The Proposal Read online

  He looked down briefly at her. He did not reply to her words.

  “Oh, this is going to be horribly embarrassing,” she said a couple of minutes later as they approached the house.

  “But better, I daresay,” he said curtly, “than lying out on the slope above the beach, exposed to the elements and waiting for the seagulls to come and peck out your eyes.”

  Uncharitably, he wished that that was precisely where she was, though he would not wish the eye-pecking gulls on her.

  “Oh,” she said with a grimace. “When you put it that way, I must confess you are right.”

  “I sometimes am,” he said.

  Lord! Today’s grand joke had been that he was to go down onto the beach to find a personable woman to marry. And here he was, right on cue, carrying a genuine lady back with him. A damnably pretty one too.

  Perhaps she was not single, though. Indeed, she almost certainly was not. She had introduced herself as Lady Muir. That suggested that somewhere, perhaps in the village a mile away, there was a Lord Muir. Which fact would not save him from the teasing. It would merely enhance it, in fact. He would be accused of the most naïve form of miscalculation.

  It was going to take him a long time to live this one down.

  Gwen would have been experiencing surely the worst embarrassment of her life if her mind had not been more preoccupied with pain. She felt embarrassed nevertheless.

  Not only was she being taken to a strange house owned by a man of some notoriety who was not expecting her, but also she was being carried by a large, morose stranger who had done nothing to hide the fact that he despised her. And the trouble was that she could hardly blame him. She had behaved badly. She had made an idiot of herself.

  She was pressed against all that muscled strength she had observed as he approached her across the pebbles, and he felt really quite disturbingly masculine. She could feel his body heat through his heavy clothing and her own. She could smell his cologne or his shaving soap, a faint, enticing, distinctively male scent. She could hear him breathing, though he was not panting from his exertions. Indeed, he made her feel as though she weighed nothing at all.

  Her ankle was throbbing very badly indeed. There was no use in continuing to pretend that she would be able to walk back to Vera’s once she had shaken off the first twinges of pain.

  Oh, dear, he really was a morose man. And a silent one. He had not even confirmed or denied being a military officer. And he had nothing else to offer by way of conversation, though to be fair, he probably needed all his breath to carry her.

  Goodness, she would have nightmares about this for a long time to come.

  He was making his way straight for the front doors of Penderris Hall, which looked like a very grand mansion indeed. He was, as she might have expected, totally ignoring her plea to be taken directly to the carriage house so that she might avoid the house altogether. She just hoped the duke was not going to be close by when she was carried inside. Perhaps one of his minions would summon a carriage to convey her back to Vera’s. Even a gig would do.

  Lord Trentham climbed a short flight of steps and turned sideways in order to thump his elbow against one of the doors. It was opened almost immediately by a sober-looking man in black who resembled all butlers the world over. He stood aside without comment as Lord Trentham carried her into a large square hall tiled in black and white.

  “We have a wounded soldier here, Lambert,” Lord Trentham said without any trace of humor in his voice. “I am going to carry her up to the drawing room.”

  “Oh, no, please—”

  “Shall I send for Dr. Jones, my lord?” the butler asked.

  But before Lord Trentham could answer or Gwen voice a further protest, someone else arrived on the scene, a tall, slender, blond, extremely handsome gentleman with mocking green eyes and one elevated eyebrow. The Duke of Stanbrook, Gwen thought with a sinking heart. She could scarcely have imagined a scene more lowering than this if she had tried.

  “Hugo, my dear chap,” the gentleman said, his voice a lazy drawl, “however did you do it? You are a marvel. You found the lady on the beach, did you, and swept her literally off her feet with your charm, not to mention your title and fortune? This makes for a very affecting scene, I must say. If I were an artist, I would be d-dashing for my canvas and brushes in order to record it for the delight of your descendants to the third and fourth generation.”

  He had lowered his eyebrow and lifted a quizzing glass to his eye as he spoke.

  Gwen glared at him. She spoke with as much chilly dignity as she could muster.

