The Luckiest Lady In London (10 page)

“It’s worth abducting you from Lady Balfour’s drawing room, before a full crowd of onlookers, just to hear that.”

Dear God, Lady Balfour and all her friends. “Please tell me that wasn’t what you came for.”

“Of course not. I came to tell you that I have decided to rescind my offer. The idea has run its course—and expired.”

The contents of her skull imploded. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t breathe.

He wasn’t a good man and she hadn’t cared. She was willing to overlook any number of staggering faults, as long as he felt at least something of what she felt for him.

When he had been toying with her all along.

As if from a great distance away, she heard herself say, “You might as well, I suppose. I never would have cheapened myself by accepting that particular offer.”

It was a lie. She would have hated to become his mistress—because it would mark the beginning of the end—but she had never, at any point, eliminated the choice from consideration.

“You don’t look as righteously vindicated as you ought to,” he pointed out, his voice insidiously soft, insidiously close.

“Rest assured my immortal soul is pleased. It’s only my vanity that is crushed.”

And her pathetic heart.

“My poor, darling Louisa,” he murmured, the evil, evil man.

“It is still very ill done of you to come here and single me out, just to tell me you’ve thought better of your nefarious plans. What am I supposed to tell Lady Balfour in”—she glanced at the clock—“precisely forty-five seconds?”

And once those forty-five seconds flew by, once he walked out Lady Balfour’s door, she might not ever see him again. Who else would like her for her scheming ways? Who else would applaud her for thinking of herself? And who else would ask her about the telescope she had loved and lost?

He touched her face—but to her horror, she realized he was only wiping away her tears.

“You may tell Lady Balfour that in exactly three weeks, you will be married.”

She stared at him through the blur of her tears. “To whom?”

He only looked at her as if she were a very slow child who couldn’t grasp that one plus one equaled two.

“I don’t understand,” she said, though understanding was beginning to penetrate her woolly brain.

“What is there to understand? I have made you an offer of marriage. Will you take it, or must I rescind that offer, too?”

Suddenly she felt as if she’d drunk an entire gallon of coffee. Her fingertips shook. “Of course I will take it—I came to London to marry the largest fortune I could find, and there is none available larger than yours. But why would you marry
me
?”

“Because young ladies who confess to pornographic reveries ought to be rewarded with riches beyond their dreams?”

But that made no sense at all. “I don’t—”

“Our ten minutes are up,” he said, buttoning her blouse and wiping away the rest of her tears, his fingers sure and warm. “I will not allow any eclipsed second to besmirch my sterling reputation. Time for us to return to the drawing room, Louisa.”

He was already turning away when she gripped his hand.

Kiss me. Shouldn’t you at least kiss me when you propose to me?

But when she opened her mouth, out came, “I still want my house and my thousand pounds a year—for the duration of my natural life. And I want those conditions written into the marriage settlement.”

He tilted his head. She could not tell whether he was vexed or amused. “You do?”

She gathered her courage. “If something seems too good to be true, then it probably is. For all I know, you are secretly readying your solicitors for an annulment as soon as you’ve tired of me.”

“
Such
a cynic.”

“Better be unromantic than thoroughly used and still poor.”

He took her chin in hand. “And if I refuse?”

“Then I will tell Lady Balfour that I turned down your proposal.”

She could scarcely believe it, but she was extorting the most eligible bachelor in London.

“I will give you a house and five hundred a year,” he countered.

Her heart was in her throat. “I won’t marry you for a penny less than eight hundred. And it had better be a house with at least twenty rooms.”

His fingers cupped her cheek. The pad of his thumb rubbed against her lips. His gaze was cool and severe, and she was suddenly in a panic.

No, no, it’s quite all right. I will marry you for five hundred a year and a hovel. In fact, take my mother’s pearl brooch. Take my great-aunt Imogene’s jet pin. And you can also have the emergency money I’ve hidden away at home, all eleven pounds and eight shillings of it
.

He smiled. “You will pay for this. You know that, right?”

