Not Wicked Enough (42 page)

“She’s my girl,” Mr. Kirk said. He stared past Mountjoy. “My firstborn. The best of the lot of them if you ask me. She’s ruined. Ruined!”

“Has something happened to Jane?” He lifted a hand palm out. “Choose your words carefully, sir.”

Kirk took a deep breath. “As if you don’t know, when she’s pregnant with your bastard.”

He blinked twice. “I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t deny what you’ve done. All these years you’ve kept her from meeting a man who will marry her. Leading her into sin. Seducing her.” Kirk scrubbed his hands over his face and when he looked up, he seemed to have collected himself. “Do you think we don’t know your reputation when you are in London? Opera girls and ballet dancers. Do you think a father can’t see his daughter’s weakness? Jane loves you. She loves you enough to do whatever you ask of her because you’re the bloody duke.”

Mountjoy pressed his lips together. “Has she actually accused me?”

Kirk set his jaw. “Who else would seduce her? To whom else would she give herself except to the man she believed would marry her?”

“Someone besides me,” Mountjoy said.

“You’ll marry her,” Kirk said. “You’ll marry her as quickly as you can. It’s only right when you’ve ruined her for anyone else. I’ll sue you for breach of promise if you don’t.”

“What promise would that be? I never asked permission of you to marry any one of your daughters.”

“You didn’t need to. Everyone knew you’d marry Jane. Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you.”

“If you stand before a judge and swear that I promised any such thing, you’ll consign yourself to Hell.” Anger slipped into his voice because until now he’d considered Mr. Kirk a friend, and the man was here, sitting in his house, attempting to force him into a marriage he did not want. “Nor did I ever speak to Jane or any of her sisters about marriage. I won’t marry your daughter, Kirk.” He leaned over the man. “Drag this farmer’s name through the mud if you feel your reputation and your soul are worth the lies.”

Kirk blanched. “Agree to acknowledge her bastard as yours, then. The bastard son of a duke might do very well in life.”

“No.” He felt for Kirk’s pain, for the scandal and disgrace if it was true Jane was with child. Sadly he must consider
the possibility that Kirk was lying in an attempt to force a marriage. “If it’s true, I am very sorry. But I am not the father. I will not marry a woman pregnant by another man any more than I would support another man’s bastard simply because a distraught father accuses me.”

“We are at an impasse.” Kirk lifted his head, eyes bleak. “It must be you. It can only be you.”

“There’s no impasse, sir. I am not the man responsible for your daughter’s misfortune.”

“Then she’s ruined and some rogue will not do right by her.”

“So long as we agree that the rogue is not me.” Mountjoy walked to the bellpull and called for Doyle. When he turned, Kirk was slumped on his chair, head down, hands clasped between his open knees. “Doyle will show you out.”

Still with his head in his hands, Kirk said, “What am I to do?”

He held out Kirk’s riding whip. “Go home to your family. Surely you or your wife can convince her to tell you who is responsible.”

The man shook his head. “If it were someone who was free to marry her, she would have told my wife.”

Doyle appeared, and Kirk, after a shaky sigh and a curt bow, left the room. Mountjoy returned to his desk, but he could not concentrate on the tasks at hand. He wished Doyle had brought a brandy.

Someone tapped on his door. “Come,” he said.

The door opened. Slowly. Too slowly for the efficient Doyle.

He knew it was Lily before he saw or heard her. “Mountjoy?”

This should not be happening to him, that a woman’s presence should make his heart pound and his body shiver with anticipation, with doubt, and with outright lust. Shouldn’t, but was. He stood, though he stayed behind his desk, fingertips resting on top. “Yes?”

Lily was so beautiful it hurt his heart to look at her, yet
what he wanted to see from her wasn’t that angelic perfection but the impish smile that meant she had the measure of him and intended to make him pay. Mountjoy, still on his feet, carefully, very deliberately, capped the ink and placed his quill in the stand.

“May I come in?” She gripped the side of the door. “I understand you’re busy, but I’ll only bother you for a moment.” She put her other hand over her heart. “I promise.”

He made the same gesture to the near chair as he’d done for Mr. Kirk. “Please.”

She came in and sat on the chair, back straight, hands resting lightly on her lap. She wore a pale gray muslin with narrow vertical stripes of a darker gray. A fiery orange ribbon was threaded through her hair. The effect was, as ever, flattering to her, without there being any obvious reason why. “Sit down, your grace.”

The door was open. If he could have closed it with a look he would have. If he could have changed whatever thought or concern had made Lily choose to leave it open, he would have done that, too.

“You heard all that I suppose.”

“Yes.”

He didn’t sit down. “It isn’t true,” he said. “About Jane and me.”

She leaned forward. “It was impossible not to overhear. He was quite angry.” She met his eyes, and all he could think was how she’d looked in his arms last night, the sound of his name on her lips, the way she’d felt around him. “Is aught well with you?”

“I am not the father of her child.”

“I know you’re not.”

He came around from behind the desk and stood before her. “There will be gossip.”

“I fear Mr. Kirk intended that result.”

