His At Night

Chapter Eight

For once in his life, Vere didn’t need to act flabbergasted. He was struck dumb, his limbs turned to stone, his brain a pulped turnip.

His eyes, however, remained quite functional. She was ripe perfection, like a Degas nude, all curves and softness and shadowed mysteries. And then she came toward him, her lips parted, her skin smooth and lovely, her nipples the very points at which the darkness kissed the illumination of the candle flame.

Her arms raised and intertwined behind his neck. She smelled, as she always did, of honey and roses. Her mouth, cool and quivering, touched his.

Reaction jolted through him. Lust, an astonishing quantity of it, but not lust alone: He was finally shocked out of his paralysis.

How could he have missed it so badly? Her aunt was a broken woman who no longer knew how to scream even when terrified. Miss Edgerton herself could and did smile under almost all circumstances. Everything pointed to her uncle being a monster. She didn’t just want a husband. She wanted a way out of this house.

And she was desperate enough that even he would do.

He disengaged her arms and backed away from her. She followed him. Without thinking, he yanked the curtain next to him from its mooring and tossed ten yards of double muslin at her. She flailed inside the tent of fabric, a pornographer’s idea of a girl mummy.

He ran. But encumbered as she was, she tackled him. Hard. Her weight crashing into him unbalanced him just enough to tumble them both over the curved, padded arm of a chaise longue, knocking down a stand in the process.

Something made of glass broke loudly—one of the ships in bottles. Something else crashed too—the hand-candle. The room plunged into darkness. He tried to heave her off him, but she was as demonically strong as one of Jules Verne’s giant octopuses, her arms welded to him. He set one foot down on the ground, turned so that she was against the back of the chaise, and pushed.

Yes, her hold on him was loosening. He pushed harder. She emitted a muffled scream of frustration. Or was it pain? He didn’t care. He had to be rid of her. She struggled with renewed vigor. Dear God, she almost kneed him in the groin.

He wasn’t sure what happened, but suddenly the chaise longue overturned along its length, dumping the two of them onto the carpet. They rolled a turn and a half before coming to a stop, she again on top of him, but this time without the curtain.

Her hair had come entirely loose during the struggle. She panted. Her beautiful breasts rose and fell. And just visible behind the cascade of her hair, small, tightly budded nipples—

How could he see anything? Hadn’t the candle gone out earlier? His eyes followed the source of illumination up and up, his gut already comprehending what his mind did not want to acknowledge.

There was someone else in the room.

“Oh, my. Oh, my, my, my,” Lady Avery murmured. Then she giggled. “I must say, I did not expect the two of you.”

Now Miss Edgerton leaped off him. Now she wrapped herself in the muslin curtain. Now she stammered, “It’s…it’s not what you think.”

“No? What do you think this is, Lady Kingsley?”

Bloody hell, not Lady Kingsley too.

Their eyes met. “I…ah…” Lady Kingsley stammered, her shock almost as strong as Vere’s own. “It is certainly an inconvenient situation.”

“Inconvenient, Lady Kingsley? Inconvenient is when your footman breaks his leg and you’ve no one but your parlor maid to serve tea to your callers. This is scandalous. And to think, Lord Vere, that your father was a schoolmate of Sir Bernard Edgerton, Miss Edgerton’s uncle.”

Until this mention of his late father, it had not occurred to Vere that being caught in Miss Edgerton’s scheme would lead all the way to the altar. After all, he’d known her for only three days. He had not touched her in truth. And he was an idiot, for God’s sake; surely some consideration must be given to that fact.

But that was apparently not the way Lady Avery’s mind worked. He had compromised a young lady of good standing—never mind that the young lady had a loose-moraled mother; never mind that the young lady engineered the encounter herself—and therefore marriage must follow suit. And Vere, publicly at least, was a nice, docile idiot, not the sort to willingly stand by and watch a girl go to “ruin.”

He put on his most thickly bovine expression, rose to his feet with a stumble and a grunt, and looked around. “Sorry for the nice ship-in-a-bottle, Miss Edgerton.”

“It’s quite all right,” she said in a small voice.

“Arrangements, children, arrangements,” chided Lady Avery. “Arrangements must be made. Isn’t the archbishop of Canterbury your second cousin, Lord Vere? He will no doubt be glad to issue a special license to you.”

“Oh, is he? My second cousin? I had no idea. Perhaps I shan’t bother him, just in case he isn’t.”

“Banns then?” Miss Edgerton asked hesitantly.

