Kitabı oku: «Bronwyn Scott's Sexy Regency Bundle», sayfa 12

Chapter Fourteen

The sun had been up for a scant hour when the door to Brandon’s study slammed open and bounced off the mahogany panelling of the wall.

Brandon looked up from the papers spread before him on the desk, startled by the intrusion. Jack filled the room, his elaborate cape swirling about his knees in fair imitation of a whirlwind. ‘What have you done? I’ve been away from your side for a mere twelve hours and now the village is on fire with news of your engagement. I hope you haven’t done anything foolish.’

Brandon leaned back in his chair, hands folded behind his head while he studied his friend’s chagrin. Calmly, he replied, ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you this early in the morning before, Jack. Sit down and settle yourself. You look as if you’ve been up all night.’ Brandon gestured to a chair and rang for coffee.

‘If I’ve been up all night, it’s your fault. I spent the wee hours in the public house, listening to the latest scandal brewing on your behalf. First, there were harrowing tales of The Cat hauling you out of the dinner party up in Cheetham as a hostage. Then Witherspoon and his friends launched into stories of your delectable betrothed who was beside herself with worry over your wounds.’ Jack gave a wry smile. ‘What wounds would those be?’

‘Self-inflicted.’ Brandon held up his cleanly bandaged hand.

‘It didn’t take me long to add up all the bits and deduce that the supposed intended was none other than The Cat. Deuce take it, Brandon, I’ve heard politics make for the most unusual bedfellows, but this is beyond the pale.’

Jack might have gone on with his scolding, but a footman entered with a tray of morning coffee and toast.

Brandon gathered his thoughts against Jack’s attack. Jack was only the first of many visitors who would demand explanations. He’d left Nora sleeping peacefully more than an hour ago in order to organise his defences, beginning with a missive to Manchester’s leading dressmaker.

Jack voiced the most pressing issue facing him as the servants left the room. ‘Now that you’ve got her, what are you going to do with her?’ Jack asked over the rim of his coffee cup.

‘I am going to play out the ruse and present her as my intended. It will buy some time until everything settles down.’ Brandon laid out the plan that had been taking shape in his head. ‘It’s the only way I can think of to get what I want.’

Jack gave a disbelieving guffaw. ‘If it were me voicing those sentiments, I’d know exactly how self-serving that plan was. Humour me, Brandon, and tell me what it is that you want? Somehow I don’t think the answer will be the mill progressing.’

‘I want to keep her safe. If she goes back to The Grange, she’ll try something else just as dangerous as that performance she gave last night at St John’s.’

‘And you worry that you might not be there to rescue her?’ Jack’s flippant tone softened. ‘You can’t keep her, you know that, don’t you? The Cat’s as wild as they come.’

‘Not all of us are as jaded as you, Jack. It’s not a character flaw to be less cynical.’

‘Still, it’s my job as your friend to disabuse you of any foolish notions you might harbour about taming The Cat. It’s what you called me up here for,’ Jack reminded him.

He gave Brandon a half-grin. ‘But I can see my preaching falls on deaf ears. You’ve got that “morning after” glow about you.’ Jack rose and put down his cup. ‘I’ll leave you to play house with your supposed betrothed and let your ruse run its course.’

Brandon drew a deep breath. ‘That’s another thing, Jack. I am not sure I want to see the ruse end.’

‘Well, it has to eventually, unless you actually—’ Jack broke off the sentence. Brandon was rewarded with a view of Jack at his most nonplussed, a feat few accomplished. ‘Are you suggesting you would make the relationship more permanent in nature? Make The Cat your Countess?’ Jack managed to get out when the initial shock passed.

‘Yes, my Countess. I have not forgotten,’ Brandon said placidly. ‘It is time I marry and look to my nursery.’

Jack resumed his seat, scrubbing at his face with his hands. ‘Yes, yes, of course it’s time to spring the parson’s mousetrap and all that. We’re getting no younger, but why couldn’t you find a nice débutante?’

Brandon hooted with disbelief. ‘A nice débutante? Listen to yourself, Jack. I could no more settle for a nice, white-gowned virgin half my age than you could. Just because I must marry to beget an heir doesn’t mean I’ll leg-shackle myself to the first débutante and her mother who come along. If that was the case, I would have married ages ago. There would have been no point in waiting. I have standards that must be met. I’ve waited to marry because no one has yet met them.’

‘Until now? Surely you’re not in love with her?’

‘Until now, no one has provoked me enough to think of a more permanent arrangement,’ Brandon said tentatively. ‘As for love, well, I’m not sure I’d know exactly what that is, having not ever truly been in love.’ He toyed with a pen, avoiding Jack’s knowing gaze. Too many people thought love could be feigned if the prize was large enough. He wanted more than that.

