A Rogue's Downfall Read online

  “Not tonight,” he said, taking her arm and leading her from the room. “Do you still play the pianoforte?”

  Still? Had he heard her? She did not believe he had ever noticed her until her bold drunk person had taken his eye at the opera house.

  “And sing?” he said. “You used to have a lovely contralto voice. I can think of no reason why you would not still do so.”

  “I play and sing for my own amusement,” she said.

  “And will do so this evening for mine,” he said. “If you please.”

  If she pleased! As if she had a choice.

  He stood behind her while she played and sang. She did not know how he reacted to her music, though each time she stopped he asked for more. After longer than an hour, she got to her feet.

  “James will be ready to nurse,” she said. And she was, too. Her breasts were full and heavy with milk.

  “He must not be kept waiting then,” he said, inclining his head to her.

  She hesitated a moment before turning toward the door, expecting him to say more, expecting him to indicate that he would be visiting her room later. A part of her—a treacherous, unwelcome part—hoped that he would. She had been unbearably aware of his physical presence all evening.

  “Give me your hand,” he said suddenly, reaching out his own, palm up.

  She placed her right hand on his, wondering if he intended to draw her toward him. She was having difficulty breathing.

  “Your left,” he said.

  She looked at him in incomprehension as she obeyed.

  He did not close his hand about hers. Instead, his free hand touched her wedding ring and then drew it off over her knuckle. He dropped the ring into his pocket. She had not removed the ring since he had put it there on their wedding day. Even when her fingers had swelled during her pregnancy, she had not taken the advice of the midwife to remove it. Her finger looked strangely bare.

  “That, I believe,” he said very softly, “was an encumbrance. Apart from the fact that we share a son, we have no ties that merit the ring, do we?”

  She was paralyzed with shock. During the evening, she had come to expect to be bedded. Instead he intended to put her from him, to end their marriage. Could he do that? Could he refuse her support? Could he take their child from her?

  “For tomorrow at least,” he said, “we are unmarried, my lady. But I cannot call you that, can I? Amy. Tomorrow you will be my valentine, Amy.” He smiled a rather twisted smile that did not reach his eyes, and raised her bare hand to his lips.

  What? Her mind could not translate his words into any meaning. What did he mean?

  “I am sure,” he said, “that our son does not await a late meal with any patience. He is like his father in that, too. Good night, Amy.”

  She licked her lips and felt a flicker of—desire? as his eyes dropped to observe the nervous gesture. “Good night, my lord,” she said, drawing her hand from his and turning to hurry from the room. Even so he was at the door before her, opening it for her and closing it quietly behind her.

  Tomorrow you will be my valentine, Amy. That was what he had said. He had never spoken her name before. Except during their marriage service, she supposed. She had not heard a word of that service. You will be my valentine. Whatever did he mean? And what did he mean by taking her ring and telling her that it was an encumbrance. Her knees felt rather like jelly as she forced them to carry her up the stairs toward the nursery. And she was breathless enough to have climbed ten flights instead of two.

  Whatever did he mean? Whatever had he planned? A repetition of last Valentine’s Day? She had been his valentine then, too, she supposed.

  The baby was doing nothing to hide his displeasure at having been kept waiting a full fifteen minutes after becoming aware of hunger pangs.

  The idea had come to him quite on the spur of the moment. If it could be called an idea. He had decided to use the evening to try to establish some sort of ease between them, to try to get to know her a little better, to try to reveal something of himself to her. He had planned to do the same tomorrow in the hope that at the end of it there would be some sort of a relationship between them. Some small measure of friendship and respect, perhaps.

  The evening had been more of a success than he might have expected. They had talked through dinner, somehow filling in the silence with stories of their lives. It had all been very strained, very self-conscious, but it was more than they had ever accomplished—or even tried—before. He had suggested music in the drawing room afterward because he did not think they could keep the conversation going much longer. And yet it was too early to go to bed. Besides, he had always admired her playing and had always been intrigued by the unexpectedly rich, low pitch of her singing voice.

