The Earl's Marriage Bargain (Liberated Ladies)

‘I remain here, of course.’ The bruises, which were beginning to colour up nicely, did nothing to make his expression any more amiable.

‘With no money, no means of identification, a wound in your shoulder and the visage of a not very successful pugilist, my lord?’ He was unsettling her and it helped to hit back. ‘Unless you have an acquaintance living nearby, I suggest that it might be a long walk to wherever you might be known.’

‘I am aware of that. I am also aware that I have placed a lady in a compromising position. What becomes of me need not concern you.’

‘Oh, for goodness sake.’ Jane jumped up. The tea things rattled and she just managed to stop the milk jug from tipping over. Lord Kendall got to his feet, but she flapped one hand at him, irritated. ‘Sit, do. I want to pace up and down so as not to throw the sugar bowl at you. I did not haul you into my chaise and prepare to fend off ruffians with my parasol to leave you battered and destitute here. Those louts may have followed us for all you know.’

‘Indeed. Another excellent reason why I want you to go. It is not too late now for us to find you a maid and for you to drive to the next inn for the night.’

‘I am not leaving you like this. You are patronising, irritating and, just at the moment, a thorough nuisance, but I refuse to have you on my conscience.’

‘And I will not have your ruined reputation on mine.’ He stood up again, clearly furious at having to grab at the back of a chair for balance.

‘Poppycock,’ Jane pronounced inelegantly. ‘I will feel much safer with a gentleman’s escort than with an unknown maidservant. And do sit down, you are swaying. No one knows me and, with you having been abroad until recently and with your face like that, I doubt anyone would recognise you either.’ A fleeting memory of something Cousin Violet had been gossiping about when she had last seen her came to mind. ‘And your grandfather has an estate close to Bath, does he not? Exactly where you need to be.’

Chapter Three

There was a pain in his hand and Ivo looked down to see his knuckles white on the back rail of the chair. He unclenched his fingers. His grandfather’s house: exactly where he did not want to be and precisely where he should have gone on arriving back in England instead of haring off on that wild goose chase after Daphne Parris. Charles Parris’s wilful little sister. The girl he had grown up with, seen transform from a plain, sulky child into an exquisite young woman in front of his bedazzled eyes.

He had fallen in love, had proposed on the eve of his departure with Charles to join their regiment in France. She would wait, she had promised, if he would promise to come back to her. He was her hero, so gallant, so fine in his scarlet regimentals. She had been enchanting, that evening, so lovely in her wide-eyed admiration of him and he had felt like a demi-god, believing he could defeat Napoleon single-handed if she only wished it.

He had known her parents would think her too young for a formal betrothal and she had, too, but they could keep it a secret, she had agreed as they exchanged tokens—an enamelled heart on a chain for her, a lock of her hair for him. That white-blonde curl had been in the wallet he had lost in Knightsbridge.

Had he been arrogant to believe the love she had professed so ardently would last and that she would wait until the fighting ended? Deluded, perhaps. It seemed that he had misunderstood the depths of her feelings, but not his own, not as the war had dragged on across Spain.

His promise to Daphne had brought him through times when it would have been easier just to give in and die. And then Charles, dying of one enemy neither of them could defeat, had told him that news had reached him that Daphne intended to marry a rakehell baronet. Ivo must promise to stop her, Charles had pleaded. He was the only one who had known of the secret betrothal and he could not seem to grasp that his sister might actually jilt his best friend.

And Ivo did swear to it, reassuring Charles that it would all be well, even as he fought back the pain at Daphne’s betrayal, his mind reeling with the shock that she had changed so much and he had not been able, somehow, to sense it. He had promised Charles and he had failed.

He had told himself that it must be a misunderstanding, that she had lost faith in him somehow and that it could all be set right if only they could talk. That had kept him together, right up until the moment that they were face to face. After that... How were you supposed to feel when the woman you loved rejected you, sent men after you to beat that rejection into your thick skull? Did she hate him so much—or was this how a woman who married in defiance of friends and family and sacred promises reacted to defend that decision?

‘Why were you in that alehouse?’ Jane asked abruptly, jerking him out of the dark downward spiral of his thoughts. ‘Are you avoiding your grandfather?’

That is usually the most restful option...

‘I had made a promise to a friend. A dead friend.’

‘Oh. I am so sorry.’ She sat down again. ‘And that deathbed promise was what sent you into danger?’

‘Charles—that was my friend’s name—was worried about his younger sister. It seems he had every reason to be anxious, although at first I thought he was exaggerating because he was in a fever. I could not believe that Daphne would be so...foolish.’ So disloyal. ‘I tried to tell him he was worrying about nothing, tried to keep him calm but, when the story became clearer, I realised it was serious. She was being courted by a baronet with a wild reputation. I won’t name him, but Charles was convinced that he had no good intentions towards Daphne, who is well dowered and fatherless into the bargain. Besides, she was already promised to someone else.’ Someone who was not in England to protect her. Someone who had thought that a love could be kept alive for years on hasty, irregular letters scrawled by campfires.

‘Once news reached England of Charles’s death there would be no one to stop her or to warn off her seducer.’ Except the man who had blithely gone off to fight the French in the happy certainty that Miss Parris would sit at home patiently waiting for him.

‘And she would not heed her brother? Had he managed to write to her?’

‘He did—and received a letter in reply. She was certain it was love. The man to whom she had had an understanding was not there, she had grown tired of waiting for him because he would surely have come for her if his feelings were true. She felt neglected, I am certain.’

And I should have thought more about how young she was, how much she would need the reassurance of constant letters, not my scribbled notes when I had the time and the energy to think of that other world apart from the battlefield.

He tried to keep those betraying emotions from his face and from Jane’s bright, interested gaze, and was fairly certain he succeeded. But was the fault his neglect of her—or a fundamental misunderstanding of Daphne’s character? Or had he mistaken the depth of her feelings for him in the first place?

‘Charles declared that he would ask for leave, just as soon as he could haul himself out of bed. He had no idea just how sick he was, I realised. He told me that he would go home, forbid the match. He was his sister’s guardian, after all, and he could not sit by and let her fall into the hands of a confirmed rakehell, even if she was prepared to break her engagement to the man he had expected her to marry.

‘Charles had tossed and turned, distressed that his sister could have betrayed his best friend, tormented by his inability to imagine why she had done so. “I must stop her,” he’d said, just before he sank into the final delirium. I promised to do what I could. I would have done so even without that promise. I had known her all the years she was growing up.’

I loved her. Despite everything I still...

‘But you were in the army—how could