Lady Maggie's Secret Scandal (42 page)

“Begone, shoo, be off with you. Your sister and I need privacy.”

Bridget’s lips curved up in a smile that presaged heart-stopping beauty, and then—Ben was hard put not to smile right back—she winked at him and flounced out of the room.

“I didn’t know you were her guardian.” Maggie’s tone was considering, which was better than accusatory. Ben appropriated a seat on the end of the sofa closest to her and chose his words carefully.

In an effort not to rush his fences, he did not take her hand.

“I am hoping such an arrangement is more consistent with your wishes.”

She turned to gaze out the damned window. “It will spare Their Graces a legal connection with yet another person of dubious origins, and this one not even related to His Grace.”

“How are you feeling, Maggie?”

She offered him a small smile. “A little fatigued, to be honest. Events lately have been exciting.”

And she hadn’t gotten her courses. Ben had conferred with both Mrs. Danforth and Her Grace, and while he wanted to simply announce his impending paternity to the mother of his child—the drowsy, sometimes light-headed, occasionally queasy mother of his child—he suspected Maggie herself might not yet understand her condition.

“Will you walk with me, my dear?”

“I thought you wanted privacy.”

“I do want privacy, but with you, I also want to walk in the sunshine, Maggie.” She’d given him that—gotten him over the damned shadows, given him the sun.

He assisted her to her feet and did not inspect her too closely when she paused for a minute as if testing her balance. She remained silent while they wended their way through the house, past unsmiling footmen and enormous bouquets of flowers, through silent hallways scented with beeswax and lemon oil.

The silence struck Ben as peaceful, though he suspected it weighed on Maggie. He waited until they were outside, where the air was redolent of the gardens and full of the sounds of a pretty day—the distant clip-clop of traffic passing by, the warbling of birds, the hum of insects.

“You were thinking of going to Italy with Bridget?”

She nodded but had the grace to look chagrined. “You heard us. I do not trust Cecily to leave you in peace.”

“Hmm. And if Cecily were not a factor?”

“May I at least suffer this interrogation sitting down?” A spark of her old spirit crackled through her words.

“Of course.” He led her to a bench behind a convenient privet hedge and resisted mightily the urge to plead his case with kisses and caresses. He’d spoken the truth earlier—between him and Maggie, the truth in all its forms was going to have to serve. The kisses were honest, but they weren’t enough to build a marriage on such as Maggie’s parents enjoyed.

And he wanted nothing less for himself,
or
for
her
.

When they were side-by-side on a bench in a quiet little scent garden, Ben did allow himself to take Maggie’s hand. “Italy, Maggie?”

She did not withdraw her hand—and she still sported his ring.

“Italy or even France, given Bridget’s facility with the language. I want peace, Benjamin, for myself, for her, but also for you and Their Graces. There has been drama enough, and I know Cecily. I get some of my determination from her, my preoccupation with money, my unwillingness to trust.”

“And if I told you she’s right now on a ship headed for Baltimore, would you say you’d gotten this sudden need to travel from her?”

She frowned as if trying to place it on the map. “Baltimore?”

“I have a proposal for you to consider, Maggie Windham, not a proposal of marriage—that offer is still quite valid—but one regarding your future.”

“I suppose I must listen.”

She smoothed her skirts with one hand, the picture of a lady at her leisure. But the other hand, the one wearing Ben’s ring, was clutching his fingers more tightly than she likely realized.

“You can be like Cecily—independent, insecure all your days, leaning on nothing and nobody, seeing all in your path as either people out to exploit you or people you can exploit. She gave birth to you, and it’s reasonable to think you might share some of her characteristics.”

This did not sit well with Maggie. Ben knew it in the way her luscious mouth flattened and her gorgeous eyes filled with distaste. “Go on.”

“Or you can decide that your heritage comes far more from your ducal family. You are as closely related to Moreland as you are to Cecily, and he and his duchess had the raising of you. For the past quarter century you’ve been a Windham, Maggie, and I think that a far more convincing legacy.”

She blinked and stared hard at a bed of lily of the valley just starting to bloom across from them. “I kept secrets from my family, from both of my families. Sometimes it felt like nobody knew me—really knew me—at all, as if I were a living shade. It was the best I could do, though.”

The tension inside Ben relaxed just a fraction to hear her admit this. She’d done the best she could, alone, with the very few weapons and only the assets a single lady could wield, and without allies to speak of.

He withdrew a sheaf of papers from an inside pocket. “These are yours.”

She frowned and took them from his hand. “What are they?”

“Letters from Bridget to you. I haven’t read them, but I assume they are what Cecily had stolen from your reticule, and I’m all but certain she directed Bridget to sign them ‘your loving little sister’ or something equally inconvenient.”

Maggie bent over the letters a little, just a small shift in her spine and a downward tipping of her chin, as if absorbing a blow. “Thank you for these, but how did you acquire them?”

“I parlayed with Cecily, and we reached an agreement.”

“Oh, Benjamin. You cannot trust that woman. She’ll slink away for a time—she left me in peace for a time—and then she’ll strike when you least expect it. She’s devious, she’s underhanded, she’s—”

He put two fingers over her lips. “She’s gone. I understand devious and underhanded behavior, Maggie. I very nearly consigned myself to a purgatory filled with it until you gave me a choice.”

“Cecily will take those choices away.” Her grip on Ben’s hand was nearly painful, and in her voice he heard a wealth of unshed tears.