  He had stood behind her while she played and sang, so that he could watch her at his leisure. And he had wondered what she would do if he followed instinct and bent to kiss the back of her neck as it arched over the pianoforte. Or if he slid his hands beneath her arms to cup her full breasts—full with his son’s milk. He was jealous of his son. He had wondered, looking at her wedding ring, if she always wore it, if she had put it back on, perhaps, when she knew he was coming. It was something of a mockery.

  And that was when the idea came to him. The impulse to erase all that was between them—except their son—and all that was not. The need to cancel the past and start again. On Valentine’s Day, the day for lovers, the day when everything had gone wrong for them. And so he took her ring, the symbol of a marriage that was really not a marriage at all, and put from his mind the thought that had been lingering all evening, the thought that perhaps he would go to her bed that night and try to win her with sexual expertise.

  It seemed like a good plan to make her his valentine for the day. Except that Valentine’s Day to him had always meant only a more than ordinary excuse for philandering. He knew nothing about wooing an innocent young girl. If he was to erase last year and all that had happened since—except his son—then she was an innocent young girl. She probably was anyway. He did not know quite how she had come to be at that masquerade ball, but he knew she was not supposed to be there. And he knew she would not have acted as she had if someone had not been busy plying her with gin.

  He was up very early in the morning, after his usual almost sleepless night, down in the kitchen stealing a rasher of bacon off the grill and having his fingers slapped for it by the cook while a maid gaped. The cook had been in his employment and in his father’s before him for as long as he could remember. He had been stealing food from under her eye and being slapped for it for as long as he could remember.

  “How does one woo a young maiden on Valentine’s Day?” he asked.

  “Sit down at the table like a proper gentleman,” she said, as she had been saying to him all his life, “and I’ll make you up a plate of bacon and eggs. But don’t pick with your fingers. You don’t need to be wooing no young virgins. You have a wife.”

  “How does one woo a young wife on Valentine’s Day then?” He grinned at her and sat. Why did food in the kitchen always taste more delicious than food in the dining room? “Three eggs? Are you trying to fatten me up?”

  “You be nice to her, that’s what,” the cook said. “Just a pretty little thing she is that comes tripping down here every day to approve the menu, and never thinks to set her fingers on any of my food, and says thank you very much when I gives her a cake or a tart what I have just baked. And as fond as you please of Master James. He has the look of you. This time next year I’ll have to have an eye to the currants and the apples when he is around, like as not. You be nice to her.”

  The gardener had come into the kitchen. A longtime employee, too, he looked not at all taken aback to see his master seated at the kitchen table digging into an early breakfast. He rubbed his hands and held them out to the fire. “There be roses coming into bud in the hothouse, m’lord,” he said with a grin.

  “Are there, by Jove?” the earl said. “They are good for Val
entine’s Day, Jenkins?”

  “Magic,” the gardener said. “Better than di’monds, m’lord.”

  Morse, standing in the doorway, dignified and immaculate despite the earliness of the hour, looked pained to see his master eating with such informality. But he said nothing. He would scold the cook later, though his words would do no more good than they had ever done, he supposed. Cook was a law unto herself.

  “We are discussing Valentine’s Day, Morse,” the earl said, holding out his plate hopefully to the cook, who frowned and forked three more rashers of bacon and two slices of toast onto it. “And how one woos a young wife for the occasion.”

  “Music, my lord,” Morse said, bowing and spreading a snowy, freshly starched napkin over his master’s lap. He would remind Cook about that, too. “The Reverend Williams has his nephew staying at the rectory. He is an accomplished violinist. He has played for the Prince Regent.”

  “And Miss Williams is still at home?” the earl asked. “She is an accomplished pianist.” Probably more accomplished than his wife, he thought disloyally.

  The butler bowed.

