Miss Darling's Indecent Offer Read online

  Jack muttered about vengeance on the cur. “Why then?” he asked, though he could guess the cause.

  “Since I turned twenty-four and therefore, came of age to inherit.”

  Jack lifted her chin with two fingers. Her skin was sallow, her eyes rimmed red from crying. Her perfect skin—save for the sprinkle of freckles on her upturned nose—needed the glory of the sun to enliven it. Her large eyes—almond-shaped and dulcet grey as a porcelain doll’s—needed to clear and smile again. Her lush lips needed once more to curve upwards in a smile. Jack felt the urge to help her feel joy once more. “And Daniel insists you marry?”

  “He and Trayne have an agreement to split the proceeds of the estate. I overheard them talk of it in our own parlor. When I confronted Daniel, he locked me away. I must have what is due me, Jack. I need it.”

  He had just enough glow left from his liberal consumption of brandy tonight that he could smile at her intensity. “What would a lovely young lady do with the thousands reputed to be left to you, my dear Miss Darling?”

  Her mouth lifted with some rapturous thought and he nearly lost all his teeth gaping at the serenity which overcame her. He tipped his head to catch the ethereal glow she exuded. “I want to build an orphanage in Dover, and I need the money for beds and linens and books and food. Two staff, I think would do for a start. If at first I take in only the neediest children in Dover, I would have ten, maybe eleven orphans—”

  “Whoa! Whoa!” Jack put up a hand. “You want your money to open an orphanage?”

  She captured his gaze with raw intention of her desire. “It is a useful thing. A helpful thing to educate and clothe those for whom no one cares. Don’t you think?”

  “Oh, I do. But why you?”

  “Why not me?”

  He pursed his lips. “You have me there.” Suddenly, he had to know the other side of this offer. “Have you made this proposition to other men?”

  “No!” Her grey eyes locked on his in dismay. “You are the only man who can help me.”

  Jack could have been complimented. But his reputation had never been one which invited damsels in distress to run to him. In fact, the other direction was their wont. “And the reason for that is?”

  “It is said by gossips that no man bests you. At cards or dice. Or women.”

  “And your mother?” He chose to react to Emma’s train with logic rather than any pride in a back–handed compliment. He had met Joan Darling years ago. She was a vain woman, frail of body and flighty of mind. Intent on social engagements and fripperies, she was a social magpie whose discourse he had always avoided. Still, he knew not what sort of mother she was and offending her daughter as she shivered here before him was not a kind venture. “What does she say?”

  “She cannot say anything. She is ill. At home in the country. Since Christmas, her health has declined. I fear she will not survive till this summer.” Emma cupped her hand to her mouth.

  She fought back tears. “Marry me, Jack. You are my finest hope. And when I have my inheritance settled on me, for your help I will give you half.”

  “Half!” Half of forty thousand pounds and two estates fit for a king. “Tempting.”

  She beamed at him.

  “Temptation to help you, my dear, comes not from this offer of money.” That he did not need. The lure came from the way she looked and the way she beseeched him. Dire. Sad.

  Desperate. Yes, her state roiled him. For he knew Pinrose from his financial schemes and from his losses at the gaming tables. A conniving little frog. And Jack knew Trayne from Eton. A pompous peacock. Forever in debt.

  “Name your price, then.”

  Jack narrowed his gaze on her. The temptation to take her offer rose up from that same well spring of emotion, so rare in Jack’s thinking, that he had to look at her once more and imagine what she had been before Pinrose had sequestered her and abused her. She had been lively, fun-loving, a woman well–spoken with an education and a wit to form a plan to save herself. Jack bit back outrage she had been so poorly treated. Flooded with empathy that she had been deprived of what was rightly hers, he felt a fierce protection of her, tall and elegant and lovely as she most certainly was. For before Pinrose had imprisoned her, this delicate creature had been a jewel of femininity. Ivory skin. Sun-kissed hair. Peony pink cheeks. Cherry lips.

