extra clothes she’d kirtled about her waist.
‘Even as I hope you’re getting dressed and concealing yourself from me before you rouse me to insanity once more, you’re undressing yourself, Louisa Alstone. What a very contrary female you truly are,’ he commented out of the gloom and she had to bite back on a sigh of regret, for all that lovely intimacy, that wonderful forgetfulness of herself in him.
She smoothed down her remaining, nondescript skirts and wished that, just once, he could have seen her in her elegant evening finery. She’d be groomed to perfection, she let herself fantasise for a brief moment. Her hair would be brushed into immaculate disorder, every shining lock curled and pinned to show the fiery glow within its apparent darkness. Her gown would fit as only an exclusive Bond Street modiste could shape it and it would be made up of the finest cross-cut silk crepe to cling and lovingly outline her much-vaunted figure. Apparently she was not too tall or too short and would have been the epitome of elegance, if she wasn’t so cold. She allowed herself a wry grimace for the rosy glow her brother’s money cast over her as far as her needy suitors were concerned.
‘The top layer was meant to be for you,’ she managed to tell him when she could make it sound as if it didn’t matter.
‘For me—devil take it, woman, do you take me for a molly?’
‘How could I?’ she muttered under her breath, but he heard her all the same.
‘You certainly know different now, if you ever did,’ he confirmed smugly.
‘Would you like me to provide you with a testimonial?’
‘Thank you, but your brother would undoubtedly kill me, so I’ll pass on that.’
‘As well, perhaps, but the clothes were meant to be a disguise.’
‘Good heavens, I think you really mean it. You really are the oddest female,’ he told her as if he had more important things on his mind and she seethed in the darkness as she fumbled for the key under her skirts and then searched about for the wretched thing on her erstwhile resting place.
‘Looking for this?’ he asked, suddenly in front of her and she felt as much as saw the outline of the cleverly wrought key held out to her.
‘You stole it?’ she accused rashly.
‘Just as you must have done,’ he confirmed lazily. ‘It’s always as well to be prepared, as you undoubtedly know.’
‘You took it while you were busy seducing me?’
‘Not exactly while, more afterwards, and I dispute your definition, since you seduced me as surely as I did you. Don’t try to denounce me as the despoiler of innocence when you begged to be deflowered. No—correction, you convinced me you were as experienced as the lovely Eloise and had nothing left to deflower. Which of us do you think anyone would believe, once they knew you kidnapped me and lured me here in a questionable guise, my dear Miss Alstone?’
‘I have no intention of broadcasting my seduction, so if that’s what you’re worried about, Captain Darke, stop plaguing me with slanderous suggestions and be reassured that I’ll never tell a living soul.’
‘Yet Mother Nature has a way of catching out the most secretive of lovers. So what about any child we made tonight?’ he asked all too seriously and her heart stuttered in its tracks at the bare idea.
‘It would take more than that to make one,’ she managed to say scornfully, even as part of her marvelled at the very notion.
‘No, sorry,’ he said with a fine act of light-hearted indifference, ‘unfortunately I can’t close my eyes to the fact that it often takes a good deal less than we just managed between us.’
‘Well, there’s certainly no need for you to sound so smug about it.’
‘That’s not smugness, it’s resignation. We must marry, my dear.’
‘Over my dead body,’ she managed to whisper between gritted teeth.
‘I admit it’s not what either you or your brother would have wanted, but I’ll not have a child of mine running about the place, blithely learning petty theft and fraud at its mother’s knee.’
‘I can’t be a mother,’ she gasped as if the very idea pained her, which it did, acutely. She let the insult pass her by as she stood horrified by the suddenly very-present possibility that he might be right.
‘I think we may shortly find that you can, like it or no,’ he mocked her.
‘No, no, I mustn’t,’ she said, hugging her arms about her suddenly trembling body and trying not to come apart in front of him. ‘No,’ she whispered again in horror at the very idea as she sat suddenly back down on her much-maligned coffee sacks and rocked backwards and forwards at the desperate possibility of it.
‘I’ve heard of being wise after the event, but this is ridiculous, Miss Alstone,’ he told her. When she didn’t reply, but continued to rock blindly, as if she’d forgotten he was even there, he moved to kneel beside her and hold her still.
He was almost tender as he soothed her and whispered meaningless words of comfort as he felt the dry sobs that shook her, for all her faint attempts to put the usual armour of indifference back in place.
‘I can see how a lady like you might be horrified by the bare notion of bearing my child, but I promise it won’t be as bad as you think, Louisa. We will contrive to look after it somehow between us, and even if I’m not the husband you would have chosen, I’ll try to be an easy one on you and a good father to our children, whenever they should come.’ Hugh Darke was promising her all the time she tried to take in what had happened and how stupid she’d been to make him think he had to vow anything to her, let alone marriage.
‘You don’t understand,’ she wailed, ineffectually hitting a would-be fist against his rock-like chest as he tried to take her in his arms in an embrace of pure comfort that was so tempting she had to find a way to make him let her go.
‘I understand that you’re a lady and a very lately ex-virgin and I’m just a common sea captain, but I could say we’ve made our bed and now must lie on it, if only we’d ever got that far.’
‘It’s not that, and I’m not a lady anyway,’ she said vaguely, for it seemed as if they were moving through a dream and she was looking much further back at a reality he couldn’t even guess at.
‘That you are—the whole world knows Miss Alstone is a Diamond of the ton, and only the highest born and most beautiful in the land gain that accolade.’
‘The Ice Diamond, the Untouchable Alstone?’ she scorned incredulously. ‘You should be the first to pour scorn on that epithet from now on.’
‘I’ll call out any man who seeks to argue with your icy reputation in public, even while I’m enjoying the real, warm human woman in my bed,’ he reassured her and if she hadn’t been bound up in her own misery she would have surely relished his partisanship, as well as his apparent desire to revisit her bed, however makeshift it might prove to be.
‘I
