Midnight's Wild Passion, page 16
Pretending he didn’t recognize the puppy, Ranelaw stared down into his ale. Unfortunately his distinctive coloring meant nobody could mistake his identity.
“Gresham? It is you, isn’t it? By Jove, I don’t believe my eyes.”
With a sinking sensation in his gut, Ranelaw found Benton hovering at his elbow, clutching a brandy and eager as a hound welcoming its master home.
“It’s Ranelaw now,” he said coldly. At school, he’d been known as the Earl of Gresham, one of his father’s junior titles. Calling him Gresham proved how out of touch Benton was.
Benton frowned. “The pater passed on, did he? My condolences.”
“Eight years ago,” Ranelaw said with a lack of emotion he didn’t have to feign.
“I’ve been in Italy.” Without invitation, Benton sat opposite Ranelaw. “Only back a week ago.”
He’d clearly left his manners in Tuscany or wherever he’d been skulking. Ranelaw leaned back, took a mouthful of ale, and observed the fellow.
He seemed . . . less.
He was still too pretty for a man, with his ruffled black locks and Roman profile. But there was a soft edge to his features as if over the years, he’d enjoyed too much food and wine and easy Italian living. The flashing dark eyes, celebrated by society papers and not a few poetesses, were dull and sunken.
Ranelaw wondered briefly if the man fell victim to opium or drink. It must be a good decade since he’d encountered the milksop, but Benton seemed to have aged at least twenty years.
“Going home, are you?” Ranelaw frowned. “Your people are in Devon, aren’t they?”
“Yes. I’m on my way south now.” With an unreadable expression, Benton brooded into his brandy. Fleetingly he looked like the poetical swain who had conquered society ten years ago. “I had . . . business in Northumberland.”
A difficult silence fell. What the devil was the matter with the blockhead? He acted as if his dog had just died.
“Do you want another drink?” Ranelaw asked reluctantly as the maid slid a full plate in front of him.
Benton continued to contemplate his empty glass. “Bring the bottle.”
The girl sent Benton the same flirtatious glance she’d cast Ranelaw. But Benton didn’t even look up as he spoke. She flounced off and returned to slam a full bottle of brandy on the table. Benton refilled his glass with a shaking hand. In his hurry, he slopped some on the table.
Feeling distinctly uncomfortable, Ranelaw began to eat. The sooner he got out of here, the better. Benton showed no sign of moving on and was proving even worse company than anticipated. The fellow emptied his glass and filled it again, still with that prodigal clumsiness.
“You’re drunk, man,” Ranelaw said softly.
Benton shook his head and to Ranelaw’s horror, a tear oozed down his cheek. “Not yet. But I will be.” Before Ranelaw could think of anything to say, Benton fixed a bleary gaze on him. “Do you believe in the one?”
Ranelaw emptied his tankard and wondered how the hell to get rid of Benton. “The one what? God? King? Pope? The fucking Archbishop of Canterbury?”
Benton didn’t react to the angry sarcasm. “The one woman. The girl who owns your heart forever. True love. Soul mates. You know, the one.”
“No,” Ranelaw said shortly.
He was trapped in hell. Was he hungry enough to make staying worthwhile?
“I do, damn it all.” Benton drained his glass in a single swallow and filled it again with more finesse.
“I take it congratulations are due.” Although if the bugger contemplated marriage, he didn’t seem particularly jolly at the prospect.
“Bloody hell.” Benton’s hand clenched around the glass before he flung it into the grate. The crash made heads turn with unwelcome curiosity.
Ranelaw gritted his teeth. Much more of this and he’d tell the numbskull to sod off. It was the kind of flamboyant gesture that had made Ranelaw despise Johnny Benton when they were younger. For all that, he couldn’t mistake that under the flashy dramatics, the man was genuinely distraught.
“Wouldn’t she have you?” Benton’s seething despair demanded some response, even from a heartless bastard like Ranelaw.
Benton focused burning eyes upon him. “She’s dead.”
Good God.
Ranelaw wasn’t sure what to say. He hadn’t been a chum of Benton’s. But it seemed cruel to abandon the man to his sorrow. “I’m sorry,” Ranelaw said, knowing his words were inadequate.
