your brother’s ambition?” Lucius knew the answer well enough. He asked merely to enhance the value of his offer in Miss Lacewood’s eyes.
“His lordship is only a relation by marriage.” Clearly Miss Lacewood was parroting back the answer her entreaties to her uncle had received. “He feels He has fulfilled his obligations by taking my brother and me into his household after our parents died. He wishes Miles to find a post in the city.”
Lucius nodded. He’d expected no better from the odious Lord Bulwick. “I would purchase a commission for your brother and see that he is suitably outfitted for it.”
“And what would you expect from me in return?” Angela Lacewood squared her shoulders.
Lucius found himself wishing he could see those shoulders bare and admire their contours, for he had no doubt they would equal her graceful neck in beauty.
How might Miss Lacewood react if he approached her with slow, deliberate steps, then raised his hands to push down the brief sleeves of her gown?
Swoon dead away perhaps? Run screaming? It was a dangerous weakness for him to entertain such fancies.
Dangerous? Perhaps. But he had once courted Lady Danger and been seduced by her lethal charms.
“I would ask only one favor of you, my dear.” Emerging from behind his fortress of furniture, the baron approached Miss Lacewood with slow, deliberate steps. “A trifle, really.”
Some subtle cant of her posture and a rapid sideways glance told Lucius the young lady wanted to retreat from his steady advance. Yet, she managed to hold her ground. “One man’s trifle is another man’s treasure.”
“So it is.” Lucius halted his advance.
There was not much distance between them now. If he held out his hand and she held out hers, they might touch.
“Your words are most apt in this case,” he added. “What I require from you will cost only a little time and less effort on your part. But it will bring a treasure’s worth of pleasure to someone else.”
“To you?”
“No.” At one time it might have, but those days were past.
“To whom then?”
“Perhaps you will guess when I tell you what I want.”
“I shall be glad to hear…at last.”
Balancing on the balls of his feet, Lucius sank slowly to his knees. It was a ridiculous and unnecessary bit of ritual, but he felt compelled to it all the same. “Miss Lacewood, I am asking you to become my fiancée.”
The lady did not move, speak or even blink. She stood there like a golden statue, staring down at him.
Her eyes were alive, though. Alive with wariness and aversion and other things the baron could not so easily identify. It took every crumb of his considerable will to hold her gaze in his, issuing her a mute challenge to accept his offer.
At last she drew a deep breath and wet her bountiful lips with a dart of her tongue that made Lucius ache with sensations he struggled to ignore.
“I am sensible of the honor you do me by proposing, my lord.” She shook her head. “But I cannot marry you.”
Lucius heard himself laugh for the second time in half an hour. It must be some sort of record. For a moment all the cares that weighed on him eased.
“I understand, Miss Lacewood.” As slowly as he had sunk to the floor, the baron rose again until he looked down into her eyes. “But, you see, that is not what I am asking.”
Chapter Two
Angela could not decide whether she was sorry or relieved that she’d left her gloves back on the footstool with her bonnet. If she’d been holding them in her hand when Lord Daventry had baited her with yet another riddle, the urge to strike him with them might have been too fierce a temptation for her to resist.
He was playing blindman’s bluff with her! Keeping her in the dark about his intentions and his feelings. Swooping in close to tease her with a tiny kernel of information calculated to set her lurching after him. Then dancing out of her reach once again, while she groped a fistful of air.
“Did you wake up this morning, sir, and say to yourself, ‘This looks like a marvelous day to go vex my neighbor!’?”
His lordship laughed again, clearly oblivious to his increasing danger of being throttled. “If that notion had entered my mind, I can assure you, Miss Lacewood, you’d be at the very bottom of my list of potential victims. Forgive me for not being more plainspoken. My years spent in polite society did little to foster that commendable ability.”
He sounded genuinely contrite in a wry sort of way. His green eyes, previously hard, cool and impenetrable as jade, had softened until they beckoned her like the garden on a dewy summer morning at sunrise.
Against her will, Angela felt herself relent. “I should have known better than to presume you were proposing marriage to someone like me, my lord.”
“On the contrary.” A harsh note crept into his hypnotic voice. “Someone like me would not presume to propose marriage to you, Miss Lacewood.”
“But you said…?”
“I asked you to be my fiancée, not my wife. And before you accuse me of vexing you intentionally again, I beg to point out that one need not follow the other as a matter of course.”
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it did, though, unless a couple wished to bring scandal on themselves and their families.
Once upon a time, Angela had indulged in childish fancies of marrying a man like Lucius Daventry—titled, wealthy and so very handsome. A sort of fairy-tale prince to whisk her away from Netherstowe, where she often felt of little more consequence than a scullery maid.
Since then, she’d experienced enough of the world to realize how unlikely it was that any man would offer for a dowerless, unaccomplished country girl who had never ventured out in society. She’d also come to understand that marriage might not be the refuge she’d once imagined it to be. For those reasons, she’d resigned herself to a life of placid spinsterhood, making herself sufficiently useful to her relations that they would not grudge her bed and board.
While sunshine, fresh air, music and friendship were still free for the taking, she would be content. If only Lord Daventry had not come with his unorthodox proposal to stir up the embers of her silly girlhood longing for some-thing more.
“Intentional or not, I fear you are confusing me again, sir.” Not only with his words, either.
Never before had she felt herself so aggravated by a person one moment, then so powerfully drawn to him the next. Really, it was enough to drive a girl straight to…the pantry! How she would love to soothe her wrought-up feelings with a thick slice of pound cake, so rich as to be nearly indigestible.
“Whatever you want from me, Lord Daventry, I seem unable to grasp it.” Her mouth watered so much at the thought of cake that she had to swallow before continuing. “No doubt there
