Midnight Scandals (31 page)

R
ALSTON COULD ALMOST HEAR
the pounding of his heart in his ears.

She ran toward him, stopping bare inches away, her breaths audibly uneven in the quiet country twilight. Soon it would be too dark to make out her features, but for now her eyes shone with a wild, almost ferocious light. “Mr. Fitzwilliam, are you married?”

He blinked. “No, I am not.”

“Are you promised to anyone, explicitly or implicitly?”

“No.”

She exhaled, as if in relief, only to tense again the next moment. He tensed too, a long breath held. He could not predict in what direction her questions were headed. Or perhaps he could and he was not quite ready for it yet.

She looked down. In the last remaining rays of the day, her lashes cast shadows over her cheeks. She licked her lips. And suddenly he thought of their kiss, the heat and urgency of it, the willingness of her body against his.

“You said I was welcome to call you Fitz, Mr. Fitzwilliam,” she said, her gaze somewhere to the left of him. “I can’t do any such thing, unless—unless you agree to pass for him.”

Somehow he managed not to exclaim aloud, though shock jolted through him. “Do I look that much like him?”

“The resemblance is uncanny, except for your coloring and your voice. If you remain silent and stay away from strong light, it would require no effort at all for me to believe that you are him.”

“I see,” he said slowly.

He’d expected something, but this was far beyond what he could have imagined.

She still did not look at him directly. “If you are willing to assume the role, then come back here at ten o’clock. I’ll leave the front door unlocked. I’m sure you can find your way to my room.”

Had she been a different woman, had the occasion been trivial and frivolous, he might have agreed, in exchange for a new, interesting experience. But reducing himself to a jointed dummy for her to pose and fondle when he wished to… He didn’t know exactly what he wanted, but it was not becoming a mindless substitution.

“If you are against the idea”—her voice caught—“you have but to walk away and I will never trouble you again. If not, you have also but to walk away—and dismiss the hansom cab on your way out. I’ve already paid the cabbie for the wait.”

Ralston could just see the very rear of the hansom cab from where he stood. He should bow, walk out of the gate, and go home, leaving her to deal with the cabbie and her mad desires.

And never see her again.

Silence escalated. Her fingers clasped tightly together. She stole a peek at him, then glanced away just as quickly, almost as if she could not bear the sight of him.

The cabbie’s horse snorted. A breeze rustled the pine needles overhead. Somewhere deeper in the gardens, a bird took flight, the flapping of its wings startling her.

“Before I can consider your request, Mrs. Englewood,” he heard himself say, “I need to ask you a few questions in return.”

M
R.
F
ITZWILLIAM’S FIRST QUESTION
Isabelle could guess. “Fitz is the man I would have married, had he not inherited a bankrupt earldom that required him to marry an heiress instead.”

His brow lifted slightly. “You speak of Earl Fitzhugh?”

The dissonance of Fitz’s face and another man’s voice still flummoxed her, even more so when that voice brought up his name. “Do you know him?”

“Not personally. But I’d heard talk—his seat is not that far from here.”

Doyle’s Grange’s proximity to Henley Park, Fitz’s estate, had been one of the reasons she’d chosen the place.

“It must have been a number of years since Lord Fitzhugh married his heiress,” Mr. Fitzwilliam went on. “Does it still matter so much to you?”

She took a deep breath to steady herself. “I came back from India not long ago. Fitz and his wife had always lived in a platonic marriage. So when he and I met again, for the first time in eight years, we decided that we would pick up our old dreams where they had fallen apart.”

How she missed those first sweet moments of their reunion, when everything—the sun, the moon, entire constellations—had appeared not only possible, plausible, or probable, but absolutely, staggeringly certain.

Ironclad.

But soon Fitz’s conviction had begun to waver. He never said anything to the effect, but she’d sensed, increasingly, that his mind was not so much on her as on the girl he’d married most unwillingly eight years ago. During Isabelle’s long absence, he and his wife had grown close—much too close.

It was stupid to sign the lease for Doyle’s Grange without first having his firm agreement, but as Isabelle’s vision of happiness slid from her grasp, she’d needed to do something. And securing the house had felt like a solid something.

She wanted desperately to believe that Fitz would be utterly charmed by the rhododendron hedge, the gate with its whimsical wrought-iron carvings, and the garden full of blooming pinks and delphiniums. And when he roamed the bright and comfortable rooms of the house, he would instantly feel at home—the home they would have made together, had life not intervened eight years ago.

But as he walked through Doyle’s Grange this morning, he had regarded the property not with the dreaminess of a man about to embark on a new chapter in life, but with the solemn ruefulness of one coming to the conclusion that he had been reading the wrong book altogether.

Can you picture yourself here?
she’d asked, holding on to one last shred of hope.