Brandon sighed heavily. ‘I’m probably not in love with Nora any more than she’s in love with me, but she makes me feel alive, Jack, in a way I’ve felt with no other. When I am with her, life is a grand romp.’

‘An illegal romp, don’t forget. Surely that can’t be one of your standards.’ Jack was all silky sarcasm. ‘I admit I find myself insanely curious as to what those standards might be. What does a thief have that an eligible girl of good family lacks?’ Jack stretched out his booted legs and waved his empty coffee cup toward the decanters collected on the polished sideboard. ‘I’ll need something stronger than coffee, however, to get through this.’

Brandon rose and obliged, pouring a healthy dose of brandy into the cup before adding a splash of coffee from the silver urn on the tray.

Jack sipped and sighed deeply. ‘Much better. Nothing like good French brandy to dull the shock that one’s best friend has gone completely mad. Now, about those standards.’

‘I want a wife who shares my causes and has a passion for the political welfare of the country.’ Brandon began ticking his standards off on his fingers. ‘I want a wife who cares for people. I want a wife who has a healthy appetite for the bedroom and a sense of adventure. I want a woman who wants me for myself, who looks at me and doesn’t see estates, titles, coronets and enormous pin allowances, but sees an intelligent man who thinks and has ideas of his own. In short, I want a woman who will be my partner in all aspects of my life.’

‘In short, you want a paragon. The irony of it all is that you think you’ve found this paragon in the notorious Cat of Manchester, who is robbing your investors blind and hobbling the very ideas for which you want to be appreciated,’ Jack asserted.

He shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t wish to demean your standards. We all want the paragon. In the end, we all settle for the débutante and the glimmer of hope that we might make her blank canvas into someone we can passably spend the rest of our lives with.’

‘I don’t settle,’ Brandon said with conviction.

Jack rubbed his hands on his thighs. ‘True enough. I’ve known you since our school days. You’ve always found a way to get what you want. It’s what I like about you, Brandon. I hope she’s worth it. For your sake, I hope she’s not upstairs stealing your mother’s damnable amethyst ring, again.’

Jack rose. ‘I will take my leave of your hospitality. When you decide you need me, I’ll be close by. Send word to the inn. In the interim, I wish you well.’

Nora sleepily groped the big bed, searching for the warmth of Brandon’s body. Her seeking hands found only cold sheets. Disappointingly, Brandon’s side of the bed was empty.

She pulled herself up into a sitting position and scanned the room, looking for traces of him. His clothes were gone. He was up and dressed.

She sighed heavily, flopping back against the down-filled pillows. It was better this way. She could be dressed and gone out the window before he knew it.

The two of them were unsuited for a long-term future together, as much as she wished that could be different. The realisation that she did wish it could be different struck her with such force she sat upright, trying to quell her rising emotion.

Her mind cruelly played the ‘what if’ game. What if there could be more than a short-term relationship between them? What if their passion was based on more than mutually shared lust? What if Brandon had been right, that they wanted the same things?

But they were only fantastical ‘what ifs’. In order for them to come true the world would have to be a far different place, a place where Earls married outlaws, a place where The Cat was not needed. That would be a perfect world indeed, an utter utopia where workers were treated fairly, where children did not risk limbs scavenging cotton droppings from under machines.

Those days were far away and probably beyond her lifetime, which might be a short one if she wasn’t careful. As much as her body yearned for Stockport, she had no business giving him her trust carte blanche. And really, Brandon had no business giving her his. He was in this game up to his neck and she wondered if he realised how deeply he played these days.

She could not allow him to develop a connection to her. It would be too dangerous for them both. She would end up dead. He would end up hurt if he developed a connection to her that could be traced or an attachment of an emotional nature. That was putting the cart before the horse. They had never spoken of love or affection last night or ever.

But sometimes sex did crazy things to a relationship, creating the illusion of something being there that wasn’t. Neither one of them could afford that delusion.

The solution was simple. She needed to leave. She dressed rapidly, thrusting legs into her breeches and arms through her shirt. Her hands fumbled on the buttons in her haste. She hoped her absence would send a message. There was no need for him to come looking for her and offering futile explanations for things that didn’t need to be explained.

Drat it, where was the other boot? Nora knelt on the floor and bent to peer under an armoire. There it was. She reached out and grabbed for it with a hand. But she was out of time.

‘As lovely as your derrière looks in those breeches, I am sure I can find something more suitable for my betrothed to wear.’ A familiar male voice broke the quiet of the room.

Damn that boot. If the boot had been handy when she was dressing, she would have been out the window. Now, she would have to face Brandon. From the sound of it, he was not pleased. The last thing she needed right now was a male caught up in some primal sense of protection for the woman he’d bedded.

