Regency 09 - Redemption (11 page)

The blasted ball continued
on interminably. Dare finally grew weary of standing around,
waiting for Jenny to reappear again. She’d left the ballroom
several minutes ago, after what had appeared to be a heated
argument with her brother and sister.

He hadn’t liked the look on
her face. In his experience, when someone’s face took on that
particular cast, said person was teetering on the brink of total
breakdown.

And Jenny, sweet,
charismatic, effervescent Jenny, was lonely.

He turned
and walked in the direction she’d gone without really making the
conscious decision to do so. He kept an eye out for her
overprotective brother, not wanting to tangle with him, and another
out for his own brother, knowing, without a doubt, that Miles would
not
approve
.

After a few minutes of
searching, Dare finally found Jenny, huddled up on a broad settee
in what appeared to be an unused antechamber in the Riesley house.
Everything was under Holland covers. Jenny had thrown back the one
covering her perch.

Dare closed the door,
locking it against unwelcome intruders, and approached her much the
way one would a wounded deer.

He stood beside the sofa.
“Jenny-love,” he whispered. She looked up at him with such misery
that he gasped. “Oh, Jenny. What could possibly be so bad to
warrant such misery?”

A fresh torrent answered
his question and she buried her face in her folded arms, shoulders
shaking with the force of her sobs.

Dare could no longer keep
his distance. Jenny was hurting and that was something he wouldn’t
stand for.

He eased down beside her,
gently taking her in his arms. Smoothing his hands over her back,
he asked, “Tell me what it is, Jenny-love. I’ll make everything
better.”

She sniffled, lifted her
head slightly and accepted the handkerchief he held out to her.
After wiping her face—amazingly unmarked by her grief—she sniffled
again.

“Con says I mustn’t speak
with you,” she admitted after a long moment. “Gwen agrees. I have
not seen any evidence that you are unworthy of my…friendship. But
they wouldn’t listen. Con mentioned a girl you seduced and left but
I told him it was nonsense, that you would never do such a thing
and—” she broke off at the expression on his face.

“What?” Her pale brows
furrowed in confusion at his guilty silence. “Oh my. It’s true? You
seduced a gently bred girl and abandoned her? How could
you?”

Dare stared at her, unable
to allow her to place all the blame on him as everyone else had. He
opened his mouth to offer what miserable little defense he had but
she forestalled him.

Shaking her head, she
decided, “No, it is as I told Con. Nonsense. If you… granted her
your attentions, it was as much her fault as yours, I’m
sure.”

He stared at her, one black
brow lifted in utter astonishment. “You would trust me…just like
that? No explanation or defense on my part. Just your own belief
that I would never seduce someone who was innocent.”

Jenny offered a blinding
smile. “Of course. You may be maddening at times, even less than
gentlemanly at others, but you are not a scoundrel.”

In that moment, Dare was
quite sure he loved her. No one, not even his own twin, had ever
taken his part in the whole miserable debacle. No one had trusted
that there were circumstances that led to his behavior, not the
least of which happened to be the fact that Belinda Markwell had
honored half the county with her attentions and he had simply been
yet another to fall for her dubious charms. It was moot that she
had been only nineteen at the time.

“Thank you,” he told Jenny
now, from the bottom of his bitterly blackened heart.

It may not have actually
been true before, but it was now.

Dare glared at his
reflection. Seducer of innocents. Ruiner of reputations.

The devil
incarnate.

After being told that he
was honorable, what does he do? He seduces the one person who
actually believed he wasn’t like that.

He groaned. Memories of
last night, Jenny, and pale moonlight spilling over silken skin
coalesced in his mind, making him stumble blindly for a chair. How
could he be so bloody stupid? He couldn’t even blame drink, as he’d
not had one all night.