She did it very well, this virginal timidity.

“Absolutely not. Very quaint, but not the thing to do at all, especially not under the circumstances,” proclaimed Lady Avery. “You should ask your uncle to apply for a special license for you, Miss Edgerton.”

“Oh, I don’t know—”

“When your uncle comes home, you will explain the matter to him. He will meet Lord Vere. He will obtain the special license. Then we will all be delighted to attend your wedding.”

Miss Edgerton said nothing.

“Very good. Now to bed,” said Lady Avery, satisfied. “And no more secret meetings between the two of you. You are to be married. And that means your days of clandestine lovemaking are behind you.”

But the ordeal was far from over.

The other gentlemen had gathered outside the small parlor—no doubt drawn by the fearsome crashes Vere and Miss Edgerton had caused during their struggle. Lady Avery and Lady Kingsley, after putting Miss Edgerton back into her dressing gown, quickly whisked her away, leaving Vere behind to fend for himself.

“What happened?” Wessex asked, even though it couldn’t be more obvious what had happened.

Vere ignored the question, walked past Wessex, marched out of the front door of the house, and did not stop until he was in the middle of the garden. And even then, it was only to pull out a cigarette and light it.

“I’m sorry,” said Freddie, who had followed him out. “I should have said something.”

Vere expelled a lungful of smoke. “What would you have said?”

“I was—I was thinking of telling you to be more careful.”

The irony. “Me, be more careful?”

Freddie stuck his hands into his coat pockets. “Last night I was out walking late—and I saw the two of you, just the two of you, going back into the house. And in the morning, I thought you might be having your nightmare again. But when I opened my door I saw her coming out of your room.”

Vere sucked hard on his cigarette. Christ.

“I thought at the time that surely there was an innocent explanation for everything—you know, that she’d heard your nightmare and come to check on you…”

Vere threw down his cigarette and crushed it under his heel.

Freddie sighed. He took the cigarette case and the matchbox out of Vere’s pocket, lit another fag, and handed it to Vere. Vere sighed and accepted Freddie’s offering. How could he be angry at Freddie?

“I’m sorry,” Freddie said again.

Vere shook his head. “It’s not your fault.”

Freddie, who usually refrained from tobacco, lit a cigarette for himself. They smoked in silence.

“Will you be all right?” Freddie asked, after they’d had two cigarettes apiece.

Vere stared up at the starry sky. “I’ll be fine.”

“Well,” Freddie said, hesitating, “I have seen the way you look at her. And since she does return your regard…I mean, you have been trying to find a wife for a while, haven’t you?”

Had any man ever been so perfectly hoisted with his own petard? Next thing Vere knew, people would be genuinely delighted for him, that by hook or by crook he finally landed himself a wife. And once they’d had a look at her bosomy comeliness, he’d be the subject of a thousand congratulatory slaps on the back.

“She is very cheerful,” Freddie continued. “And she listens when you speak.”

When you speak, Vere wanted to retort.

He yanked off his necktie. “I think I’ll go for a walk now, if you don’t mind.”

As it turned out, one walk wasn’t enough. Lady Kingsley was waiting for him in his room, nodding off, when he returned at two o’clock in the morning. The conversation she desired necessitated another trip out of the house.

He thought she wanted to speak of the ramifications concerning the investigation at hand. But that was not at all the case.

“Just now she came to my room and begged me to help her,” said Lady Kingsley.

He glanced at her sharply.

“She said her uncle will kill her if he learns what happened. She wants to be gone from Highgate Court before he returns.”

“And you agreed to help her?”

“I know you are not one, but the world is full of awful men who do unspeakable things to women who depend on them. I have no reason not to believe her. And since you must marry her anyway, I told her I would arrange for a special license for the two of you and that we will leave at first light for London.”

“Is that all?” he asked coolly.

“She wants to bring her aunt along.”

“Well, then, the more the merrier.”

Lady Kingsley looked at him uncertainly, then placed a hand on his sleeve. “I don’t know whether to console you or to congratulate you. I know you didn’t quite have marriage in mind when you began your assignation, but if she gets you this carried away, marriage is not the most terrible outcome.”

He’d expected better from Lady Kingsley. He’d expected her to know that it was entirely out of character for him to be this carried away and therefore to harbor at least some suspicion of foul play on Miss Edgerton’s part.

Instead it was Freddie all over again, with the implication that Vere was largely, if not entirely, responsible.

“If you will excuse me,” he said. “I’m quite exhausted.”