  “They play a treat, they do,” the cook said. “They played at church last Sunday. Miss Williams on the organ, of course. He didn’t sound a bit like a cat, he didn’t, on his violin. I never heard a violin before without it didn’t sound like a cat. Yours included.”

  “Yes,” the earl agreed. “My violin lessons did not last long, did they? It seemed to be mutually agreed by all concerned that I had no talent whatsoever.”

  “Praise the Lord, we all said belowstairs,” the cook said, while Morse frowned at her and the gardener chuckled and the maid gaped.

  “Music,” the earl said, mopping up the last of the grease from his bacon with his toast. “And roses. And candlelight and dancing. I like it. Arrange it, will you, Morse?”

  “A party?” the cook said, looking alarmed. “I can’t do it on such short notice. I won’t. What do you want served?”

  “A party for two,” the earl said. “It will be far more romantic than a party for fifty. Would you not agree?” He fixed his eye on the gaping maid.

  “Oh, yes, your lordship,” she said, blushing hotly and bobbing three curtsies in succession. “The first man a girl sees on Valentine’s Day will be her husband, your lordship,” she added irrelevantly. She bobbed again.

  “That was why you was in the stables gawking at Roger almost before the cock had time to crow this morning?” Jenkins said with a chuckle. “And he was gawking back, too, Sal.”

  Sal turned an even deeper shade of red.

  “Take that greasy plate away,” the cook instructed her, “and wipe up the crumbs. Some people could have a plate as big as a house and still have crumbs dotted about it. Her ladyship already has a husband. Though sometimes one wonders.”

  The earl got to his feet. “There can be no harm, anyway, in doing everything one is supposed to do,” he said. “What time does my wife usually get up?”

  “She gets up earlier than any of the rest of us,” the cook said tartly, “to give Master James his feed. But then she goes back to bed. Jessie will be taking up her chocolate soon. It is shameful a man has to be told such things of his own wedded wife.”

  “If you will stop scolding and pour the chocolate for me,” the earl said, “I shall play ladies’ maid myself this morning.”

  Sal sighed, the gardener chuckled, Morse looked dignified, and Cook poured. The earl took the tray with his wife’s cup of steaming chocolate on it and climbed the servants’ stairs to her room. It had felt almost like old times being down in the kitchen. It seemed to him that he had spent most of his childhood down there. His parents were always too busy to be bothered with him, and his nurse was a careless creature who had liked to sit gossiping in the housekeeper’s room or else nodding off to sleep in the nursery. He had loved his nurse.

  But it did not feel like old times now. Today was Valentine’s Day, and he was on his way to begin the wooing of the woman he had seduced and ruined exactly one year ago and married six weeks after that. He was on his way to try to erase a year of bad memories. It seemed a daunting task he had set himself.

  It was her ring that woke her. Or rather the absence of her ring. She had not realized how much she had fingered the ring and turned it on her finger until it was no longer there. She had noticed that fact the night before while she had lain awake trying to sleep. Trying to make sense out of what he had said and done. Trying to ignore the fact that he was sleeping in the master bedchamber, separated from her room only by the dressing room between. Trying desperately not to admit to herself that she wanted him. Her woman’s needs were beginning to reassert themselves now that her body had recovered from pregnancy and the experience of giving birth. She had been aware for some weeks that she was twenty years old, that spring was coming, that she was going to have to learn to live her life without a man in it.

  How did one learn such a thing? The craving had been there, muted, not fully understood, denied, even before the night of the masquerade. But now that she had had a man, despite the ugliness of the circumstances, she knew what it was her body needed. She knew what it was she would never experience again. It had been hard to fall asleep knowing that he was there in the next room. Knowing that he was her husband and James’s father. Knowing that he had taken her ring and called it an encumbrance. Knowing that he had said she was to be his valentine the next day.

