The Surrender of Miss Fairbourne Page 7

  “I did not come here to discuss the disposition of Fairbourne’s, Lord Southwaite. That subject is well settled between us. Any disposition is still out of the question.”

  He looked away but she saw exasperation flicker in his eyes. His attention returned to her. A tight smile formed on a face that had turned less amiable. “Then how can I help you, Miss Fairbourne? What other part of our conversation was incomplete? Ah, yes—I did not finish with my romantic proposition by discussing the usual details. Have you come here for that?”

  She could not believe he made this reference to the Outrageous Misconception. He had just apologized a second time, hadn’t he? They should be pretending it had never happened.

  Instead he all but invited her once more to be his mistress, only without any misunderstanding as an excuse.

  He watched her with dark humor. He was not flirting. Surely not. However, he observed her most specifically, as if he were truly interested in her reaction. She could not dispel the notion that he waited to see his reference fluster her, as if that would be some victory for him.

  She managed not to reveal her surprise. However, she reacted to his gaze and insinuation, and not with the indignation that was warranted. Instead of disgust or anger, a very different emotion affected her. A thrilling sensation fluttered up to her throat, then spiraled down through her body, stirring her. Invisible sparkles danced on her skin and a foolish giggle bubbled in her brain. It was much like the taste of forbidden pleasure last night, only much less languid.

  It dismayed her that her own femininity conspired against her by making her susceptible to this man, in that way, at this time. How incredibly unfair.

  She reminded herself that Southwaite wanted to destroy Fairbourne’s. She sought refuge in her anger, but was incapable of summoning its full force again, or of obliterating the new, discomforting awareness she had of Southwaite’s masculinity, which saturated the air between them and made her nervous.

  “I spoke with Mr. Weatherby today.” She made her voice as crisp and unwavering as she could. “I know that you visited him after you left my house yesterday, and told him to stop referring applicants to me.”

  He calmly drank some coffee, then assumed a very cool expression. “Yes, I did. I had just proven how that advertisement could lead to misconceptions about the situation it described. I could not allow Mr. Weatherby to send prospects to your house all week, and risk the world knowing that the daughter of Maurice Fairbourne had written such a thing.”

  “You sought to preserve my reputation?”

  “As best I could under the unfortunate circumstances, yes.”

  “Do you not find that in the least ironic, Lord Southwaite?”

  He thought a moment, then shook his head. “I see no irony. Even if we had come to an arrangement yesterday, I would have used all of my power to avoid scandal for you.”

  He was speaking of it again!

  “You will be relieved to know that I also paid off the men who were there when I arrived, and made them promise not to speak of where Mr. Weatherby sent them,” he continued. “We will have to hope those you interviewed prior to my arrival are discreet. If they are not, I can only pray that you did not have any of them remove their coats.”

  He was scolding her. Obliquely, but it was a scold all the same. Worse, he did so as if he had the right to.

  “Lord Southwaite, I came here to explain that Fairbourne’s does not need or welcome your interference, only to learn just how much more you interfered than I knew. It was not your place to send those men away at all. Now I discover that you paid them for silence, as if I had committed a crime that needed to be obscured.”

  “You were not guilty of a crime, Miss Fairbourne. Only weak judgment.”

  “Forgive me for speaking plainly, but—”

  “If I do not forgive you, will I be spared? No? I did not think so.” He sighed with forbearance. “Pray, continue.”

  It was not easy to do so after he said that. Still, she managed to speak the message she had come here to give him. “Your meddling is not wanted. Your help is not needed. You were an invisible investor for years and should remain so.”

  “Miss Fairbourne, with your father’s passing, the situation is much changed. We are two halves of a financial whole, and your half is now troublesome to mine. I will interfere as I see necessary and as I see fit.”

  He spoke like the lord he was, without the slightest note of apology or hesitation. Her mind formed scathing criticisms of his arrogant manner. Another part of her, the stupid feminine part giving her unexpected trouble today, was awed by his masterful presence and supreme confidence.

  A slow smile appeared on his stunningly handsome face. It was a dazzling one that seemed calculated to appease the furious Emma and entrance the stupid one, as if he knew both existed and were at odds right now. To her shock that smile captivated her in ways she could not control. Almost immediately the remnants of her anger started slipping out of her grasp. She found it hard to look away.

  “I do not require any particular behavior from you, Miss Fairbourne. I am not that much of a hypocrite,” he explained, cajoling her to see the sense of it. “I merely require discretion such as I practice myself. Should the world learn about this partnership, our reputations will begin to leach onto each other. I would prefer not to get the worst of it, should that happen.” That smile again. “I am sure you understand that.”

  “Your concerns are misplaced. I am too common and unknown to affect your reputation, no matter what I do. I am too insignificant to engender either gossip or scandal, nor am I accustomed to the kind of behavior that might incite either. Why, I even turned down an earl who offered to make me his mistress in a thoroughly discreet arrangement.”

  He cupped his chin with his hand and regarded her. “That earl’s misunderstanding is cause enough for caution, don’t you think? He might have made assumptions due to your friendship with Lady Cassandra, for example. More discretion would be wise there too, I think.”

