D
amaris’s eyes flew to Alec’s
face, and what she was thinking must have showed in her expression, for he shifted uncomfortably and said, “I am sorry. They had only one private room left. I did not like to leave you alone, in any case. I’m not sure I could get to you in time if you needed me. This seemed… for the best. I hope you will not think that I have any intention of putting you in a situation that—well, I mean, of maneuvering or forcing you into—oh, devil take it! I am no good at prettying up my language. I know that what I said this morning might make you think otherwise, but I did not do this to compel you to sleep with me.”
“I know.” Damaris had experience with men who were happy to lie to a woman to get what they wanted, and she knew that Alec was not one of them.
But she also knew what had happened this morning, and the memory of it made her shiver. Not just the consuming kisses after Alec returned to the room. Not only his blunt words that still reverberated through her, the promise that he would have her in his bed. More than all that, it was the
thought of the blissful pleasure his seeking hands had awakened in her early this morning that made her wary of spending a night in this room with him. Alec had been asleep and dreaming; no doubt he had no idea what had transpired, but Damaris had been fully aware, and she knew she would never forget the passion that had surged through her, shattering her into a thousand pieces.
There was a very real danger in staying in this room with him, a danger to her heart and to the comfortable, content life she lived. She knew the kind of life that awaited her if she gave herself to the Earl of Rawdon, and she was determined not to fall into that trap.
Damaris straightened, pulling her strength together, and said, “It is a, um, very inappropriate situation.” She sounded horridly miss-ish, even to herself. “You would not wish to have your sister in a similar position, I am sure.”
“Good Gad, I should think not!” The horrified look on his face was enough to make Damaris laugh, but she kept her lips firmly clamped together. He swung away, then turned back. “But I should not wish her to spend the night unprotected, either. Especially not if someone had been chasing her across the countryside. I—I shall put this chair in front of the door and sleep in it.”
Damaris cast a doubtful glance at the rather rickety narrow chair.
“Unless you prefer that I sleep in the hall across your door.” His voice assumed some of its old hauteur.
“No, of course not. I am not
unreasonable
, I hope.”
“I assure you that I am capable of not acting upon my baser instincts,” he told her, lifting a brow.
Damaris was not about to tell him that she was not entirely certain that she could say the same about herself. She turned away, saying stiffly, “I am sure that we can manage here together well enough, as long as we are mindful. Careful.”
“Of course.”
Damaris looked around her. She did not know what to do or say. The room was small, and the bed seemed to fill it. There was no place to sit other than the one chair or the bed, and it seemed much too suggestive to sit casually on the bed. Her face and hands felt gritty, and she was sure that beneath the bonnet, her hair was a mess. For some reason, the realization that she did not even have a brush was enough to make the tears start in her eyes. She blinked furiously and drew a steadying breath.
“If you will excuse me,” Alec said, “I believe I shall go downstairs and see if I can procure us something to eat.”
Damaris turned and smiled at him. She knew he was tactfully giving her a chance to be alone, and she was grateful. “Thank you.”
“Mm. You may wish to hold those thanks until you see what I manage to find.”
After he left, Damaris pulled off her bonnet and did what she could to freshen up. At least there was a washstand in the room and water in the pitcher so that she was able to wash. There was little help for her hair except to take out the few hairpins she had left in it and run her fingers through it to disperse some of the tangles. She was trying in vain to restore
some order to her tresses when a soft knock sounded at the door and Alec entered, carrying a tray.
“Alec!” Damaris’s voice lilted upward in delight as a delicious aroma filled the air. “Food?”
“I was able to wheedle some scraps from the cook. Meat pie, mostly, and a bit of bread.” He set the tray down on the bed.
“Anything sounds wonderful to me. I am starving,” Damaris admitted, going over to inspect the tray. “Oh! You even got a bit of cake.”
“Bought by flattery and a sixpence.” He had set the tray down more or less in the middle of the bed, and he whisked off his boots and perched on the other side. “Sit down. Enjoy it.” He made a show of tucking a napkin into his neckcloth, then whipped another one off the tray and handed it to her. “Meat pies are messy business.”
Damaris laughed and followed his example, sitting down on the bed and picking up a small meat pie. It was so hot it burned her mouth, but she was too hungry to care. It was a messy meal, the crust flaking everywhere, and she had cause to be thankful for the placement of the napkin. But she had rarely enjoyed a meal more. Her hunger added a zest to the food unequaled by any sauce, and the cup of milk tasted better than the finest wine. Best of all was sitting there, feet tucked up under her, with Alec cross-legged on the other side of the tray, as if they were picnicking on the bed. They talked and laughed, going over their day’s adventures again and repeating choice bits of Mrs. Sanders’s conversation.
“Is
that
what she was talking about?” Alec exclaimed when
Damaris explained to him that the woman’s sister’s affliction was pregnancy.
“Yes! And apparently the poor woman has to endure a months-long visit from her every time she has a child.”
“That would be enough to put one off of having children forever. Hmm.” He looked thoughtful. “Yes, I can see how if one left out every reference to giving birth or pregnancy or lying-in that it might come out that way. I thought the poor woman was wasting away of some unmentionable disease, though I could not imagine what.”
“Mrs. Sanders would not want to bring up such lewd topics with a gentleman,” Damaris told him.
“Oh, aye, especially an inveterate gambler such as myself,” he retorted. “Feel free to slander my character any other time you choose, by the way.”
“I did not!” Damaris protested, laughing. “It was Mrs. Sanders who was sure you had lost your money on cards and dice. She said it was always so with gentlemen.”
“No doubt.” He took a bite of the cake, then leaned closer and popped a bit of it into her mouth.