“Cecily will never set foot on British soil again, my love. If she does, I will have her committed for the unfortunate loss of reason often resulting from a life dedicated too entirely to vice for too long.”

He did not want to speak the word “syphilis” aloud, but with a mad king on the throne and many suspecting the affliction had a venereal origin, Maggie would easily make the connection.

She frowned at their joined hands. “I suspect she was losing her reason. Bridget has confirmed the same. She was obsessed and getting worse. All the moving about, the dresses appropriate only to a coquette.” She fell silent.

“You are not to pity her. She left with a bank draft adequate to sustain a modest lifestyle for years to come. Moreover, a few of the jewels in that cache of paste were real. If she’s smart, she can attach herself to some aging Colonial of means and live comfortably all the rest of her days.”

“Why some real jewels?”

“To ensure the contract was binding, but Westhaven wrote much of the description of the financial consideration in French. It lists jewelry, both genuine and for costume purposes. I did explain this to her.”

Maggie was staring hard at the lily of the valley again. “You should not have undertaken all of this, Benjamin. I love you for rescuing Bridget. I hate that you had to deal with Cecily so directly.”

This was a delicate moment, an important moment, and while Ben wanted to get down on his knees before his intended—the way he should have weeks ago—there was more he needed to say, more Maggie needed to hear.

“And yet you dealt with Cecily for years. Without any to aid you and for the sake of a girl you might have turned your back on, you took on that viper and did all that was necessary to protect Bridget, Their Graces, your siblings—some of whom were decorated cavalry, another was skilled in law, and yet
you
protected
them
. This is not how the daughter of a scheming courtesan acts, Maggie.”

She hunched over again, more tightly this time, and made a sound, a wretched, undignified sound, but Ben wasn’t finished. “It is the behavior of a woman who holds herself to ducal standards. The dukes of old led armies, Maggie, but you had only yourself, and yet you prevailed.”

She was shaking now, her eyes closed, her hand cutting off the circulation to Ben’s fingers, but he could not stop.

“I love you, Maggie
Windham
. I love your courage, I love your independence, I love your determination, and I want it for my own.” He paused and gathered his own courage. “I want—I pray—that our children take after their mother.”

The words took an instant to penetrate the emotion wracking the woman beside him, a silent, fraught moment during which Ben’s hopes and dreams, his very heart and soul hung suspended between the light of hope and the shadow of despair.

“Benjamin.” She pitched into him, right there in the sunshine, sobbing and clinging and bawling for all the world to see. “Hold me, please. Hold me and never let me go, not ever. Not for anything.”

He held her, but he did shift so he was on his knees before her, his arms wrapped around her while she shed more tears and clung for more long, lovely minutes as Ben fished for his handkerchief and thanked a merciful God for a woman brave enough to know when she was loved.

“I wanted to tell you.” Maggie was smiling now, and when he pulled back enough to appreciate that fact, she started toying with the hair at his nape.

“Tell me what?”

Her fingers went still. “You never miss a detail, Benjamin. Surely you knew when I nearly fainted at Lady Dandridge’s…?”

He rose and dusted off his knees, then resumed his place beside her—right smack beside her. “You’d been wandering in the rain for God knows how long, missing sleep, and likely doing without proper sustenance. If every woman who laced her stays too tightly were carrying, the population would shortly double.”

“Benjamin, we are going to have a baby. I should have told you this sooner, but I did not want you to feel trapped.”

She was back to smoothing her skirts and gripping his hand, suggesting she hadn’t composed herself quite as quickly as appearances might indicate.

“Maggie, do you feel trapped?” It was a sincere question, the sort of sincere question that kept a sincere man up late of a night and might cause him more than one pang in years to come.

“By the child? Of course not.”

Or it might not. “You want this child?”

“Gracious God, Benjamin. I spent years dealing with Cecily because Bridget was mine to love. I’ve protected my ducal family because they were mine to love. This child is mine to love, and you are mine to love. How could you think I’d feel otherwise?”

“We are going to have to watch this tendency of yours to protect all whom you love.”

She smiled a little sheepishly. “I want a big family, but we’re getting a rather late start on things.”

“Then we’ll just have to be diligent about it.”

His Maggie—his brave, independent, determined, and very loving Maggie—blushed.

And then he
had
to kiss her. He scooped her across his lap, planted his mouth on hers, and there before God, the birds, and probably the duke, the duchess, assorted siblings, and a few dozen servants spying from various windows, he kissed his future countess in the bright sunshine for all to see.

Coming October 2012

From Sourcebooks Casablanca

Sir Joseph Carrington acquired two boon companions after doing his part to rout the Corsican. Carrington was accounted by no one to be a stupid man, and he understood the comfort of the flask—his first source of consolation—to be a dubious variety of friendship.

His second more sanguine source of company was the Lady Ophelia, whose acquaintance Carrington had made shortly after mustering out. She, of the kind eyes and patient silences, had provided him much wise counsel and comfort, and that she consistently had litters of at least ten piglets both spring and autumn could only endear her to him further.

“I don’t see why you should be the one moping.” Sir Joseph scratched the place behind Lady Opie’s left ear that made her go calm and quiet beneath his hand. “You may remain here in the country, leading poor Roland on the mating dance while I must away to London.”

Where Sir Joseph would be the one being led on that same blighted dance. Thank God for the enthusiasm of local hunt. It preserved a man from at least a few weeks of the collective lunacy that was Polite Society as the Yuletide holidays approached.

“I’ll be back by Christmas, and perhaps this year Father Christmas will leave me a wife to take my own little dears in hand.”