Page 97 of The Ladies Least Likely

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“ I am very sorry for your loss, cousin,” Amaranthe said for the dozenth time. She sat in the formal parlor of Penwellen, a dark and shadowed chamber, the mirrors hung with black fabric. “I wish I had been here to help her at the end. It must have been terrible for you both.”

“My wife dead, and no heir.” Reuben prowled the length of the narrow room, close and airless, as if the drapes had not been drawn back in ages.

Perhaps Favella had stopped using the room.

The funeral was done with, and the house had seen no callers that day besides them, as far as Amaranthe could tell.

“No heir. You know what this means.”

He paused to glare at her, and Amaranthe tensed. Did he want to discuss Joseph? The musty smell of the house cloyed in her nostrils.

The years had not been kind to Reuben. He had gone from fleshy to portly, his face florid with signs of heavy drink, his hair greasy and his sideburns unevenly shaved.

A man could be forgiven dishevelment after losing his wife and child, but Reuben’s appearance suggested the neglect had gone on far longer.

“I have to marry again,” he growled. “Soon.”

“If you say so.” Amaranthe curled her hands in her lap, pressing her knees and ankles together.

She wished she hadn’t left Mal upstairs, freshening up in the room the housekeeper had shown him.

The surly, gloomy woman, no one Amaranthe recognized, had greeted them at the door and accepted their names as if she didn’t care who they were.

Amaranthe’s old room held no signs that she had ever lived there.

It, along with the rest of the house, felt strange and familiar at the same time.

The furnishings were the same, everything in place, but shabby and in need of care.

Favella had been insistent about housekeeping, very often pressing Amaranthe to engage in cleaning herself, yet this dust and decay had been accumulating.

Did they not entertain? Had Reuben no pride? What had happened here after she left?

“I won’t have just anyone.” Reuben continued his circuit of the room, his face flushed with anger. “Our name is too good for that.”

“Of course,” Amaranthe replied, paying him little mind as she looked about, wondering at the cause of the house’s decline.

Reuben’s high opinion of his worth rested on very little basis, from what she could tell.

Being a baronet put him above most of his neighbors, but there were far grander people in the world. Dukes, for instance.

She was calculating how long politeness required her to stay when Reuben wheeled on her with a sneer. “So this is why you rushed here, I take it.”

“For what?” She blinked.

His contemptuous gaze settled on her bosom. Her traveling gown today was less smart than the others, but nothing of the duchess’s was dowdy. Even if her figure was unremarkable—and in Amaranthe’s opinion, hers was—the dress gave its own advantage.

“You’re not much, but I suppose you’ll do,” Reuben said.

Amaranthe stared at him, her blood turning cold. “I beg your pardon.”

He advanced upon her, his belly in its embroidered waistcoat coming first, the rest of him following after.

Amaranthe scrambled to her feet. She recognized that look of avarice and lust, the face of a selfish boy looking upon something he thought belonged to him, and he meant to break it merely because he could.

They were not in the stables this time, but that would not stop him.

He outweighed her by several stone. She put her chair between them.

“Don’t pretend to be simple. At least you share my grandfather’s blood, though I can’t say much for your mother.

You look healthy, sturdier than Favella was.

All to the good. I don’t care for those dark, plain looks of yours, can tell your mother was a foreigner.

But if you’re here, throwing your cap at me, what else is a man to do? ”

“You’re lost your wits if you think I’d marry you,” Amaranthe exclaimed.

“It’s why you ran off all those years ago, isn’t it?

” He scoffed. “Teased me for years to tumble you, then bolted when I finally took the bait. And now you scramble back here the moment Favella’s in her grave, looking to take her place.

A slyer baggage than I ever took you for.

” A leer split his florid features. “Can’t say I won’t enjoy getting an heir off you, though. A plain woman’s a beauty in the dark.”

“You have a child.” Amaranthe moved about the chair as he circled toward her. “Derwa. Eyde’s babe.”

He shook his head. “Not an heir,” he growled. “A bastard can’t inherit.”

“She’s your child nonetheless.” Indignation straightened her spine. “You turned Eyde off without a character. She deserves some support from you.”

“Acknowledge a by-blow?” He barked out a laugh that turned to a cough. “Worthless! Should drown them all at birth. Like puppies.”

