Heiress Without a Cause (18 page)

She was well and truly shocked by his declaration. She blindly sank onto the small footstool by the dying fire, twisting her hands into the coverlet she still used as a dressing gown. “But we’ve known each other less than a fortnight. How can you be in love with me?”

He strode around the bed, taking considerably less care wrapping himself in sheets than she had, and she caught a tantalizing glimpse of one muscled thigh before he stood in front of her. “I know you probably hate my past, and I can’t say I’m particularly proud of it myself — but if there is one thing I learned, it is how rare it is to find what we experienced tonight. In fact, I can safely say that I have never, ever found a woman who could compare to you.”

He paused for an endless moment. “What is your answer, Mad?”

She looked into those blue eyes, read the mixture of hope, sincerity, and hunger, and felt a slamming in her chest as she realized he told the truth. She couldn’t call the abruptness of his affections into question — not when she was surely at least half in love with him herself.

A collapsing log in the fireplace jarred her out of the dream. Any debutante would swoon at such a declaration of love, particularly from a duke.

But she knew from bitter experience that love wasn’t enough. The fire, and the nightmare it embodied, was enough to remind her. Her parents had loved her, but they still sent her away to fulfill their duties. Augusta and Alex loved her, but they wouldn’t accept her desire to act in public. Amelia loved her too, but even that love seemed to be reaching its limit.

People in their spheres could marry for love, but love was not what drove the ton.

Ultimately, Ferguson would embody the title he had inherited, whether he desired it or not. The duties of a dukedom would slowly pave over any hope of a pure, committed love. Or he would go to Scotland to avoid it — but she had never romanticized life as a hermit, and saw no appeal in spending the rest of her life on a remote estate.

If he stayed in London and was not corrupted by the title, she would still be a duchess. If her life felt constrained as a spinster, it would be awful when she was expected to be a grand hostess.

The panic started to rise. She had slept safely in his arms, even with a fire burning in the grate. But awake, with her mind overruling her heart, she couldn’t face him. He stood in front of her, one hand fisted in the sheet he used to cover himself, looking like the powerful lord he was. She had successfully tricked her family to pursue her own pleasure, but Ferguson wouldn’t be fooled — she would never again have the freedom of the past few weeks.

Marrying him could mean jumping from the boring but comfortable prison of her current life to a trap of her own making. She was sure Ferguson would be more exciting — but the risks were higher. If she married him, there would be no escape.

And his love might not last long enough to compensate for her freedom.

She reached the end of that line of reasoning before the last sparks subsided in the fireplace. Her heart raced and her palms were wet as she clenched them in the folds of the coverlet, but she knew her answer.

“I can’t marry you, Ferguson,” she whispered.

She forced herself to watch as the hope in his eyes turned to disbelief. He gave her a long, assessing look that made her want to take everything back, but she bit her tongue. He didn’t plead his case, and he was not a man who would ever beg. His hand shot out and pulled her to her feet, his arm wrapping around her to hold her against his chest. She made a sound — either of protest or sadness, she didn’t know — and he silenced her with one swift kiss.

The heat stayed on her lips even after he stepped back, and she somehow managed to stay on her feet. He snagged his coat from the floor and fished the door key out of its pocket. “I will send the maid up to dress you so you can return to Salford House,” he said, as nonchalantly as if they had been discussing the weather instead of marriage.

But then he pinned her with his gaze. With his bare chest and the sheet slung low on his hips, he looked like a warrior roused from bed, ready to do battle at a moment’s notice. “Some night soon, though, I will hear a different answer from you,” he said, with a subtle assurance that made it sound more like a promise than a threat. “And I will hear you confess to what I suspect you already feel, even if you’re pretending otherwise.”

He gathered his clothes and left. The door slamming behind him was the only proof of just how frustrated he was.

She sighed, wondering if she should have said yes, or if she could have said no in a kinder way. But there was no way to have an independent life as a duchess, particularly not a duchess who would have to watch her lover turn into the very type of man he did not want to be.

She just had to hope her independence was worth Ferguson’s wrath — and that her resolve wouldn’t crumble in the face of his love.