  She was so entranced by how well he looked in that chair, and how handsome he could be when he was not stormy, and by how delicious her physical responses were, that she almost did not hear him. When she did she made a display of frowning, but it was a feint, a mere attempt to display the indignation that she should be experiencing instead of this foolish, pleasant stimulation that prickled in her.

  “I will not insult my dearest friend to satisfy your oddly selective notions of propriety. As for the rest, if you do not interfere with Fairbourne’s, no one will be the wiser about your investment, thus removing the reason you claim a need to interfere to begin with. I am sure you understand that.”

  She stood, to make good an escape before she did something that revealed how a hidden part of her had lost all claim to sense or strength. “Good day to you, Lord Southwaite. Thank you for receiving me so I could make my position clear.”

  “Are you finally ready to ride?”

  The question, spoken with sharp impatience, pulled Darius out of his contemplation of Miss Fairbourne as soon as he opened the library door.

  His friend Gavin Norwood, Viscount Kendale, did not wait for an answer. Already he was gathering his limbs and rising to leave.

  “Five minutes, you said,” Kendale muttered, raking his dark hair with his fingers while he reached for his gloves with his other hand. “I could be halfway to the coast by now.”

  “My caller’s mission was not as friendly as I had hoped,” Darius said. “It required some time to come to an understanding with the lady.”

  Not that they had come to one, he admitted to himself. He had put off this journey with Kendale and chosen to see Miss Fairbourne only because he assumed she had come to capitulate. It turned out that instead she had come to upbraid him.

  No one did that. Women surely did not dare such a thing and remain unscathed, not even lovers who tried it while employing pouts or, more annoyingly, caresses.

  At least he had not been at the disadvantage this t
ime, even if she did have her say. He had also learned something about Emma Fairbourne. A smile could fluster her faster than a scowl, and a command could end an argument more surely than a threat.

  He would not have minded exploring just where more smiles and commands could have led. Her extreme boldness today hardly encouraged the indifference he had sworn regarding her. In response he had experienced the urge to demand she bend to his will. Various ways of effecting that, most of them involving erotic subjugation on her part, had played through his mind vividly while they sat together. The remnants of those images still distracted him. There had been signs in her—a flush here and a stammer there, and the way her intense gaze never left his—that suggested her surrender was not out of the question.

  “She?” Kendale asked, his stride to the door arrested by the pronoun when it finally penetrated his temper’s storm. “You put off our duty because of a woman? You delayed a matter of dire importance to the realm, to dally with one of your lovers?” He cursed in annoyance. “You said that Tarrington wanted to meet in the morning.”

  “And we will meet in the morning. I stole no more than thirty minutes, and that we can spare. The woman is not a lover either, so please start no rumors.”

  “I don’t know her name. How can I start a rumor? As for thirty minutes, I have seen men die because of a delay much shorter.”

  Darius opened the door to encourage Kendale to stride again, right out to the horses. Tomorrow morning’s plans were important, but not nearly as significant as Kendale hoped. It was tomorrow night’s meeting that would tell whether long-laid strategies had borne enough fruit to be successful.

  Darius understood Kendale’s preference for action over negotiation—Kendale had been in the army, after all—but it was the latter that might make their efforts work in the long run.

  “Ours is merely an independent surveillance regarding movements on the coast, Kendale. It is not a military maneuver. No one will die even if we are two days late, let alone half an hour.”

  Kendale walked by, brow furrowed and steely gaze straight ahead. “A lot you know about maneuvers, military or otherwise, or about the small mistakes that cause some men to die in them.”

  Chapter 7

  Having fed Southwaite the lie about Obediah running things at Fairbourne’s, Emma was reduced to complicated machinations in order to perform her duties at the auction house. She dared not just walk in the door, lest the earl be there to investigate his investment.

  For all of her bravado, she knew that she had failed to obtain Southwaite’s agreement not to interfere at their last meeting. Rather, the opposite might have occurred. She feared that she had dared him to do something he might not have done otherwise.

  Worse, she suspected he knew about the sparkles and flutters. The more she remembered that slow smile and cajoling voice, the more she pictured the way he had looked at her, the stronger that suspicion became.

  In order to make any progress with the catalogue, she devised a system of communication with Obediah. Doing so forced her to confide the news of the earl’s partnership to him. Obediah took it very well, but then, the arrangement had not depleted his family business by half, had it?

  For the next three mornings she sent a note to Fairbourne’s with a footman, asking if Lord Southwaite had come by. If Obediah responded in the negative, as he did each day, she had the carriage bring her over. Before entering, however, she checked the front window. Obediah had agreed to leave the Angelica Kauffman in the window if Southwaite still was not there.

  She made good progress with cataloguing the silver while the workers cleaned the property and began hanging the paintings that she had held back. Patrons who walked by would see them, and could watch the next auction taking shape. Hopefully it would whet their appetites. In the least, the activity announced that Fairbourne’s was not closing, as everyone assumed.

