‘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 never wanted to make my début among the ton,’ she told him blankly, as if not quite sure who she was talking to and all of a sudden she felt him take her misery seriously and draw back to try to see her face in all this frustrating darkness. ‘I certainly never intend to marry and did everything I could to make that fact clear to my family. I would not accept any gentleman’s offer of marriage, could not,’ she explained desolately as if she was in the dock instead of his arms.
‘Since I’m in a very good position to know you were a very proper maiden lady, then why not, Miss Alstone?’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, call me Louisa,’ she demanded with a sudden return to her usual forthright manner and, for a brief moment, she felt horror recede and the world rock back on to its proper axis for the first time in years. Then it was back again, that old revulsion at herself, the familiar, terrible worthlessness of what she’d done, so long ago.
‘Why will you have no husband or child to love, Louisa?’ he demanded imperiously and suddenly she knew he had easily as much noble blood pumping round his body as she could claim to have inherited from the Earls of Carnwood.
‘I can’t tell you,’ she whispered, back in that nightmare. ‘Whatever will you think of me if I do?’
‘How can I say, until you actually tell me what troubles you so deeply? We can hardly say or think much worse of each other than we already have, now can we?’
‘No,’ she admitted hollowly, thinking back to all the names she had called him, all the harsh opinions he’d already voiced about her.
‘Then what does it matter to you what I think of you? If you won’t marry me and insist on bastardising our maybe child, then I’ll certainly think far worse of you than you currently do of yourself, I can safely promise you that much at least.’
‘How comforting,’ she managed to say almost lightly and decided he might as well know the worst about her, if only so he’d agree to walk away and forget her.
‘Tell me, it can’t be worse than a secret I can’t bring myself to tell you in return,’ he soothed ruefully, but she couldn’t imagine anything worse than her own dark misdeeds.
‘It was back in the years before I became a lady,’ she warned him.
‘Before you were born, you mean? I can’t say I approve of the axiom that the sins of the fathers are to be visited on the sons, or in this case the daughters, so I know that you were always a lady, my dear.’
‘My father certainly had a full hand of misdeeds to hand on, even if that was all he left us.’
‘So I have heard, but as I say, I can’t see why that ought to blight you, any more than it has your brother and sister.’
‘Only me,’ she said so low he had to bow his head to catch it and she felt him so close to her again that her heart seemed to ache over that last inch of space between them.
‘No, you’re an Alstone