Benton’s eyes swam with tears, which damned well embarrassed Ranelaw even if they didn’t embarrass him. “She’s the one I’ll never forget. She’s written her name in my heart. Has that ever happened to you?”
“Hell, no,” Ranelaw said with sincere horror, while that inconvenient voice reminded him of his astonishingly profound emotions when he’d thrust inside Antonia. He gave the taunting voice the cut direct.
“Then I feel sorry for you.” Benton filled his glass again but didn’t lift it.
Ranelaw bit back a heated retort. How dare a broken-down wreck like Benton pity the magnificent marquess? He took a vicious swipe at his sirloin and heartily wished he’d ridden on to London.
Benton addressed his glass. “Through ten years of exile, I couldn’t forget her. I did wrong by her and now I’m back to remedy my evil. I prayed she was still free, that she’d marry me, in spite of what I’d done.”
Ranelaw refrained from asking what Benton had done. Frankly he didn’t much care. The story sounded banal in the extreme. All this lachrymose emotion put him off his dinner. With a grunt, he shoved his half-full plate away.
The fribble still maundered on. “I rode up to that gloomy pile in Northumberland and asked for her. Her brother saw me. More than I deserved. Her father would have chased me off with a shotgun. When I stated my honorable intentions, he informed me the lady died shortly after our last meeting.”
He looked up with such misery, Ranelaw, who grew increasingly impatient, couldn’t bring himself to up and leave. Much as he wanted to. He struggled to think of something to stem the man’s torrent of confidences, but weariness and turmoil over his own chaotic love life kept him mute.
Benton went on, his voice raw with desperation. “How can my heart’s darling be dead a decade without me knowing? How can I make peace with her after wronging her so egregiously?”
Ranelaw winced at the word egregiously, even when slurred with drink. Couldn’t the scoundrel talk like a real person? “Buck up, old man.”
Benton’s mouth quivered and he stared down at the table. Ranelaw had no doubt the fellow fought more tears.
“You don’t understand. Only someone who has loved as I have would understand.”
“I’m sure.”
Benton was too upset to notice his audience’s lack of enthusiastic support. “Gresham, if you could have seen her. She was seventeen when we met and there’s never been a woman to match her. Tall, hair a perfect silver blond, eyes the blue of the sky at dawn, skin like a white rose, lips like soft pink petals, a form Venus herself would envy. A low, sweet voice like the music of a cello. Clever and wise and witty. A brave, proud spirit. Rode a horse like an Amazon. And she loved me, she risked everything for me, for all that I deceived her.”
It couldn’t be . . .
Shock rocketed through Ranelaw, settled like a lead weight in his empty belly. This description sounded nauseatingly familiar.
He must be mistaken. He was obsessed with Antonia Smith. Benton couldn’t be talking about her. That was too much of a coincidence.
Anyway, the chit Benton sniveled over was dead. Had been dead ten years.
And yet. . .
Still difficult to credit, but Antonia hadn’t been a virgin when Ranelaw took her. At least one lover lurked in her past. Disbelief warred with the impossible suspicion that Antonia’s previous lover must be this lugubrious weasel.
How many women had eyes that particular shade of blue, which, curse Benton, he could picture immediately? Eyes of that unusual blue and hair like moonlight? Benton couldn’t have described her more accurately if Antonia had stood before them in all her splendor.
No, it was absurd. She preyed on his mind and inspired him to ridiculous fancy.
But he couldn’t leave it alone. If he added up the years Benton mentioned, she was the right age. Fear of a scandal might explain why she bundled herself in those god-awful rags, hid behind tinted spectacles, and played a humble companion when anyone with eyes could tell blue blood ran in her veins.
Then there was her anomalous treatment from the Demarests. Her bedroom was suitable for an aristocratic lady. However fond Cassie was of her companion, this seemed generous provision for someone little above a servant.
Antonia, Benton’s lover? Ranelaw couldn’t believe it. He refused to believe it. She was a thousand times too good for the worm.