The way he looked at her, so much wickedness, delight, and
camaraderie
. If she hadn’t been born with the constitution of a horse, she would have fainted from both relief and a tsunamic surge of sheer happiness.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”

A thousand yeses.

L
ouisa’s life changed from the moment Lord Wrenworth declared to a roomful of breathless ladies that Miss Cantwell had consented to become his wife.

Within the crisp, freshly ironed pages of the next day’s
Times
, she found the engagement announced with all due pride and gravity. An hour later, an enormous bouquet of pink-tinged white orchids arrived at the house, courtesy of her husband-to-be. At noon, more evidence of his regard, a magnificent diamond ring, made its dramatic appearance, sending Lady Balfour into a swoon of ecstasy.

“What did I tell you, Louisa?
What did I tell you?
”

Notes of congratulations snowed upon the house, along with invitations to every event taking place from then to the end of the Season. Louisa spent two entire days answering the well-wishers. When she went on calls with Lady Balfour, amidst many an envious and sometimes incredulous look, much fuss was made of her.

The luckiest lady in London.

Louisa herself was no less staggered than any of her well-wishers. She giggled when she was alone. She gaped at her ring whenever she caught sight of it. Sometimes, as she lay in bed at night, she pummeled her mattress with both hands and feet, as gleeful and irrepressible as a child about to go on her first holiday.

But other times, her dumbfoundedness took a more sober turn. Clearly his proposal took place, but with each passing day it made less sense. A mistress was a temporary feature in a man’s life, a passing fancy to be discarded or replaced anytime he so chose. A wife, on the other hand, was a permanent installation, almost as irrevocable as a mother.

What could possibly have induced him to make such a decision? She had a healthy regard for herself, but even if she esteemed herself ten times as much, she still couldn’t comprehend what it was about her that had proved irresistible to a man who could have had any woman.

The tentative explanation she cobbled together was a discomfiting one. He enjoyed wielding power over her—almost from the very beginning, he had intentionally set out to disrupt and destabilize. She’d had to fight back for every inch of footing she could command, so that she was not entirely at his mercy.

It was possible that even with her resistance, he’d come to the conclusion that he would never hold greater sway over a woman. Or perhaps it was precisely her resistance that he relished, that in spite of it he could still prevail over her as much as he did.

She often thought back to the moment their engagement first became reality, that flash of euphoric happiness that he liked and wanted her enough to pledge his name and all the privilege that came with it. But the fact remained that she could trust him no more now that he was her fiancé than when he had been merely a devious and amoral would-be lover.

When they were married, she would not try to deny his dominance in the bridal bower—in that particular arena he would probably always render her breathless and helpless. But that was the only weakness she would ever admit, lust of the body. Her mind would remain her own. And her demented and slightly shameful love she would carry as a secret to her grave.

It was the only path through the dangerous and, someday, very possibly heartbreaking terrain of her marriage.

L
ouisa’s epic success brought her family to London. Their departure from home was delayed two days by Frederica’s continued refusal to leave her room. Frantic telegrams arrived for Louisa, who cabled back,
Tell Frederica Lord Wrenworth has the means and the connections to make her skin marble smooth again
.

Whether anything in the world could accomplish what she promised was immaterial. At twenty-seven Frederica was still a head-turningly beautiful woman—her problem had far less to do with dermatology than with perception.

“Your task, when they arrive, is to make her feel as lovely as the first star in the sky,” she told Lord Wrenworth.

It was the first time they had seen each other since the day of their engagement—she’d been quite buried by the work that came with mounting a wedding, in three weeks, of the magnitude and splendor required by his station in life.

“What?” he mock-exclaimed. “I am out a twenty-room house plus eight hundred pounds a year.
And
I have to play the swain to the sister-in-law, too?”

He looked both commanding and delicious standing by the window of Lady Balfour’s drawing room, bathed in the light of the afternoon. She was proud one moment, covetous the next, and then fearful the moment after that. It would
always be like this, wouldn’t it, being the wife of a man she loved but couldn’t trust, whose true motives were as murky as the bottom of the sea?

“It will save you—well, me, actually—money on milk baths and exotic emollients later.”

