Theresa Romain - Season for Temptation

She rested her hand on Julia’s head again, and Julia felt all the healing of her sister’s understanding and forgiveness.

“He loves you, too, doesn’t he?”

Julia nodded hesitantly, and Louisa continued. “I admit, I’m surprised at what you did — at least, what I presume you did — but if you really love him, I can’t fault you for anything.”

She smiled ruefully. “I only wish I could have felt the same way, but I never did. He just wasn’t right for me, and I certainly wasn’t the one for him. He was my escape; he was never my destiny.”

“You’re not angry with me?” Julia asked, scarcely able to believe it.

Louisa sighed. “If this damned item hadn’t been in the paper — yes, Julia, I know those words as well as you do, and this is absolutely the time to use them — I would be unreservedly happy. I was afraid I had ruined our family’s relationship with James and that I would embarrass him terribly. I knew he didn’t love me and wouldn’t be hurt on a personal level, but I thought his pride would be touched. I’m. .” She shook her head. “It’s a good thing you have each other.”

Louisa began absently to tease tangles out of Julia’s hair in their familiar way. “I’m not sure what to do about the situation, though. The paper implies that my engagement was broken because of you, which is quite wrong. I would like to see that corrected.”

Julia straightened up and looked Louisa directly in the eye. In this way, at least, she could show herself worthy of Louisa’s trust. “No, I won’t allow it.”

Louisa looked taken aback. “What? What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Julia explained, “as it stands, you are innocent in the eyes of the ton. You have every chance to walk away from the situation unscathed and find happiness with someone else. It would be madness to do anything to change that.”

“Madness? I hardly think that,” Louisa protested. “Julia, it’s not right. I won’t have you protecting me.”

“Yes, you will,” Julia insisted. “For once, you’ll let me shield you. It’s the least I can do. Louisa, I feel as if I haven’t done right by you, even by allowing myself to think of your betrothed husband in a romantic way.” Or by acting on it, she thought, ashamed once again about the encounter in the carriage.

She added, “Thank God, he’s an honorable man and he’s offered for me. Eventually, we will be married, and it’ll all be forgotten. We’ll spend time in the country for a while, and we’ll come back when everything’s blown over. We’ll be fine.” She tried to smile bravely. “A viscount can get away with a prodigious lot, you know.”

Louisa gave a short laugh. “Yes, I know that well enough.” She bit her lip, looking uncertain. “I just don’t feel it’s fair to you,” she said again.

“Trust me on this,” Julia said. “It’s more than fair. The least I can do, to help you through this situation — which wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for me — is to make sure that you come out of it unscathed.”

“But if you hadn’t gone to James’s house, all the world would know the truth about me. That I’m a jilt,” Louisa insisted.

“You aren’t,” Julia replied. “You only agreed to marry James out of a sense of obligation to our family, and to him. If anything, this is more like. . an annulment,” she decided.

“Now that is the most ridiculous thing of all,” Louisa said, smiling, and Julia knew she was beginning to come around.

“So you’ll let it stand?” Julia pressed. “You won’t say or do anything to counter the story?”

Louisa sighed and waved her hands in capitulation. “Fine, fine. I’ll allow you to throw yourself to the wolves — well, one wolf — in order that I might seem innocent and have a chance at finding another potential husband.”

“James isn’t a wolf,” Julia protested, but she was smiling now, like her sister. Thank heaven this conversation had gone so well. Thank heaven above, Louisa was a generous and forgiving person. Thank heaven Louisa loved her — and didn’t love James.

“All the same,” Louisa added, “I would like to leave London for a time. A long time. I think it will take me a while to come to terms with all this. I’m not angry,” she assured Julia, “but I feel like I’ve got to start over. I have to decide what I want, and who I want, and this certainly isn’t the place to do it.”

“Well, Aunt Estella plans to take us back to the country very soon if James and I can’t pull off a hasty wedding,” Julia said. “Honestly, even if we can, I’d like to leave, too. I think we’ll all need to get away from the wagging tongues for awhile.

“Besides,” she admitted, “if I ever cross paths with Lord Xavier, I’m sure I will haul off and punch him in the face, and you know that would cause a scandal of its own.”

“Ah, yes; as Aunt Estella would say, that would be both vulgar and unladylike,” Louisa replied. “So our aunt knows, then?”

Julia rolled her eyes. “She summoned me this morning and nearly flayed me alive. And she hit me on the head with her newspaper.”

Louisa gasped, and covered her mouth to suppress a startled laugh.

“Go ahead, laugh—” Julia waved a hand airily. “I deserved it. She was very angry, but I think she’s less so now. By the way, it was her suggestion to let the impression stand about your engagement being broken as a result of, ah, the events of yesterday. I do completely agree with her, of course. But I just wanted to let you know in case you tried to pull any self-sacrificing tricks.”

Louisa gave her sister a small, knowing smile. “After all the fun you got to have? I suppose I’ll agree to both your wishes, so I at least have a chance of such fun in the future.”

“It was wonderful!” Julia squealed. She blushed at once. Had she really just said that aloud?

Louisa only laughed, so Julia hastily covered her discomfiture with a change of subject. “Come, let’s speak with our aunt. Perhaps she’s gotten word back from James by now.”