His fingers brushed her lip, and suddenly the food became flavorless on her tongue. She was overwhelmingly aware of the state of her hair falling loose around her shoulders and that they were sitting together on a bed. Entirely alone and distant from everyone they knew. She gazed at him, her eyes caught by his ice-blue gaze. She thought of his lips on her. His hands. The heat that had surged up in his skin when he touched her, as if someone had laid a spark to a torch.
No one need ever know what happened here tonight. The thought dangled tantalizingly in front of her.
Except, of course, that
she
would know. She would hope and dream, and gradually her comfortable life would slip right through her fingers, no longer in her control. Damaris turned away and slid off the bed. Reaching down, she ripped another bit of ruffle from her mistreated petticoat and used it to tie her hair back. She turned back to face him.
“Thank you for supper,” she said, her voice and face formal.
“You are welcome.” His face changed, too, and he followed her lead, leaving his relaxed position on the bed and standing up. He set the tray aside on the dresser and turned back to her. “It is time to talk, is it not?”
The grave expression on his face, the way he stood, arms crossed over his chest, sent little prickles of warning through her. “About what?” She suspected that she knew what was coming, and she had little desire to face it. However, she could not continue to keep Alec in ignorance. He had done too much for her, taken too many risks.
“About those men. Who are they? Why are they after you? I find it difficult to believe that this is simply a ‘family matter.’ “
“It seems excessive,” Damaris agreed. “Truly, Alec, I do not know who they are. I have never seen them before the other day when they seized me. I assume that they were hired.”
“Who hired them?”
“I don’t know, but I think… perhaps… it was my father’s mother.”
“Your
grandmother
?” He stared at her in disbelief. “Are you
seriously telling me that your grandmother hired a bunch of ruffians to abduct you? Why?”
“Because I am a scandal to her. I am a reminder of the way her son flouted her for years, how he brought shame to the family name. I am…” She took a breath and said quickly, “I was born on the wrong side of the blanket.”
He continued to look at her. She could not read his expression.
“I am sorry,” Damaris went on quickly. “I should have told you earlier. But it is not the sort of thing one blurts out when one first meets someone. Clearly, I should have told you when you invited me to your party. I shouldn’t have gone to it. It was very wrong of me to put you and your family in that position.”
“That doesn’t matter. I am glad you didn’t stay away from the ball. If you had, I would not have been able to waltz with you.”
She gave him a fleeting smile. “That is very nice of you to say.”
“My dear girl, I think you have me mistaken for someone else. You keep telling me I am kind or nice, and I promise you that I am not known for either quality. Nor is ‘good’ a word that is usually attached to my name.”
“You have been all those things to me. And I have repaid your kindness poorly. I should not have accepted the invitation. I know that no one would fault a man such as yourself for… keeping company with a woman like me, but it is a different matter for your sister and your grandmother. They would not like the
ton
thinking that they are friends with a
woman whose mother was an actress and who was not married to her father.”
“I am not sure that my grandmother is friends with anyone,” Alec told her lightly. “However, I am confident that she has known other people whose parents were not married—at least, not to each other.”
“I will not tell you again that you are kind, since you seem to mislike it. But I am not naïve or foolish enough to believe that your grandmother would not be most upset if she knew who I was. She would think, rightfully so, that I had deceived all of you, and she would be embarrassed in front of society.”
“I can promise you that my grandmother would not for a moment accede to the idea that anyone else had the right to disapprove of her or what she did. As a result, she is rarely embarrassed. You need not worry about that.” He paused, frowning. “But I fear I still do not understand why you think your grandmother would hire thugs to abduct you. The scandal was years ago, after all.”
“Yes, but I think she fears that it would all come up again if I were in London, going to
ton
parties. You see, I have never done so before. I went to school in Switzerland, and after my father’s death, my mother and I remained on the Continent. I did not return to England until last year, and I have stayed in Chesley all that time. I don’t believe any of them knew I was here. But she saw me at your party. I did not even realize who she was, but she knew me. She came up to me during the ball, and she was livid. She told me she wanted me to leave England, that I would bring shame and scandal on her family.”
Damaris was not about to tell him the rest of her scandalous past. She was not even sure that her grandmother knew about her hasty marriage or that it played any part in Lady Sedbury’s fear of scandal. In any case, it was not something Alec needed to hear. “That night, when I came to you, I had no idea who the men were or why they would have attacked me. It was only afterward that I realized they must have been hired by Lady Sedbury to remove me from England.”
“Lady Sedbury is your grandmother?” At Damaris’s nod, Alec went on, “Then your father was…” He looked thoughtful. “The present Lord Sedbury’s father?”
“Clement, yes. Did you know him?”
“Vaguely. I saw him at the club a time or two when I was first on the town. We did not really move in the same circles.”
“My father was a quiet man, the sort who liked his hearth and home, except that he did not really like the home he was born to.”
“I don’t remember any scandal surrounding him.”
“You would have been too young. When my father was a young man, he fell in love with an actress. So much in love that he not only bought her a pretty little house, but he went to live with her there, as if they were man and wife.”
“If your mother looked like you, it is little wonder that he was willing to face scandal to be with her.”
“One could argue that he might have shown some restraint… or maybe enough courage to stand up to his family,” Damaris retorted tartly. “But he was unable to do either. When his father died and he inherited the title, his family convinced
him that he must do his duty and marry a suitable woman. Someone from his own class. And so, when I was eight, he left us.” Her eyes flashed, and she lifted her chin. “He could not stay away entirely, of course. He visited my mother now and then. He would chuck me under the chin and tell me I was his girl. But I knew, of course, that it was no longer true. I was his bastard daughter, the one he would not openly acknowledge.” Tears sparkled in her eyes, and she dashed them away angrily. “Oh, blast it all. I am not going to cry about him.”