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 are plenty of other young ladies who’d be delighted to oblige you.”
Her guest parted his lips to speak, but Angela cut him off. “I bid you good-day, my lord. Remember me warmly to your grandfather.”
She pivoted on the toe of her slipper to dash off. Before she could stir a step, his lordship caught her hand to detain her. A curious sensation rippled up her arm—hot and cold at the same time. Rather like her bewildering reaction to the baron himself.
Before she had a chance to withdraw her hand from his, Lucius Daventry blurted out the words she had prevented him from speaking a moment before. “Please, Miss Lacewood, stay and hear me out. I need your help. My grandfather is dying.”
His words struck Angela a harsh backhand blow. She flinched from it at the same instant her knees grew weak. If his lordship had not held her hand in such a tight grip, she might have wilted to the floor.
“Dying?” She raised her free hand to her brow in a vain effort to stem the chaotic whirl of thoughts in her mind. “That can’t be. When I visited Helmhurst yesterday he looked better than I’ve seen him in some time.”
But the earl was not a young man. And he’d been mildly ailing for as long as Angela could remember. “I must go to him at once!”
Another notion reared up from the tempest of her thoughts.
“Why did you not tell me straight away?” Wrenching her hand back from Lord Daventry’s, she was surprised to find the warm air of the sitting room chilly against her skin where he had touched. “It was most unfeeling of you, subjecting me to a litany of paradoxes while keeping me in ignorance of your grandfather’s condition!”
The baron clenched his jaw tight, but some subtle shift of his brow betrayed the injury her reproach had inflicted upon him.
Stifling a qualm of guilt that squirmed in her belly, Angela turned away from him. She must get to Helmhurst, and her dear friend the earl, as soon as possible.
She had scarcely taken a step toward the door before Lord Daventry loomed in front of her. “I cannot let you go, Miss Lacewood.”
“You had better.” she tried to duck around him, but he caught her in his arms.
“Let go of me this instant!” she cried, ignoring her ridiculous desire to linger in his hold, which felt oddly like an embrace.
“I cannot let you go,” he repeated, “until you have calmed down. My grandfather is in no immediate danger, and I do not want him to guess what his doctors have told me.”
Angela eased her token struggle to free herself, yet her breath came fast and shallow, as though she had wrestled against him with all her might. “How can you say the earl is dying one minute, then claim he is in no danger the next?”
“No immediate danger,” Lord Daventry corrected her. His respiration seemed to have picked up tempo, too. “You should pay more careful heed to my words, Miss Lacewood. Though my grandfather does not appear in any worse health than usual, his doctors assure me he has, at most, three months to live.”
A bank of dark, tearful clouds suddenly shadowed the coming summer that had stretched ahead of Angela with such promise only moments ago.
Lord Daventry relaxed his grip on her.
“I do not want that time blighted for him in any way by the knowledge of how grave his condition is. If you wish to see him again, I must have