Lord Stanhope's Improper Proposal Read online

  “Writing is a poorly paid profession. My father paid his published authors the same as I earn today for each copy of my works.” She tried for levity, but the fact that she had made more in an advance on a political scandal sheet series about him made her cold with worry. She shivered, so far from the fire and, too, so far from the warmth she had expected of him on their wedding trip. She backed toward the flames of the fireplace.

  “Christ! Felice, don’t stand there.” His gaze flowed down her form and stuck on the juncture of her thighs.

  She looked down her body. Silhouetted by the dancing red conflagration behind her, her body seemed almost bare of the transparent silk.

  “Out with this, Adam. What are you telling me?”

  “I married you for convenience.”

  She swallowed back wild disappointment. She could have sworn that a tiny part of him had wanted her in his bed.

  “I knew some of your motivation was your desire for political advancement.”

  There. She’d been bold to say it and let him know she had heard the rumors.

  He set his jaw. His eyes dimmed. “But I regret it.”

  “Don’t.” She tried for magnanimity. “I am pleased to help you.”

  “Pleased? No!” He looked as if he were in pain. “Hear me out. I am proud you are my wife, but I doubt you’ll ever be pleased you belong to me.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “Because, we Stanhopes have miserable marriages.”

  “Ah, the curse,” she said matter-of-factly. “A fable of immense proportions.”

  “No fable, madam!”

  “It is. Used by men and women to justify their own failures to make a marriage a congenial union.”

  “Come now, Fee. You and I are not one of your romantic heroines and heroes in your epic poems.”

  “Thank god. I intend we mortals do as we must to make a good marriage of what once was a solid friendship.”

  He raked his hair. “No, Fee. That cannot be.”

  “Why not?”

  “This marriage will make us miserable.”

  “Silliness.”

  “It’s not silly, my girl. For over a century, no Stanhope has had a happy marriage. The Stanhope wives have died of broken hearts. The men have turned bitter, some dying in their cups, others going mad. I do not wish that for you or me.”

  “Yet you took me anyway.”

  “I did. I thought when I saw you at the Brimwells’ country house last month that we might escape the Curse. I saw a lovely woman of wit and wisdom. I saw someone who could be my companion and my hostess, my partner. I also saw someone who would make a compassionate mother for my boy. Georgie is two and needs petting and coddling by a woman who can discipline him and love him.”

  She sank her fingers into the rough velvet of Adam’s dressing robe and leaned into his warm hard body. “I want to be all those things for you.”

  He gave a pained laugh then clutched her closer. “Don’t make this harder for me.”

  Both brows arched as her hips met his and pressed. His cock was high and hard.

  Impressively so. “Darling Adam, I doubt it can get any harder.”

  At her double entendre, he laughed ruefully and hugged her. “I should not touch you.”

  “I will touch you then.” She slid his robe from his shoulders

  “Fee, don’t.”

  “I want you, too. Don’t you see? I have for years and years.”

  He smoothed her hair from her cheeks. “You are charming. You remind me of a garden.”

  He took her lips in a sweet kiss. “Fragrant and filled with every imaginable delicacy. Ready to be plucked.”

  She swayed fully against him, his declarations more than she had dared hope for.

  One of his hands traced her throat, one breast and the curve of her waist. “I took one look at your dusky beauty last month in Kent and was enchanted. Who could imagine little Felice could be so utterly fascinating?”

  She undulated in his caress. Her eyes fell closed. He was saying everything, doing everything a loving groom should.

  His hand intruded between her legs. “You are petal soft and hot.”

  The sound of how ready she was for him filled the room. “Wet, too,” she offered.

  “Like dew,” he growled then bent to scoop her up into his arms and stride two steps to lay her on the bed. He loomed above her, pulling down the negligee to cup her breast and rub his lips across her skin. “And your nipples are like spun sugar.” He made her arch as he sucked her into his mouth, then ruched up her hem to slide his two fingers inside her cunny. “You flow so sweetly here. How did I know you would?” he asked like a man in a trance.

  Thrilled at his enchanting words, she moaned and spread her legs wide in invitation.

