Promise Me Tonight (19 page)

nothing of particular importance, yet filled with deliciously

juicy gossip—August 1795

J
ames resolutely clamped his mouth shut and followed

Lord Weston into the study.

“Sit,” he commanded, pointing to a chair.

James remained standing. “Before you break out the dueling pistols,” he said, “I would like to point out that I had nothing to do with this.”

Lord Weston raised one disbelieving eyebrow.

“All right, I was involved,” James admitted, “but it wasn’t anything I wanted.”

The eyebrow didn’t budge.

“Fine! You’re right. I wanted it. I wanted her.”

The eyebrow lowered to its normal position.

“But,” James added darkly, “I did not want to marry her.”

Lord Weston’s eyebrows drew together in a sharp frown. The sort of frown a man might wear when contemplating murder. A slow, painful murder.

“It was nothing to do with
her
,” James explained hastily. “I did not plan to marry. Anyone. Ever,” he clarified.

“And now?”

James sighed and sank down into a chair. “And now I have no choice. We will be married by special license as soon as possible.”

Long minutes passed in uneasy silence before Lord Weston finally snapped, “You needn’t sound quite so put upon. It may have escaped your notice, but there
are
some benefits for you in this arrangement.”

“Ah, yes, regaining my precious inheritance.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of your having
my daughter
for
your wife
,” was the growled response.

Lady Weston’s entrance into the room saved him from having to reply. “Well, this is a fine mess!” she huffed, disapproval radiating off her in nearly palpable waves.

James took a step backward, raising his hands in the air like a criminal. He supposed he
was
guilty. He had stolen the innocence of his best friend’s little sister. There was probably a special circle of hell reserved for people like him. Then again, perhaps “stolen” wasn’t the right word. Isabella had offered herself up to him freely. Actually, he would be damned if he wasn’t the injured party in this scenario. Something had been stolen from him, too—his bloody freedom.

Unfortunately, there was something about the situation that made him feel like a naughty schoolboy, which probably explained why he uttered the classic line used in the face of adult displeasure: “It’s not my fault.” As he said it, James glanced warily over at Lord Weston, who had seated himself at his desk, obviously content to let his wife run the show. Damnation, there went that bloody eyebrow again.

James wondered whether he looked equally supercilious when he did that.

Probably not.

Damn.

Lady Weston began to pace across the room. “Of all the impossible situations.” She turned and came back the other way. “I cannot believe—” She stopped right in front of James.
“What were you thinking?”

“Er,” James responded brilliantly.

“Oh, never mind. It is fairly obvious that neither you nor my daughter is capable of acting with any degree of intelligence.”

James refrained from pointing out that a man’s brain functioned only partly when he was inebriated, barely when he was asleep, and not at all when a naked female in his bed was thrown into the mix. Considering that her daughter was the naked female in question, he didn’t think it would go over too well. Still, he couldn’t let the insult pass entirely. “
I
was not the one who sneaked into someone else’s bedchamber,” he said defensively, then added again for good measure, “This was not my fault.”

Perhaps, James thought, if he said it enough times, he might be able to convince himself. As it was, the guilt was beginning to choke him. He couldn’t escape the fact that Isabella would never have come up with such a ridiculous scheme, let alone have acted on it, if he hadn’t introduced her to passion. He had shown her the spark that ignited between them; could he really blame her for seeking more, like a moth drawn irresistibly to the light?

Really, if there was anyone who should shoulder the blame in this debacle, it was his grandfather, who had manufactured the situation, treating people as pawns on a chessboard, to be moved and manipulated as he willed. Of course, at this point it was another game entirely. The die had been cast and there was no turning back.

As if she had read his thoughts, Lady Weston sighed and said, “It doesn’t matter who, if anyone, is at fault. What’s done is done. All we can do now is move forward and make the best of things.” She grimaced, and then gave James a wry smile. “That did not come out quite as I intended it. You know there is no one I should like better to have as a son-in-law, but . . .”

“We would have preferred that the wedding come before the bedding,” her husband finished dryly.

“Oliver!” Lady Weston gasped.

James developed a newfound appreciation for the rug beneath his feet.

“Well, it’s the truth, isn’t it?” he said.

James was relieved that the man seemed to have returned to his usual calm equilibrium.

“Ye-es,” she admitted reluctantly. “But you needn’t have put it quite so distastefully. Not that a hasty marriage can be seen as anything other than distasteful. Especially while James is in mourning. People are going to think the worst.”

“And they would be right,” her husband commented helpfully.

She glared at him. “What we need,” she continued, “is an unobjectionable reason for an immediate wedding.”

“What if one of them—James, for instance—were to suddenly become deathly ill?” Lord Weston suggested, cracking his knuckles.

There was an excited gleam in his eyes that made James worried. Very worried.

“No, that won’t work,” Lady Weston muttered.

James sighed with relief. Lord Weston, he noticed, was visibly disappointed. James frowned; his relationship with his future father-in-law was off to a decidedly rocky start.

“However,” Lady Weston went on, beginning to pace again, “if we let it be known that the Earl of Dunston’s dying wish was for Izzie and James to wed, surely no one would find fault with the immediacy of the affair.”

Even James had to admit sometimes telling the truth really was the best policy. He looked speculatively at Lady Weston, who had ousted her husband from behind the desk and was jotting things down on a piece of paper.

