The Stanhope Challenge - Regency Quartet - Four Regency Romances (23 page)

He grimaced at the mental image of his character. Swiping a hand through his hair, he turned away from her and glared out the window.

“My lord?” Rawley, his coachman, called down from his perch. The poor man must be soaked by now.

“Yes, Rawley! Drive home!” Jack called up through the din.

Jack heard the flick of the reins on his drays. Then he felt the jerk of the carriage as Rawley did as he was bid.

Emma reached over to clasp Jack’s hand, her eyes wide and gleaming with success. He had other ideas on that score.

“Is there not another man whom you wish to approach?”

“None. You are the perfect man.”

Jack snorted. “I doubt that, Miss Darling. No other woman has ever proposed to me.”

She became still as a mouse. “You cannot be serious.”

He surveyed the shock in her grey gaze. “Deadly so.”

“But you are sought after. Desired. Titled. Rich. Achingly handsome.”

“I thank you for the compliments. But my assets have not brought me anyone like you.”

“For myself, I am grateful they have not,” she said, looking regretful. Then she sneezed once more and blew her nose into his handkerchief. “Few other men have a reputation which could so decidedly ruin a woman’s.”

That, too, bit. Avoiding her gaze, he unbuttoned his coat, removed it and peeled her sopping wet cloak from her shoulders.

“I have insulted you,” she murmured with contrition. “I do apologize.”

“No need.” He pulled his heavy wool coat snug about her shivering frame, the sight of her dampened dress clinging to her solid little breasts inspiring more guilt for who and what he was. “Truth will be told.”

They sat in silence for a long minute while Emma fiddled with his handkerchief and he considered nothing except his jaded past.

“I do not expect you to care for me these three months. You may leave me alone. I am quite capable of entertaining myself so if I could but take up residence in one of your houses and—”

Even now she wanted little of him. So extraordinary for a woman to do so. Usually a woman forward enough to invite you to her bed wanted your name, your title, your purse and if they wanted to share your bed, well then, that came with a propriety that bored the living daylights out of him. “But you would need a divorce.”

“Yes. I doubt one may be granted an annulment these days if the marriage is consummated. And it must be for Trayne to renounce me. He is proud and even Daniel could not force him to take a woman to wife who had been…”

“Debauched?” Jack provided the word she acknowledged with a slow nod.

He crossed his arms. He was to be a debaucher.
Hunh.
And divorced! He’d never thought of himself as that, either. What an extraordinary evening. A proposal of marriage. An indecent offer to wed and bed a woman whom he had never met. Plus the knowledge that, if he accepted this bizarre bargain, he would be married, divorced and well paid for it all within three months’ time. He turned toward her, intrigued. Lovely, she was, though she did not wear her success with any hauteur. She had a humility to her demeanor that fascinated him for its novelty. That it also astonished him was unique. So much so that he admitted to himself he wanted to please her and pet her. That desire doubled as he discerned that her recent circumstances had worn her down to skin and bones, coupled with desperation that had brought her to him and to this pass. Marrying him could not only change her life immeasurably, but change her attitude, her health and her financial position.

But what would marrying her do to him?

Make him more of a rogue in the eyes of the
ton
?

He ran a finger over the seam of his lips. Did it matter if that were so?

He knew no woman he wished to take to wife. He had, at the moment, no lover, either. No plans for the next three months. Not if one counted an invitation to Adam’s and Felice’s supper parties once a month. Or his annual business meeting with his father in late March in the family seat in the Cotswolds. Surely, White’s and gambling did not figure prominently in any intelligent man’s engagement book. However, the compassion, the sympathy he felt for her, coupled with his extreme dislike of her stepfather and Trayne, propelled him to accept this final stipulation from her. At his fine ripe age of thirty-five he had no other pressing objections to such an insane proposition as marrying for three months. This indeed meant he was rather
louche
, didn’t it? Without purpose, plight or grand passion, he had no reason to deny her what she wished. Him. His name and his protection. For three months.

What harm could that cause, when the damage done to her was a thousand-fold more brutal than any divorce might bring her?

