Miss Wonderful (The Dressmakers 1)

“I, trifle with a man whose affairs have become the stuff of legend?” she said. “Don’t be absurd.”

“In this case, my affections are of no consequence,” he went on as though she hadn’t spoken. “You are welcome to break my heart, if this is what you wish. But you must find another way. You cannot know the harm your actions will cause others.”

“Break your heart?” She went cold inside. Even William had not accused her of toying with him, though everyone else did. After she broke off with him, half her acquaintance became cold and aloof, and those who didn’t snub her held back only so that they could tell her what the rest were whispering behind her back.

She was a jilt, people said. She’d used William Poynton shamefully. The letters followed her home. People who saw him in Venice claimed he was going into a decline, dying of disappointed hopes. They said he’d scarcely the heart to lift a paintbrush…collapsed after completing the mural…traveled to Egypt…would never survive the journey…vowed he’d never return to England.

All her fault.

For a moment memories from those first two dreary years after she’d given up William engulfed her, and she felt the old despair, that her life would never come right again.

She wanted to sink to the floor and weep.

And the wish to give up and weep made her angry—with this man, for making her so weak, and with herself, for letting him reduce her to this state.

She stood up, trembling with indignation. “I have been playing with you, have I? So this is your opinion of me.”

“That is not what I meant. It is your opinion of me—”

“I should have realized my forward behavior would lower me in your esteem,” she said. “Yet never in my worst imaginings did I see you casting my errors in my teeth.”

“My esteem? I am not—”

“You believe I oppose your canal merely to torment you? You think me so petty, so contemptible?”

“Of course not. Why do you twist my meaning out of all recognition?”

Mirabel looked at Mrs. Entwhistle. “Am I off the mark?” she said. “How would you interpret his words?”

“I haven’t the least idea,” Mrs. Entwhistle said, calmly serving herself a slice of cake. “It has been a long day, and I am far too weary to sort out such complicated matters. If you must dispute, kindly take your quarrel to the dining parlor and let me have my tea in peace.”

MRS. Entwhistle might have been a stick of furniture for all the notice Alistair had taken of her. All he’d seen when he entered the sitting room was Mirabel. He hadn’t noticed whether the servant had lingered. For all he knew, a crowd of them had gathered upon the stairs to eavesdrop.

Typical, he thought bitterly. Nine and twenty years old, and he still had no notion of discretion.

Furious with himself, he followed Mirabel into the adjoining room and pulled the door closed behind him. She crossed to the farthest corner, by the banquette under the windows overlooking the street, as though she could not get far enough away from him.

He hardly blamed her. He could not believe how clumsily and offensively he’d spoken. He’d been articulate enough at the canal meeting. Why must his brain shrink to pea size when he was with her?

“I didn’t mean…” he began. Yet even now, he could not string intelligible words together. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted to hold her, beg her pardon, bring the warmth and trust back. She was pale and stiff. He’d hurt her.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I had wanted so much to please you with the new canal plan, and I failed, and so I was beside myself.”

“You did not fail.” Her voice was brittle. “You have won the first battle. We must see who will win the last.”

“Can you not tell me what I’ve done wrong?” he said. “I want to make it right, but I am all at sea. Perhaps I was overhasty, assuming we would wed could I but bridge this one gap between us. You have told me no, but I assumed only the canal stood in the way. Was I arrogant to suppose this? Are your feelings…” He searched for words. “I have cast lures. I have seduced you. It was not honorable of me to try to win you that way, but I did not care very much how I did it. Perhaps I have merely seduced you, not won your heart, after all. If that is the case, I beg you will do me a kindness and tell me so, and I shall stop plaguing you.”

He would do it, too, and it would kill him.

Her hair glowed like burnished copper in the candlelight. He remembered it tumbled upon the pillows and his fingers tangling in it. He remembered tearing the bonnet from her head and dragging his hands through the unruly curls, and her laughter when she knocked the hat from his head. He remembered the way she’d kissed the top of his head, the tenderness, the utter trust.

He remembered what she’d said.

You make me happy. You make me feel like a girl again.

But he’d made her unhappy. She stood stiffly, her gaze so dark and solemn, her hands clasped tightly at her waist.

“That is all I need do?” she said finally. “Tell you I do not care for you? How easy it sounds. How impossible it is. I have told you so, many times, but each time it becomes a bigger lie, and you always know I am lying.”

“My love.” He started across the room.

She put up her hand. “If you truly care for me, you will keep a distance. If you touch me, I shall become irrational. That is taking unfair advantage.”

He wanted to take every unfair advantage.

He made himself retreat.

“You are not to speak sweetly to me, either,” she said. “You are too persuasive. This morning, you had me almost convinced that Providence could bestow no greater blessing upon Longledge than your canal.”

“Only ‘almost,’ ” he said. “That is the trouble. That’s why I came.” He gave a short laugh. “No, that isn’t why I came. It’s the reason I gave Gordmor for hurrying on ahead: to find out where my new plan failed you. I still don’t know. What would you have us do?”

“Go away,” she said. “Give it up. I cannot believe you are both so foolish or obstinate as to persist. I am not a stranger to business or politics. I know how these matters are conducted. You may win in the end, but it will cost you more than you bargained for, perhaps more than you can af

ford. Certainly, it will be more than what those mines are worth.”

“My dear,” he said, “as little as they are worth at present, those mines are all we have.”

Her eyes widened, and color rose in her cheeks. She sat down abruptly on the banquette.

Alistair remained where he was, wishing someone would do him a favor and cut out his tongue. “I do wish,” he said, “my tongue would consult with my brain now and again. Our financial affairs are not in the least your concern.”

“Not my concern?” Her expression became exasperated. “No wonder Lord Gordmor has been so infernally obstinate. What a fool I am! When I wrote to Aunt Clothilde, I should have enquired about him as well as about you. It would have been far more useful to have financial details than the catalogue of your amours, entertaining as that was.”

“Entertaining?”

“You ought to write your memoirs,” she said.

“My memoirs?” He had grown so used to being clubbed in the head that he didn’t even blink.

“It will bring in more money than those paltry mines.”

Alistair walked to the fire and watched the tiny tongues of flame licking the coals while he debated how much to tell her. At length he turned back to her. She watched him intently.

“Mirabel, there isn’t time,” he said.

“You are not yet thirty,” she said. “As exciting as your life has been, the tale is relatively short. If you applied yourself, you could easily write your memoirs in a matter of months, for you do have a way with words.”

“There isn’t time,” he said. “I’ve only seven weeks.”

In a few crisp words, he told her: about his meeting in November with his father and the list of Episodes of Stupidity, and the choice his father had given him.

She listened, her head tipped to one side, as though he were a vastly complicated puzzle. When he was done, she said, “I do not understand what the problem is.”

Alistair knew he was not as articulate as he wished to be when speaking to her. Still, he’d told the story in terms so simple, a child could not misconstrue them. He tried again: “If Gordy and I fail to get our canal act passed by the first of May, I must marry an heiress.”