Mary Balogh: Gentle conquest

Vera was pulling on her gloves as a footman opened the doors into the drawing room so that she might bid her mother farewell. She felt a lurching of the stomach and almost lost her poise when she saw Beauchamp himself standing there talking to her mother. He looked as cool and as elegant as if he had never entertained a sinful thought in his life.

Vera inclined her head stiffly in his direction. "I shall be on my way, Mama," she said. "I shall see you later."

"You are on your way to see Georgie," Lord Beauchamp stated. "I have your mama's kind permission to escort you. Do I have yours, Miss Burton?" He made her an elegant bow.

"It is merely a sisterly call that I make," she said stiffly. "I would not put you to any trouble, my lord."

"No trouble in the world, I assure you, ma'am," he said cheerfully. "It would be my pleasure."

With her mother sitting there smiling affably, Vera had no choice but to accept the offered company. She turned and preceded him from the room.

"If you held your spine any straighter," Lord Beauchamp said conversationally when they had reached the pavement outside, "it would shatter from the tension." He took Vera's hand and tucked it beneath his arm.

"Kindly release my arm, sir," she said staring straight ahead. "I am perfectly capable of walking without any support."

"But consider my reputation," he said, "if I should be seen to be walking along beside you without offering you the use of my arm. I should never live down the ignominy, Vera."

"And I have not given you leave to use my given iminc," she said.

"Ah," he said with a sigh, "can this be the same young lady who melted into my arms but two nights ago and enslaved me with the passion of her kiss?"

"I would have thought the least said about that evening the better," Vera said tartly.

"Why?" he asked, looking down at her with raised eyebrows. "Do you find words inadequate to express how you felt? You are quite right. Perhaps we should drop the topic of kisses until we are in surroundings conducive to a repetition of the action."

"You have deliberately misunderstood my meaning," she said. "And why are we turning at this corner, sir? My sister's house is straight on."

"So it is," he said. "But the park is in this direction."

"I am not going to the park, my lord," Vera said quite firmly. "Certainly not with you. If you will kindly release my arm, you can continue to the park and I shall continue on my way to my sister's."

"Now, why should I wish to walk to the park alone?" Lord Beauchamp asked. "Sometimes I wonder about your intelligence, Vera."

She stopped walking, resolutely drawing him to a halt. "Enough!" she snapped. "I am tired of this verbal sparring that we always seem to become involved in. I have no wish to walk with you, sir, and no wish to speak further with you. I wish you will leave me alone. And Georgie too."

"Ah, Georgie," he said, turning to her and covering her hand with his. "She is at the root of all this, is she? Come, Vera. You will walk to the park with me-"

"No, I will not."

"Don't interrupt," he said. "It is ill-mannered to do so. You will walk to the park with me and we shall talk about this quarrel that you seem to think we have. And if you still believe you have a grievance at the end of it, I shall conduct you to my cousin's house and say goodbye to you. I shall not bother you ever again. Is that fair enough?"

"Fair enough!" she agreed abruptly after a moment's consideration.

"Good girt," he said, patting her hand and resuming their walk. He chatted about inconsequential matters while they picked their way through the more crowded streets around the entrance to the park, and steered her through the gates. Inside, the paths and the grass were nearly deserted.

"Now," he said at last, "you may let fly at me, my dear."

Vera said nothing for a while. "Tell me if it is true," she said finally, looking away from him toward a clump of trees.

"No," he said, not even pretending to misunderstand, "of course it is not true. I am wounded to think that you have even had any doubts."

"How could I not have doubts?" she cried passionately, turning a flushed face to him. "There is your reputation, your very forward behavior to me, your familiarity with Georgie, your admission that she has been leaving home late at night in your carriage, her pregnancy. How could I avoid being suspicious?"

He was grinning suddenly. "Is Georgie in a delicate way?" he asked. "That is new to me. And that will certainly put her into a nasty predicament."

"Then there is something going on," she said, "and you know about it. How can you stand there and smile?"

"Merely because your sister has got herself into an unbelievable scrape," he said. He held up a hand as she opened her mouth to speak. "And it has nothing whatsoever to do with immorality, Vera. I can tell you with some certainty that the child is Ralph's, that there is no possibility of its being anyone else's. And I believe I can assure you with equal certainty that those two are almost indecently in love with each other. There are merely a few tricky misunderstandings to clear up. I am not at all sure which of them is in the worse tangle. But to be quite honest with you, at the moment I do not feel like affording them another thought."

Vera looked doubtful. "And has Lord Stanley accepted the fact that he made a mistake?" she asked.

"I have no idea," he told her. "He made a very formal and abject apology this morning. But I could not tell if it was spontaneous or not. It struck me at the time that he might have been under pressure from whoever gave him the black eye and swollen lip."

"Ralph?" Vera asked, saucer-eyed.

"I think you must be right," he said, "though Ralph always seems the veriest lamb. But there was once a similar occasion when he became quite unreasonably violent on behalf of a female. It was only that memory that made me give up my conviction that Georgie was the architect of Stanley's morning face. I cannot think how Ralph found out, but he knew by last night, when he appeared in my dressing room breathing fire and brimstone. Only now does it strike me that I was probably most fortunate not to share young Stan's fate."

"I told Ralph," Vera admitted. "I assumed that he knew already, you see."

"Then you are probably my savior," Lord Beauchamp said, raising her hand to his lips and making her a bow. "My brains might be splattered on a barren field by now had it not been for you."

"A duel?" she said, her eyes wide with shock. "Lord Stanley challenged you?"

"Vera," he said, "I do wish you would not do that with your eyes in such an exposed part of the park. It is most unfair. Knowing how your lips taste is far more tantalizing than merely imagining, I find. Yet the two occupants of that barouche and those two pedestrians on the horizon would doubtless have forty fits apiece if I did what I badly want to do."

"I wish you would not talk so," Vera said, turning abruptly and beginning to walk again.

"We are very different from each other, are we not?" he said, falling into step beside her, and taking her arm again. "Do we have anything in common at all, Vera?"

"No," she said, "I think not. Unless it is a tendency to speak our minds."

"Is that why we have all these deliciously exhilarating arguments?" he asked.

"I fear so, my lord," she agreed.

"Would we be very unwise to marry?" he asked.

Vera looked at him, startled. "To marry?" she said faintly. "Surely there is no question of such a thing."

"What did you expect?" he said. "An offer of carte blanche? I would not dare, you know. It must have taken a full hour a few nights ago for my face to recover from the sting of your slap. And that was only from a supposed dishonoring of your sister!"

"I have not expected anything," Vera said. "I am an old maid, my lord, past the age of marriage."