Raking a hand through his
sleep-mussed hair, he wondered bitterly if he had completely lost
his mind. Lady Genevieve Northwicke, beautiful, daughter-of-a-duke
Jenny, was no longer an innocent virgin eagerly awaiting her
husband’s induction into the mysteries of the marriage bed. Oh no.
She now knew exactly what would happen, with a few little extras
thrown in for good measure.

He had taken his time with
her, made her want him as he wanted her and when she had
breathlessly begged him to take her, he’d readily complied, not
even giving a thought to the fact that her family was only a few
hundred feet away, dancing in the ballroom.

And it had been everything
he could have dreamed. She was as passionate as he’d supposed,
giving as well as taking, making him ache just to recall her words
and actions. She’d excelled as a student, barely blushing at her
inquisitive queries that bordered on indecent.

And he’d thrived in
teaching her things he was sure she would probably never learn from
whatever prosy old bore she ended up marrying.

She should be pledging her
life to him, he thought with an inner snarl. But…

He really was the cad
everyone thought him. And the worst part was, he couldn’t marry
her.

No matter how desperately
he wanted to.

She deserved a man who
could give her the world. A man who wasn’t tied down by obligations
that took him away for months at a time. A man worthy of her and
her station.

A man who
wasn’t considered the black sheep of a family that had its
fair—
un
fair?—share
of balmy members.

And if he wasn’t there to
distract her, she would have her chance at a better man.

He
suppressed a growl at the thought of a
better
man touching her lily-white
skin, having the right to see her naked, bring her pleasure,
satisfy her every curious whim.

For the first time in his
life, Dare wished the past undone. Worse than that, he wished he
were Miles.

Rising, Dare dressed. His
movements were precise, done without thought, mechanical. In less
than an hour, he was packed.

Less than five minutes after that,
he was gone.

The Prestwich household rose just
after dawn as was their habit, to prepare the day’s bread and begin
the many other chores required to ensure the sufficient running of
a house.

It was a day like any other. Except
for the fact that when West scratched at Mr. Darius’s chamber, he
received no response.

It had become routine for the
butler to serve Dare in whatever capacity he could. The young man’s
search for a valet had not gone well and while West openly
disapproved of many of the young man’s activities and attitudes, he
also secretly liked Dare.

And so he stood outside the young
master’s door, a perplexed frown marring his normally rigid
countenance. He entered the chamber, an action he would never have
performed without permission had he not been so uneasy about the
preternatural silence.

He was actually less than surprised
when he saw the tangled bedclothes, empty wardrobe… and two letters
propped up on the washstand.

Bri sat up in bed, nibbling dry
toast and trying very hard to keep her stomach firmly in place. She
hadn’t had morning sickness with any of her other pregnancies; why
would she have it with this latest?

Annoyed, her command to enter was
terse when there came a scratching at her door. West entered,
holding two sheets of folded parchment in one hand.

“
My lady, these were left by Mr.
Darius.”

Bri’s eyebrows threatened to
disappear into her curly red hair. Reaching out a hand, she
demanded, “Where is he?”

“
I’m sure I don’t know, my
lady.”

Her ladyship scowled. “You know
everything, West. How could Dare’s precipitate flight get past
you?”

“
I’m sure I don’t
know.”

Lady Prestwich
shook her head at his evasive answer, opening the note
labeled
Bri
. She
quickly scanned the contents, swearing in such a way that even
West, who had heard some rather colorful language from his unusual
mistress, winced.

Without a thought to the
impropriety of reading someone else’s correspondence, Bri also read
the other note. Instead of swearing, her face went unnaturally
pale.

“
Dear God, how could he?” she
breathed.

She gasped suddenly, groping for
the edge of the bed. West, a little out of his element in the
lady’s bedchamber, nevertheless realized she was trying to get to
the chamberpot. He reached it before her and held it out as she
emptied the nonexistent contents of her stomach.

In that moment, seeing his beloved
mistress in such agony, West was quite sure he could have
cheerfully strangled Mr. Darius Prestwich.