The Courtship - Catherine Coulter [74]
He put his hands on her, drawing her ever so slowly against him. He kissed her temple. “It will be all right, Helen. I’ll tell you about all of them. Well, no. I didn’t know that James Arlington knew anything about this.”
They discovered an hour later that Lord James Arlington, fourth son of the Duke of Hailsham, was dead, shot, it was rumored, in a duel with Lord Crowley because Arlington had been caught cheating. Dueling was outlawed in England, but since no one would speak openly about it, it remained buried. Evidently the duke, Lord James’s father, had shrugged when told the news of his son’s demise and said simply, “He always did cheat. His mother taught him. He obviously cheated the wrong man.” And it was over. Had Crowley killed him in a duel?
Lord Beecham said, “It’s time for us to go home, Helen.”
They rode horseback for the hour and a half. It was a lovely afternoon, summer flowers coming into bloom, the trees spreading their green canopies over the narrow country roads. “I forgot to tell you,” Lord Beecham said, “we have two more partners.”
“Douglas and Alexandra?”
He nodded, then leaned over and patted his horse’s neck. When he straightened, he kept his eyes firmly fastened on the road between his horse’s ears. “Before you arrived, I had other plans for tonight,” he said at last.
She didn’t even seem interested. “Hmmm.”
“I was going to bed an opera girl and take her three times in under fifteen minutes.”
“Hmmm.”
He eyed her now with growing frustration. “You were new to me, that is all.”
No more humming, just bored silence.
“If you had stayed the night with Douglas and Alexandra, I would probably have climbed up to your window and taken you three more times. What do you think of that, damn you?”
“I am sorry, Spenser. I was distracted by the lovely honeysuckle. Did you say something?”
“Helen, do you want me to thrash you?”
“I would do you in if you tried it. You know that. What is wrong with you? We are in the midst of a dreadful mess. We don’t know anything more about King Edward’s lamp than we did two weeks ago when you insisted upon leaving me and coming back to London. I might add that London is only an hour and a half’s ride from Court Hammering, yet you never even once came for an afternoon or an evening, even one simple meal.”
Now was the time. He had to do it, else he would be lost. He ignored her complaint and said, “Listen to me, for I mean this. I have decided to be only your partner, nothing more. Ever.”
She didn’t acknowledge that he had spoken. She didn’t even acknowledge that she had heard him. She simply clapped her heels in Eleanor’s sleek sides. Eleanor streaked off down the road. Helen said nothing more to him the rest of the ride.
It rained the final half hour.
19
NETTLE FOLLOWED IN A carriage behind his master. Lord Beecham turned around to see him leaning out the carriage window, his face a study in ecstasy even though a sullen rain was dripping over him. “His heart is soaring,” he said to Helen, who wasn’t speaking to him and in fact was a good twenty yards ahead of him on the road. “Soon he will see his goddess, Teeny.”
To his valet’s immense distress, Lord Beecham elected to stay at the King Edward’s Lamp. He did not want to be in Helen’s home, with her coming downstairs in a nightgown and him all weak in his resolution upon seeing her, with the more than likely result that he would lose his head. No, the inn was safer. She never took her clothes off at the inn. She would never look at him provocatively at the inn.
Then he thought of the gazebo and that rotted old cottage. Her wet, sodden clothes—no provocation there, and it hadn’t mattered. Ah, but at the gazebo, he had known and she had known as well exactly what would happen. And of course it had, with no particular reflection at all.
He hoped staying at her inn would prove a good idea, one that would keep him on the path of celibacy.
He would be her partner. Not her lover. He would. He was determined. He would not hurl himself from the path of righteousness again.
Helen