‘Don’t get up.’ Brandon’s voice held a dangerous tone. ‘It’s the perfect position for spanking, which is what I’d like to do to you right now for even contemplating leaving.’

That was the sound of cold fury. Nora shut her eyes and took a deep breath before rising from her ignoble position on the floor. Her acerbic wit failed her, so she opted for silence, countering his anger with crossed arms and a defiant pose. She waited.

Brandon stared at Nora in disbelief. After Jack left, he’d come upstairs, expecting to find her still abed, still drowsy and on the brink of fully awakening. If he had waited a minute more, she would have been gone.

It was quite a blow to his ego to find that, while he was contemplating some level of serious commitment with a woman, the woman in question was contemplating escape out of a two-storey window. The whole scenario was worthy of a Drury Lane farce: an Earl, rich and handsome, able to have any woman, made sport of by the only woman he wanted.

Brandon shut the door behind him and met her stare evenly. He was gratified to see she was at a loss for words. ‘What did you think you were doing?’

‘We both know I’m not really your intended,’ she said at last.

‘We’re the only ones who know that.’ Brandon folded his arms and settled against the bed post, entrenching. ‘You cannot simply make such a claim in front of witnesses and then walk away, leaving me to clean up the mess. How am I to explain your disappearance or live down the scandal of broken nuptials? It’s hardly fair to me.’ He tried to sound cool, neutral, as if he weren’t furious at finding her in the midst of leaving.

‘I am sure you’ll think of something. Tell them you discovered I was a woman of loose virtue and that I misled you into believing I was something I was not.’ Her tone was punishingly devoid of any warmth. They could have been strangers for all that her tone implied. Brandon hated it.

‘I don’t lie well.’ Brandon pinned her with his gaze. ‘You are not a woman of loose virtue, but a woman of more honour than any person I’ve ever known. As for the bit about pulling the wool over my eyes, I resent the implication that I might be capable of being hoaxed. It reflects poorly on my manhood, to say nothing of being highly unbelievable. I fear Witherspoon and others would smell a rat. After all, I am the Cock of the North. I know my way around women, adroitly.’

Nora rolled her eyes. ‘Then it’s settled. We should definitely let people go on believing in our little deception for the sake of keeping your precious manhood intact.’

Brandon felt a smile crease his lips. This was better. He would rather joust with her wit than shadow-box her silence. ‘If there has to be any deception involved, I’d rather deceive others than deceive ourselves.’

‘What is that supposed to mean?’ Nora fired back.

‘You want to walk out of here and pretend last night or the first night didn’t happen.’

‘For the record, I wasn’t going to walk out of here, I was going to climb. And pretending they didn’t happen is better than what you want.’ Nora bent to tug on her boot.

Brandon smiled wickedly and advanced towards her, making it difficult to look at him and put her boot on at the same time. ‘Tell me, what is it that I want?’

Nora gave up on the boot to meet him squarely. ‘You want to believe last night meant something, that you are under obligation to protect me.’

‘That is true enough. Protection is an issue we must consider. Witherspoon is set on capturing The Cat. We can’t risk him discovering The Cat’s identity.’

Nora interrupted, caution infusing her tone. ‘This is my fight. I will not have you entangled. The game has become too perilous.’

Brandon ignored her and forged ahead. ‘I will politely debate that point. The moment Witherspoon realises my betrothed and The Cat are one and the same, I am suddenly in the middle of a very tricky situation. I find myself in great need of guaranteeing your safety. The only way we can guarantee your safety is to stop the raids. Once the raids stop, people will lose interest in The Cat.’ He braced himself, knowing she wouldn’t like it.

‘You are asking me to give up my goals. How do I know you are not using the situation to get what you want? You want me gone so your investors won’t flee,’ Nora said shrewdly.

Brandon nodded. ‘You need assurances of my trustworthiness and you already have them. I have had opportunities to turn you in and I have not. Instead, I played out your ruse. Those are not the actions of a desperate man who could take the easy way out.’

Nora crossed her arms over her chest. ‘I have to leave at once if I want to live to fight another day.’

Brandon’s tone turned sharp. ‘There will be no more fighting for you. Consider yourself retired.’ He was close enough to touch her.

He reached for her. She let him draw her into his arms, but he could feel the tension of her reluctance. ‘Nora, when I said “protection”, I meant permanent protection. If Witherspoon doesn’t catch you, someone else, somewhere, will. You can’t play The Cat indefinitely. The only way to be safe is to stop being The Cat altogether.’

She was ready to bolt and Brandon knew he was on tenuous grounds. ‘Nora, don’t be The Cat. Don’t be Eleanor Habersham or any other bit of fiction you can dream up. Stay with me and let me keep you safe.’