He gave a dark laugh and gestured at his desk. “My responsibilities must be met. Every day. Every minute. I do
meet them and have done so since the day I became Mountjoy. Duty to my family, my title, my tenants, the people who live in this parish, and those where I am an absentee property owner they know only by name. To those in my employ and to my king and country. But I do not owe Jane Kirk a father for her child.”

“No, I suppose you don’t.” She let out a breath. “What if you married her after the child comes?”

The world stopped. His heart no longer beat. “You can’t marry Fenris. Not now. No more than I can marry Jane. You know that. You know why.”

“Mountjoy, don’t.”

“Don’t what? Am I to do nothing while you marry a man you don’t love? Should I marry a woman I don’t love? For God’s sake, you can’t mean that.”

She stood, too, and he closed the distance between them and the hell with the open door, he thought. He kissed her, mouth open from the start, and twined an arm around her waist to bring her close. She moved with the forward impetus of his arm, melted against him and now, for this moment, he felt right. Whole. Her arms went around his shoulders, both of them so that she was pressed against him. She slid her fingers into his hair and brought his head down to hers and kissed him senseless.

They parted, eventually, each of them breathless. They’d ended up with her backed up to a tall and thankfully sturdy cabinet that stored various documents and supplies. Paper. Ink. Letters, deeds, the last will and testament of the third duke.

“I’m not going to marry Fenris,” she said.

“I’m not going to marry Jane.”

“Very well, then.”

“Have you made up your mind what you’ll do about me?” he said. When he made up his mind that he wanted thus and such a woman, he’d never had any difficulty getting her into his arms. He’d watched other men flirt and seduce and
cajole, and he had never had to do that. Until now. Until Lily. He touched her shoulders, her low back, the sides of her throat.

She leaned against the cabinet. “I can’t think when you kiss me like that.”

“You do want me.” He wasn’t a man of sweet words. To his knowledge he had no particular way with women the way other men did, just good sense about them. “You couldn’t kiss me like that if you didn’t.”

Her impish smile flashed. “Perhaps you’re right.”

“I’m always right.” He kept her close. “Have you changed your mind about us?”

“No. Have you?”

“No,” he said. Relief blew through him, but it was followed by the unsettling conviction that he’d just made a serious mistake. Though, how could that be when Lily wasn’t leaving him?

M
OUNTJOY OPENED THE DOOR TO
L
ILY’S ROOM AND
slipped in as quickly and unobtrusively as he could. Lily was in bed, a single candle providing the light by which she’d been reading. She had a book in her hand, but it was facedown on her chest, and her eyes were closed.

She sat up, though, blinking when he turned from the door he’d just locked. “Mountjoy?”

He put a finger across his lips and whispered, “Don’t send me away.”

“I shan’t.” If she hadn’t been asleep, then she’d been near to it. Her hair was down, but braided so that it would not tangle while she slept. Half past six in the morning and she was only now falling asleep. “What is it?”

“Lord, where to start.” She was the first and only person he wanted to talk to, and he had taken a risk, coming here with the servants already up and about.

“In the middle, if you please.” The curtains were drawn, but her candle and a soft morning light kept the room from darkness.

“Nigel came home late last night.” He walked to her dressing room door and closed that, too. And locked it.

She set aside her book and sat with her legs curled underneath her. If he were a painter, he’d take her likeness posed like this. As if she were fresh from her lover’s embrace, even though she wasn’t. A frown creased her brow. “And?”

“He arrived home in possession of a special license. In order to marry Jane Kirk. Which he has done, I should add, without my prior knowledge or consent. In the middle of the night.”

“Don’t tell me you object.”

“It wouldn’t matter if I did. They are married and are even now sitting downstairs having come here to inform me I have a sister in law. I have just listened to my brother confess that he has been in love with Jane Kirk for months and that he is responsible for her inconvenient situation.”

“What does Mr. Kirk say? Does he know?”

“Not yet.” He scrubbed his hand through his hair. “Directly he obtained the special license, Nigel went to Jane. Not here. He did not come home to consult the head of his family. He went to the Kirks’, got a ladder, put it up against Jane’s window, and carried her away.”

“He did?”

Mountjoy looked down and saw her eyes wide and, God help him, filling with tears. “For pity’s sake, don’t cry. There’s nothing to be done now. He did not consult a soul, the fool.”

She blinked, and two fat tears rolled down her cheeks. “I always cry when there’s a happy ending. I can’t help myself. A ladder, you say? It’s so romantic.”

“Romantic?” He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her.

“Thank you, your grace. That’s simply the loveliest story. He adores her. Did he throw pebbles at her window, or was she waiting up for him?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.” He resisted the impulse to
kiss her. For now. “Wouldn’t it make more sense for him to climb the ladder and tap on the window?”

“I think he must have thrown pebbles.” She put her book on the bedside table. “It’s what all the heroes do when they carry away their ladyloves.”

The tension in his chest eased because he’d just seen his future. He was looking at it now. He knew exactly what he had failed to recognize before. “You don’t think it’s a scandal? Eloping with the woman everyone thought was to marry his brother?”

“Of course it’s a scandal. A delicious, wonderful scandal of true love, Mountjoy.” She extended a hand, and without thinking, he took it. “You’ll have to have a wedding party for them.”

He groaned. “More people in my house.”

“I’ll help you plan it.”