Afterward, he would live. Once the
ton
heard the true tale as they would, years from now, he might even be redeemed. He scoffed at the very notion. Redemption had never been a need of his. It was not now, either. If he did this, it was to help her, not raise up his own reputation in the eyes of others.

She watched him like a bird of prey, sharp-eyed as a starving child seeking succor.

Imagining himself a married man was a singular pastime. The family curse had always ruled out any prudent consideration of a union with any woman, young, old, ugly, infirm. But this lady had him debating the possibility with more smiles and frowns than ever before.

Rawley pulled up to Jack’s front door. The coach rolled to a stop while the horses stamped and snorted. The rain drummed a fierce tattoo on the roof.

Jack took Emma’s hand. “Come. We must get you out of those clothes.”

She bristled. “We must not—not until we’re married.”

He shook his head. Yes, his reputation certainly was an outrage if the woman who had just proposed marriage to him might think him plotting to take her to him before the ceremony. “Miss Darling. I wish to have my housekeeper find you dry clothes, not remove yours from you.”

He felt the tension drain from her body. “Thank you. I am grateful.”

“Thank me in three months’ time.”

****

However in the world Emma would survive this hideous journey, she could not fathom. She shifted, her derriere flattened from the interminable bumpy ride. The trip north in the travelling coach Jack had hired was long, cold and silent. Worse, he had changed his attitude toward her, his humor gone. Instead, he sat brooding all the way from Grosvenor Square to Northampton.

That was only the first day’s travel. The second was no better, with nary a word from him to ease their way. He sat with his dark brows knit tightly together like a gargoyle and considered the landscape out their coach window with an appalling dedication. Though she tried to bring him out in conversation, her perpetual sneezing and coughing made polite conversation a challenge.

Each night he’d take a room for them at an inn. Of each proprietor, he’d demand their fire built to a blaze. He’d order food with abandon. Whatever the innkeeper had, he wanted it in huge quantities. When it arrived, he would stand over her and demand she eat mountains of it as if she’d been starved for twenty years. As she swallowed mouthful after mouthful, he would walk around the room, looking in corners, examining the linens on the bed and the tankards on the sideboard. He was a picky bugger. But she’d grin and silently thank him because she appreciated cleanliness, too.

She appreciated a lot about him. His handsomeness. His willingness to be so bold to help her. His agreement to become her husband made her grateful, but it also incited illicit longings in her naïve little soul. To have him as a friend would be comforting. But to have him as a lover? Ah. Jack Stanhope. With the black hair and arresting demeanor and the dangerous reputation. To have him desire her, that would be true success. Better than their bargain. Better than any young girl’s dream of romance and commitment. To have Jack Stanhope as a true mate in her arms, in her bed? Oh, well. That was a fantasy for a cosseted debutant with money and prospects and a family who cared for her. She was not that girl.

Sighing, she picked up a pillow from the coach seat opposite and punched it. Anger at her circumstances transformed into frustration at his perpetual silence. Could they not talk? Become friends? And if not as close as that, could they not rub on together with congeniality?

She rearranged the pillow behind her back. She’d never been so sore. Nor her throat. Nor her heart. Why ever was she the one so afflicted with a greedy stepfather and a grasping suitor? What had she ever done to deserve such? As if that were not enough trouble, she now contended with a man who had agreed to wed her, bed her and divorce her. She should have committed herself into an asylum for all her lack of wits.

Jack seemed no more civil about their agreement than that night she’d proposed. In fact, she had no idea what he thought. Emma had had more discourse with her cat than with this mute man.

“I say, Jack, if you are angry with me, let me hear it. I cannot bear any more of your torrid silence!” And then, rasping as she was from her outburst and her infernal sore throat, she clamped a hand to her mouth and nose and sneezed. Loudly.

“Good god, woman,” he muttered, as he swept her skirts aside and crossed the coach to sit next to her. “Turn around and let me rub your back for you. It’s what my nurse would do for me or Wes when we took a chill. Would that we could escape this damn storm.”

