Someone to Care (Westcott #4)(20)

“Yes,” she said when he lifted his head, and she listened to the echo of the word, almost as though someone else had spoken it. “Yes, let us make it an even better night, Marcel.”

There was an arrested look on his face. And her mind was catching up to her words. This was Mr. Lamarr standing before her, the ruthless, dangerous Mr. Lamarr, one of England’s most notorious libertines, among other vices. Suddenly he looked like a forbidding stranger, all dark and brooding and attractive beyond bearing.

“I shall go down to the taproom for a while and make myself seen,” he said. “If when I come back up I find your door locked, I will know you have regretted the words you just spoke. If I find the door unlocked, I shall indeed give you a very good night. And you will give me the same in return. It is give and take with me, Viola, in equal measures. It will be a night you will not regret—if your door remains unlocked.”

He turned and went back to the staircase and down to the taproom below. It was a strange seduction, giving her space and time to change her mind, to lock her door firmly against him. Or perhaps it was the most effective seduction of all. No coercion. There could be no looking back afterward to claim that she had been deceived by a practiced rake.

The decision was all hers.

. . . I shall indeed give you a very good night.

Would he? Was it possible? She had no idea what to expect except for the basics. Could that ever be good?

. . . a night you will not regret.

Oh, she very much doubted that. Which begged the question—why go through with something she knew very well she would bitterly regret?

She stepped inside her room after lighting the candle on her dresser from the larger candle in the wall sconce in the corridor and shut the door behind her. She set down the candlestick and stood watching the flame gutter and then grow steady.

I shall indeed give you a very good night . . . It will be a night you will not regret.

Would her door be unlocked when he came back upstairs? She really did not know. But the choice—the decision—would be hers.





Five





The noise in the taproom subsided somewhat when Marcel walked in and seated himself at a small table close to the fire. But when it became clear that he wanted neither to contribute to the conversation nor to listen to it, the men recovered from their self-consciousness in the presence of such upper-class splendor and the noise level resumed its former pitch. He drank his ale and stared into the coals.

He wondered idly if her door would be unlocked when he went back up. He laid private and conflicting bets with himself. Yes, it would be. She had made her decision, and it would go against her dignity to change her mind and hide behind a locked door. But no, it would not. She would think twice—and very probably thirty-two times after that—and decide that a sordid coupling with a near stranger, and a rake to boot, at a third-class inn was not at all the thing, and she would conclude that a locked door was what he thoroughly deserved.

He did not much care either way. If the door was unlocked, he would have a night of unexpected sport. If it was locked, he would have a decent night’s sleep . . . perhaps. There would be nothing else to do, and the bed in his room looked clean and comfortable enough. Tomorrow he would be on his way by some means or other. He was not worried about being stranded here indefinitely.

And he was indeed in no hurry to arrive home. He was going to have to assert himself when he got there over matters in which he really had very little interest. He ought of course to have done it two years ago immediately after he had inherited his title and Redcliffe Court and all the encumbrances that went with it. But it had seemed too much bother at the time. He had been content to settle the twins there with their aunt and uncle and to pay them his usual twice-yearly visits while leaving everything else to be sorted out by those who lived there. It had been too optimistic an expectation. Lately he had been inundated with an increasingly frequent stream of increasingly lengthy and discontented letters, and it was too much to be borne. He would not bear it. He was going to have to put a stop to it.

The marchioness, his elderly aunt, complained that her authority was being usurped by that upstart Mrs. Morrow, his sister-in-law. She—Marcel had assumed his aunt was referring to herself—had had the running of Redcliffe for more than fifty years and no one had ever found fault with her management until she—Marcel had assumed the marchioness was referring to Jane Morrow—had come upon the scene with the idea that she could just take over everything simply because she had the care of Estelle and Bertrand. Marcel had not bothered to keep track of which she or her was being referred to. Neither had he read on to find out. Obviously there was friction between the two women, and of course Jane wrote of it too, at great and indignant length, emphasizing her superior role as guardian of Marcel’s heir and her longtime experience in running his household. He had not read that letter to its conclusion either, though there had been three pages of it left.

He nevertheless had been made aware—by Jane in another letter—that his cousin Isabelle, who also lived at Redcliffe with her husband, the excuse being that the marchioness was elderly and frail and needed her daughter on hand to administer tender care, was also trying to assert an authority over the running of the house that she did not in any way have. She was also planning a lavish wedding for her youngest daughter, Margaret, doubtless at Marcel’s expense, and no one had yet answered Jane’s perfectly reasonable question about where the couple planned to take up residence after the wedding. He had stopped reading, but clearly he needed to go there in person, though he would rather be setting out for the North Pole unless there was somewhere farther away and more remote. The South Pole?