The Rake to Rescue Her Read online

  Distress creased his sister’s forehead. ‘I’m so sorry you encountered her! I just this morning discovered her presence myself, and intended to warn you straight away so you might...prepare yourself. That woman, too, has only just arrived, or so Hetty Greenlaw reported when she called on me this morning.’ Her tone turning to annoyance, Jane continued. ‘Knowing of my “close connection to a distressing incident involving my maternal family”, she felt it her duty to warn me that the Duchess was in Bath—the old tattle-tale. Doubtless agog to report to all her cronies exactly how I took the news!’

  ‘With disinterested disdain, I’ll wager,’ Alastair said, eager to encourage this diversion from the subject at hand.

  ‘Naturally. As if I would give someone as odious as that scandalmonger any inkling of my true feelings on the matter. But,’ she said, her gaze focusing back on his face, ‘I’m more concerned with your reaction.’

  Alastair shrugged. ‘How should I react? Goodness, Jane, that attachment was dead and buried years ago.’

  Her perceptive eyes searched his face. ‘Was it, Alastair?’

  Damn it, he had to look away first, his face colouring. ‘Of course.’

  ‘You needn’t see her, or even acknowledge her existence. Her whole appearance here is most irregular—we only received word of the Duke’s passing two days ago! No one has any idea why she would leave Graveston Court so quickly after his death, or come to Bath, of all places. With, I understand, almost no servants or baggage. I highly doubt a woman as young and beautiful as Diana means to set up court as a dowager! If she’s angling to remarry, she won’t do her chances any good, flouting convention by appearing in public so scandalously soon after her husband’s death! Although if she did, I’d at least have the satisfaction of being able to cut her.’

  ‘That might not be feasible. Robbie has struck up a friendship with her son,’ he informed her, making himself say the word again without flinching. ‘He invited the boy to meet him again in the gardens tomorrow.’ Alastair smiled, hoping it didn’t appear as a grimace. ‘So I can take them both for cakes.’

  If he hadn’t been still so unsettled himself, Alastair would have laughed at the look of horror that passed over his sister’s face as the difficulty of the situation registered.

  ‘I shall come up with some way to fob off Robbie,’ Jane said. ‘It’s unthinkable for you to be manoeuvred into associating with her.’

  Recalling the strength of his nephew’s single-mindedness when fixed on an objective—so like his mama’s iron will—Alastair raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘If you can succeed in distracting the boy who chattered all the way home from the Gardens about his new friend, I’ll be surprised. Besides, if Diana goes about in Society, I’m bound to encounter her from time to time.’

  ‘You don’t mean you’ll chance seeing her again?’ his sister returned incredulously. ‘Oh, Alastair, don’t risk it!’

  ‘Risk? Come now, Jane, this all happened years ago. No need to enact a Cheltenham tragedy.’

  Pressing her lips together, Jane shook her head, tears sheening her eyes. ‘I know you say you’re over her, and I only pray God it’s true. But I’ll never forget—no one who cares about you ever could—how absolutely and completely bouleversé you were. The wonderful poetry you wrote in homage to her wit, her beauty, her grace, her liveliness! The fact that you haven’t written a line since she jilted you.’

  ‘The army was hardly a place for producing boyish truck about eternal love,’ Alastair said, dismissing his former passion with practised scorn. Besides, poetry and his love for Diana had been so intimately intertwined, he’d not been able to continue one without the other. ‘One matures, Jane, and moves on.’

  ‘Does one? Have you? I’d be more inclined to believe it if you had ever shown any interest in another eligible woman. Do you truly believe all women to be perfidious? Or is it what I fear—that your poet’s soul, struck more deeply by emotion than an ordinary man’s, cannot imagine loving anyone but her?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said stiffly, compelled to deny her suspicion. ‘I told you, that childish infatuation was crushed by events years ago.’