  “No, no. I can’t!” He rose to his knees and stared at her as if seeing her anew. “We will not do this.”

  “But—”

  “No!” He bounded from the bed. “I loved you as a child. I want you to be happy. You must not care for me, nor I you. The best way to ensure that is for us never to share a bed.”

  “You do not wish to consummate this marriage?”

  “Better this way to keep my door and my mind locked against you.”

  She reeled with sorrow and propped herself up on her elbows. “Not every couple who goes to bed learns to love the other.” She knew that firsthand.

  “Love becomes tangled with other emotions. All of them are too wild to tame.”

  “Adam, this curse is just so much folderol. There is no proof.”

  “My mother died of it. So too did Wes’ and Jack’s. My father’s three marriages all were failures. My first was a living hell. There is no joy in loving Stanhopes.”

  “What if I don’t love you?” She didn’t, did she? “What if I just want to be bedded by you?”

  He blinked, appearing utterly astonished and sad, too. “The same! It matters not!”

  “It remains I am still your wife.”

  “But in name only, Fee.” He picked up his robe and strode for the door. “In name only.”

  * * * *

  The next morning, he rose from the bed he’d never slept in and told the innkeeper to take a hot bowl of porridge and a pot of tea up to his wife’s room. Then he bid the man to send a runner to the ferryman with the message that they would not sail to Jersey for their honeymoon.

  Adam told the man to go to the livery, too, and hire two carriages to take him and his wife back to London. Felice could ride in her own carriage. Adam would not presume to burden her with his presence after he had abandoned her last night.

  Coward.

  Aye, he was. He liked his life. Wanted Felice. But if he never became a cabinet minister, could he affect change? Could he help write laws to change child labor? And repeal taxation?

  Could he improve the welfare of men in the Army? He doubted he could accomplish any of it.

  So he took the stairs up to her room like an old man burdened with infirmities of body.

  When he opened the door and saw the bed made, her trunk and valise gone, he knew he had truly become an older man filled the insecurities of his poor judgments.

  She was gone.

  He tried to hold back the agony of his despair. He had hurt her. Sweet, shy Fee. And thus had he taken the first step toward their destruction.

  She had taken the second step. She had fled him.

  And so the curse was now really upon them both.

  Chapter Three

  The stationers’ bill came first. Well, that Adam could understand. Felice was a celebrated author of epic poetry. He had never asked her how much paper she used, but by Jove from the size of this bill, she must scribble all day on the very best parchment! Without quarrel, he summarily paid the man.

  Two weeks later, came the book shops’ invoices. Two of them. For more than twenty pounds each. How quickly did the new Mrs. Stanhope read? Adam tapped his fingers on his desk and idly wondered, too, what she read. No matter. Not his
affair. He paid the owners the sums in full.

  A month later, came a bill from a milliner. The amount was small. Adam wondered what she’d ordered. A hat to wear to tea? A feathery thing for a dinner party?

  And where the hell was she living anyway? Not at her own small cottage in Kent. For certain, he knew that. He had charged Reggie to check when his friend went down last week to visit his uncle in Canterbury. The place was boarded up tight as a drum.

  No one hinted where Felice might be. He did not inquire of anyone else. Too risky. He’d appear desperate. Was he? No, no, absolutely not! But from the invoices, he had to conclude she was in London. Somewhere. With her cousin, Lady Dunwitty? Or her friends, the Baron Jasper Elgin and his wife, Annabelle? Respectable people even though his cousin, the hideous Drayton Howell, had begun that horrible scandal sheet, the Tell-Tale.

  But a fortnight later, Adam sat in his library and glared at the newest bill. He read the address of the dressmaker and concluded that wherever the hell Felice had taken refuge, she evidently needed quite a few new clothes. A whole damn closet full. He cursed roundly. What in the world was she thinking? Would she brave society by herself?

  He did not know. But he worried.

  He paid the dressmaker but demanded from the proprietor a complete listing of every item Mrs. Stanhope had purchased. Two days later, he sat scanning the Frenchwoman’s descriptions of them. Incensed at Fee’s audacity, he shot up from his desk and strode to the window overlooking Berkeley Square. She had purchased day dresses, riding clothes, walking ensembles and four ball gowns. Four! Where the hell was she going?

