JMcNaught - Something Wonderful (28 page)

Alexandra pinkened with embarrassment, but she didn't think Jordan should be blamed if women fell in love with him.

"I loved him like a brother, but that doesn't change the fact that he was a notorious rake with a well-deserved reputation for profligacy." Swearing under his breath at her loyalty and innocence, Tony straightened. "You don't believe me, do you? All right, here's the rest of it: On the night of your first ball, you publicly commented on the beauty of two women—Lady Allison Whitmore and Lady Elizabeth Grangerfield. Both of them were his paramours. Do you understand what that means? Do you?"

The color slowly drained from Alexandra's face. A paramour shared a man's bed while he did the intimate things to her that Jordan had done to Alexandra.

Anthony saw her color fade and forged ahead, determined to get it out in the open. "During that same ball, you asked if Jordan enjoyed the ballet, and everyone nearly laughed their sides off because everyone knew that Elise Grandeaux was his mistress
until the day he died
. Alex, he stopped in London and was with her here on the way to your ship—
after
you were married. People
saw
him leaving her house. And she's told everyone your marriage was one of
in
convenience to him."

Alexandra leapt to her feet and wildly shook her head, trying to deny it. "You're wrong. I don't believe you. He said he had 'business' with someone. He would never have—"

"He would and he did, dammit! Furthermore, he intended to take you to Devon and leave you there, then he meant to return to London and continue where he left off with his mistress. He told me so himself! Jordan married you because he felt obliged to, but he had neither the desire nor the intent to live with you as his wife. All he felt for you was pity."

Alexandra's head jerked sideways as if she had been slapped. "He
pitied
me?" she cried brokenly, drowning in humiliation. Clutching the folds of her skirt, she twisted the fabric until her knuckles turned white. "He thought I was
pitiful
?" Another realization hit her, and she covered her mouth, thinking she was going to be sick: Jordan had meant to do the same thing to her that her father had done to her mother—marry, leave his wife in some obscure place far away, and then return to his wicked woman.

Reaching for her, Anthony tried to put his arms around her, but she flung them off and stepped back, staring at him as if she thought he was as evil as Hawk. "How could you!" she burst out, her voice shaking with bitterness and pain. "How could you let me go on grieving for him and making a fool of myself over him? How could you have been so unutterably cruel as to let me go on believing he had actually c-cared for me!"

"We believed it was a kindness at the time," the dowager duchess said gruffly from behind her, walking into the room with the slight limp that appeared whenever she was deeply troubled.

Alexandra was too battered to worry about the elderly woman. "I'm going home," she said, fighting to control the wrenching anguish that was strangling her breath in her chest.

"No, you're not!" Anthony snapped. "Your mother's spending a year sailing about the islands. You can't live alone."

"I do not require your permission to go home. Nor do I require your financial support. According to your grandmother, I have money of my own from
Hawk,
" she enunciated bitterly.

"Which I control as your guardian," Anthony reminded her.

"I don't want or need a guardian. I've been managing on my own since I was fourteen years old!"

"Alexandra, listen to me," he said tautly, grasping her by the shoulders and giving her a slight, angry shake. "I know you're angry and disillusioned, but you can't run away from us or slink away from London. If you do, what happened to you here will haunt you forever. You didn't love Jordan—"

"Oh,
didn't
I?" Alexandra interrupted furiously. "Then tell me why I spent an entire year trying to make myself worthy of him."

"You loved an illusion, not Jordan—an illusion you created out of whole cloth because you were innocent and idealistic—"

"And gullible and blind and stupid!" Alexandra hissed. Humiliation and anguish made her turn away from the sympathy Anthony was trying to offer and, in a desperate voice, she excused herself and ran to her room.

Only when she had gained the privacy of her bedchamber did she succumb to tears. She cried for her stupidity, for her gullibility, and for the year she had worked, driving herself to become worthy of a man who did not deserve to be called a gentleman. She cried until the sound of her own weeping made her despise herself for wasting her tears on him.

Finally, forcing herself to sit up, she dried her eyes while her mind continued to torment her with images of her own folly: She saw herself in the garden the day before they were wed: "
Are you going to kiss me
?" she had asked, and when he did, she nearly swooned in his arms, then promptly told him she loved him.

Mary Ellen had told her that gentlemen liked to know they are admired and she had certainly taken her friend's advice to heart!
I think you are as beautiful as Michelangelo's David
, she had told Jordan after his kiss.

Shame surged through Alexandra and she moaned aloud, wrapping her arms around her stomach, but the mortifying recollections wouldn't cease. God! She had given him her grandfather's watch. She had given it to him and told him that her grandfather would have
liked
him because he was a
noble
man. Liked him! Why, her grandfather would have barred that treacherous, overbred blueblood from their door!

In the coach she had let Jordan kiss her again and again—she had lain atop him like a stupid, besotted wanton! In bed she had let him do every intimate thing he wanted to do to her, and when he was finished, he had done the same things with his mistress the very next night.

Instead of shooting Jordan's assailant the night she met him, she should have shot Jordan Townsende! How boring her inexperience must have seemed to him, and no wonder he hadn't wanted to hear her naive declarations of love!

"How much longer?" George Morgan whispered to Jordan in the darkness.

"An hour, and then we can make a run for it," he answered tightly as he flexed his cramped muscles, forcing blood into them to strengthen them for their impending flight.

"Are you sure you heard them say your troops are fighting fifty miles south of here? I'd hate for us to walk fifty miles in the wrong direction, me with a game leg and you with a hole in yours."