  Jack Stanhope sat, stunned at himself. For a man who had never thought twice about a woman’s birthrights, he craved a restitution of this woman’s. “I will help you.”

  “Wonderful!” She leaned over and hugged the stuffing out of him. “And you will do it tonight?”

  “Tonight it is.”

  She swayed with joy. Then she caught herself up to sneeze.

  Jack fished a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it over.

  She blew her nose. “And you will promise me one more thing, please?”

  Murder seemed to not be on her menu, but a man never knew what a woman would want. “Let me hear it.”

  “That after we are wed, you will have me.”

  “Have you?”

  “Yes, you know…” She gestured about with the handkerchief.

  He searched her face, bright now with growing embarrassment. “Do I?”

  “You must take me to bed.”

  “Why must I?”

  “Debauch me. Teach me! Everything!”

  Never in his thirty–five years had he ever heard a lady say the word “debauch”. He told himself not to laugh and instead cleared his throat. She would be lovely and a sensuous temptation, he knew, once she recovered her health and vigor. His usual desire for a woman, once sparked, held for months. Would he be ready to let this one go from his bed after one encounter? “You wish to know the ways of the bedchamber?” When she nodded, he had to ask,

  “Why is that?”

  She tore her gaze away, then straightened her spine as she faced him. “I want to know if what my mother says is true that love between a man and woman can be enchanting. But more than that, I want to be ruined for any other man.”

  The force of her declaration set him back to the plush comfort of the squabs. He stared at her.

  “The ton has it that to be taken to bed by Viscount Durham ruins any woman for another man.”

  His rake’s reputation suddenly took on a new perspective. A sinister aspect became a monster that would have him help this charming young woman only to ruin her. Was he such a man to do such a task? He was appalled that this is what he had become.

  “And there is the other fact,” she intruded on his reverie, “that if you take me to bed, Trayne will never want your castoffs.”

  Chapter Two

  Jack froze. If earlier he’d thought himself nigh unto foxed with the outlandish nature of her offer, he groped now for a suitable response to this preposterous request. Is this what others thought of him? A man so unprincipled that a woman might approach him to save her by taking her virginity? He’d never heard of such a thing!

  He grimaced at the mental image of his character. Swiping a hand through his hair, he turned away from her and glared out the window.

  “My lord?” Rawley, his coachman, called down from his perch. The poor man must be soaked by now.

  “Yes, Rawley! Drive home!” Jack called up through the din.

  Jack heard the flick of the reins on his drays. Then he felt the jerk of the carriage as Rawley did as he was bid.

  Emma reached over to clasp Jack’s hand, her eyes wide with what she assumed was her quick success. He had other ideas on that score.

  “Is there not another man whom you wish to approach?”

  “None. You are the perfect man.”

  Jack snorted. “I doubt that, Miss Darling. No other woman has ever proposed to me.”

  She became still as a mouse. “You cannot be serious.”

  He surveyed the shock in her gray gaze. “Deadly so.”

  “But you are sought after. Desired. Titled. Rich. Achingly handsome.”

  Achingly? “I thank you
for the compliments. But my assets have not brought me anyone like you.”

  “For myself, I am grateful they have not,” she said, looking regretful. Then she sneezed once more. “Few other men have a reputation,” she commented as she blew her nose, “which could so decidedly ruin a woman’s.”

  That, too, bit. Avoiding her gaze, he unbuttoned his coat, removed it and peeled her sopping wet cloak from her shoulders.

  “I have insulted you,” she murmured with contrition. “I do apologize.”

  “No need.” He pulled his heavy wool coat snuggly about her shivering frame, the sight of her dampened dress clinging to her solid little breasts making him feel all the more guilty for who and what he was. “Truth will be told.”

  They sat in silence for a long minute while Emma fiddled with his handkerchief and he considered nothing except his jaded past.