  Without him?

  The whispers began three weeks later. The second Mrs. Stanhope had taken the waters at Bath. She called on her elderly uncle and aunt alone. She took tea with the reverend who had once served in her parish in Kent and now lived in a retirement home in Lambeth. The Tell-Tale reported that a certain Mrs. S. had dined on the fourth with that literary sponsor, the Earl of Hargrave and his wife. If this was his Mrs. S., Adam wondered what she discussed. If she spoke of him. Thought of him. Hated him.

  Soon after came two more pieces of rough news.

  The first came in the form of a second installment of a short story by a self-styled political observer. This pseudonymous Miss Proper published her fiction in the Tell-Tale and in this episode, the main character, a certain member of Parliament named Alfonse Starhope had forsaken his wife on the pretext of a family curse. His lady wife, said the hideous tale, considered divorcing her husband. Desertion was her justification.

  If this story were true, Adam supposed he could not blame her. But still, bad form to put it about in a scandal sheet.

  “I’d confront her,” he told his brother, Jack, one morning as they rode home together from a late night card game at White’s. “But I cannot find her!”

  “I heard last night at the gaming tables that Wingate and his wife give a ball in two weeks.

  Your wife has accepted the invitation. Go yourself, and have it out with her.”

  “I will.” He scowled. “I must know what the hell she’s up to.”

  Jack chuckled. “She’s doing exactly what you’d expect. She’s making a life for herself without you.”

  “She certainly is. Inspiring this simpleton Proper to make a mockery of me.”

  As Jack’s coachman drew the horses to a stop in front of Adam’s townhouse, he gazed at Adam with pained mirth. “Sending you the bills, too.”

  Adam drew his frockcoat about him and grabbed his top hat. “I cannot let her continue.”

  “Why not? Actually, Fee has not done anything scandalous.”

  “Not yet.” He climbed out of the carriage and faced his brother. “I married her to create the impression of stability and peace. Instead, she appears to be preparing herself to navigate society alone and on my money, as well.”

  “What will you do about it then? Stop paying her bills?” Jack pursed his lips, rueful.

  “You‘ve set that precedent. And she does not appear to need an allowance. Her earnings from her book of poems suffice.”

  “I’ll find a way.” Adam checked the expression of his oldest brother. “I made my bed.”

  And it’s cold. Empty. “I’d rather lie in it with her under my own roof than have her gallivanting about alone.”

  “She’s not known to be biddable. And you’re not known to be flexible.”

  “But I am a good negotiator. I will use all my skills and do the thing that is most politic.”

  “What might that be?” Jack snorted. “Haul her home in chains?”

  “Seduce her.”

  * * * *

  Adam loathed balls. They were lavish things meant to force a man to chat and dance with any brainless chit or matronly drone he could not avoid.

  For two hours now, he had grown weary of holding up the walls. If Felice were indeed here, it would not do for him to take the floor with anyone but her. But damnation, if he could find her in this throng.

  Grumbling, he shot his cuffs and headed for the punch bowl. Dinner had not yet been called, and his stomach was growling. He should have eaten something as his man had suggested, but he’d been too eager to get here and look for his wife.

  “Where the hell are you?” he muttered to himself, wondering if Clarence Wingate and his wife were mistaken about Felice’s acceptance of their invitation. He took a drought of his wine and frowned. What if Felice had taken ill? A headache? The vapors? Ba! Not Felice. Too ferociously healthy. He sipped more of his wine and recalled the way she’d looked at him that night in the inn. Her golden eyes had swum with desire as he put his hands on her delectable body and tasted her nipples. Her plush lips had parted in need as he stroked her cunt. The memory of how silken her skin was inside her swollen labia had him tossing back the rest of his wine.

  Stifling a groan, he backed up against a column, and his gaze drifted. He lifted his chin to acknowledge his Great Aunt Amaryllis across the room. She spoke with some tall, lush thing in diaphanous red. The woman, her back to him, had hair of purest black that curled at her nape.

