Helen Dickson - When Marrying a Duke...

Taking his arm, with great difficulty she managed get him on to the veranda, relieved when no one tried to stop them and ignoring the pipe smokers who rose and drifted away into the shadows.

‘Devil take it,’ Oliver mumbled, stumbling to his knees and grabbing at a post to keep himself from falling flat on his face. ‘I’m all at sea.’

‘It jolly well serves you right,’ Marietta scolded.

Suddenly a tall, lithe black-haired man materialised from across the street. ‘Get up, man,’ he retorted as he hoisted Oliver to his feet.

‘Thank you,’ Oliver muttered. ‘I am much obliged.’

Marietta’s head spun round on hearing the strong authoritative tones. Suddenly she wished the ground would open and swallow her up. She lowered her head to hide her face, for there was no one in the whole world she would so much dislike to discover her in this disguise as Lord Trevellyan.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Max demanded of Oliver.

Oliver’s eyes darted about, but he saw there was no escaping Lord Trevellyan’s interrogation. ‘I—came on behalf of a friend to collect a package, and before I knew …’

‘Like hell you did,’ Max ground out. ‘You knew what kind of establishment this is—that not only is it a house of ill repute, but that Chang deals in narcotics. If you are hell-bent on self-destruction, young man, you are going the right way about it.’

Marietta was about to move behind Oliver when a warm hand on her shoulder pulled her back and spun her round to face him.

‘Wait. Are you with him?’

Knowing there was no escape, Marietta raised her head and met his gaze, her eyes wide with horrified embarrassment. She saw astonished recognition in his eyes and tried to shrink away, but he held on to her shoulder, his fingers digging into her soft flesh.

‘Miss Westwood. Just as one might have expected. What an absolutely tiresome girl you are.’ She flinched before the exasperation in his voice. ‘I might have known—although I didn’t expect to meet you engaged in yet another mad escapade quite so soon. It leaves me wondering what the devil you’ll get up to next.’ He rounded angrily on Oliver. ‘Have you no sense? You must have known it was the height of dangerous folly to bring a young girl to a place such as this. Not only does Chang deal in opium, but slaves are his speciality—the younger the better, and the fairer the skin the higher the price.’

‘I hadn’t meant to bring her, but …’

‘She insisted.’ Max fixed his fierce gaze on Marietta. ‘Do you go out of your way to court danger and excitement? I suppose it’s pointless me asking if your father knows you are here?’

Marietta shook her head.

‘Then he should.’ He looked at Oliver with severe approbation. ‘It would be advisable for you to leave now, Mr Schofield. I’ll escort Miss Westwood home.’

Eager to be gone, Oliver didn’t raise any objections as he was hoisted up into the rickety carriage. Turning his attention to Marietta, Max took her arm and almost dragged her across the street to a waiting sedan chair.

‘Kindly take your hands off me,’ she snapped, angry and resentful of his interference. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere with you.’

‘That’s too bad. Get in.’

‘I most certainly will not.’

‘Shut up,’ he hissed, his voice like acid.

As he shoved her inside without gentleness, her ill-fitting shoe came off and dropped into the street. Cursing softly, he picked it up and thrust it into her hands. In a silky, dangerous voice, he said, ‘Be still. I am averse to leaving you to the mercy of an opium-soaked idiot.’

Clutching her shoe, taking judicious note of the taut set of his jaw and feeling the first tendril of fear coil in the pit of her stomach, Marietta did as she was told. She didn’t think she could escape and, anyway, she would only enrage him further. Besides, if she didn’t let him vent his wrath now, he would undoubtedly tell her father—which he would probably do anyway. She shot him a mutinous, measuring look. He looked dangerous and invincible. She already knew he had a vile temper. She judged from the ominous look in his silver-grey eyes that he was even now considering shaking her for her idiocy. Rather than give him the satisfaction, she sat frigidly in the sedan while he walked briskly along side.

Steeling herself to endure the journey home, she sat in angry silence all the way, relieved when the coolies carrying the sedan halted outside the gate. She scrambled out, impatient to be rid of her persecutor.

Instructing the coolies to wait, Max looked down at Marietta, his face hard. ‘I’ll have a word with your father before I go.’

‘He isn’t at home.’

‘Then I’ll catch up with him later. He should know what his daughter gets up to in his absence—for your own good, you understand.’

‘No, I do not understand,’ she flared. ‘Tell me, Lord Trevellyan, are you really as heartless and unfeeling as you sound right now?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘You’re a monster. Why are you talking to me like this?’

‘Someone has to.’

‘What I do has got nothing whatsoever to do with you. I would be obliged if you would mind your own business.’

‘When I find a girl of your age in one of the most notorious opium dens in Hong Kong, I make it my business.’

‘It’s also a place where brothels and gambling dens thrive,’ she flared, ‘which leads me to question the purpose of your own visit to the native quarter, Lord Trevellyan.’

He raised one sleek, questioning brow. ‘And you know what a brothel is, do you, Miss Westwood?’

Her face turned scarlet with embarrassment and she found she couldn’t look at him. ‘Yes—at least—I think so.’

Max was shocked, for such things were never discussed with an innocent girl. ‘Damn it, there are some things a girl of your age shouldn’t know about.’

Marietta didn’t, not really. One day she had asked Oliver to explain what a brothel was, having overheard some young men making ribald remarks among themselves about such establishments. In a roundabout way Oliver had told her what a brothel was, firmly stating that, of course, he never visited them. She had always taken everything Oliver said as the gospel truth—but today had changed all that.

‘I can’t see why not. I’m seventeen, Lord Trevellyan, not six, and I cannot for the life of me understand why a man would want to visit such places if he is in love with his wife.’

‘Brothels are full of married men, Miss Westwood,’ he replied drily. ‘When you are older you will no doubt realise that. Why did you go there? What made you want to?’

She shrugged. ‘It was the adventure, I suppose, the excitement of doing something different.’

‘Something wrong, more like. Just what did you think you were playing at, doing something as lunatic as going to a place like that? Have you no brains at all?’

‘Don’t speak to me like that. I won’t listen.’ Her hands were trembling now, and her legs felt weak beneath her. I’m usually so strong , she thought. Why do I feel like a child? She knew why it was. She was in the wrong. In a fit of pique, Marietta threw her shoe at Lord Trevellyan, almost hitting him in the face, before turning on her heel and flouncing off.

‘Miss Westwood.’

Marietta paused and scowled back at him. She beheld a face of such dark, menacing rage that she shuddered. ‘What?’

‘That’s a nasty temper you have there. You could have taken my eye out.’

‘I’m only sorry I didn’t take your head off.’ On that note she left him and stalked away.

Max watched her disappear down the drive, her ridiculous fat plait bouncing against her back and her shins exposed like a couple of white sticks beneath her wide trouser bottoms and wearing only one shoe. Although he was accustomed to being assaulted, it was usually by someone of his own age and sex, not an angry young woman. Tiresome though Miss Westwood was, she didn’t lack personality, perhaps to be expected of Monty Westwood’s daughter. He was a man fond of breaking regulations, who believed his nefarious dealings in Hong Kong were a well-kept secret—it was hardly surprising that he had fathered such a little firebrand.