Amaranthe gasped at his cruelty. “I’ll never marry you.”

“You think you can do better?” He lunged toward her.

Mal appeared in the doorway in that moment, and Amaranthe exhaled in relief.

What a welcome sight he was, and not only because he was big and solid and as handsome as sin.

He was a superior specimen to Reuben in every way, with his brown hair unpowdered, his stockings as white as his cravat, buttons gleaming along his coat and the knees of his breeches. Everything in her leaned toward him.

“I am already contracted to be married,” Amaranthe lied.

Reuben hauled himself up short. It was no easy feat, with his bulk. “What?” he barked. “To him ?”

“Yes. To Mr. Grey.” She sent Mal a wild, pleading glance. “He asked me to marry him at the inn in Tavistock. I accepted.”

“You!” Reuben sent an angry, cutting glance in the other man’s direction.

He looked ready to lose his temper, and Amaranthe shrank back, recalling his rages.

But as Mal stepped into the room, her blustering cousin retreated.

He outweighed Mal also, but he seemed to sense that the other man was dangerous.

“Throw yourself away on a duke’s nameless bastard? You’re a bigger fool than I thought!”

“I am very honored that he asked me.”

“And I, of course, am the happiest of men.” Mal watched Amaranthe.

Reuben glared back and forth between them, puffing out his chest in challenge. Amaranthe went cold with the fear that she had just put Mal in a position where her cousin might call him out and shoot him.

But Mal was a better shot as well as a better swordsman. She could guess that at a glance, and after muttering wrathfully to himself, it seemed Reuben did, too.

“Out,” he snarled. “You, whore, and your cuckold. I want you out of my house tomorrow. I’d put you out of my house this moment if it wouldn’t cause talk.”

Amaranthe blinked, taken back that he ordered not punishment but reprieve. She knew Reuben reviled common women. He never visited brothels but preferred to defile innocents under his own roof. She could scarcely believe she might escape him so easily.

“We’d go today, if our horses didn’t need resting,” Mal said. He held out a hand to Amaranthe. She took it and fled the room and, she hoped, her vile cousin for the last time.

But now she had caught Mal up in her lies.

A knock on her door much later, when she was already abed, made Amaranthe’s heart stop, then launch into a frenzy. “Who is it?”

She was in her bedgown, covers heaped upon her.

Trapped, if it were Reuben come to importune her.

Mal’s room was close beside hers, but she didn’t know if he was in it.

After a distasteful, silent dinner with Reuben brooding at the head of the table, the most sulky and suspicious of hosts, she had been grateful to retire to her room.

Having visited with Thaker, there was nothing more of Penwellen she wanted to see.

Nothing she would miss. She wished only to leave tomorrow, their luggage barely opened, her book cradled in her arms.

If Reuben tried to force himself on her—she looked around her room for a weapon. All she had was the Book of Hours lying open across her knees. Hardly heavy enough to knock a man out, but she would use it as a missile if she must.

“It’s me.” Mal’s low voice floated from behind the door.

She nearly melted into the bed in relief. “I’m undressed.”

“So am I. And we’ve shared a bed together before. Don’t you remember?”

She giggled. What an uncomfortable night that had been.

After that heady kiss in the parlor of the Queen’s Head, feeling her awakened body humming with life and hope, she’d lain stiffly on her half of the bed all night, the rolled blanket dividing the mattress and making a barrier between them.

Every breath, every movement from Mal had grated on her sensitized, singing nerves.

All she could think of that night was kissing him again, and the thought recurred at least once a minute in the time that had elapsed since.

It was a terrible temptation to let him into her room. A man could be forgiven if he roamed before marriage; indeed, it was expected. But a woman could never recover her virtue once it was lost.

“Come in,” she called anyway.

He looked delicious and comfortable, wrapped in a long velvet banyan robe with slippers, and she felt the inappropriate urge to press her mouth to the exposed skin of his throat. She pulled the coverlet over her hips, a layer of protection.

She wanted more of him, was greedy for more kisses, but at the same time she didn’t want to rush.

She was enjoying the slow, delectable simmer of attraction, the deep satisfaction of having him near.

No chair in the room being available, he stretched out atop the coverlet beside her, and every nerve in her body came alive.

“I thought I would find you with your book.” His smile sent heat curling through her to her toes.