“And why would I want to save you money?” He rounded to the side of her padded chair and looked down at her. “Wouldn’t I prefer it if you had to spend it all and come begging for more?”

She stared at his lips. He had not kissed her, ever. She would like him to, but she refused to ask. She even held back from reaching out and touching the hand he braced on the back of the chair. It was one thing to try to undermine his mastery of the situation with unwholesome speech and action, quite another to betray heartfelt desires that only further strengthened his hand.

“I couldn’t spend eight hundred pounds a year if I tried.”

“Don’t let anyone hear you speak like that. My reputation will never recover if it is known that I married a woman who can make do with eight hundred pounds a year. Besides, what will I have to complain about at my club if my wife isn’t suitably spendthrift?”

My wife
. A wife could be the object of unabashed adoration or simply another nuisance in a man’s life. Where would she fall along that continuum? And would his, if not black, then at least darkish grey heart ever be hers?

She folded her hands together primly. “Does no one complain about their wives being too insatiable in bed?”

His gaze swept her entire person. Her skin tingled. He wanted to do wicked things to her—it was the reaction she had hoped to provoke—but he touched her nowhere, not even the fabric of her enormous sleeves.

He took a seat opposite hers, his long legs taking up most
of the space between them. “Are you planning on being an overly enthusiastic wife?”

The way he studied her both absorbed and unsettled her. “Would you like me to be?”

“I am much more interested in the wife you cannot help being,” he said, the firm last word on the subject.

He wanted to strip her bare in every way. Her naked body was only the beginning. From there, her undisguised thoughts. At last, her unhidden heart.

She took a sip of her tea, her fingers tight around the handle of the cup. “So . . . will you promise to shamelessly flatter Frederica?”

T
wo days later, as Lord Wrenworth strolled into Lady Balfour’s drawing room to meet Louisa’s family, there was a reverent collective intake of breath, as if the Cantwell women were a group of mortals who had accidentally stumbled into the presence of Apollo himself.

Louisa, too, felt as if she were seeing him again for the very first time, her eyes blurring with the potency of his physical perfection.

You, sir, are a scoundrel
.

As if he’d heard her thought, he glanced her way. Their gazes held, a pair of miscreants recognizing each other in a roomful of upstanding people.

It lasted only a moment, but the sweetness of that secret communion lingered: a joy that was also an ache in her heart. They were two of a kind—she wished she wouldn’t need to always guard herself from him.

“May I present his lordship the Marquess of Wrenworth?” said Lady Balfour, still giddy from having pulled off the most spectacular match—or mismatch, as Louisa sometimes
thought of it—in years. “Sir, my dear cousin Mrs. Cantwell, Miss Julia, Miss Matilda, Miss Cecilia, and Miss Cantwell.”

Frederica, addressed as Miss Cantwell, as she was the eldest, kept her head lowered.

Lord Wrenworth approached her chair. She still sat with her head down.

Much to the surprise of everyone present, he lowered himself to one knee, so as to be level with her. Flustered, she turned her entire body to one side. He studied the angle she presented him, then calmly rounded to her other side.

Lady Balfour and Mrs. Cantwell both glanced toward Louisa, who could only shake her head to show that she had no idea what he was doing.

He straightened. “I understand you have been mourning the loss of your beauty for years, Miss Cantwell. What I do not understand is why your family has allowed such an act of rampant narcissism.”

Frederica looked up in shock.

“The only imperfections I see are a few shallow pockmarks on your right cheek. I would never have permitted any sister of mine to brood over such minor blemishes for the better part of a decade.

“Had you come for a London Season, you would not have dislodged Mrs. Townsend from her perch as the most beautiful woman in London. You might not even have disturbed Miss Bessler’s place third on that list. But make no mistake, you would have been mentioned in the same breath as those women. Instead, you have wasted your youth grieving for a gross misfortune that never took place: You are perhaps five percent less lovely than you would have been without the pockmarks, not fifty percent.

“Miss Louisa asked me to compliment you, but I shall not, not when you can go out and garner hundreds of them on your own with minimum effort. And if you will not, then there is
nothing anyone can do for you—the matter is not with your face, but your head.”