  “I twisted my ankle,” she explained, “and Lord Trentham was obliging enough to carry me here. I do not intend to impose upon your hospitality any longer than necessary, Your Grace. All I ask is the loan of some conveyance to take me back to the village, where I am staying. You are the Duke of Stanbrook, I presume?”

  The blond gentleman lowered his glass and raised one eyebrow again.

  “You elevate me in rank, ma’am,” he said. “I am flattered. I am not, alas, Stanbrook. I daresay Lambert will call out a gig for you if you insist, however, though Hugo looks eager to impress you with his superior strength by d-dashing upstairs with you in his arms and arriving in the drawing room without any noticeable shortness of breath.”

  “It is a good thing you are not me, Flavian,” another, older gentleman said as he approached from the back of the hall. “You appear not to know the first thing about hospitality. Ma’am, I fully agree with both Hugo and my good butler. You must be taken up to the drawing room to rest your foot on a sofa while I send for the doctor to assess the damage. I am Stanbrook, by the way, and entirely at your service. You must tell me whom I may summon to offer you some comfort. Your husband, perhaps?”

  Oh, dear, this was getting worse and worse. If there were just a dark hole in the middle of the hall, Gwen thought, she would be happy to have Lord Trentham drop her into it. The duke was much as she had originally pictured him—tall, slender, and elegant, with handsome, finely chiseled features and dark hair silvering at the temples. His manner was courtly, yet his gray eyes were contrastingly cold and his voice chilly. He spoke of hospitality but made her feel like the worst kind of intruder.

  “I am the widow of the late Viscount Muir,” Gwen told the duke. “I am a guest in the home of Mrs. Parkinson in the village.”

  “Ah,” the duke said. “She lost her husband recently, I recall, after he had suffered a lingering illness. But off you go on your way upstairs, Hugo. I will hope to have the pleasure of some conversation with you later, Lady Muir, after your ankle has been tended to.”

  He made it sound as if it would be anything but a pleasure. Or perhaps her extreme discomfort was causing her to do him an injustice. He was offering hospitality and the services of a physician, after all.

  How could one sprained ankle cause such pain? Or perhaps it was broken.

  Lord Trentham turned to stride toward a broad staircase that wound upward in an elegant curve. She could hear the Duke of Stanbrook giving orders for both the doctor and Vera to be sent for without further delay. The gentleman with the quizzing glass, the one who spoke with an affected sigh in his voice and a slight stammer, appeared to be offering to perform the errand himself.

  The drawing room was empty. That was one mercy, at least. It was a large, square room with wine-colored brocaded walls hung with portraits in heavy gilded frames, and an ornately sculpted marble fireplace directly opposite the door. The coved ceiling was painted with scenes from mythology, the frieze beneath it heavily gilded. The furnishings were both elegant and sumptuous. Long windows looked out upon lawns enclosed by hedges, but they nevertheless afforded a distant view of cliffs and the sea beyond. A fire crackled in the hearth, and the warmth of the room prevented the outdoors from looking too starkly bleak.

  Gwen took in room and view at a glance and felt all the humiliation of being an uninvited—and unwelcome—guest in such a home. But for the moment at least there seemed
no point in making a fuss and demanding yet again the loan of a carriage to take her back to Vera’s.

  Lord Trentham lowered her to a brocaded sofa and reached for a cushion to put under her injured ankle.

  “Oh,” she cried, “my boots are going to get the sofa dirty.”

  That would be the very last straw.

  But he would not let her swing her legs to the floor. Neither would he allow her to bend forward to remove her own boots. He insisted upon doing it for her. Not that he uttered a word of command, but it was difficult to bat aside such large hands and such massive arms or to prevail against such deaf ears.

  He had done her a kindness, she admitted grudgingly, but did he have to be so unpleasant about it?