  And now, she thought, twisting the ring that was not there, the absent ring that had woken her, it was Valentine’s Day. She had no ring, no marriage, no reason to get up to be mocked by the day. She wished she could get up to find him gone again, taking her ring with him, the one symbol of their marriage—apart from James. She wished she could be alone with her baby again as she had been for almost three months. She had made her baby her world. She had made motherhood her reason for living.

  Jessie had been already and left her chocolate on the table beside the bed, she noticed, opening her eyes. That was unusual. Although Jessie never did anything as ill-bred as shaking her or shouting into her ear, she did make her presence felt, bustling about the room, opening the curtains rather noisily, rearranging the already carefully arranged pots and brushes on the dressing table, clearing her throat. Jessie knew that she valued her mornings, that she hated to oversleep, even after those nights when James was hungrier than usual or decided to take his meal at a more leisurely pace than usual.

  She turned onto her back, stretched out her legs, lifted her arms up at full stretch, and yawned loudly.

  And realized that there was someone standing at the window watching her. Obviously not Jessie.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  She was not wearing a nightcap, she thought, mortified. Her hair must be all wild tangles. It usually was when she got out of bed in the mornings. How long had he been standing there? What was he doing here? She felt a sudden treacherous stab of desire deep in her womb. But he was not in his nightshirt or his dressing gown. He was dressed in riding boots and breeches and a dark coat. He looked—gorgeous. One of her hands strayed to her hair, but it was hopeless.

  “I brought your chocolate,” he said. “It should be just the right temperature for drinking.”

  “Oh,” she said again, looking at the cup. She was expected to sit up and drink it? She was wearing a nightgown. It was perfectly decent and no more revealing than any of her flimsier dresses. But still, it was a nightgown. It struck her as rather ludicrous that she was embarrassed for her husband of a year to see her in her nightgown. Especially when just a year before—exactly a year before—he had done that to her that had got her with child.

  “Don’t sit up yet,” he said, walking toward her. “You are embarrassed to have me in your room. You are quite right. I ought not to be here. I just wanted to make sure that I was the first man you saw this morning, you see.”

  She stared up at him, unconsciously drawing the bedclothes closer to her chin.
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  “It is Valentine’s Day,” he explained. “There is a superstition about the first man a woman sees on that day. Sal told me.”

  “Sal?” Her brain felt sluggish, as if his words should make sense to her. “Sally? The kitchen maid?”

  “She was in the stables early,” he said, “to make sure that Roger was the first man she saw. Roger, I take it, is the good-looking young groom who is new to my stables?”

  She nodded, feeling stupid. What was he talking about?

  “The first unmarried man a maiden sees on Valentine’s Day will be her husband,” he said.

  “But we are already m—”

  “No.” He set a finger firmly across her lips. A warm and masculine finger that smelled faintly of—bacon? “Not today. For today we are single. And thus my presence in your bedchamber is scandalous. Today you are my valentine. I claim you by virtue of the fact that I am the first man you have seen today, my son excepted.”

  She understood at last. Though only in part. She did not know what it meant to be his valentine. The same as it had meant last year? She did not want the same as last year. At the time it had seemed unutterably romantic to be danced with and held close by a black-masked, black-cloaked gentleman whose identity she knew. She had thought it romantic to be whisked off by him for a private tryst. She had thought it romantic to be made love to. But she had seen it all through the deceptively rosy haze of alcohol. It had not really been romantic at all. None of it. It had been sordid. It could have been called seduction if she had not been so very willing from the first moment.

  She wanted romance. Pure, wonderful, chivalrous romance. But it was too late for romance with him. And too late for romance with anyone else. Her life was to be forever without romance. And yet he was pretending that they were unmarried. He was claiming her as his valentine on the strength of an old myth that she had used to believe in implicitly. And perhaps—oh, just perhaps—he did not mean this year to be a mere repeat of last year. Perhaps he meant something else. Some game a little more romantic. Her heart yearned, and she remembered how she had loved him, how he had been woven into all her dreams before she had come to hate him.