Not Quite a Lady (The Dressmakers 4)

She caught him unprepared. He was stunned by his own behavior, far too shocked to notice the elevated pitch of her voice. He understood only the words, and these made him wonder if he’d lost his hearing along with his mind and sense of honor.

“Frightened?” he repeated incredulously. “Frightened? I? Of you?”

She lifted her perfect chin. “My bonnet, if you please,” she said in precisely the tone she might have used with a lackey.

He was all but trembling with the turmoil within, almost sick with it. Yet he picked up her frilly bonnet from the shelf and gave it to her. He pulled the door open.

She did not put the bonnet on her head, only held it by the ribbons, as though he’d contaminated it by touching it.

“I won’t tell anybody,” she said with a small, scornful smile. “It is hardly worth mentioning, after all.”

She sailed through the door, nose in the air.

He slammed it behind her.

As the door slammed shut, Charlotte let out a whooshing breath.

“You bloody damned idiot,” she gasped. “How could you?”

How couldn’t she?

He was infuriating, and she’d felt so sure of herself: no question she could stand up to him, no doubt in her mind of how she’d deal with his obnoxiousness. He thought all he had to do was act the conquering male and her heart would flutter and she would surrender.

She’d show him, she’d thought. How easy it had been to turn herself into a stone statue!

And then, and then…

…the light touch of his lips upon her skin, the tenderness that took her all unawares and made her heart ache.

Guile. It was nothing but the guile of a practiced rake. And she’d succumbed. Instantly.

Oh, but for a moment, a lifetime of a moment, it had been sweet, unbearably so. For that small lifetime she’d felt young again and could believe again. For that time it seemed a bud of true happiness was growing in her heart and blossoming in the warmth.

Warmth, indeed.

A euphemism for lust.

Yet for a time, for that small lifetime, she’d felt warm and cared for and safe. For that time, desire was a joyous blossoming of tenderness.

How could she be so deluded?

Easily, too easily.

She put two fingers to her lips. They were swollen and tingling. She was swollen and tingling down below, too, where no hand but her own had touched for more than ten years.

How gently he’d touched her. She remembered the way he’d gathered her in his arms, and made her feel precious. She’d even imagined his hands trembling…but it was she who’d trembled, fool that she was, with anticipation and hope and girlish excitement.

She could scarcely remember the girl she used to be or the excitement she’d felt so long ago when a man first gathered her in his arms.

She’d worked so hard to forget how wanton she’d been. She couldn’t bear to think of it: the blind foolishness of a moment and the shame afterward, at what she’d given up so thoughtlessly, the most precious thing a woman had to give. The shame cut so deep she’d thought it would kill her. At times she’d hoped it would.

She doubted she and Geordie Blaine had had time for tenderness, even if he were capable of it, which was most unlikely. Their few couplings had been so furtive and hurried. She had loved him madly—or thought it was love—and she’d been ignorant. She had felt pleasure—or the madness of infatuation—simply to be with him, to be daring and defiant.

So there, Papa. Forget Mama so quickly, will you? Marry again, as though she never mattered, as though I never mattered? Forget me, too, will you?

Anger, loneliness, fear of losing her father as well as her mother: She understood all the whys now.

She’d churned with feelings, far more than a spoiled, sheltered girl could manage, certainly.

She must have forgotten a good deal, though, because nothing she could recall of that time resembled what she’d experienced minutes earlier with Mr. Carsington. If he hadn’t been holding her, she would have tumbled from the dairy table and melted into a puddle on the floor.

Wicked man. He was too curst skilled by half.

And she was the greatest ignoramus of a woman who’d ever walked the face of the earth.

Another minute and he’d have had her, there on the table of the dairy, like the sluttish dairymaids in those lewd prints her boy cousins had tried to shock her with.

Another minute and—

But it hadn’t happened. She was not sure where or how she’d found the presence of mind to stop him, but she had.

Then—and again she had no idea where salvation had come from—she’d said the first thing that came into her head, and it turned out to be exactly the right thing, finally.

Hardly worth mentioning.

She glanced back at the closed door.

It was a wonder he hadn’t thrown her out of the dairy bodily.

He could do it, too, easily.

He was not only large but he had the muscles of a blacksmith.

“Oh,” she said, and she ached, because she could feel it yet, the warmth of his big body, the strength of those muscled arms.

She pressed her fist against her mouth. She had to get away. Far away.

She hurried down the footpath, putting on her bonnet and tying the ribbons as she went.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

This was the sound Darius’s head made as it struck the dairy door, about ten minutes after he slammed it behind Lady Charlotte.

He needed to hit somebody, and the logical target was himself.

“You moron.”

Thunk.

“Half-wit.”

Thunk.

“Imbecile.”

Thunk.

He stepped back from the door and sank onto a stool. There he sat for a time, clutching his head.

The pain was a relief from the stew in his mind.

So close he’d come, so close.

Another minute and he’d have ravished her. And then…and then…

It didn’t bear thinking of.

He saw it in his mind’s eye all the same: a hasty trip to the altar, and everyone knowing why, because there was no other reason on earth the likes of Lady Charlotte Hayward would suddenly become wife to Lord Hargate’s youngest and least impressive son, whose sole asset was a ramshackle property whose house was tumbling down about his ears.

There was no way out of marriage in such a case, no way even Darius could excuse himself. No matter how unjust and illogical he deemed Society’s rules, he couldn’t change them. Gentlemen expected their wives to be virgins. If they were not, they would suffer either public disgrace or private misery. He couldn’t change Nature, either, who’d designated the female as childbearer.

Whatever else he was, he was a gentleman who understood that to deflower her and abandon her was out of the question.

He would have to marry her, which meant that, henceforth, her father would view Darius Carsington as a fortune-hunting debauchée.

Henceforth his own father would perceive him as an unprincipled incompetent. Darius could hear the deep, scornful voice: You decided it was easier to seduce an innocent girl and live off her portion, I see.

His brothers would despise him. His mother would be disappointed. His grandmother would be disgusted.

And the woman forced to wed him would hate him, of course, for the rest of her life, for ruining her life.

“Errgh.” He clenched fistfuls of his hair. “Errrrrgh. No. Don’t think about it. Just…stop. It didn’t happen. It’s not going to happen.”

To blot out the nightmare in his mind, he opened his eyes and gazed about him.

Sparkling white. Elegant.

He sighed. The dairy was…beautiful, really.

Not merely immaculate but arranged exactly as it ought to be. If she’d found no fatal flaws in the scullery, that, too, must be…right.

“Damn me,” he said. If he had only listened to her in a calm and ration

al manner, the situation would not have become emotional and he would not have acted like a cliché.

She was Lithby’s daughter, after all. Hadn’t she told him how her father quoted Darius’s writings? Doubtless Lord Lithby shared his agricultural enthusiasms with his wife and daughter. Hadn’t Lady Lithby said that Lady Charlotte was a country woman? Why should she not know how a dairy worked?