  He undid the laces of her left boot and removed it without any trouble at all before placing it on the floor. He went far more slowly with the other boot. Gwen untied the ribbons of her bonnet, pulled it off her head, and dropped it over the side of the sofa so that she could rest her head back against the cushioned arm. She closed her eyes—and then pressed her head back harder and clenched her eyes more tightly as she was engulfed in a fresh wave of agony. He had surprisingly gentle hands, but it was not easy for him to ease off her boot, and once it was off, there was nothing left to support her foot or hold it firm against the swelling. She felt him lift it onto the cushion.

  But pain sometimes dulled sensibility, she thought a few moments later as she felt his hands reach under her skirt, first to remove the handkerchief he had wrapped about her knee earlier, and then to roll down her torn stocking and ease it off over her foot.

  Warm fingers probed the swelling.

  “I do not believe anything is broken,” Lord Trentham said. “But I cannot be certain. You must keep your foot where it is until the doctor comes. The cut to your knee is superficial and will heal in a few days.”

  She opened her eyes and was acutely aware of her bare foot and a length of bare leg elevated on the cushion. Lord Trentham was standing upright, his hands clasped at his back, his booted feet slightly apart—a military man at ease. His dark eyes were gazing very directly back into hers, and his jaw was set hard.

  He resented her being here, she thought. Well, she had tried very hard not to be. She resented being resented.

  “Most women,” he said, “do not bear pain well. You do.”

  He was insulting her sex but complimenting her personally. Was she supposed to simper with gratitude?

  “You forget, Lord Trentham,” she said, “that it is women who bear children. It is generally agreed that the pain of childbed is the worst pain there is.”

  “You have children of your own?” he asked.

  “No.” She closed her eyes again and for no apparent reason continued—on a subject she almost never spoke of, even to those nearest and dearest to her. “I lost the only one I conceived. It happened after I was thrown from my horse and broke my leg.”

  “What were you doing riding a horse when you were with child?” he asked.

  It was a good question, even if it was an impudent one too.

  “Jumping hedges,” she said, “including one neither Vernon—my husband—nor I had ever jumped before. His horse cleared it. Mine did not and I was tossed off.”

  There was a short silence. Why on earth had she told him all that?

  “Did your husband know you were with child?” he asked.

  It was an unpardonably intimate question. But she had started this.

  “Of course,” she said. “I was almost six months into my confinement.”

  And now he would think all sorts of uncomplimentary things about Vernon without understanding at all. It was unfair of her to have said so much when she was certainly not prepared to launch into lengthy explanations. She seemed to have done nothing but show herself in a bad light since she first set eyes upon him and cringed in fear. Yes, she really had. She had cringed.

  “This was a child you wanted?” he asked.

  Her eyes snapped open and she glared at him, speechless. What sort of question was that?

  His eyes were hard. Accusing. Condemning.

  But what did she expect? She had made both herself and Vernon seem unpardonably reckless and irresponsible.

  It was time to change the subject.

  “Is the blond gentleman downstairs a guest at Penderris too?” she asked. “Have I imposed upon a house party?”

  “He is Viscount Ponsonby,” he said. “There are six guests here, apart from Stanbrook himself. We gather here for a few weeks each year. Stanbrook opened his home to us for several years during and after the wars while we recuperated from various wounds.”

  Gwen gazed at him. There was no outer sign of any wound that might have incapacitated Lord Trentham for that long. But she had been right about him. He was a military man.

  “You were or are all officers?” she asked.

  “Were,” he said. “Five of us in the recent wars, Stanbrook in previous ones. His son fought and died in the Napoleonic Wars.”

  Ah, yes. Shortly before the duchess leapt from the cliff top to her death.

  “And the seventh person?” she asked.

  “A woman,” he said, “widow of a surveillance officer who was tortured to death after being captured. She was present when he was finally shot.”

  “Oh,” Gwen said, grimacing.

  Now she felt worse than ever. This was far more terrible than imposing upon a simple house party. And her own sprained ankle seemed embarrassingly trivial in comparison with what the duke and his six guests must have endured.

