The Unmasking of Lady Loveless

Lady Loveless indeed.

How very apt for his estranged wife.

Out in the street it was snowing, tiny flakes on the edge of a cold east wind. Alex turned up the collar of his coat, refused the offer of either a hackney carriage or a sedan chair, and set off down the dark streets toward Cavendish Square. Almost he relished the idea of a run-in with a pickpocket or thief. It would at least relieve some of his anger and frustration.

The wind stung his face. He felt cold inside as well, his heart shriveled, encased in ice. Melicent. He thought of his bride on their wedding day. They had met for the first time a mere week before. Melicent had been a gangly debutante in her first season, with long conker-brown hair and huge brown eyes. She had been impossibly shy and seductively innocent. Even though Alex had been furious to be forced into marriage by his father, the Duke of Beaumont, he had tried not to blame Melicent.

He had been attentive to her throughout the wedding breakfast, trying to draw her out, thwarted by her reserve. Later that night he had consummated his marriage, treating his young wife with gentleness and patience, but the encounter had not been a success, for she had lain as still and cold as a statue and he felt unfulfilled and empty afterward. A few more unsatisfactory couplings had followed, but after a fortnight or so he had not sought her bed or her company any longer. Running the Beaumont estates had kept him fully occupied; they were both wife and mistress to him. He needed nothing more.

Occasionally he would appear at balls to squire Melicent in a dance or two. His mother insisted on it and it silenced the gossips and his own guilty conscience. He and his wife had never spoken of their unsatisfactory marriage. It could not be said that the two of them had drifted apart, he thought now, for they had never come together in the first place.

He was sure that no one, least of all Melicent, had guessed at the fury that had burned him up inside. She would have had no notion of the frustration and rage engendered by the threats the Duke of Beaumont had used to force his younger son into marriage. Alex’s father had wanted to ensure the succession and he had known that his heir, Alex’s elder brother, Henry, with his preference for men, would never marry. The duke had therefore blackmailed Alex, threatening to deny him the right to run the Beaumont estates if he did not wed. Alex had loved Beaumont with a passion from the moment he was born. The lands and the people were his life. He was the only one in the family who cared a rush for them. His father could not have chosen a more effective weapon.

The weight of the book in Alex’s pocket brought his thoughts back to Melicent and reminded him that she might have been an untutored virgin when first they had married, but that she had certainly gained some experience from somewhere—or someone—in the meantime. The anger kindled in him once again. How could Melicent, with her sweet, honest eyes, her generous smile and her patent innocence, have become Lady Loveless, the shameless purveyor of erotic literature? It seemed impossible.

They had been married for two years and it was a month after the Duke of Beaumont’s death when Melicent had told him that she was going to Yorkshire to care for her mother and that she would be staying indefinitely. Her own father had died the previous year, her mother was an invalid and Melicent’s feckless young brother Aloysius was running wild.

They had quarreled for the first time in a married life previously marked by indifference. Alex had forbidden her to go. He could see now that he had been driven by pride; it was one thing for him to treat Melicent with careless unconcern, but quite another matter for her to defy him. And she had defied him.

“You don’t want me!” she had said bitterly, her belongings scattered about her as she hastily packed a portmanteau. “You have never needed me. Mama does.”

He had not heard another word from her in two years.

Now she would be hearing from him. He would go to Yorkshire and confront his errant wife. He paused. No. He would go to Yorkshire and seduce his errant wife according to the style laid down by Lady Loveless. He would expose her for the wanton she must surely be.

Chapter 2

Peacock Oak, Yorkshire—two weeks before Christmas

Lady Melicent Beaumont put down her pen and rested her chin on the palm of her hand. It was impossible to concentrate when she could hear her mother’s querulous tones floating down from the room above:

“I want Melicent! Where is she? And where is the doctor? I told you to send for him hours ago! I feel as sick as a cushion, and if he does not come soon I am like to perish here and now in my bed! No, do not build the fire any higher, you foolish woman! It is far too hot in here and is positively smothering me—”

Melicent sighed. She could not have blamed Mrs. Lubbock very much if she was tempted to take the pillow and squash it firmly over her mother’s face. Mrs. Durham, a hypochondriac whose imaginary illnesses were always so much worse than anyone else’s, had taken to her bed when Melicent’s father had died and she had made everyone dance attendance on her ever since. It had taken Melicent only a few short weeks to realize that her mother was a tyrant. Unfortunately by then it was too late to turn back. After her last, dreadful quarrel with her husband she would not, could not, creep back to London with her tail between her legs. And so she was trapped here in Peacock Oak, in the little grace-and-favor house provided by a distant cousin, the Duchess of Cole; trapped in this drab existence with her ghastly mother and her idle brother and a very long-suffering servant.

“Miss Melicent is working, ma’am,” she heard Mrs. Lubbock say with stolid patience. The housekeeper was a treasure, unflappable and fortunately impervious to insult. “She has sent for the doctor—”

“I will not see him!” Mrs. Durham was becoming shrill. Melicent sighed.