I’m sorry, Isabelle, but I picture myself elsewhere,
he had answered gently, but his words had been daggers in her lungs.

The corners of her lips had quivered.
You mean you’d like to look at a different house?

No, I picture myself at Henley Park.

Henley Park was the estate he had inherited, the albatross around his neck that had destroyed their happiness.
That hovel?
Her voice had risen with her despair.
I never told you but I went to see it before you married. It was a horrible place.

It was. But it isn’t anymore.

He’d taken her to see Henley Park, an undeniably beautiful place, radiant with hope and vibrancy. They’d spoken not a word on the state of his marriage, but Isabelle had felt all too clearly the devotion and nurturing that had been imprinted upon every square inch of the soil.

She could have made a scene. She could have demanded, with a tantrum to end all tantrums, that he honor his promise to her. Instead, she’d wished him well through her tears and bid him goodbye, too proud to debase herself when she had been told that she was no longer needed.

She forced herself to speak past the raw pain in her heart, to finish answering Mr. Fitzwilliam’s question. “Until this morning, I had believed—and hoped—that Fitz and I would indeed put those dreams to fulfillment. So yes, he still matters.”

And he would always, always matter.

Mr. Fitzwilliam was silent and still. She could no longer distinguish his individual features in the encroaching darkness. He was but a silhouette of a man, upon whom she could project all her starkest needs.

He bowed and walked away.

H
E HAD DONE AS SHE’D SPECIFIED
, leaving without a word to make his decision known to her by dismissing the cabbie. Or not.

But already she felt rejected. And with it, a sense of utter incredulity.

What had come over her?

He might have been forward, but not mad. She, on the other hand, had proved herself completely barmy. He would take himself home without a backward glance, revisiting her antics only to amuse his gentlemen friends the next time they were deep in their cups.

Slowly she made her way back into the house, her legs heavy, her heart heavier, her head spinning with mortification.

In the upstairs sitting room, she lit the lamp and located her great-great-great-grandmother’s miniature portrait. Two days ago, she’d come through the house to make sure everything was perfect and to set the portrait on the mantel of the sitting room. Great-Gran Cumberland had also been an Isabelle, a woman both terribly wild and terribly lucky. Among her descendants, it was said, in every generation there would be a girl as wild and as lucky as she.

Isabelle had always hoped she would be that girl of her generation. But while she’d had wildness aplenty in her younger days, luck had been elusive. But that, she was promised, would change once her mother’s cousin, Mrs. Tinsdale, passed down to her Great-Gran Cumberland’s miniature portrait, as reliable a talisman against the woes of fortune as anything the family had known in a century. Why, on the day Mrs. Tinsdale received the portrait, the physicians had advised her to make funeral arrangements for both her sons. But within a week, they’d miraculously recovered and went on to produce a total of nine grandchildren for Mrs. Tinsdale.

But the talisman had not proved effective for Isabelle. And in coming back for it—she’d already boarded a train that would take her from London to her sister’s place in Aberdeen, Scotland when she remembered that she’d left it behind at Doyle’s Grange—she’d only added humiliation to her heartache.

Had she been younger she might have thrown the miniature portrait into a fire. But this older, sadder Isabelle wrapped it carefully and put it into her satchel. It might yet change someone else’s luck someday, when the woman most needed it.

And now there was nothing else left to do in this house. It was time to take herself to the hansom cab, then onto the next train going back to London. In the morning she would start for Aberdeen, where her children were having a riotous good time with their cousins. Perhaps in time, some of their fresh joy in life would rub off a little on her.

She wiped the tears that gathered anew at the corners of her eyes, lifted the satchel—and stopped before she’d taken a single step.

The sound of a carriage moving.

There was no other carriage within hearing range except her hansom cab.

She rushed to the window and threw it open. In the light of its own lantern, the hansom cab rolled away, picking up speed as it went.

Mr. Fitzwilliam would be calling at ten o’clock.

For a long minute she couldn’t breathe, let alone move. Then it occurred to her she needed to get ready. She lugged the satchel to the bedroom she’d have shared with Fitz and pawed frantically through its contents, while having not the least idea what she might be looking for.

After a while, it dawned on her that she was about to embark on her first ever affair. With a man she’d spoken to for all of five minutes, whose Christian name she did not even know.

She gave a wild little laugh, smacked her hand against her forehead, and went on with turning her satchel inside out.

Chapter Three

T
HE LAST TIME
R
ALSTON
approached a lady’s house at night, feeling as if he had been turned upside down, he had been twenty-one. That, too, had been an illicit visit: He’d climbed up to her window and knocked, hoping she was alone.

From time to time he still saw her face in his dreams, her smile wide with surprise and pleasure. They’d giggled madly—and kept telling each other to shush while laughing. It was a wonder he hadn’t lost his grip and plummeted into the boxwood hedge below.