  Lord Trentham had picked up a shawl from the back of a nearby chair and came closer to spread it over Gwen’s injured leg. At the same moment the drawing doors opened again and a woman came inside carrying a tea tray. She was a lady, not a maid. She was tall and very straight in posture. Her dark blond hair was pulled back in a chignon, but the simplicity, even severity, of the style emphasized the perfect bone structure of her oval face with its finely sculpted cheekbones, straight nose, and blue-green eyes fringed with lashes a shade darker than her hair. Her mouth was wide and generous. She was beautiful, despite the fact that her face looked as though it were sculpted of marble. It looked not only as though she never smiled but as if she were incapable of doing so even if she wished. Her eyes were large and very calm, almost unnaturally so.

  She came toward the sofa and would have set the tray down on the table beside Gwen if Lord Trentham had not taken it from her hands first.

  “I’ll see to that, Imogen,” he said.

  “George guessed that you would consider it quite improper to be in a room alone with a strange gentleman, Lady Muir,” the lady said, “even if he did rescue you and carry you back to the house. I have been designated as your chaperon.”

  Her voice was cool rather than cold.

  “This is Imogen, Lady Barclay,” Lord Trentham said, “who never seems to consider it improper to stay at Penderris with six gentlemen and no chaperon.”

  “I would entrust my life to any of the six or all of them combined,” Lady Barclay said, inclining her head courteously to Gwen. “Indeed, I have already done so. You are looking embarrassed. You need not. How did you hurt your ankle?”

  She poured three cups of tea as Gwen described what had happened. This, then, she thought, was the lady who had been with her husband when his torturers had killed him. Gwen had an inkling of the torments she must have lived through every minute of every day since. She must forever be asking herself if there was anything she might have done to prevent such a disaster. Just as Gwen forever asked it of herself with regard to Vernon’s death.

  “I feel very foolish,” she said in conclusion.

  “Of course you do,” Lady Barclay said. “But it could have happened to any of us, you know. We are always up and down to the beach, and that slope is quite treacherous enough even without the shifting stones.”

  Gwen glanced at Lord Trentham, who was silently sipping his tea, his dark eyes resting on her.

&
nbsp; He was, she thought in some surprise and with a little shiver of awareness, a terribly attractive man. He ought not to be. He was too large to be either elegant or graceful. His hair was too short to soften the harshness of his features or the hard line of his jaw. His mouth was too straight and hard-set to be sensuous. His eyes were too dark and too penetrating to make a woman want to fall into them. There was nothing to suggest charm or humor or any warmth of personality.

  And yet …

  And yet there was an aura about him of almost overpowering physicality. Of masculinity.

  It would be an absolutely wonderful experience, she thought, to go to bed with him.

  It was a thought that shocked her to the roots of her being. In the seven years since Vernon’s death she had shrunk away from the merest thought of another courtship and marriage. And she had never in her life thought of any man in any other connection.

  Did this unexpected and rather ridiculous attraction have anything to do with the equally unexpected wave of loneliness she had felt down on the beach just before she met him?

  She made conversation with Lady Barclay while these strange thoughts buzzed about in her head. But really it was difficult to concentrate fully upon either words or thought. Pain, as she remembered now from the time when she broke her leg, could never confine itself to the injured part of one’s body but throbbed instead all through it until one did not know quite what to do with oneself.

  Lord Trentham got to his feet as soon as she had finished her cup of tea, took an unused linen napkin off the tea tray, and crossed to a sideboard, where he must have found a jug of cold water among the liquor decanters. He came back with a wet napkin from which most of the water had been squeezed, spread it over Gwen’s forehead, and held it in place there with one hand. She rested the back of her head against the cushion again and closed her eyes.

  The coolness, even the pressure of his hand, felt very good.

  Where was the insensitive brute she had judged him to be?

  “I have been hoping to distract her with conversation,” Lady Barclay said. “She is as pale as a ghost, poor thing. But she has uttered not a moan of complaint. She has my admiration.”