Candace Camp - So Wild A Heart

“You know I don’t,” he replied thickly, swinging her up into his arms and dropping her none too gently on the bed. “You’re right. We’re steeped in sin,” he said as he unbuttoned his trousers and peeled them off. “And I will marry the damned heiress, if that is what you want.”

Miranda settled her spectacles on her nose and suppressed her sigh. For once, the accounts in front of her bored her past speaking. She had been feeling faintly blue all day. She knew that the feeling had to do with the stranger she had met last night. The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that the man who had been attacked was the very man whom her father had wanted her to meet. It should have been a fortuitous thing that that man had turned out to be the first man who had sparked her interest since she had been in England. Instead, it was rather depressing, since it was clear that he obviously was so set against her that he had not even been willing to attend his mother’s party to meet her. Of course, she had felt pretty much the same, so she could hardly hold it against the man. In fact, it showed that he was not the weak, shallow sort that she had assumed him to be. However, she could not help but feel a trifle miffed, no matter how silly she told herself that was.

She would never admit such a thing to anyone, of course. Indeed, she had not even told her father that she thought she had actually met the elusive Earl of Ravenscar the night before. If he knew that she had found his candidate for a husband in any way intriguing, he would never let up his campaign to get her to marry the man. And, of course, she had no intention of doing anything like that, no matter how attractive she had found the earl. She still felt the same way. She could never marry a man whom she did not love. She wanted the kind of marriage her father and Elizabeth had—they had been devoted to one another from the day they met. And while she certainly was not the sort of dependent, clinging female that her stepmother was, she wanted to experience that same sort of firm, long-standing feeling.

She wanted her eyes to shine every time she saw her husband the way that her father’s did whenever Elizabeth came into the room. She wanted to miss him when he was away and greet him with unfeigned delight when he returned, the way she had seen Elizabeth do with her father. Otherwise, what use was marriage? She could do very well on her own without a husband. She was used to taking care of things herself, and she had an ample fortune. She did not need to marry the way most women did, and she certainly did not feel, as Lady Westhampton had said about herself, that she must marry out of duty to her family. She might want to please her father, but it would not harm him or the Upshaw name if she did not.

She had told herself that she was being uncharacteristically foolish about the matter of the man she had rescued last night, and so, after picking her way through her breakfast, she had decided to spend the remainder of the day doing something useful—as well as something that usually kept her thoroughly engrossed. So she had pulled her hair back into a plain, no-nonsense bun and slipped into one of the older, much washed sacque dresses that she was accustomed to wearing when she did the accounts or wrote business letters. She was far too likely to get splotches and smudges of ink on her clothes when she worked to wear one of her nicer dresses. Then she had gone downstairs to the study, put on the small round spectacles that she wore when she did close work, and settled down to work with her father’s assistant, Hiram Baldwin.

Much to her dismay, she had found that she could not seem to shake her mood. Worse, she could not get interested in the sheets of numbers that Hiram had laid out before her. Usually she and Hiram shared an abiding interest in financial dealings, but today his voice droned on unmercifully, and she found her attention wandering back to the events of the evening before. Time and again she had to pull her mind back and apply it to the business at hand.

It was something of a relief when the door opened early in the afternoon and her father bustled in, grinning from ear to ear. Miranda smiled back at him; it was difficult not to, when her father smiled like that. Besides, she was more than ready to have a legitimate reason to be distracted from her work.

“Hello, Papa,” she greeted him. “You certainly look like the cat that ate the canary.”

“Indeed?” Her father’s grin grew even broader. “Well, I have every reason to be, my girl. I’ve been talking with a gentleman, and it seems he would like to pay his addresses to you. I told him I was amenable to it, of course.”

“What?” Miranda jumped to her feet. “What are you talking about? What gentleman? Papa, what have you done? If you have found some other puffed-up nobleman to try to shackle me to, I swear I’ll—”

“No, no,” Joseph hastened to assure her. “It’s no new gentleman. It’s the same gentleman. Lord Ravenscar.”

Miranda stared. “What? Here?” Her hand flew to her hair. She must look like a fright! Her hair was not arranged becomingly at all, and the dress she wore was so old and outmoded that she was embarrassed to be seen in it. “Papa! No! I can’t—he mustn’t.”

“Pish-posh, girl,” Joseph replied cheerfully. “I’ve already told him he could speak to you. Wouldn’t be polite to send him packing now. Won’t take but a minute.” He turned and walked toward the door. “Come, Hiram, you and I had better leave the girl alone.”

Hiram, with a single puzzled glance at Miranda, who was standing as if turned to stone, stuck his pen back into the inkwell and followed his employer out the door.

“No, wait!” Miranda hurried toward the door. She couldn’t let Ravenscar see her like this! But she had not even reached the doorway when it was filled by a large, well-dressed gentleman.

Miranda’s first thought was that she had been right. The man standing before her, handsome and tall, was the same man whom she had helped to escape his attackers last night. Her second thought was to wonder what had happened to all that man’s charm.

This man’s face was faintly bored and settled into lines of aristocratic hauteur. He was handsome, certainly, and his figure was slim and well-muscled in his perfectly tailored clothes, but the green eyes held no laughter or excitement now as they flickered coldly around the room and settled on her briefly.

“Miss Upshaw,” he drawled as he made an elegant bow in her direction.

“Lord Ravenscar,” Miranda replied in a tone as cool and distant as his face. She wondered if the excitement of the evening before had addled her brain that she had been drawn to this man. The Earl of Ravenscar seemed to be like every other arrogant nobleman she had met—if not worse.

Devin glanced at Miranda again. He hated being here. It was humiliating, degrading. It grated at his soul to be reduced to this—for however Leona or his mother or Rachel might phrase it, it still boiled down to his selling himself for this woman’s money. It was proof, he knew, of just how low he had sunk. Well, as Leona had pointed out, he was in the mire now, had been for years; he might as well wallow in it.

Still, it was hard for him to do. He had felt shamed as he had spoken to the girl’s father; he felt even more so now, facing the girl herself. But he had enough pride left that he would not allow them to see the way the humiliation scored his soul. His family, he reminded himself, had walked and talked with kings; he was not about to let some fur trapper or his daughter see him humbled. He lifted his chin and cast another look at the homely creature before him.

She was much as he had imagined her: dowdy in an old-fashioned, rather shapeless dress, her hair skinned back into an unfashionable bun, a pair of spectacles perched on her nose. She was without mistake a spinster, a plain woman who would be married only for her money. No doubt her speech and manners would be just as bad as her looks—a grating American accent and no idea what to do or say in polite company.