‘And you, sir, what have you to say for yourself? What do you mean by it, eh?’
‘Oh, please, don’t be cross with him, Papa,’ blurted Lady Julia, before he’d managed to utter a single word of the excuse he’d planned to make. ‘It was all my fault.’
What? She was admitting it? For some reason, though he’d said the very same thing not five minutes ago, hearing her try to take the blame didn’t sit right with him.
‘We are both—’ he put in swiftly before floundering to a halt. He may not have come up with a story to satisfy the heart of a doting father, but he knew the truth wasn’t going to suffice. ‘That is, neither of us—that is—the truth is, sir, that...’
Actually, there could probably be only one excuse he could give that might, eventually, mollify an outraged father.
‘Our feelings for each other overwhelmed us.’
That eyebrow went up again. ‘Your feelings?’
‘Yes, sir. We got carried away.’ Well, that was certainly true. He couldn’t remember ever being so completely entranced by a woman. There had been nothing in his head but her. After all the months of oak and muscle and sinew, the sweetly scented softness of her body had been too alluring to resist. He hadn’t stopped to think. He’d just wanted to drown in the haven she offered. The heaven.
‘And when Lady Julia says it was her fault, she can only mean, of course, in permitting me to take her to a secluded spot when she knew it was not at all the thing. The blame for what happened afterward was entirely mine. As a man, an experienced man, I should not have let things go so far.’
‘And how far, exactly,’ said the old man in that cold, forbidding tone, ‘did things go?’
He felt Lady Julia flinch. He squeezed her hand again.
‘I regret to have to inform you, sir, that your daughter could be with child.’
The earl went very still. Not a single flicker of emotion appeared on his face. But in a voice that could have frozen the Thames, he said, ‘You have, in effect, left me with no choice.’
With child? Heavens, that possibility hadn’t even crossed Julia’s mind.
But of course, doing what they’d just done was obviously what started babies.
And just as obviously, she would have to marry the man who might have started one growing inside her. She simply couldn’t have a baby out of wedlock. She couldn’t do that to a child.
And no matter what she felt for the father, she would love her own child. She knew only too well how much a child could suffer because of what the parents felt about each other. She’d always known that the main reason her father hadn’t been able to warm to his first two sons was because they resembled their mother in looks.
The thought sent a fresh chill down her spine. Captain Dunbar was very, very angry with her. What if that anger never went away? What if the resentment he felt about having to marry her spilled over to their child?
‘It appears,’ her father continued, jerking her back to her present difficulties, ‘that my daughter has escaped the wiles of one fortune hunter only to fall into the clutches of another.’
* * *
Alec’s stomach turned over, as her father brought that aspect of the case to his attention. Not only was he going to be saddled with a wife, he was also going to be accused of marrying her for her money. Like father, like son, they’d say. When he’d worked so hard, for so long, to prove he wasn’t that kind of man at all. Damn the chit!
‘No, Papa!’ Lady Julia took a step forward, as though attempting to defend him from the invisible darts her father was shooting his way. ‘I told you it was my fault. Entirely my fault. He didn’t even know it was me in the orangery. Just look at the way I’m dressed.’
‘Eh?’ The earl stopped trying to send Alec to the coldest reaches of hell by sheer force of will, and turned to look at his daughter.
‘He thought I was the Neapolitan Nightingale. I... I deliberately deceived him and lured him out there...’
‘You did what? Why?’
‘Well...’ She swallowed and then started gazing frantically along the rows of books on the shelves, as though she might find inspiration amongst the stiff leather spines.
Yes, what excuse could she possibly come up with to explain this evening’s fantastic sequence of events? Without, that is, confessing the whole truth, which would land her friends in the very trouble she’d already declared she wanted to spare them.
Or laying the entire blame upon his shoulders, which it looked as though she was equally reluctant to do. Which came as quite a surprise. He would have thought she’d have been only too willing to throw him to the lions. Instead, she’d drawn the earl’s fire down on herself. Although from the look on her face now, she hadn’t really thought it through. She’d acted on impulse. And backed herself into a corner.
Alec supposed he had to give her credit for speaking up in his defence. He hadn’t expected her to demonstrate the slightest shred of honour over this affair, not given the way it had come about.
‘Don’t say another word,’ he advised her. He’d come in here seething with resentment at the way she’d trapped him. But she’d drawn the line at letting her father think he was a fortune hunter as well as a despoiler of innocence. It would cost him nothing to return the favour.
Besides, he could see she was floundering in a welter of equally unpalatable choices. Whatever lie she might choose to tell her father next was only likely to plunge them both into even deeper water. And he was used to thinking on his feet. Alec knew, only too well, that no matter how meticulously you planned an assault, something always cropped up that you couldn’t possibly have foreseen. The success or failure of many a mission had depended on his ability to adapt to such new challenges.
‘My lord,’ he said, turning to her father, ‘I am sure your daughter did not know what she was doing. She is so naïve—’
‘No, I won’t have you taking the blame, and everyone saying you are a fortune hunter when it is no such thing,’ she cut in, hotly. ‘I may not have planned for things to go so far, but—’ She broke off, blushing. ‘Papa—you...you saw how he was with all the ladies. So curt. So dismissive. How he refused to take any notice of me at all.’
The old earl’s wintry gaze turned on her. He regarded her coldly for some moments. ‘I have spoiled you,’ he said. ‘You saw a man who wouldn’t pay court to you, and decided you must have him, by hook or by crook.’
It hadn’t been like that. It hadn’t been the least like that. She had detested him.
So why was she implying that it was? Why was she willing to shoulder the blame herself? She could easily have painted him as the very sort of opportunistic fortune hunter her father had taken him for. Instead, she was clearing his name.
And he couldn’t even contradict her story, not without exposing what she’d really been up to out there... Ah! So that was it. A matter of saving face. She’d rather her father think he was the man she’d wanted to seduce all along, than for him to know how very far her true plans had gone awry.
He gave a sort of mental shrug. If that was the way she wanted to play it—fine.
‘Well,’ said the earl with weary resignation. ‘At least this one is an improvement on the last fellow you fancied yourself in love with. At least nobody will blink at the connection. Only the manner by which it came about.’
‘Yes, Papa. He is the Earl of Auchentay, as well as being a naval captain, is he not? And you always did say I should marry within my own class.’
‘The