  She wore it short, the fashion in France now the rage in London among the truly daring. This elegant creature also wore the Empire style, which he wagered, would cup magnificent breasts to tempting advantage. He had the roguish impulse to circle round the two women to see if he might enjoy other comely views of her figure. But she was animated in her conversation.

  Responding to his aunt, she turned to their other companion, Adam’s vociferous opponent on matters of funding the army in the Peninsula, Drayton Howell.

  Adam was about save the ladies from this odious man when he spied his aunt beckoning him with small, surreptitious gestures. He strode over, gave the ladies a small bow and froze.

  “Good evening, Adam,” his aunt bid him as Howell briefly acknowledged Adam. “How are you, dearest?” She offered her wrinkled cheek for him to kiss. “Adam?”

  He could not move. This, this apparition in delectable cherry was his wife?

  “Kiss her, dearest. Both cheeks,” his aunt instructed him, scarcely above a whisper. “There.

  That’s a darling man. How are you?”

  “How am I?” I’m apoplectic! “I hardly know what to say! My heavens, Fee, you were lovely before, but now…”

  Her lush mouth slowly widened in a smile of welcome. Her golden gaze danced over his features. “I am honored, Adam. I believe you know Lord Howell.”

  Adam bid the man good evening, wondering why this lout was chatting with his wife and his aunt. He wanted this creature nowhere near Felice.

  “Have not seen your wife in a while, eh, Stanhope?” the man asked with immense satisfaction.

  “She took the waters at Bath,” Adam bit off, trying for a nonchalance he did not feel.

  Damn this man.

  “She came with me, Lord Howell,” Aunt Amaryllis announced with her righteous brand of hauteur.

  Adam tried not to gape at this revelation. Fee has taken refuge with my
aunt?

  “Did she?” Howell asked, intrigued.

  Felice’s smile for Howell was strained. “Forgive us, my lord, but—”

  “Miss Proper should report that in her stories,” he ventured.

  “I think not, Lord Howell. Excuse us, will you?” She cut the man and faced Adam and his aunt. “You look distressed, Adam. I assure you that—”

  He took her arm. “What the hell are you doing talking to him?”

  “Adam,” cautioned his Aunt, “not so loud, my boy.”

  Felice frowned. “Howell approached us,” she shot back in a whisper.

  “How do you know him?” he persisted.

  “He bought my father’s office ten years ago.”

  “Where he now publishes that rag?”

  “The Tell-Tale. Yes. He bought out my father, printers, typeset racks, staff and all. Oh, my. Smile, Adam,” his wife demanded in a stern tone. “Sir Henry Ulmsly approaches.”

  “Sir Hen—” His brain hardly worked. What the deuce was she rambling on about? “Ah.

  Good evening, Sir Henry.” Adam bowed in deference to the man who was second in seniority in his political party. “How wonderful to see you out.”

  “Thank you, Stanhope. Ladies,” the older gentleman greeted Amaryllis and Felice. “Nice party, say what? The orchestra is fine, too. Tried it yet, Stanhope?” The man glared at him, the stare though his monocle emphasizing his suggestion Adam take Fee out to go down the dance.

  Did the man read Miss Proper and question Adam’s fidelity?

  “No, sir.” I’ve only just found my errant wife.

  “Should show her off and stay away from Howell. I must say, Mrs. Stanhope, you are looking lovely. Charming gown, don’t you think, Stanhope?”

  Adam gritted his teeth, but managed to sound polite. “Stunning.”

  “Thank you, Sir Henry,” his wife replied to the compliment with radiant joy. “I chose it especially for this evening.”

  Did you now? Adam was going to extract her from this assembly and show her just what he had chosen for this evening. A good spanking. A chance to lock her up and throw away the key, that’s what!

  “Well done, Mrs. Stanhope.” The old man made a gesture to dismiss himself. “I want your opinion on the funding for the Spanish Campaign. Your husband,” Ulmsly addressed Felice with a solicitous voice, “is becoming the foremost expert on the Army’s preparedness.”