James had lain awake into the early hours of the morning, savoring the feel of the bedclothes against his nude body, thinking of Julia and how she had so recently been here with him.

Julia. What changes the last day had brought. He could finally allow himself to love her, to long for her, to touch her. Good Lord, he wanted her even more now that they had been together and he knew what lovemaking with her was like. Would be like — for they would be doing that all the time once they were married, he would see to that. It had been amazing, transcendent; it was a pleasure he had never felt before, not with any other woman. He had grown hard just thinking of it, and wished mightily that she were in his bed so he could demonstrate to her just how greatly she affected him.

He’d gone to quite a bit of trouble the previous day to procure a special license, as soon as Xavier had left him. He was looking forward to bearing Julia off as soon as the clock struck a decent hour of the morning, making her his wife, traveling to Nicholls with her, and having a spirited repeat of their activities of the previous afternoon. Or more than one repeat, preferably.

Needless to say, he’d had trouble falling asleep in such a physical state.

His mind wasn’t entirely untroubled, either, which didn’t help a fellow drift off. He had been feeling uneasy about that whole conversation with Xavier. Of all the damned coils, to have that man, of all the men he knew in London, come by at such a time. Xavier, who missed nothing, and — if James remembered their schoolboy days rightly — withheld even less.

Xavier had come in off the street while James was still in that cursed dressing gown, drunk James’s best brandy while he waited for the viscount to dress decently, and smirked at his host when James rejoined him and tried to explain that there was nothing in it, simply a family visit related to his engagement.

That had been a mistake. It would have been better to say nothing at all and just fill the man with so much liquor that he was too stupefied to recall what he’d seen. Instead, at the mere mention of James’s engagement, Xavier’s clever features had perked up like a hound scenting the fox. He had plied James with questions that the viscount simply refused to answer, but it was too late. The young earl had already seen more than enough to draw his own conclusions.

By the time the sun rose in earnest, the viscount had only just drifted off into a troubled sleep. Unfortunately, he was soon awakened abruptly by a flood of sunshine.

He squinted, startled awake, and gasped at the sight of his mother standing in his bedchamber, one hand still gripping the curtains that she had just wrested open.

Good Lord, that was an unwelcome sight. She’d never before come to visit him at his lodgings, and now she had plowed her way past Delaney into his most private room.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, still blinking in the sudden brightness of the room.

He drew the bedcovers up to his chin and tried, as his mother began to rant, to absorb the fact that she was standing in his bedchamber. Something must have happened. Something dreadful, judging from the fire in the dowager’s eyes.

She said something about “how sharper than a serpent’s tooth” as well; James distinctly heard that even through the clammy fog that clouded his brain once he saw what was in his mother’s hand. In the hand that wasn’t scrabbling at his curtains, she held a newspaper.

It was dreadful, all right.

James snatched the paper from his mother’s hands and read the item she jabbed at with a furious forefinger.

His whole body went cold, as if he’d been plunged into icy water. The words were there on the page in front of him, but he still could hardly believe this.

He’d expected Xavier to bandy the news about in his club. He had expected lewd ribbing from friends, and probably even anger from Julia’s family.

What he had not expected was that the news would be printed in the ton’s favorite scandal sheet for all to see, or that it would reach the eyes or ears of his mother before he was safely removed to the country with Julia as his bride.

Some might call that a cowardly hope, perhaps; James had preferred to think of it as sensible. His mother wasn’t going to change his mind no matter what she said to him, and he knew she was going to be livid whether she spoke to him or not. So, he reasoned, he might as well save his time — and hers — by sparing them both the annoyance of a confrontation.

Unfortunately — disastrously — none of it had worked out that way. Here it was, in the paper, for the whole ton to read and judge him. And to judge Julia. And here was his mother, ranting at him from the foot of his bed as if he were six years old and had rolled in horse shit.

She’d already said the bit about the serpent’s tooth more than once; did the woman have no other way to call him ungrateful than by relying on Shakespeare? She also called him a rake, a disgrace to his illustrious name, and unprincipled, vulgar, and ungentlemanly. This last string of epithets almost made him smile despite the seriousness of the situation; Lady Irving would probably be proud of her old crony’s vocabulary.

“Don’t you dare smile, young man,” Lady Matheson fumed, seeing his mouth curving. “You have dragged our name through the mud once again. Through filth, I say! Yes, filth is the word for this entire situation. At least Gloria’s debasement was Roseborough’s fault and not of her own choosing. Your engagement was bad enough, but I stood it, because your motives were honorable, and at least it was respectable — although barely so. Throwing yourself away on a baron’s daughter with a mediocre dowry!” She sneered.

These inflammatory words blew away James’s lingering sense of shock. A trickle of anger began to fill him instead, slowly but mountingly. How dare she barge into his home and insult him and his decisions? She had no right, and he opened his mouth to tell her so — but her ladyship was hardly finished with her tirade.

“Then you splash our name in the papers as if we were the vulgarest sort of cit, with no idea what was due to the sensibility of gently bred persons. And for what? A quick tumble with the daughter of nobody knows who? To slake your lusts with some upstart who hopes to entrap you into marriage! Was it worth it? Because you’ve disgraced us all. You are even worse than Roseborough. You disgust me,” she spat. “There are whores for that sort of thing.”