"It's only a nick," Jordan answered, referring to the wound he'd received from the guard they overpowered yesterday.

The cave they'd been hiding in since yesterday while the French searched the woods for them was so small that they were both nearly doubled in half. Pain shot through Jordan's cramped leg and he stopped moving, his breathing shallow and fast as he automatically called up Alexandra's image and focused on it with every fiber of his being. He tried to imagine how she looked now, but today all he saw was a girl in a wooded glade, looking up at him with a puppy in her arms and all the love in the world shining in her eyes. With his eyes clenched shut, Jordan slowly traced every curve of her face in his mind. The pain in his legs retreated until it was an ache on the perimeters of his mind, still present but bearable now. It was a technique he'd used hundreds of times in the past, and it was as successful now as it had been before.

In the beginning of his imprisonment, when weeks of torture and deprivation drove him to the brink of madness, it was Alexandra he focused on to escape the pain that racked his body and tried to devour his mind. In his imagination, he relived, slowly, every second he had spent with her, concentrating fiercely on each minute detail of their surroundings, recalling every word, every inflection. He made love to her in the inn, time after time, undressing her and holding her, clinging to the memory of her incredible sweetness and the way she felt in his arms.

But as weeks faded into months, his memories of their brief time together were no longer enough to counteract the torment; he needed another weapon to silence the sweetly insidious voice that urged him gently to give up the fight to live, to let himself succumb to the pleasant anesthesia of death. And so Jordan began to invent scenes and build them around her, using them to reinforce his flagging will to survive because he knew from his experience with wounded men in Spain that when despair set in, death soon followed.

In his mind, he invented all sorts of scenes—pleasant ones in which Alexandra ran ahead of him, laughing her musical laugh, then she turned, holding out her arms to him—
waiting
for him to come to her, frightening scenes where he saw her cast out on the streets by Tony and living in a London slum—
waiting
for Jordan to come home and rescue her; tender scenes where she lay in naked splendor on satin sheets—
waiting
for him to make love to her.

He invented dozens of scenes, and the only feature each one had in common was that Alexandra was always waiting for him. Needing him. He knew the scenes were fantasy, but he concentrated on them anyway. Because they were his only weapon against the demons in his brain that shrieked for him to give up the struggle, to loosen his grip on sanity—and then on life.

And so, in the squalor of his vermin-infested cell, he had closed his eyes and planned his escape so that he could go home to her. Now, after a year of looking back on the bleakness of his former world, he was ready to let Alexandra show him
her
world, where everything was fresh and alive and unspoiled—where "something wonderful" was waiting just around the comer. He wanted to lose himself in her sweetness and surround himself with her laughter and
joie de vivre
. He wanted to cleanse himself of the filth of that prison and then rid himself of the tarnish of his misspent life.

Beyond that, he had only one other goal, and it was less noble, but equally important to him: He wanted to discover the identity of whoever had twice tried to end his life. And then he wanted vengeance. Tony had the most to gain from his death, Jordan knew, but he couldn't bear to think about that yet. Not here. Not without proof. Tony had been like a brother to him.

«
^
»

A
lexandra awakened
feeling oddly refreshed after her awful night of tearful self-recriminations. The discovery of Jordan's treachery had destroyed her illusions, but as she slowly went about her morning routine of bathing and dressing, she began to realize that what she had learned last night had released her from the bonds of loyalty and devotion that had kept her tied to his memory for over a year.

She was free of Jordan Townsende now. A faint, wry smile touched her lips as she sat down before the dressing table and began brushing her long, heavy hair. How funny it was that, in trying to become "worthy" of being Jordan's wife, she had turned herself into a rigidly prim and proper female who would have suited a cleric, but never, ever the wife of a scandalous, unprincipled rake. Which was really rather funny, she thought wryly, because her true nature was any thing but rigid and starched.

She had always done that, Alexandra realized suddenly; she had always tried to be what those she loved wanted her to be: For her father, she had been more like a son than a daughter; for her mother, she had become the parent, rather than the child; for Jordan, she had become… a complete antidote.

However, from this day forward, all that was going to change. For better or for worse, Alexandra Lawrence Townsende was going to enjoy herself.

In order to do that, however, she first needed to eradicate the reputation for hauteur and boundless idiocy she had unwittingly earned amongst the
haute ton
. Since Sir Roderick Carstairs was her most vocal, and most influential, detractor, he was obviously the best place to start. Anthony intended to speak to him this morning, but perhaps she could say or do something to change his opinion of her while he was here.

While she was contemplating that problem, she suddenly remembered the last part of her conversation with Melanie Camden last night. Lady Camden had said her friends thought Alexandra was "
the veriest greenhead ever to appear at a London ball,
" so she had obviously known Alexandra was persona non grata amongst the
ton
, yet she had still wanted to befriend her. She had, in fact, been hinting at the same thing Tony had said later. The brush stilled in Alexandra's hand, and a surprised smile lit her face. Perhaps she was going to have a true friend in London, after all.

Feeling more lighthearted than she had in over a year, she pinned her heavy hair atop her head and hurriedly pulled on a pair of the tight breeches and one of the shirts she wore each morning when she and Tony practiced their fencing. Snatching her rapier from the closet and picking up her face mask, she walked from the room, humming a cheerful tune, her steps light and buoyantly carefree.

Tony was standing alone in the center of the deserted ballroom where they practiced each, morning, idly tapping the tip of his rapier against the sole of his boot. He turned at the sound of her brisk footsteps upon the polished floor, his face mirroring his relief at her appearance. "I wasn't certain you'd feel up to this, after last night…"