“Now that
that
is settled, when should we hold the wedding? I suppose it might be done in a fortnight. Hmmm, yes, three weeks would really be better,” she said to herself.

“I should prefer something sooner,” said James.

“But what about all of the arrangements? The attendants? And the flowers? And the dress? And the wedding breakfast?”

James stood and eyed her dispassionately. “I suppose that they, like the proposal, formal announcement, and engagement party, will fall under the category of things that never were,” he remarked.

“One week,” she offered. “It will be a challenge, to be sure, but I can do it in a week.”

“I am afraid that waiting a week will prove impossible,” James said, shaking his head.

“And why is that?” his future mother-in-law asked, her eyes narrowing in suspicion.

“Because,” James replied, “by this evening I plan to be on my way to London to obtain a special license from the archbishop. I shall return tomorrow, and we will be married the following morning. I plan to be gone from England entirely by the week’s end.”

He had to be. He couldn’t stay—not when he was going to be leg-shackled to temptation. He had to remove himself. Distance—as much as he could put between them—was the only thing that might keep him sane. Might save him.

“What about Isabella?” queried Lord Weston, though the resigned tone of his voice suggested he knew the answer.

James briefly closed his eyes, steeling himself. “Isabella will shortly be the Countess of Dunston. As such, she is mistress of several properties, including Sheffield Park, a London town house, a Scottish castle, and a sugar plantation in Jamaica. Wherever she chooses to reside, I am sure she will find some way in which to occupy herself.”

He strode over to the door as he said, in a voice that he hoped brooked no argument, “Now, if you will be so good as to excuse me, I have an archbishop to visit.”

James wrenched open the door. A split second and a startled yelp later, he was on his back on the floor, knocked over by his eavesdropping, soon-to-be wife. The scenario felt far too familiar and—his body began registering the nearness of soft female curves—far, far too enticing.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in your room?” scowled James, quickly moving Isabella off himself before his body betrayed him.

“This involves me. I have every right to know what is being said.” Her face was stubbornly set as she rose to her feet.

He got up as well. “I hope you heard all that you wanted,” he said, “because I was just leaving.” He started again for the door, not that he expected to make it through. Sure enough, he hadn’t taken three steps before—

“James, wait!” Isabella called out. “I have something I need to say to you.”

“Yes?”

“In private,” she clarified.

Her father snorted loudly. “If you think we are going to leave the two of you alone—”

“Hush, dear.” Lady Weston grabbed her husband’s arm and began hustling him out of the room. “I am certain the children have things they wish to say to each other.”

“But—”

“They
are
going to be married,” his wife reminded him.

“Very well,” he huffed as he was dragged out the door. “But this door is to remain unlocked at all times. And there is to be no touching, do you hear? And—”

The door closed, leaving him alone with Isabella, in a room that had somehow shrunk to the size of a broom closet. She took a step toward him. Make that a very small broom closet. She came another step closer. A very small and airless broom closet. And then she was standing right before him, so close that he ached to take her in his arms. Every inch of his flesh tingled with awareness; his skin felt taut and stretched, as if it were physically reaching out to her like a magnet to a lodestone.

He took a step backward and found he could breathe a little easier. “All right, what was it you wanted to speak to me about?”

She bit her lip.

“Look,” he said impatiently, “I don’t have time for this. Why don’t you think on it, and we can discuss it after—”

“Where are you going?”

“I already told you; I have to go see to the special license—”

“No,” Isabella interrupted. “Where are you
going
? You said you were leaving England.”

“I am.”

Before he knew it, she had closed the distance between them and taken his hands with her own. That contact, though ever so subtle, was ecstasy. And agony.

“I know—,” she started, staring down at their joined hands. “I know you didn’t want to get married because of your grandfather, but—”

“About that,” he began, needing to tell her the truth, the full truth.

“No, wait,” she said. “This is what I needed to say to you. Of course, I had always thought that someday I would have children, but I want you to know that it—it doesn’t matter to me. Well, it
does
matter, but you matter more. You don’t have to leave. I promise we won’t have children if that is truly your wish. Marriages are built on compromise, aren’t they?”

“This one certainly is,” James grumbled, dropping her hands. He began to pace around the room. “Isabella, my wishes clearly don’t factor into your plans. Don’t you realize you could already be pregnant?” he demanded, and then froze.

“Surely not,” Isabella said. A frown creased her brow as she looked down at her stomach, clearly perplexed.

“Given the night’s events, it’s entirely possible.” James felt sweat beginning to bead on his forehead.

“You mean . . . from what we did? I know that is how one loses one’s innocence, but . . .” Her blue eyes widened, and her mouth fell open in astonishment.

It dawned on him that, had it been a normal wedding, her mother would have explained the intimacies of the marriage bed. As it was, with the wedding night preceding the ceremony, there were apparently some large gaps in Isabella’s knowledge—gaps that were now up to him to fill in. Bloody hell.

“A woman gets pregnant from a man’s seed,” he explained.

“So when you . . . At the end . . .”

“Yes.”

“Ah.” Her eyes dropped to her stomach once more, her gaze filled with tenderness and awe, as her hand came up to rest reverently there.

James remembered his mother standing in just such a pose when she had been with child. They had all been so happy, so excited, and then . . . He was transported to the day of the funeral. The sky was the same dismal gray, and the ground in the graveyard was still laden with water, spongy beneath his feet, but nothing else was the same. He had revisited this scene any number of times in his mind, but he was always a boy, and his father always stood beside him.