn to a photograph on the mantel. She’d been too nerve-stricken to notice anything of the house, but this portrait she saw all too clearly: the young duke and his stepmother, each holding a handful of darts, standing together next to a tree.

We threw darts at a tree instead.

He had been honest and forthright. She had been everything but. And now she must suffer the consequences of her action.

The duke did not rise to greet her; he was already standing before a window. “Mrs. Easterbrook,” he said without turning around, surveying the street beneath. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

She had racked her brains over how to approach the matter, but only the simplest words emerged from her parched throat. “Your Grace, I am with child.”

His head lifted abruptly. An awful silence smothered
the room. At last he said, “And what do you want me to do about it?”

“The child is yours.”

“You are certain?”

His sangfroid momentarily shocked her out of her fright. He ought to be outraged, and yet here he was, acting as if the only unexpected news was her pregnancy.

“You know it was me on the
Rhodesia
?
How
?”

“Does it matter?” His tone was arctic.

She looked down at the carpet. Her actions were egregious enough. But for him to have discovered her deceit on his own somehow made everything worse. “To answer your previous question, yes, I am certain the child is yours.”

“You are a wealthy woman. I imagine you have not come to ask for money.”

“No, I have not.”

“What do you want?”

“I—I hoped you might advise me on that.”

“Why do you think I’d have advice to offer? Do I appear to be in the habit of regularly impregnating women?”

“No, of course not.”

“And did you not inform me that you could not conceive?”

Did he think that she’d have deliberately misled him, in order to put herself in this untenable situation? “I did.”

“How do I know you are telling the truth?”

“Concerning my erstwhile infertility? I can give you the names of the physicians who examined me.”

“No, concerning your current state of health.”

He meant her pregnancy. Her head spun. “You think I’d lie about it?”

She regretted it immediately: That was precisely the wrong thing to say.

He did not miss the opportunity. “You must admit, Mrs. Easterbrook, you lie about an astonishing range of things.”

She took a deep breath. “I will admit that I can hardly consider myself creditable before you. But what advantage does it garner me to pretend that I am with child when I am not? The situation presents only inconvenience.”

“Oh, I’m sure there is no advantage at all to carrying my child.”

She had not imagined their conversation could turn in this particular direction. Was it truly so advantageous to be an unmarried woman carrying the Duke of Lexington’s child?

Or was he in denial, as she had been? To accept the pregnancy as fact was to accept that there was no walking away from this affair, that its significance would reverberate in his life for the foreseeable future and beyond.

“Is there not a scientific principle that the simplest explanation tends to be the correct one?”

“And what is your simple explanation, Mrs. Easter-brook?”

“That I was stupid and did not prepare for the possibility of conception.”

He turned around at last. Her heart ached. He’d become even thinner, his cheekbones prominent and sharp.

“What
did
you prepare for?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“A woman such as yourself does not cover her face without a reason. What did you mean to achieve?”

She wanted to explain her entire life leading up to his lecture at Harvard, the bouquet that had been sent to her
room by mistake, and her rage-driven, slightly incoherent scheme. She wanted to tell him how he’d upended her entire plan and laid siege to her heart. And she wanted to let him know that it was the greatest mistake of her life, not revealing herself the moment she realized that she’d fallen in love.

But he would not believe a word of it. Not now. And not—she abruptly realized—ever.

Because he was a man trained to examine only facts, and the following were the indisputable facts: She had seduced him under false pretenses; she had wrested a proposal of marriage from him; she had promptly disappeared; and she had subsequently reneged on her promise to meet him again, all the while dancing with him, speaking with him, and watching him fester in his anxiety and misery.

He would not care to listen that she had changed her mind. That it had been wrenching for her to let him go—and even more so to stand before him a despised stranger. These emotions could not be scientifically tested; therefore they were nonfactors, utterly invalid and irrelevant.