Ferguson wasn’t in the hallway when she finished dressing, and Madeleine didn’t seek him out. She slipped out of the townhouse and through the door cut in the Stauntons’ high stone wall, hurrying across the darkened gardens toward Salford House. It was a clear night and the path was easy to find, but she still shivered in her thin gown. She couldn’t risk wearing a cloak — it would already raise enough eyebrows if a servant saw her wandering around the lower floors long after her family left for the evening.

But even though she was freezing, and even though she wanted to avoid seeing Ferguson, she wasn’t eager to return to her room. With the events of the last two hours — losing her virginity, and then refusing a marriage proposal from a man she thought she might love — she knew she would not sleep easily.

Still, she couldn’t delay. Her family could return at any moment. Josephine had surely made excuses for Madeleine, but with Aunt Augusta growing increasingly concerned about Madeleine’s health, Madeleine needed to be in bed before anyone came home. Light filtered through the curtains of Alex’s study, but it was several rooms away from her preferred entrance — he wouldn’t hear her. Otherwise, the back of the house was dark, with a low lamp shining in the small sitting room the girls used during the day. Josephine would be there, loitering to keep the butler from locking the French doors. Madeleine pushed the door open, stepped over the threshold — and shrieked as a man’s hand grabbed her arm.

She jerked away, every instinct screaming at her to flee, but his grip was unbreakable. He swung her around to face him, and she relaxed as she realized Alex was the one who had caught her.

The worst of her panic drained out of her, but a different kind of fear replaced it. She saw the grim set of his jaw and the hardness in his eyes — like nothing she had ever seen there before — and her need to flee surged again. There was nowhere to go, though, not when her cousin had just caught her sneaking into the house hours after she had supposedly taken to her bed.

“Where have you been?” he demanded as he marched her out of the sitting room and down the hall to his study.

She had dreaded this moment, almost more than the possibility of being ruined in the eyes of the ton. She didn’t say a word, not willing to incriminate herself until she discovered what Alex already knew. If he only thought she had been outside alone, she could talk her way out of it, claim she’d had a nightmare, play on his sympathy. She had already betrayed them so deeply — would another lie hurt?

But if he knew she was acting as Marguerite Guerrier, he would guess her connection with the duke of Rothwell. Everyone knew about his mistress. At least Alex would understand her passion for the theatre, even if he would be annoyed that she had done it without his permission. But if he knew she was acting as Ferguson’s mistress...

He opened the door to the study and pushed her inside, gently enough that she didn’t fall but forcefully enough to show he was taking over. Every lamp was lit and the brilliance made her blink.

When her vision cleared, she saw Aunt Augusta and Amelia sitting on the small settee beside Alex’s desk. Aunt Augusta was ramrod straight, with a severity to her expression that Madeleine hadn’t seen since those first awful weeks after Uncle Edward’s death. Amelia huddled beside her, her knees drawn up under her chin as though she were five years old. Amelia was thoroughly miserable — and the look in her eyes was something between an apology and a warning.

“Sit down, Madeleine,” Alex ordered. There was no invitation in his voice; it was pure command.

She sank into an armchair across from Alex, angled to look at him rather than Augusta and Amelia. She still didn’t want to answer his question, so she slowly peeled off her gloves and tossed them onto the table next to her. Her guilt was probably written on her face, but at least her maid had reset her hair and clothed her completely. Despite Ferguson’s lovemaking, she knew she looked innocent.

Anxiety and fear still flooded her veins, but she was an actress — she could get through whatever this conversation brought. With that reminder, she took a deep breath, folded her hands in her lap, and looked up at Alex with an expression of utter innocence.

Alex frowned. “You seem remarkably composed.”

“Is there a reason I shouldn’t be composed?”

He exploded. “I just caught you sneaking into the house a mere half hour before midnight and you ask if there is a reason why you shouldn’t be composed? If I were a better guardian, I would whip you for this.”

Alex was usually so mild — but he looked half-tempted to follow through on his threat. She swallowed, her mouth dry. “Shall we have some tea as we discuss this?”

