‘You’ll keep a still tongue in your head about my future wife if you want me to go through with this marriage.’ Magnus sounded as austere as a monk and halted his father’s trail of obscenities in their tracks.
Isabella stifled a hum of sympathy as she felt the weight of real life settling back on her shoulders. It felt even more of a burden now than when she had first decided to share Magnus’s responsibilities. They weren’t in love, but she never wanted to be in love anyway. Love was a trap and an illusion, nothing like the fairy-tale emotion three-decker romances portrayed. Isabella had agreed to Magnus’s proposal for one reason—to get him and his sisters out from under the Earl’s thumb—to give her best male friend outside her family a chance to be free of the monster she had heard bully and even beat his children. She had had no idea until a visit to the Haile ladies showed her the insults and foul language of the real man under the Earl of Carrowe’s urbane outer shell. The Countess had hidden Isabella’s presence and even took her out down the backstairs so the Earl wouldn’t know she had been there. From that moment on she was filled with a passionate desire to help the Earl’s daughters and Magnus had given her a chance to do it, so she took it and him and told herself all would be well because she didn’t want to be in love with her husband anyway.
Except it felt as if they had missed something vital out. Isabella had been restless and hot and uncomfortable in her own skin in the ballroom and bolted outside to get away from what she’d done with her eyes wide open. And look where that had got her; she’d taken light in the arms of a stranger and now had to live with the memory of it on her conscience while she pretended to be Magnus’s glowingly happy bride-to-be.
‘Renege on our deal and I’ll tell the world what you did last year and who you did it with,’ the Earl threatened Magnus as if he couldn’t bear to be bested by another son after his heir married a rich woman and got control of his own purse strings. The atmosphere in the ballroom had felt oppressive with Viscount Haile and his wife holding court while family tensions simmered just below the surface. Or maybe she was making excuses for her own bad behaviour.
But what did Magnus do last summer? A couple of times since she arrived here Isabella had sensed something was deeply wrong with Magnus. It felt as if she knew only half of what was going on. Their engagement was supposed to be a surprise that would make this annual party even happier, but it didn’t feel very joyous to Isabella. Her money and family power were pitted against the Earl’s extravagant self-indulgence and his cruel grip on his family. He’d traded control of his unwed daughters for part of her fortune; Magnus would save his sisters and Isabella could start the family she longed for. But then she arrived here and the reality of marrying the man who’d been her friend since she made her debut finally hit home. To make those babies they would be intimate together and it felt like a giant factor she left out of her calculations about marrying for sense and companionship. Much as she liked Magnus she wasn’t sure she wanted to couple with him. She was a country girl at heart and three and twenty; she knew enough about the mechanics of marriage to shiver at the very idea of the one she’d committed herself to while she stood so close to a man who had nearly taught her a lot more than she needed to know about how a man and a woman were together when they wanted each other so urgently they couldn’t even wait for a bed.
‘You need money too much to risk Isabella jilting me,’ Magnus was arguing now and she felt the man at her side wince.
Not for her sake, she sensed, or for the Earl’s. So he must be on Magnus’s side. She could feel fury arcing across the few bare inches of late summer air between them. The shame of her own betrayal was bad enough—the wrong she’d done Magnus with this stranger. So what about him? He was furious with her, but fairness whispered he hadn’t deserved to kiss another man’s affianced bride as if she was free as air, then find out how wrong he was before their lips were cool from kissing. Even more guilt twisted in her belly and finally saw off the wanton Isabella who still longed for more from a lover and never mind who he was and who he wasn’t.
‘No, damn you, I need all that gelt to keep the duns at bay,’ the Earl was saying now. ‘You find the wench so we can announce the engagement before all the local clodhoppers go home.’
‘I’ll see if Isabella is mending a flounce or visiting the ladies’ withdrawing room, because she’s clearly not out here. You shouldn’t judge her by your low standards. Not everyone has your genius for sin.’
‘Speaking of sinners, where’s your mother?’
‘Maybe she’s with her prospective daughter-in-law, avoiding you.’
The string of obscenities that greeted that provocation faded as father and son turned to go back inside. Isabella wasted a few moments wondering how quickly the Earl could put on the mask of genial host after his unpleasant tirade. No doubt it would be plausible as ever by the time he was back in the crowded ballroom that she now dreaded so deeply she would almost prefer to stay out here with a furious male of a very different kind than re-enter it and face the future.
‘I presume you know your fiancé’s mother, Miss Alstone?’ he asked coldly.
She shivered despite the sticky heat that hit her again now the magic of the moonlit night had flown. ‘How do you know my...?’ she began, then her voice trailed off when he turned to face her.
‘Who else but you would skulk on the terrace at Haile Carr, trying to avoid her fiancé in the arms of a stranger? Who else did I come here to see and maybe even steel myself to meet?’
‘I don’t know, but why are you here?’
He grasped her arms as if she was the last person he really wanted to touch and walked her towards the pool of golden light on the still-warm stones. Her gaze ran over his hawkish features and heat and excitement flashed through her once again, but there was such fury in his uncannily light blue eyes it suffocated.
‘Can you see it now?’ he demanded roughly, shaking her a little when she stayed silent. ‘The mark of Cain you have put on me tonight,’ he bit out and the rage and guilt beneath his bitter words felt formidable.
For another cowardly moment she let her gaze linger on features that seemed uniquely his. Eyes clear and pale and steely blue, yet so alive and passionate even the fury in them seemed better than the cold aloofness he was striving for. Eyebrows and wild curls so dark above his icy gaze that looked so hard now. His features were so strongly marked and masculine she couldn’t sort them from a softer, more blurred version that nagged at her memory.
‘The Countess, you’re Lady Carrowe’s...’ Yet again she let her voice tail off as if she was an incoherent and bedazzled debutante. Even the thought of being so silly and unguarded made her stiffen her spine and meet his eyes as if it didn’t cost such an effort. She felt sweat bead her brow. ‘Youngest son,’ she ended, because she knew who he was and still refused to name-call over one thing that certainly wasn’t his fault.
‘Say it, Miss Alstone,’ he ordered with weary impatience. ‘I’m my mother’s publicly denounced shame since the day I had the bad taste to be born alive. I’m the cuckoo in the Earl of Carrowe’s nest; Lady Carrowe’s disgrace; destroyer of innocent ladies’ reputations and all the names they call me if I’m stupid enough to enter a room full of your kind. And what about you, Miss Alstone? You’re Magnus Haile’s affianced wife and far more of a disgrace than my mother ever was in private. She married a monster and you’re about to wed his very opposite; you have no excuse for luring in a lover before you even marry my big brother.’
‘That’s between us and none of your business,’ she said coolly.
‘Tell him about this and I’ll tell the whole world what you