Benton sucked in a shuddering breath, then to Ranelaw’s absolute disgust, lowered his head to the table and burst into theatrical sobs. The maid rushed to his side, bleating comfort, but Benton was beyond consolation.
Ranelaw scowled at the rogue’s heaving shoulders while his brain worked busily at what he’d learned. Could Antonia be Benton’s lost love?
Surely not. After all, Benton mentioned a brother and Antonia had no family. There must be other women in England who could carve a rift in a man’s heart so deep that it never knitted. Other women who were tall and blond and had eyes the color of the sky.
Striving to rein in his rioting imagination, he shifted his gaze from the overwrought Benton to the congealing remains of his meal. His gut insisted that Antonia was Benton’s mysterious beloved. His brain insisted she couldn’t be.
The Antonia he knew wouldn’t have a bar of this man’s overweening vanity. She was too shrewd, too suspicious, and she had a jaded view of humanity, or at least the male half.
What if that jaded view resulted from her affair with Benton?
Because Ranelaw couldn’t mistake the source of Benton’s guilt. Ten years ago, Benton had been breathtakingly handsome. Antonia at seventeen would have seen considerably less of the world than she’d seen since. She wouldn’t be the first female to fall for a pretty face with no character behind it.
Had this bastard ruined her?
Ranelaw clenched his hands on the table. The yen for violence was a rusty taste in his mouth. He burned to beat the slug to a bloody pulp.
Steady, man, you don’t even know he’s talking about Antonia. You leap to conclusions faster than a hungry trout leaps after a fly.
Nonetheless his gut assured him he was right. His gut was never wrong.
The mongrel deserved to roast in the lowest circle of hell. What right had he to place his hands on Antonia?
Ranelaw closed his eyes as fury surged, bathing him in stinging acid. Benton had known Antonia. Benton had heard those husky moans she made in the throes of climax. Benton had felt her passage tighten around him.
Ranelaw couldn’t contain his anger when he pictured her in Benton’s arms. Innocent, unprotected, and brought down by this man’s selfish passion.
Benton needed to die slowly and in excruciating pain. And Ranelaw wanted the pleasure of killing the spineless son of a whore.
But as he glowered at the sobbing craven, he couldn’t summon the stomach to challenge him.
Ranelaw needed to know for sure yet he couldn’t bandy Antonia’s name around a common tavern. And who could say the name would be familiar? Long ago he’d decided Smith was an alias.
“Oh, my love, my darling,” Benton was moaning into his folded arms.
Ranelaw closed his ears to more of the same while he tried to calm the chaos of questions bubbling in his head. Antonia as Benton’s paramour? Imagination, surely.
“Sweet, sweet Antonia . . .”
Antonia?
What the blazes? Surely he’d misheard.
Even if he had, it wasn’t as if no other woman was called Antonia, especially in society’s upper echelons. This still wasn’t unassailable proof, even while his gut obstinately insisted that of course Benton was talking about his Antonia.
His Antonia who perhaps had once been Benton’s Antonia, God rot the bastard.
He felt suddenly trapped, suffocated. He needed to get out of here. Before he did something rash like murder this mongrel. Assuming Antonia was Benton’s long-lost and supposedly dead lover was crazy. He couldn’t breathe without thinking of her. She made him mad. Fresh air might clear his head.
Abruptly he rose and scattered a handful of coins across the table. They landed with a rattle, but Benton didn’t look up. He was too sunk in self-pity.
His belly churning with frustrated bloodlust and his mind buzzing with a thousand angry questions, Ranelaw strode into the freezing night and curtly ordered his horse.
Chapter Fifteen
For a fortnight after returning to London, Antonia managed to restrict Cassie to quiet strolls in the park and a few small gatherings at the house. The girl’s strength hadn’t fully returned, but her determination to rejoin the social whirl was so powerful, that scarcely mattered. Antonia tried again and again to convince Cassie to return to Somerset to convalesce, but she became so upset at missing her first season that it seemed less injurious to her health to remain in Town.
Eventually Antonia reluctantly consented to accompany Cassie to the Merriweather ball. But only after extracting the strictest promise that if Cassie felt ill, they left.