“No tea,” he said flatly. “All the servants have the night off. We couldn’t risk having one of them overhear this discussion.”

“Surely Josephine is here?” she asked. If she could just see Josephine and find out what Alex knew, she would know how to handle him.

“She’s packing her things.”

“What?” Madeleine gasped. “What have you done to her?”

“You could hardly expect me to keep her when she’s far more loyal to you than she is to the rest of the family. She said she would rather be turned off than tell me where you disappeared to all these nights, so I granted her wish.”

Madeleine rubbed her throbbing temples. “You can’t send Josephine away. It was my decision to act the way I did. She merely helped me when she realized I was going to do it with or without her.”

“And what, precisely, have you been doing?” Alex asked. “You still haven’t answered that question.”

She paused, not ready to plunge into explanations, defenses, and denials, not sure she could meet Aunt Augusta’s eyes as she lied to them.

Amelia shifted in her seat. “You may as well tell them about the theatre,” she said.

The strained, urgent tone of Amelia’s voice meant that her cousin was trying to tell her something else — perhaps that Madeleine’s acting had already been discovered, but they hadn’t realized Ferguson’s role in it. She relaxed into her chair, trying to put all thoughts of Ferguson — and what they had done in the little house across the alleyway — out of her mind so that she could convince Alex that acting was her only sin.

“What do you already know?” Madeleine asked.

Alex pulled a playbill out of his desk drawer and slid it across to her. “I know you are Madame Guerrier. In fact, I even know how talented you are. I was in the audience tonight and discovered it for myself.”

“You attended the play? You don’t even like the theatre.”

“I’ve known something was wrong with you for weeks, and it wasn’t the headache you kept pleading. Mother and I agreed that we needed to discover what was wrong before there were any surprises. And once I found out what you were doing, we knew just how unpleasant those surprises would be.”

Aunt Augusta hadn’t said a word since they entered the room. Madeleine would have noticed such unusual silence if she had not been so concerned about what Alex knew. She looked over at her aunt and was horrified to see the glimmer of what looked like tears.

Madeleine hadn’t seen Aunt Augusta cry since Uncle Edward’s funeral.

And then Madeleine knew their ambush was about more than just her acting.

“You know about Ferguson too, don’t you?” she whispered.

“Ferguson?” Alex said, his brows slamming together. “So now you’re calling that bounder by his nickname instead of his title?”

Damn.
They didn’t know about Ferguson — and she had given herself away. “He made it clear at every turn that he prefers not to use his title.”

Alex ignored her explanation. “And yes, we know. Everyone in London is talking about how the duke is back to his old tricks, taking the most desirable actress of her generation as his mistress.”

She heard Aunt Augusta sniffle, but she kept her gaze locked on Alex’s. He was turning positively feral. She had a very real suspicion that he had never been angrier in his life. She held her breath, waiting for his next words.

But they were even worse than she could have imagined. “You have thirty seconds to convince me you haven’t become his whore, or I’m going to kill him.”

Madeleine felt dizzy, and a dull roar in her ears almost drowned out the end of Alex’s threat. Aunt Augusta finally intervened. “Alexander, there is no need for such vulgarity. Madeleine is still ours, despite whatever she has done.”

Madeleine had felt guilty about rejecting Ferguson’s proposal, but it was nothing compared to what she felt now. She used to wish for her real family to come back and take her away, dreamed of what it would have been like to grow up with them in France. But Aunt Augusta had never treated her as anything less than a daughter — and Madeleine had just repaid the kindness by disappointing her more than any of them could have imagined.

Alex didn’t back down. “Thirty seconds, Madeleine.”

She could barely breathe, let alone come up with a coherent, non-incriminating sentence. Finally, she just held up her hands. “Ferguson offered to protect me from others who might try to seduce me, and I thought it best to accept his help. By pretending that I am his mistress, he’s kept other interested men away from me while I am at the theatre.” Then she steeled herself for the lie. “But I would never do anything improper with him, and he is too much of a gentleman to take advantage. He is only helping me to keep me from ruining his sisters by association.”