She undulated with his ministrations. His hands were huge, warm and strong across her aching muscles. Facing out the window away from him, she could give in to her urge to pout. “Thank you, this is wonderful.”

“I fear the cough will go deeper in your chest. Not a good thing, Emma.”

“I know. Perhaps with rest and a few good brandies, I can recover.”

“Like brandy, do you?” His voice held a hint of humor.

She smiled to herself. His hands felt like enormous machines, massaging her body to mush. “Do you?”

“The best. What else do you like?”

“Roast beef.”

He hooted. “We have not had the best in the past few days have we?”

“I dream of potatoes,” she told him, her mouth watering at the very idea of warm slivers baked in cream and cheese.

“Parsnips, too, I bet.”

“Ba! Who does?” She hacked with a wild cough. “Goose and pudding.”

“Together?” He chortled.

“At Christmas dinner, yes. And you?”

“I’d rather that roast beef.”

“And the pudding? Delicious plum pudding, dark with currants and cherries, sugar and a strong whiskey bath.” She knew she was crooning, salivating over the rich treat.

“My girl,” he said with a laugh as he settled her back into his arms and relaxed them both against the spare leather upholstery, “With all your talk of spirits, I would take you for a lush.”

“Hmm.” She nestled to his solid chest, warmer and more comfortable now in his embrace than she’d been in this coach or his presence to date. “I like strong red wine, too.”

He nodded as he took her hand and stroked it. “Definitely I need to see you do not get in your cups.”

She laughed. “I like beer too when the weather’s hot.”

“Ale?” He massaged her fingers.

“Never.”

“Ah. Good taste.” He put her hand to his thigh and covered it with his own.

She shifted again, liking the feel of his muscles beneath her palm.

“Uncomfortable?”

She was tired, exhausted with her sneezing and hacking, but leaning against his warm chest had inspired sleep in her. “The bouncing of this coach will make me black and blue.”

“I do understand. Perhaps then you’d like to rest more against my chest.” He put his back to the side of the coach and put an arm around her.

“I’ll not crush you?”

“I would not have offered, if that were so,” he told her with stern eyes.

She rose from her position and then reversed to lay against him. Now reclining in his arms, she felt herself bolstered in a more substantial way.

“Is this comfortable for you?” she persisted, trying hard to make her voice cheery while her nearness to him made her body tingle.

“Very.” He put her head back against his shoulder. “We should make Yorkshire tonight. You need to rest.”

But she couldn’t. She felt every small movement of his body. The rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. The breadth of his right shoulder as she leaned against it. The power of his arms as he held her to him. Long and corded, quick to grab her when the coach hit a stone or a rut in the road.

“I’m afraid I cannot sleep,” she confessed on a sigh and made to rise.

“No. Rest. The sneezing and coughing I do not like. I’ll not have it said I killed you before I married you.”

That set her to laughing and coughing. “Oh, Jack! No one would believe that!”

He lifted one long brow. “You are an innocent, aren’t you? Of this escapade, I think the
ton
will have a merry dance for months. Then when you divorce me, it will revive once more. And on until you open your home for ragamuffins. Once more society will chew me over for abducting you.” He examined her now from lips to eyes to hair and back again. “They will never forgive me.”

“I will always praise you.”

He chucked her under her chin. “Darling Emma, your word won’t count. The
ton
will label you a ruined woman who will say anything to make her way in the world.”

“Jack, I promise you. For what service you do me here, I will daily proclaim your honor.”

He smiled, sad and mellow. “If you are to have your way, I will dishonor you.”

She tipped her head, aware of his word play. “You have your way with me as I have asked and we both shall be content.”

“Do you think so? Tell me. The first man you cared for, what happened to him?”

“He died on a plain in Spain with Wellesley.”

“I see. Hideous place. My brother Wes was horribly wounded at Talavera last year. He survives well though. Did your young man not wish to marry you before he left?”

“He did.” Emma pressed her lips together and glanced at her hand in his. “I regret I did not run away with him. Daniel forbade the match. It was the first indication of how conniving my stepfather could be.”