by Anne Stuart
Page 16
Author: Anne Stuart
Cadogan Place was a fair distance, but no farther than she’d walked in the country almost daily. And she needed the exercise, needed the fresh air and the time to recover her temper. How dare her family try to interfere with her life? It seemed she had their full support when she lived a cloistered existence. Make one new friend and she was suddenly beyond the pale.
If Brandon wouldn’t tell her then she knew where she could get the answers. And it wasn’t as if the man had done anything to her family—it was the ridiculous fear that he might. Just as society feared she might corrupt the morals of the young ladies who had once been her dearest friends. Only Lord and Lady Montague had stood by their daughters’ friendship, with Lady Montague insisting that whatever Miranda had done, she’d done ten times worse and twice on Sundays, making Miranda laugh.
Evangelina Montague wouldn’t order her away from Lucien over any ridiculous might. Neither, she was sure, would her parents. It was only her interfering brothers who’d suddenly gotten the alarm up, and she was going to nip this whole thing in the bud. Lucien meant her no ill, and to assume otherwise was absurd.
The Scorpion. What an utterly absurd name for him. He was no more venomous than a field mouse. Well, perhaps that was putting it too gently. No more venomous than a fox. In truth, the whole thing was ridiculous and cruel, and she refused to listen to it.
The brisk hike through the cool morning air put color in her cheeks but did little to dampen the blaze in her eyes. By the time she reached the huge, dark house on Cadogan Place she was still in a fine stage of outrage, and her footman was sweating profusely and trying to catch his breath. “You need to exercise more, Jennings,” she said as she marched up the front steps to the shiny black door. He wheezed his agreement as he stood a decorous pace behind her as she used the heavy brass knocker.
The door was opened promptly, and the servant who stood there was tall, lugubrious, cadaverously thin and dressed in funereal black, clearly the Scorpion’s preferred color for livery. And for the first time Miranda began to feel conspicuous. Young ladies, even ruined ones, didn’t call at a gentleman’s house unannounced. “Is his lordship at home? Would you tell him … tell him a lady is here to see him?” She should have had enough sense to wear a veil, she thought belatedly. She’d just been too angry to think clearly.
For a long moment she was afraid the man would have her wait on the doorstep, but he opened the door wide, silently inviting them in. “I am Leopold, Lady Miranda. Lord Rochdale’s majordomo. He told me to expect you one day. If your ladyship would follow me I’ll find a place for you to wait while I see if the earl is receiving. He often doesn’t arise until noon. ”
Now that was an embarrassing image, she thought, following him down the dark, faintly foreboding corridor. The thought of Lucien in bed, asleep amidst snowy-white sheets, was disturbing, though she wasn’t sure why.
And why was the servant told to expect her? And recognize her? The room he left her in was dark and cold. What windows it had were covered with heavy black fabric, and there’d been no fire laid in the grate. The furniture was stiff and uncomfortable, and Miranda was glad no one had bothered to take her cloak and gloves. She needed all the covering she could get in that icy, dark little dungeon.
She waited a very long time. There was no way she could really tell, though. The room boasted no clock that she could see in the gloomy shadows, and her fury was finally beginning to drain away, to be replaced by a touch of embarrassment. Any apprehension that slid into her consciousness she swiftly banished. She simply needed to clarify things, to find out why her family found the earl so unacceptable. And then she could stuff it down Brandon’s throat.
After all, the Rohans were hardly the epitome of respectability. Though her loving but stern mother had made certain her sons had never succumbed to the lure of such depraved activities as the Heavenly Host provided, she had accepted that young men were bound to kick up the occasional fuss. And Miranda knew the shocking truth. Her own darling father and his father before him had been active in the Host. In fact, her father said his knowledge of them gave him particular reason to make certain his sons kept their distance.
But still, she vaguely remembered the occasional scandals. Benedick had once been engaged to a woman so unstable she’d threatened him with a gun at a public rout, and then she’d continue to behave so strangely she would have ended in Bedlam if she hadn’t died.
Charles, stuffy Charles, had had a great fondness for opera dancers until he’d fallen in love with Kitty Marsden, the surprisingly down to earth daughter of a country squire.
And Brandon was doing his best to follow in the family tradition. It was no wonder they’d been so forgiving of her lapse.
So the Rohans were scarcely high-sticklers. Why should they kick up a fuss about a simple friendship with a man of bad reputation? It made no sense.