Antonia was well aware it wasn’t just Cassie’s well-being that made her desperate to escape London. She’d be a hypocrite of the first rank if she pretended it was.
She’d hoped giving herself to Ranelaw would cool the heat in her blood. Instead it only stirred demons she thought she’d conquered ten years ago. Demons that now tormented her, broke her sleep, made her unusually intolerant of everyone around her.
Tonight she’d see Ranelaw. He had at least one spy in the household so he’d know their plans. She’d considered dismissing the entire staff, but that seemed unfair to the honest servants. Anyway, she had a healthy respect for Ranelaw’s charm, not to mention his ready coin. She might as well stick to people familiar with the domestic routine.
Since their visit to Surrey, neither she nor Cassie had mentioned the disreputable marquess. He’d sent flowers and a note wishing Cassie a quick recovery, but Antonia hadn’t remarked upon his bouquet among the hundreds Cassie received.
When they entered the crowded Merriweather ballroom, Antonia immediately scanned the throng, seeking a tall man with guinea gold hair. She told herself it was for Cassie’s sake. She knew that for a lie.
The pressure around her chest eased when she realized Ranelaw wasn’t present. He was such a striking man, she couldn’t miss him.
Perhaps fate granted her one boon by keeping Lord Ranelaw away for the evening. Wild Antonia burned to see him, but her saner self had had time since that shattering encounter in the summerhouse to recognize the risks she took.
She turned to Cassie with her first genuine smile all night. “It’s quite a crush.”
Cassie looked ethereal and breathtakingly lovely in white silk, like a visitor from celestial realms. Antonia already noticed masculine heads turning in their direction. If she could divert Cassie’s attention from Lord Ranelaw, a number of men here would make her cousin a suitable husband.
“It’s going to be a wonderful ball.” Cassie returned Antonia’s smile.
Briefly Antonia forgot everything but the excitement in the girl’s eyes. How wonderful to be so full of life and hope. She said a silent but fervent prayer that Cassie kept this joyful spirit, that nobody crushed her girlish dreams the way Antonia’s had been crushed.
“Are you all right, Toni?”
Antonia realized she blinked back tears. Dear God, she needed to get a grip on her emotions or she’d make an utter spectacle of herself. She’d been on edge ever since leaving Surrey.
“Of course I am.” She heard the betraying huskiness. If she wasn’t careful, Cassie would suspect something momentous had happened at Pelham Place. “I’m just thinking how pretty you look.”
Cassie thanked her very sweetly just before her coterie surrounded her. Most of her friends had called at the house during the fortnight—although thankfully not the Marquess of Ranelaw, which she knew irked Cassie.
Antonia lagged behind as her cousin glided through the crowd like a beautiful white swan. She’d never had a season, she’d broken all the rules before she entered the marriage mart. She wouldn’t be human if occasionally she didn’t envy these glowing, laughing young people.
You made your bed, my girl. Now you have to sleep on it.
She raised her chin, told herself to stop being a henwit, and made her sedate way to where she belonged, the chairs grouped in the corner. For one brief starlit moment, she’d become a woman who pursued what she wanted. That moment had passed.
The other duennas raised their heads and greeted her more warmly than she’d expected, although she soon realized they hankered after gossip about the house party. A chaperone’s life was stultifying. Scandal was the only spice permitted these women.
She closed her eyes and let her mind drift with the lilting music. In her imagination, a man’s arms enfolded her as they whirled around the room. Surely nobody could chide her if her fantasy man possessed Ranelaw’s features.
When she opened her eyes, it was inevitable she saw Lord Ranelaw bowing over his hostess’s hand and making her blush and giggle like a debutante. Antonia’s heart crashed against her ribs and her breath jammed in her throat.
For one forbidden moment, Antonia drank in his sheer physical magnificence. The powerful body, the gleaming gold hair, the perfect profile as precise as if carved from marble. If she had to fall, at least she’d fallen to a man who made the stars stand still with breathless admiration. His was a harder, more ruthless beauty than Johnny’s, and all the more compelling for that.