Without waiting for a response, he moved on. “My dear Miss Matilda, did you have a pleasant trip?”

I
f anything, Louisa had expected a charm offensive—and a charm offensive this was not. He acted as if he’d never encountered such a ridiculous thing as Frederica considering her looks ruined.

It
was
ridiculous, except Frederica refused to believe her family when they tried to convince her otherwise, certain that her mother and sisters were lying out of love—or pity. But Lord Wrenworth’s simple, almost brusque repudiation of the truth she’d long held to be self-evident had a far more dramatic effect on her. By the time he was saying his good-byes, Louisa caught Frederica looking surreptitiously at herself in the mirror hanging over the fireplace—when she’d studiously avoided any reflective surfaces for years upon years.

She was not the only one who noticed.

“Did you see that?” asked Cecilia, as soon as Frederica and Lord Wrenworth were both out of earshot.

“I saw that!” Mrs. Cantwell exclaimed. “Think of the wonderful match she can still make for herself, if only she would go out and let herself be seen. There is bound to be a rich widower somewhere who would be thrilled to marry her.”

“Now, why didn’t we talk to Frederica like that earlier?” said Cecilia.

“We did,” Matilda pointed out. “We talked ourselves blue in the face. We said everything Lord Wrenworth said—we just didn’t say it the way he did.”

Lady Balfour nodded authoritatively. “And the way he said it made all the difference.”

Mrs. Cantwell turned toward Louisa. “I hear they call you
the luckiest lady in London, my dear. I think you must be the luckiest lady in all of Britain.”

That same general sentiment prevailed. Matilda, with whom Louisa shared a room at home, was the only one to say, before they went to sleep that night, “I know everyone else is saying how lucky you are, Louisa, but I think he is the lucky one. Just think how much Mr. Charles will envy him in having you for a wife.”

Louisa reached over and hugged this most beloved sister. “Thank you, my dear.”

“I hope you aren’t only marrying him because we need the money,” said Matilda. “You do like him, don’t you?”

Louisa had never asked herself that question before. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending how one looked at it—the answer was all too obvious. She did like him, his villainous ways included. In fact, his villainous ways might be the very reason she liked him so much, this darkly gleeful secret that he shared only with her.

“Not only do I like him,” she answered, “I would have volunteered to be his mistress if I couldn’t be his wife.”

That sent Matilda into a fit of giggling. She hugged Louisa back. “I’m so glad to hear that. I am sure you will make him very happy, and I hope he will do the same for you.”

Louisa had her doubts. She had no idea what made her fiancé happy or otherwise. Nor did she know how she would handle herself should the day come when he was no longer excited by the prospect of sleeping with her—when he would go on to bed the next woman who titillated him.

His heart in the palm of her hand might—
might
—act as insurance against this infelicitous eventuality. But where was the path to his heart? Did he have great trolls guarding it? Perhaps a fire-spewing dragon, chained before the castle gate?

Assuming, that was, The Ideal Gentleman had a heart at all.

I
’m in your debt, sir,” Louisa told Lord Wrenworth the next time she saw him.

A week had flown by since the day he was presented to her family. During that time, Frederica made a quick appearance at the afternoon tea party Lady Balfour had hosted to welcome the Cantwell ladies to London—
and
she’d gone to the dressmaker’s in an open carriage, wearing only a veiled hat that didn’t do much to hide her face at all.

“That is terrible. You will only ever be able to pay me with my own money,” he said as he handed her up into his carriage. It was pouring again. Since they were now affianced, however, he was allowed to fetch her from the bookshop on his own. “But joking aside, do you mean to tell me that my words had some effect on your sister?”

“Yes. She now has a mirror permanently attached to her right hand and studies herself constantly.”

“Sounds like symptoms of a mental disorder.”

With his walking stick, he knocked on the ceiling of the carriage to signal the coachman that they were ready to go. Louisa had not seen him with that particular accessory since they were last in the town coach together, before his proposal. She couldn’t stop herself from staring a moment at its ebony handle.