  ‘I hope so! But even if, praise God, you are over her, I shall never forgive her for the agony and embarrassment she caused you. Nor can I forgive the fact that her betrayal turned a carefree, optimistic, joyous young man almost overnight into a bitter, angry recluse who shunned Society and did his utmost to get himself killed in battle.’

  To his considerable alarm, Jane, normally the most stoic of sisters, burst into tears. Unsure what to do to stem the tide, he pulled her into a hug. ‘There, there, now, that’s a bit excessive, don’t you think? Are you increasing again? It’s not like you to be so missish.’

  His bracing words had the desired effect, and she pushed him away. ‘Missish! How dare you accuse me of that! And, no, I’m not increasing. It’s beastly of you to take me to task when I’m simply concerned about you.’

  ‘You know I appreciate that concern,’ he said quietly.

  She took an agitated turn about the room before coming back to face him. ‘Have you any idea what it was like for your friends, your family—witnessing the depths of your pain, fearing for your sanity, your very life? Hearing the stories that came back to us from the Peninsula? You volunteering to lead every “forlorn hope”, always throwing yourself into the worst of the battle, defying death, uncaring of whether or not you survived.’

  ‘But I did survive,’ he replied. Far too many worthy men had not, though, while he came through every battle untouched. ‘Angry Alastair’s luck’ the troops had called it. He’d discouraged the talk and turned away the eager volunteers for his command who listened to it since that famous luck never seemed to extend to the men around him.

  ‘Please tell me you will not see her,’ Jane said, pulling him back to the present.

  ‘I certainly won’t seek her out. But with Robbie having befriended her son, I imagine I won’t be able to avoid her entirely.’

  ‘I must think of some way to discourage the friendship. I really don’t want my son to take up with any offspring of hers. He’s probably as poisonous as she is!’

  ‘Come now, Jane, listen to yourself! You can’t seriously hold the poor child accountable for the failings of his mother,’ Alastair protested, uncomfortably aware that, initially, he’d done just that.

  ‘He’s the spawn of the devil, whatever you say,’ Jane flung back. ‘You don’t know all the things that have been said about her! I never mentioned her when I wrote you, feeling you’d been hurt enough, but there were always rumours swirling. How she defied the Duke in public, showing no deference to his friends or family. Turned her back on her own friends, too, once she became his Duchess—the few who remained after she jilted you. They say she became so unmanageable the Duke had to remove her to his country estate. I know she’s not been in London in all the years since my marriage. I’ve even heard that, as soon as the Duke fell seriously ill, she took herself off to Bath, refusing to nurse him or even to remain to see him properly buried!’

  ‘Enough, Jane. I’ve no interest in gossip, nor have I any intention of being more than politely civil to the woman, if and when the need arises. So you see, there’s nothing to upset yourself about.’

  At that moment, a discreet knock sounded and the housekeeper appeared, bearing news of some minor disaster in the kitchen that required her mistress’s immediate attention. After giving his sister another quick hug, Alastair gently pushed her towards the door. ‘I’ll be fine. Go re-establish order in your domain.’

  After Jane had followed the housekeeper out, Alastair walked back to his room, trapped by his still-unsettled thoughts. It was sad, really, that the girl he remembered being so vivacious, a magnet who drew people to her, had, if what Jane reported was true, ended up a recluse hidden away in the country, the subject of speculation and rum
our.

  Did she deserve it? Had she duped him, cleverly encouraging his infatuation so he might trumpet her beauty to the world in fulsome poetry, drawing to her the attention of wealthier, more prestigious suitors? Whether or not she’d deliberately led him on, she had obsessed him completely, inducing him to lay his foolish, naive, adoring heart at her feet.

  He ought to thank her for having burned out of him early so unrealistic an expectation as eternal love. Still, something of that long-ago heartbreak vibrated up from deep within, the pain sharp enough to make him clench his teeth.

  As before, anger followed. He would offer her nothing except perhaps a well-deserved snub.

  Though even as he thought it, his heart whispered that he lied.