  “I do not expect you to care for me these three months. You may leave me alone. I am quite capable of entertaining myself so if I could but take up residence in one of your houses and—”

  Even now she wanted little of him. So extraordinary for a woman to do so. Usually a woman forward enough to invite you to their bed wanted your name, your title, your purse and if they wanted to share your bed, well then, that came with a propriety that bored the living daylights out of him. “But you would need a divorce.”

  “Yes. I doubt one may be granted an annulment these days if the marriage is consummated. And it must be for Trayne to renounce me. He is proud and even Daniel could not force him to take a woman to wife who had been…”

  “Debauched?” Jack provided the word she acknowledged with a slow nod.

  He crossed his arms. He was to be a debaucher. Hunh. And divorced! He had never thought of himself as that, either. What an extraordinary evening. A proposal of marriage. An indecent offer to wed and bed a woman whom he had never met. Plus the knowledge that, if he accepted this bizarre bargain, he would be married, divorced and well paid for it all within three months’ time. He turned his face toward her. Lovely, she was, though she did not wear her success here with any hauteur. She had a humility to her demeanor that intrigued him for its novelty. That it also astonished him was unique. So much so that he admitted to himself he wanted to please her and pet her. That desire doubled as he discerned that her recent circumstances had worn her down to skin and bones, coupled with desperation that had brought her to him and to this pass. Marrying him could not only change her life immeasurably, but change her attitude, her health and her financial position.

  But what would marrying her do to him?

  Make him more of a rogue in the eyes of the ton?

  He ran a finger over the seam of his lips. Did it matter if that were so?

  He had no woman he wished to take to wife. He had, at the moment, no lover, either. No plans for the next three months. Not if one counted an invitation to Adam’s and Felice’s supper parties once a month. Or his annual business meeting with his father in late March in the family seat in the Cotswolds. Surely, White’s and gambling did not figure prominently in any intelligent man’s engagement book. However, the compassion, the sympathy he felt for her, coupled with his extreme dislike of her stepfather and Trayne, propelled him to accept this final stipulation from her. At his fine ripe age of thirty-five, he had no other pressing objections to such an insane proposition as marrying for three months. This indeed meant he was rather louche, didn’t it?

  Without purpose, plight or grand passion, he had no reason to deny her what she wished. Him.

  His name and his protection. For three months.

  What harm could that cause, when the damage done to her was a thousand-fold more brutal than any divorce might bring her?

  He would live. Once the ton heard the true tale as they would, years from now, he might even be redeemed. He scoffed at the very notion. Redemption had never been a need of his. It was not now, either. If he did this, it was to help her, not raise up his own reputation in the eyes of others.

  She watched him like a bird of prey, sharp-eyed and wily as a starving child seeking succor.

  Rawley pulled up to Jack’s front door. The coach rolled to a stop while the horses stamped and snorted. The rain drummed a fierce tattoo on the roof.

  Jack took Emma’s hand. “Come. We must get you out of those clothes.”

  She bristled. “We must not—not until we’re married.”

  He shook his head. Yes, his reputation certainly was an outrage if the woman who had just proposed marriage to him might think him plotting to take her to him before the ceremony.

  “Miss Darling. I wish to have my housekeeper find you dry clothes, not remove yours from you.”

  He felt the tension drain from her body. “Thank you. I am grateful.”

  “Thank me in three months’ time.”

  * * * *

  However in the world Emma would survive this hideous journey, she could not fathom.

  She shifted, her derriere flattened from the interminable, bumpy ride. The trip north in the hired traveling coach Jack had hired was long, cold and silent. Worse, he had changed his attitude toward her, his humor gone. Instead, he sat brooding all the way from Grosvenor Square to Northampton. That was only the first days’ travel. The second was no better, with nary a word from him to ease their way. Though she tried to bring him out in conversation, her perpetual sneezing and coughing made polite discussions impossible. That night at an inn in Southwell, Jack had insisted she have her own room with fires built high by the innkeeper to ward off the chill of light snowfall.