She rose and strolled nervously around the cramped confines of the room. She peered through the window that looked out over the mews, then turned and walked back around the crowded room. What was taking him so long?
Eventually she sat again, back on the hard sofa. If it had been at all warm she would have fallen asleep, but as it was she had to pull her pelisse closer about her in a vain effort to keep warm. She began to worry that the majordomo had forgotten her existence, or that his disapproval of a young lady visiting a gentleman so offended his proprieties that he thought to teach her a lesson, which was far-fetched, but servants could at times be even stuffier than their masters. Except that he’d looked almost embarrassed when he’d shown her into the dismal room.
She’d just about given up hope when the door opened, and the gloomy butler reappeared. “His lordship will see you now,” he announced, and she could sense his disapproval. Presumably with her, though he looked around the grim room with disapprobation. Miranda rose as gracefully as she could with frozen joints, giving the man a pleasant smile as she preceded him out the door.
She hadn’t realized how big the house was as she followed the gloomy Leopold through the darkened corridors. She expected to be brought to the cozy little parlor where she and Lucien had shared so many pleasant hours, but the room he brought her to was a great deal different. Warmer, thank God, with a good fire blazing in the grate, but with dark, almost severe furnishings and heavy draperies.
Lucien de Malheur was sitting behind a desk, writing. He glanced up as she approached, but in the darkness she couldn’t see his expression. Just his face surrounded by a mane of long dark hair. He made no effort to rise.
“Oh, thank God,” she said briskly, heading straight for the fire. “I’m absolutely freezing! Don’t you have fires in any of your parlors?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Leopold put you in an unheated room. ”
It wasn’t exactly a question. “He did. He probably didn’t expect it to take you so long to see me. ”
“Is that a note of reproach I hear?”
There was something wrong. His voice was light, faintly teasing, but there was something between them that hadn’t been there before. Some odd constraint that made her uneasiness deepen.
But she refused to give in to it. “It is,” she said in a cheerful voice. “I come racing across town in a desperate hurry because I had to see you at once, and you keep me locked up in an icebox for hours. ”
“One hour,” he corrected her, and he gave her no answering smile. “Things have moved a little faster than I expected, and I needed to make a few arrangements, marshal my forces before we met. ”
Her flippant response died on her tongue as she looked at him. He might have been a stranger. Not the man she’d laughed with, talked with. The scandalmongers had been right after all. This was the Scorpion who faced her, cold and deadly.
“Did I do something wrong?” she asked in a quiet voice. “Have I somehow offended you?”
“No. Have a seat, Lady Miranda. I’m still waiting c
onfirmation on a small issue, and then we’ll talk. ”
She turned slowly, facing him. He hadn’t risen, when he always had before. Perhaps his leg was paining him, and that was why everything was so stiff and strange …
No. She wasn’t going to lie to herself, and she wasn’t going to sit patiently like a good girl. She moved closer. “I think not. I think you should explain what’s going on now. ”
“Sit down. ”
She sat.
She sat, hating herself for doing so, but there was something in his voice, an icy chill, that hit her knees, and she sank into the chair behind her.
She watched him, her face composed, even as her heart raced beneath the stern trappings of her day dress. “I’ve been a very great fool, haven’t I?” she said in a conversational voice.
He was scribbling something on a piece of paper, and he didn’t bother to look up. “More than once, Lady Miranda,” he said. And then his pale, empty eyes met hers. “To which time were you referring?”
“Our friendship is far from accidental, isn’t it?”
“Our friendship?” he echoed, and there was only the slightest trace of mockery in his voice. “It was planned. ”
“But how did you know I’d have a carriage accident? Or was that simply good luck on your part?” She kept her hands clasped in her lap. She didn’t want him to see how tightly she was gripping her fingers, and she buried them in the folds of her pelisse.
“I never count on luck, child. One of my men tampered with your carriage, ensuring the wheel would come off. ”
This was a nightmare, she thought, not blinking. This was some horrid bad dream and she was back home in bed, sleeping soundly.
But she knew it wasn’t. “I could have been killed. ” Her voice was steady.
He showed no remorse. “That would have been highly unlikely, given that you are a notable whip. I expected you’d be able to control your cattle under even more dire circumstances. And of course we were right there waiting. If my calculations had been off it still would have accomplished what I hoped. ”