  Chapter Two

  Entering the modest lodgings in Laura Place she’d hired two days previous, her son and his nursery maid trailing obediently behind her, Diana, Dowager Duchess of Graveston, mounted the stairs to the sitting room. ‘You may take Mannington to the nursery to rest now,’ she told the girl as she handed her bonnet and cloak to the maid-of-all-work.

  ‘Will you come up for tea later, Mama?’ the child asked, looking up at her, hope shining in his eyes.

  ‘Perhaps. Run along now.’ Inured to the disappointment on the boy’s face, she turned away and walked to the sideboard by the window, removing her gloves and placing them precisely on the centre of the chest. Only after the softly closing door confirmed she was alone, did she release a long, slow breath.

  She should have hugged Mannington. He would have clung to her, probably. Like any little boy, he needed a mama he could cling to. And she could hug him now, without having to worry over the consequences—for him or for her.

  Could she find her way back to how it had once been? A memory bubbled up: the awe and tenderness she’d felt as she held her newborn son, a miracle regardless of her feelings about his father.

  The father who, little by little, had forced her to bury all affection for her child.

  She remembered what had happened later that first day, Graveston standing over the bed as she held the infant to her breast. Plucking him away, telling her he’d summon a wet nurse, as a duchess did not suckle her own child. He’d cut off her arguments against it, informing her that if she meant to be difficult, he’d have a wet nurse found from among one of his tenant farmers and send the child away.

  So she’d turned his feedings over to a wet nurse, consoling herself that she could still watch him in his cradle.

  A week later, she’d returned to her rooms to find the cradle gone. The child belonged in the nursery wing, Graveston told her when she’d protested. It wasn’t fitting for a woman as lowly born as the wet nurse to spend time in the Duchess’s suite. If she insisted on having the child with her, he’d end up hungry, waiting for his supper while he was dispatched to the servant’s quarters.

  Of course, she hadn’t wanted her son to go hungry. Or to have his balls taken away, as Graveston had done months later when she’d tarried in the nursery, rolling them to him, and been late for dinner.

  Though for the first and only time in their marriage, she had tried to please her husband, nothing she did was enough. The day she’d learned her toddler son had been beaten because their laughter, as she played with him in the garden under the library window, had disturbed the Duke, she’d realised the only way she could protect him was to avoid him.

  And the only way she could do that was to harden her heart against him as thoroughly as she’d hardened herself to every other instinct save endurance.

  She remembered the final incident, when having noticed, as he noticed everything, that she’d had little to do with the boy of late, Graveston threatened to have the child whipped again when she’d not worn the new dress he’d ordered for her to dinner. He’d watched her with the intensity of an owl honing in on a mouse as she shrugged and told him to do as he liked with his son.

  She’d lost her meal and been unable to eat for three days until she’d known for certain that, no longer believing the boy a tool to control her, he’d left the child alone.

  Only then had she known he was safe.

  She sighed again. Having worked so hard to banish all affection, she’d not yet figured out how to re-animate the long-repressed instincts to mother her child. Now that he was older, it didn’t help that she couldn’t look at the dark hair curling over his brow or the square-jawed face without seeing Graveston reflected in them.

  With a shudder, she repressed her husband’s image.

  Her late husband, she reminded herself. That liberation was so recent, she still had trouble believing she was finally free.

  Living under his rule had perfected her mask of imperturbability, though. Lifting her eyes to the mirror over the sideboard, she studied the pale, calm, expressionless countenance staring back at her. Despite unexpectedly encountering Alastair Ransleigh after all these years, she’d not gasped, or trembled, or felt heat flame her face. No, she was quite sure the shock that had rocked her from head to toe had been undetectable in her outward appearance and manner.

  The shock had almost been enough to pry free, from the vault deep within where she’d locked them away, some images from that halcyon spring they’d met and fallen in love. Had she truly once been unreserved, adoring him with wholehearted abandon, thrilling to his presence, ravenous for his touch? She winced, the memories still too painful to bear examining.