  She picked up a pillow from the seat opposite now and punched it, then rearranged it behind her back, which had never been so sore. Nor her throat. Nor her heart. Why ever was she the one so afflicted with a greedy stepfather and a grasping suitor? What had she ever done to deserve such? As if that were not enough trouble, she now contended with a man who had agreed to wed her, bed her and divorce her.

  Jack certainly seemed no more civil about their agreement than that night she proposed.

  In fact, he seemed less so. Dark brows knit tightly together like a gargoyle, he considered the landscape out their coach window with an appalling dedication. Emma had had more discourse with her cat than with this mute man.

  “I say, Jack, if you are angry with me, let me hear it! I cannot bear any more of your torrid silence!” And then, rasping as she was from her outburst and her infernal sore throat, she caught a hand to her mouth and nose and sneezed. Loudly.

  “Good God, woman,” he muttered, sounding frustrated as he swept her skirts aside and sat next to her. “Come here and let me rub your back for you. It’s what my nurse would do for me or Wes when we took a chill. Would that we could escape this damn sleet.”

  She undulated with his ministrations. His hands were huge, warm and strong across her aching muscles. Facing out the window away from him, she could now pout as she had long wished to do and would not allow him to see her so. “Thank you, this is wonderful.”

  “I fear the cough will go deeper in your chest. Not a good thing, Emma.”

  “I know. Perhaps with rest and a few good brandies, I can recover.”

  “Like brandy, do you?”

  She smiled to herself. His hands felt like enormous machines, turning her body to mush.

  “Do you?”

  “The best. What else do you like?”

  “Roast beef.”

  He hooted.

  “Potatoes,” she told him, her mouth watering at the very idea of warm slivers baked in cream and cheese.

  “Parsnips, I bet.”

  “Ba! Who does?” She hacked with a wild cough. “Goose and pudding.”

  “Together?” he chortled.

  “At Christmas dinner, yes. And you?”

  “I’d rather that roast beef.”

  “And the pudding? Delicious plum pudding, dark with currants and cherries, sugar and a strong whiskey bath!” She knew she was crooning, dreaming about the rich treat.

  “My girl,�
�� he said with a laugh as he settled her back into his arms and relaxed them both against the spare leather upholstery of the coach, “with all your talk of spirits, I would take you for a lush.”

  “Hmm.” She nestled to his solid chest, warmer and more comfortable now in his embrace than she’d been in this coach or his presence to date. “I like wine, too.”

  She could feel him nod as he took her hand and raised it to appraise it.

  “Beer?”

  “When the weather’s hot.”

  “Ale?” He massaged her fingers.

  “Never.”

  “Ah. Good taste.” He put her hand to his thigh and covered it with his own.

  She shifted again, liking the feel of his muscles beneath her palm.

  “Uncomfortable?”

  She was tired, exhausted with her sneezing and hacking, but leaning against his chest had inspired sleep in her. “The bouncing of this coach will make me black and blue.”

  “I see. I do understand. Perhaps then you’d like to rest more against my chest.” He put his back to the side of the coach and put an arm around her.

  “I’ll not crush you?”

  “I would not have offered if that were so,” he told her with stern eyes.

  She rose from her position and then reversed to lay against him. Now reclining in his arms, she felt herself bolstered in a more substantial way.

  “Is this comfortable for you?” she persisted, trying hard to make her voice cheery while her nearness to him made her body warm and vaguely tingly.

  “Very.” He put her head back against his shoulder. “We should make Yorkshire tonight.

  You need to rest.”

  But she couldn’t. She felt every small movement of his body. The rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. The breadth of his right shoulder as she leaned against it. The power of his arms as he held her to him. Long and corded, quick to grab her when the coach hit a stone or a rut in the road.

  “I’m afraid I cannot sleep,” she confessed on a sigh and made to rise.

  “No. Rest. The sneezing and coughing I do not like. I’ll not have it said I killed you before I married you.”