She already knew this. She’d known all this from the beginning. But the pregnancy must have destroyed her common sense. Because she had come terrified but not without a sliver of hope—that she might be able to elucidate matters, to shed such a powerfully reasonable light on them that he would see her point of view.

When her love was the single most irrational and inexplicable aspect in this entire story.

“Have you anything to say for yourself?” he asked.

The coolness of his voice sent sharp pains though her. She had feared condemnation. She had never thought she’d
prefer condemnation to dismissal. A condemnation was a passionate gesture, fueled by strength of feeling. A dismissal was … nothing at all.

She could not speak to a dismissal of love and helpless yearning. She could not speak to a dismissal of waiting outside his town house for a glimpse of him. She could not speak to a dismissal of her hopes for the future, of moving beyond this impasse and forging ahead.

Before a dismissal, and particularly one as grand and condescending as his, she had no choice but to be the Great Beauty. The Great Beauty did not have much to recommend her. But no one dismissed the Great Beauty.

“What I wanted, of course, was your heart on a plate,” said the Great Beauty.

C
hristian was cold despite the roaring fire in the grate, as cold as the trees in his garden, shivering in the rain.

“And what was the nature of your interest in my heart, exactly?”

She smiled. “I wanted to break it—I was there at your Harvard lecture.”

How could cruelty ever be beautiful? Yet she was incandescent. “Because of what I’d said?”

“Precisely.”

“Does that not validate my opinion of you?”

“Maybe. But you’d have a broken heart to go along with it, wouldn’t you?”

A muscle twitched at the corner of his eye—at last he knew who he was dealing with. “An elegant plan,” he said slowly. “A despicable one, but elegant nevertheless.”

She shrugged. “Alas that I should be fertile after all. I’d much rather put you behind me once and for all.”

For no reason at all he thought of the sweetness of resting his head in her lap, her fingers combing through his hair as they talked of nothing and everything. He should have left well enough alone; at least he’d have enjoyed the memories. Now he had nothing—less than nothing.

“I’m sure you would,” he said, his voice uninflected.

“Well then, I have troubled you long enough,” she said brightly. “Good day, sir. I will see myself out.”

It was not until she was almost at the door that he recalled himself. “Not yet. We have not yet discussed what to do about the child.”

She shrugged again. “The child will present no problem to a woman such as myself. I will find someone to marry me, which should be as simple as picking out a new hat. Simpler, if I may say so: These days millinery is convoluted and time-consuming. Why, last time it took me an hour to decide on all the trimmings.”

Christian narrowed his eyes. “The poor dupe will be unwittingly raising someone else’s bastard?”

His scowls were famously quelling. They had no effect upon Mrs. Easterbrook whatsoever.

“I can tell him if you like. Would you also like me to inform him of your identity?”

She laughed, obviously finding her own quip very funny. Her laughter was the sound of wind chimes, clear and melodious. As arrogant and callous as she was, there was not a single sensory aspect of hers that was anything less than perfection.

“I will not allow my child to be brought up in the household of anyone stupid and gullible enough to marry you.”

“Well, that certainly eliminates you from contention, doesn’t it? You, sir, wished to marry me, too, if I recall correctly.”

She actually dared to remind him of it. Shame and anger jostled in him, both scalding hot. “I wished to marry the Baroness von Seidlitz-Hardenberg, which speaks poorly of my intelligence, but not nearly so poorly as if I had wanted to marry
you
.”

She smiled, imperious, impervious. “We can stand here all day and trade insults, Your Grace. But I have appointments to keep—and new hats to select. If you do not wish your child brought up in a respectable household, do you have any better solutions to propose? Mind you, I cannot have scandals: I still have a sister to marry.”

“Swear on your sister’s life that you are carrying my child.”

“I swear.”

“Then I will marry you, for the sake of the child. But if you are lying, I will divorce you in the most public manner possible.”

She looked at him a minute, her gaze limpid and unreadable. “I take it that by agreeing to marry you, I will not need to see to a wedding gown or a wedding breakfast.”