  She worried about enhancing the offerings, and even turned to considering her family’s own collections, to see what might be sacrificed if necessary. The best art was not in London, unfortunately. Papa had moved the most prized paintings to his cottage on the coast, where he would retreat for privacy and renewal. If she were reduced to selling any of them, she would have to transport them to London, which would involve a journey she would rather not make.

  When she returned to her house on the third afternoon, Maitland immediately asked for a private word. Tall, thick, and black-haired, Maitland’s size inspired a sense of safety in this house now that she lived here as a lone woman. Even his craggy face would discourage ne’er-do-wells.

  “A person came, and is waiting for you,” he said. “There is no card.”

  “Is there a name?”

  “No name either, Miss Fairbourne.”

  “If there is no card, and no name, why did you allow this person to wait?”

  “I thought I should, Miss Fairbourne. She said she had brought some items to consign at your auction.”

  “If that is the reason for her visit, you did not err in your judgment. Sometimes people, and especially women, do not want to have it known they sell their property thus, and seek private conversations.” It was customary to keep such consignors’ identities a secret, and note in the auction catalogue only that the property was that of an esteemed gentleman or a discreet patron. “Where is she?”

  “In the garden, Miss Fairbourne. She preferred to stay out there, she said.”

  Emma walked to the morning room and to the French doors that gave out to the back terrace. Despite their distorting glass panes, she could make out her visitor sitting on a stone bench near the terrace’s low wall.

  The woman wore a loose, full-sleeved, soft gray dress, bound under her breasts with a broad red sash. A shawl of gray and red pattern hung from her shoulders. Her long auburn hair fell free in the current style, and a gray and red turban had been tied in a full, carefree wrap around her crown.

  Emma envied the style with which this stranger wore that headdress. She herself had tried many times to make such a turban appear exotic and artistic on her own head. She had managed only to appear like someone done up for the stage in a silly costume.

  She opened the door, and the image of her guest clarified. The face under that turban turned to her, and she saw its delicate beauty and captivating deep brown eyes.

  Emma greeted the young woman as best she could, considering she did not have a name. “I am told you have brought some items for consignment. Why don’t you remove them from your reticule so I can see what they are and assess what they might bring.”

  “They are not in my reticule.” The woman spoke slowly and carefully, as if considering every word. Emma heard the lingering accent that indicated her lovely guest was French, but probably not a recent arrival. She was an émigré, no doubt, a refugee from the revolution who had today come to sell valuables carried out when she fled.

  “They are there.” The woman pointed a thin, elegant finger toward the back of the garden. She wore no gloves, and Emma saw dark smudges on her hand that marred its cleanliness.

  Her visitor began walking in the direction she had pointed.

  Emma followed, perplexed, noticing again the willowy grace of this woman, but also seeing other things now. The dress, while presentable, displayed mending if one looked closely at its hem. The shawl had a smudge too, mostly obscured by its pattern. The woman wore old-fashioned mules, not slippers such as were common now.

  They walked all the way to the back garden gate. Once they were in the little lane behind the property, the woman gestured lazily to a wagon next to the carriage house, her stained hand flowing up and down.

  Emma loosened the tarp that covered the wagon’s contents. She looked in, then slapped the tarp down again.

  The old books and even the silver in the wagon were the sorts of things an émigré might well bring across the channel. However, this potential consignment did not consist only of household goods. Most of it was wine, and she had seen at once that the cases bore no custo
ms stamps.

  “Take it away. We do not accept smuggled goods at Fairbourne’s.”

  “I cannot take it away. There is no donkey.” The smudged finger floated toward the empty harness. “He took it with him.”

  “Who took it?”

  “The man who paid me to come here with him. Four shillings, he gave me, to go to the house and say the wagon was here. He said you would understand about this wagon, and its importance to your winning the prize. But perhaps not?” She shrugged. The confusion of the situation bore no interest to her. She set her shawl higher on her shoulders and began walking down the lane.

  “Stop. Wait,” Emma said. “I do not understand its importance. I do not even know what the prize is. What was this man’s name? Where is he?”

  “I cannot help you more. I only rode in the wagon, and I told you it is here as I said I would. It was a strange request, but four shillings is good pay for a few hours. Now I must go.”

  “But I want to talk to this man.”

  “I do not know him. I am sorry.”

  “Was he English, or French?”

  “English.” She turned to leave again.

  “Please, stop. If you see this man again, tell him that I need to speak with him. Will you do that for me?”

  The woman considered it. “If I see him, I will tell him.”

  Emma watched the gray dress grow smaller as her guest walked away. Then she returned to that wagon and lifted the edge of the tarp again. She examined the silver and the books and the wine. Especially the wine. She counted fifteen cases. She felt inside a large trunk. Her fingers slid over satin and lace.

  This wine must have been smuggled into England. Probably the cloth had been too. That was why it had been brought here, to the house, in a clandestine manner. It appeared that someone assumed that Fairbourne’s would be willing to accept the contents of this wagon.

  She did not want to imagine why such an assumption would be made. The disheartening conclusions pressed on her anyway, evoking a scathing disappointment that tainted memories she held in her heart.