‘What did you say?’ The pallor of her face did her credit. Her shock was real.

‘I said, stay with me.’ He felt her tense for a protest. He put a finger on her lips. ‘Shh. You can talk in a moment. You told me Christmas Day that you could never stop being The Cat because there would always be the fear of arrest for a past burglary. With me, you would be protected from that. No one would dare challenge you while you are under my care.’

Nora’s chest heaved, indicating she wanted to break into the one-way conversation. Brandon shook his head. ‘I’m not finished. I haven’t forgotten your other reasons. You won’t have to give up your cause. All my funds, all my political connections, will be at your disposal, Nora, to do with as you wish. You already know I share your concerns. You know I support the Reform Act. Nora, we would be splendid. Stay with me and know that your fears have been laid to rest.’

Brandon found himself slightly out of breath. He could not think of anything more compelling to add. He watched her face for signs of acceptance. There were none.

‘Brandon, all you say is true. It’s a good offer. But I won’t stay with a man so that he can fulfil an obligation of honour and for other reasons. Please let me go and don’t ask any more of me.’

‘You cannot expect me to let you go without a reason, Nora, not with the possibility that we’ve had two opportunities to create a child.’

He had not wanted to push things that far, to use conception as a trump card, but his hand had been forced. He’d not expected her to leave. He’d expected her to stay with him and they’d be able to face that eventuality if it arose in the natural course of time. But Nora had not done the expected. As always, she’d done the opposite.

‘Tell me what it is that would drive you away and I will fix it.’

She shook her head slowly. ‘You can’t fix this, child or not, Brandon. You can’t jump down off the wagon box and throw your fortune at it.’ It was said with sorrow, without any mocking at his actions on Christmas Day.

Brandon felt a finger of fear move down his spine as he watched her eyes harden. She was steeling her resolve. He was suddenly seized with the desire to retract his statement. He didn’t want to know.

But the decision was in motion. She was going to tell him. He knew with distressing certainty it would be like hammering the final nail into a coffin. He swallowed hard.

‘Brandon, I am married. I will not stay with one man while I am legally bound to another.’

Brandon took an involuntary step backwards, a hand covering his mouth, his other hand groping for a chair or a bed post, anything with which to steady himself. His world was reeling. The coffee and toast he’d eaten with Jack threatened to come back up.

At last he choked out the word. ‘Married?’ This was worse than being on opposite sides of politics and even the law. This was about losing Nora. An Earl could do a lot of things, but he could not be a bigamist. The jealousy he’d so adamantly denied to Jack raised its green head. He did not want to share her with anyone from the past or the present.

‘Yes. At least I think so. I haven’t seen my husband for seven years.’

A glimmer of hope, then, Brandon thought, as morbid as it was. The rotter might be dead. Deuce take it, what was he coming to when the possibility of someone’s death brought him a surge of joy? This whole situation was becoming more ludicrous by the moment.

A knock sounded at the door of his chambers. Brandon had no further opportunity to pursue this latest twist. The present and all its implications reasserted itself.

‘This is not over,’ he said sternly, waving Nora into the dressing room where she would be out of sight. It wouldn’t do to have his servants see her in The Cat’s garb.

‘Enter,’ he called when Nora was hidden away.

‘My lord, I have come to inform you that the dressmakers you called for earlier this morning have arrived and are downstairs awaiting your pleasure,’ the valet said.

‘Excellent, tell them we’ll be down shortly.’ Brandon reached for a waistcoat and jacket. Shrugging into them gave him time to regroup. When Nora appeared in the doorway from the dressing room, casting him a questioning look, he felt back in control of himself. He had a meagre plan, a delaying action, really, but it was all he had time to come up with as he finished dressing.

‘The dressmakers from Manchester are here to help my betrothed restore her wardrobe after the unfortunate mishap yesterday that claimed her luggage,’ he explained.

She quirked a brow at the fabrication Brandon was spinning. Brandon didn’t give her a chance to respond. ‘My dear, you aren’t the only one who can improvise.

‘Shall we? We have much to discuss between us. You might as well do it in fine fashion. Until we resolve this tangle, I think it is best to see the ruse through,’ Brandon said sternly, crooking his arm, knowing she didn’t dare refuse. This was a role of her making. She had committed herself when she’d hastily concocted the idea to pose as his betrothed.

Nora took his arm and the challenge he invoked with her customary cockiness. ‘The curtain rises.’

‘So it does.’ With any luck, it wouldn’t be the final curtain. As long as he kept her with him, he could protect her from Cecil Witherspoon. He would learn more about this errant husband of hers and send Jack out to find him. In the meantime, he could persuade her about the merits of being his wife, an idea that he was starting to grow fonder of by the moment. He would not let her go without a fight.