  She took a deep breath and held it until the ache subsided. Sealing her mind against the possibility of allowing any more memories to escape, she turned her mind to the more practical implications of their unexpected meeting.

  She supposed she should have expected to run into him eventually, but not this soon—or here. What was Alastair doing in Bath? His family home, Barton Abbey, was in Devon, and though he’d also inherited properties elsewhere, what she’d gleaned from news accounts and the little gossip that reached Graveston Court indicated that he’d spent most of his time since returning from the army either at his principal seat or in London.

  Would she have fled to Bath, had she known he was here? She’d had to go somewhere, quickly, as soon as Graveston’s remains had been laid to rest, somewhere she could live more cheaply and attract less notice than in London, but fashionable enough to attract excellent solicitors. Go while the servants were in turmoil, uncertain what to do now that their powerful master was no longer issuing orders, and before Blankford, her husband’s eldest son and heir, had time to travel back to Graveston from hunting in Scotland.

  What would she do if the new Duke, not content with claiming his old home, was bent on retribution against the woman he blamed for his mother’s death and his father’s estrangement? What if he pursued her here?

  Putting aside a question for which she had no answer, Diana turned her mind back to Alastair. What was she to do about him?

  She wouldn’t remember how many years it had taken to lock his image, their love, and the dreams she’d cherished for the future into a place so deep within her that no trace of them ever escaped. All she had left of him was the pledge, if and when it was ever possible, to tell him why she’d spurned him without a word to marry Graveston.

  She might well have that opportunity tomorrow if she accompanied Mannington to the park, where he hoped to encounter his new friend again. Should she take it?

  Of course, the other boy might not come back, and if he did, Alastair might not accompany him. So rattled had she been by Alastair’s unexpected appearance, she’d not even caught the boy’s surname, though he must be some connection of Alastair’s. Even his own son, perhaps.

  That Alastair Ransleigh had managed to disturb her so deeply argued for avoiding him. The process of locking away all emotion and reaction, of practising before her mirror until she’d perfected the art of letting nothing show in her face, had been arduous and difficult. She wasn’
t sure how to reverse it, or even if she wanted to. Should that barrier of detachment ever be breached, whatever was left of her might crack like an eggshell.

  As if in warning, despite her control, one memory from her marriage surfaced. The hope that she might some day speak to Alastair again had been the only thing that had kept her from succumbing to despair, or heeding the insidious whisper in the night that urged her to creep through the sleeping house to the parapets of Graveston Court and free herself in one great leap of defiance. Besides, though Alastair had almost certainly expunged her from his heart and mind years ago, in fairness, she owed him an explanation for that nightmare night of humiliation.

  Very well, she thought, nodding to herself in the mirror. She would accompany her son to the park, and if Alastair did appear, she would approach him. He might well give her the cut direct, or slap her face, but if he allowed her to speak, she would fulfil her vow and tell him the story.

  At the thought of seeing him again, a tiny flicker of anticipation bubbled up from deep within. Holding her breath and squeezing her eyes tightly shut, she stifled it.

  * * *

  Having awakened before dawn to pace his room until daylight, Alastair chose to avoid breakfast, knowing he wouldn’t be able to hide his agitation from his eagle-eyed sister. When mid-morning finally came, Alastair set out from the Crescent, his exuberant nephew in tow.

  Much as he’d tried to tell himself this was just another day, a trip to the park with Robbie like any other, he failed miserably at keeping his mind from drifting always back, like a lodestone to the north, to the possibility of seeing Diana again—a possibility that flooded him with contradictory emotions.

  The defiant need to confront her and force a reaction, and curiosity over what that reaction might be, warred with the desire to cut her completely. Overlaying all was a smouldering anger that she had the power to so effectively penetrate his defences that he’d been required to employ every bit of his self-control to keep the memories at bay—a task he’d not fared so well at while half-conscious. He’d slept poorly, waking time and again to scattered bits of images he’d hastily blotted out before trying to sleep again.