Kissing Philippa, he’d felt invincible. Right now, facing down a wall of disapproval from his dressing room doorway, he felt like a rat in a trap.
“Mamma, there’s a perfectly innocent explanation—”
“Don’t bother lying, you nasty little cat.” Amelia’s contempt made Philippa recoil. “I should have guessed when you offered to help me that you pursued your own causes. You were so clever to hide your interest in Lord Erskine.”
“Amelia—”
Erskine glanced at Philippa, then wished he hadn’t. She looked utterly overcome. Unfortunately, however wounded and humiliated she appeared, she also appeared delectable and ruffled and thoroughly kissed. Her rich brown hair tumbled around her shoulders, and in her crushed dress, she looked little better than a gypsy. Her intentions may have been pure, whatever her sister thought, but Blind Freddie could see that physical contact had occurred behind that locked door.
Before anything else, he had to put a cork in the mother’s damned caterwauling. “Mrs. Sanders, bringing the house’s attention upon us can’t be your purpose.”
To his surprise, the lady abruptly shut her mouth and turned accusatory blue eyes, eerily similar to her oldest daughter’s, in his direction. Erskine frowned. Those eyes were completely dry and, until she glanced down in what he read as false humility, alight with calculation.
What the deuce was going on? Had he been caught by the oldest trick in the world? Suspicion soured his gut as he stared at Philippa.
He was under no illusions about his appeal to the ton’s rapacious ladies. A single man of great fortune and distinguished lineage always attracted marriage-minded females. Since leaving university and taking his place in society, he’d been on guar
d. Since before that. The lassies on his Scottish estate were as awake as any English miss to the main chance.
But his doubt over Philippa’s motives vanished almost as soon as it arose. He was the one who had locked them in, and he hadn’t mistaken her dismay at the prospect of a scandal.
A glance at Mrs. Sanders told him that if Philippa hadn’t realized the advantages of tonight’s events, her doting mamma certainly had. Amelia continued to glare poison at her trembling sister.
“Just what are you doing in here, Mamma?” Philippa asked in a small voice.
Her mother regarded her youngest daughter with disfavor. “I couldn’t sleep, and I wanted you to read to me. I was horrified to find your room empty. Naturally I went to Amelia and made her tell me where you were. I can hardly believe your brazen behavior.”
Amelia’s mouth pinched at the explanation. Erskine could imagine how unwillingly she’d revealed her sister’s whereabouts. But Mrs. Sanders was a bully to the bootstraps. A self-centered little minx like Amelia could never withstand her mother’s demands.
Wearing a startling scarlet dressing gown, his host Sir Theodore Liddell appeared at the bedroom door. Only moments behind him, Erskine’s nitwit drinking companions crowded along the corridor, tripping over one another in tipsy eagerness to investigate the brouhaha.
“What’s all this hullabaloo, Erskine? Is this some Christmas prank? Bit early in the morning for hijinks, don’t you think?” Sir Theodore’s jovial tone abruptly hardened as his eyes fell upon his cringing niece. “Good God, Philippa, what are you doing here?”
Any frail hope Erskine had harbored that he and Philippa might manage to sail through without attracting the world’s notice shriveled. And he became increasingly convinced that Mrs. Sanders had manufactured this impromptu gathering.
He reached for Philippa’s hand. For one sweet moment, her fingers curled around his. Despite the chaos buffeting him from all sides, brief peace filled his soul. Then that peace disintegrated as she withdrew her hand to twist it in her skirts in an agony of guilty remorse.
“U-Uncle, I know how this looks—” she stammered, sounding completely unlike the forthright woman who had demanded her sister’s letter.
“Damned fishy is how it looks, Philippa, my girl,” Sir Theodore snapped, an angry flush turning his cheeks as red as an overripe apple. “Just what in Hades are you doing in this reprobate’s room at this hour? And why are you half-dressed?”
Erskine winced. The uncle showed as little propriety as the mother, even if he spoke from temper rather than calculation. Behind Mrs. Sanders, the drunken idiots audibly sniggered.
“Half-dressed?” With shaking hands, Philippa tugged at her clothes, although her uncle had exaggerated. However tempted he’d been to take matters further, Erskine had made sure that she stayed buttoned to the neck.
“My lord, your niece is blameless,” Erskine said, knowing nobody would believe him. But he couldn’t bear to witness Philippa’s shame. Especially when all she’d done was enjoy a few kisses. She was hardly the Jezebel that gossip would paint her once this story got out.
As it inevitably would.
Again he cursed his damned arrogance in shutting that door, although nothing could make him regret kissing her. That had been an unforgettable experience, whatever its price.
His defense of Philippa attracted Sir Theodore’s wrath. “Look at her, with her hair falling about her like bloody Delilah.” His voice lowered, but that only emphasized his outrage. “Erskine, I know the stories about you. Who doesn’t? But I never heard of you ruining a girl of good family. This is abominable behavior, even for you.”
Erskine hid another wince. Tonight he’d suffered an uncharacteristic impulse to do the right thing. Perhaps this was a lesson not to change his bad old ways.
“Your niece and I were trapped in the dressing room.” His chilly tone would have done his stiff-necked father credit. “I will not have Miss Sanders’s name sullied. She is respectably dressed. Her hair is untidy as a result of her struggle to open the door.”
“A likely story,” Sir Theodore sneered. “Even if it’s true, that doesn’t explain her presence in your bedamned bedroom.”