She reread the lines she had just written.

“‘Borwick Hall is built in late seventeenth-century style with decorative plasterwork in the drawing- room.…’”

She sighed again. The style was very dry. Mr. Foster, the antiquarian for whom she worked, disliked flowery language in his architectural guides, and so her prose was dull enough to send even the most devoted country house visitor to sleep.

Mrs. Lubbock’s heavy tread sounded on the stair and then the housekeeper knocked softly on the door of the study.

“Begging your pardon, Miss Melicent, but your mama is refusing to see the physician. I sent for Dr. Abbott, but he is out on a call and his wife said she would send his nephew, who is here to help him over Christmas, it being the time that many people fancy themselves ill, so Mrs. Abbott says…”

Mrs. Durham’s bell rang sharply, simultaneous with the heavy knocker sounding on the front door. A wail came from upstairs:

“Lubbock, where are you?”

Melicent rubbed her eyes. They felt tired and gritty from writing in the afternoon’s gray winter light. She really should have lit a candle, except that candles were expensive and she could not afford the luxury.

The knocker sounded again. Evidently the doctor’s nephew was an impatient man.

Mrs. Durham’s wailings intensified.

“Please go up to Mama, Mrs. Lubbock, and see if you may calm her,” Melicent said wearily. “I shall explain to the new doctor that Mama cannot see him at present. I expect that Dr. Abbott warned him of Mama’s caprices, but I do not doubt that he will still be annoyed, having come all this way for nothing.”

Mrs. Lubbock lumbered back up the stairs and Melicent stood a little stiffly, wiping her ink-stained fingers on her brown worsted skirts. There was no time to check her appearance in the mirror. The hallway was cold. In winter they kept a fire only in the drawing room for visitors and in Mrs. Durham’s bedroom, which was often unhealthily stuffy. The rest of the house felt like a cold larder in comparison. Mrs. Lubbock’s fingers turned red and chilblained in the kitchen. Melicent kept a hot brick at her feet when she was working, but even so her hands sometimes became too cold for her to write.

She opened the front door. A blast of cold air swirled into the hall, bringing with it a powdering of snow. The day was even more inclement than Melicent had imagined. Dark gray clouds lowered over the roofs of Peacock Oak.

She could barely see the gentleman standing in the shadow of the porch, other than to acknowledge that he was very tall and broad shouldered. The spiteful wind clipped her ankles and set her shivering, and she stood aside quickly to allow him entrance.

“Please come in, sir,” she said. “You must be Dr. Abbott’s nephew. Thank you for coming so promptly, although I fear you had a wasted journey. Mama will not see visitors today.” She could not quite keep the exasperation from her tone, no matter how she tried. “Indeed, it is very bad of her to put everyone to so much trouble, particularly when she knows we cannot afford to pay—” He stepped into the light and she turned to look at him properly for the first time. For one long, agonizing moment her mind refused to accept the evidence of her eyes.

“But you are not the doctor!” she said foolishly. “You are…” Her voice dwindled to nothing.

The gentleman raised one dark brow in mockery, then bowed elegantly.

“Your husband,” he said. “Indeed I am.”

Melicent stared at him in wordless recognition. “Alex…”

Shock made her stomach turn over. It seemed impossible. She could not even begin to frame the questions that jostled in her mind.

“Why are you here?” she said. It seemed the best place to start.

Alex moved farther into the lamplit hall, and she could see what the shadows had previously hidden—the thick brown hair, the thoughtful dark eyes, the clean, hard lines of his face. He did not look a day older than when she had seen him last. He still showed the expensive tailoring, the air of unconscious authority and the town bronze that came from years of privilege. She had always felt like a country mouse beside his casual elegance. A hot wave of mortification swept over her as she looked down at her drab gown with its pulled threads.

“I came to find you.” His voice was deep and it struck a chord inside her that made her shiver a little. “I thought that we had been apart too long.” His gaze appraised her thoughtfully. “You look beautiful, Melicent.”

It took her breath away even as her mind protested that it could not be true. Heat swept through her as she stood beneath his disturbingly intimate and lazy gaze, heat that had nothing to do with the fire burning in the drawing room. He looked too masculine, too virile to be in the dull, dark atmosphere of the cottage. Melicent pressed her hands together nervously, and in doing so caught sight of her stained and frayed apron. A feeling of embarrassment replaced the sensation of sensual awareness. Whatever he said, she knew that she looked worn and old. Worse, she had inadvertently spilled to him various details such as her mother’s hypochondria, her own exasperation and their straitened financial circumstances. And that was before he was barely in the door.

“You should have told us that you were coming.” She resisted the urge to press her palms to her hot cheeks. “I hope you have not had too difficult a journey? The roads can be treacherous this time of year.” She looked about them at the painfully bleak and unwelcoming hallway. She had not even had the time to decorate it with wintergreen to celebrate Christmas. Not that she had felt like celebrating anything this year.