The Regency Season: Forbidden Pleasures: The Rake to Rescue Her / The Rake to Reveal Her

‘Yes, I’ll come,’ Robbie replied as the child trotted after his mother. Grabbing the arm of the boy’s maid, who was tucking a ball away in her apron, his nephew asked, ‘You’ll bring him, won’t you?’

The girl smiled at Robbie. ‘If I can, young master. Though little notice as Her Grace takes of the poor boy, don’t see that it would make a ha’penny’s difference to her whether he was in the house or not. I’d better get on.’ Gently extricating her hand from Robbie’s grip, she hurried off after her charge.

Alastair checked the immediate impulse to follow her, announce himself to Diana, and force a reaction. Surely he hadn’t changed that much from the eager young dreamer who’d thrown heart and soul at her feet, vowing to love her for ever! As she had vowed back to him, barely a week before she gave her hand to an older, wealthier man of high rank.

Had he been merely a convenient dupe, his open devotion a goad to prod a more prestigious suitor into coming up to snuff? He’d never known.

Sudden fury coursed through him again that the sight of her, the mere sound of her voice, could churn up an anguish he’d thought finally buried. Ah, how he hated her! Or more precisely, hated what she could still do to him.

Since the night she’d betrayed him, he’d had scores of women and years of soldiering. He’d thrown himself into the most desperate part of the battle, determined to burn the memory of loving her out of his brain.

While she seemed, now as then, entirely indifferent.

Mechanically he gave his nephew a hand, walking beside him while the lad chattered on about his friend and his pony and the fine set of lead soldiers waiting for them in the nursery, where they could replay all the battles in which Uncle Alastair had fought. It required nearly the whole of the steep uphill walk from Sidney Gardens across the river back to his sister’s townhouse in the Royal Crescent for him to finally banish Diana’s image.

Damn, but she’d been even lovelier than he remembered.

* * *

Sending Robbie up to the nursery with a promise to join him later for an engagement with lead soldiers, Alastair turned over his hat and cane to his sister’s butler. He’d placed boot on step to follow his nephew up the stairs when Simms halted him.

‘Lady Guildford requested that you join her in the morning room immediately upon your return, Mr Ransleigh, if that is possible.’

Alastair paused, debating. He’d hoped, before meeting his all-too-perceptive sister, to return to the solitude of the pretty guest chamber to which he’d been shown upon his arrival early this morning, where he might finish piecing back together the shards of composure shattered by his unexpected encounter with Diana. But failing to respond to Jane’s summons might elicit just the sort of heightened interest that he wished to avoid.

With a sigh, he nodded. ‘Very well. You needn’t announce me; I’ll find my way in.’

Moments later he stepped into a back parlour flooded with mid-morning sunlight. ‘Alastair!’ his sister exclaimed with delight, jumping up from the sofa to meet him for a hug. ‘I’m sorry I was so occupied when you arrived this morning! Though if I’d had any inkling you were coming, I would have had all in readiness,’ she added, a tinge of reproof in her tone.

‘Do you mean to scold me for showing up unannounced, as Mama always does?’ he teased.

‘Of course not! I assume you’re not here for some assignation, else you’d not come to stay with me.’

‘Assignation?’ he said with a laugh. ‘You’ll make me blush, sister mine! And what would a proper matron like you know about assignations?’

‘Nothing whatever, of course, other that you’re rumoured to have many of them,’ Jane retorted, her face flushing.

‘You shouldn’t listen to gossip,’ Alastair said loftily. ‘But let me assure you, if I did have an “‘assignation” in mind, I’d choose a more convenient and discreet location than Bath to set up a mistress.’

‘It pains me that you’ve become so cynical. If only you’d become acquainted with any of the lovely, accomplished and well-bred girls I’ve suggested, you’d find that not all women are interested only in title and position.’

‘Of course not. You married Viscount Guildford out of overwhelming passion, the kind you’d have me write about,’ he said sardonically.

Her flush deepened. ‘Just because a match is suitable, doesn’t mean there can’t be love involved.’

‘Oh, I’m a great believer in love! Indulge in it as often as I can. But I could hardly make one of your exemplary virgins my mistress,’ he said, then held up a hand as Jane’s eyes widened and she began to sputter a reply. ‘Pax, Jane! Let’s not brangle. I came to see you and Robbie, of course, and I do hope I’m welcome.’

‘Always!’ she said with a sigh, to his relief letting the uncomfortable topic go. He loved his sister and his mother dearly, but the succession of women with whom he’d been involved since his break with Diana—with their attempted claims on his time, his purse or his name—had only strengthened his decision never again to offer his heart or hand.

Jane looped her arm with his, leading him to a seat beside her on the sofa. ‘Of course you may come and go as you wish! But if the ladies in your life would prefer to prepare a proper welcome and perhaps cosset you a bit, you must forgive us. We waited too many long anxious years while you were in the army, not sure you would ever make it back.’

‘But I did, and I wager you find me as annoying as ever,’ Alastair pronounced, dropping a kiss on the top of her head. ‘So, was it my unannounced visit that I’ve been summoned to answer for? I thought, with Guildford off in London toiling away for some Parliamentary committee, you’d be delighted to have me break the tedium of marking time in Bath while your papa-in-law takes the waters. How is the Earl, by the way?’

‘Better. I do think the waters are helping his dyspepsia. And I can’t complain about being in Bath. It may not be the premier resort it once was, before Prinny made Brighton more fashionable, but it still offers a quite tolerable number of diversions.’

‘So which of my misdeeds required this urgent meeting?’

To his surprise, despite his teasing tone, his sister’s face instantly sobered. ‘Nothing you’ve done, as well you know, but I do need to make you aware of a...complication, one of some import. I’m not sure exactly how to begin...’

Brow creased, Jane gazed warily at his face, and instinctively he stiffened. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s...’

Though Alastair would have sworn he neither moved a millimetre nor altered his expression in the slightest, Jane’s eyes widened and she gasped. ‘You’ve already seen her! You have, haven’t you?’

Damn and blast! He was likely now in for the very sort of inquisition he’d heartily wished to avoid. ‘If you mean Diana—the Duchess of Graveston, that is—yes, I have. At any rate, I believe it was her, though we didn’t speak, so I’m not completely sure. It has been years, after all,’ he added, trying for his calmest, most uninterested tone. ‘A lady who looked like I remember her came to Sidney Gardens when I went after Robbie, to fetch her s-son.’ Inwardly cursing that he’d stumbled over the word, Alastair cleared his throat.

Distress creased his sister’s forehead. ‘I’m so sorry you encountered her! I just this morning discovered her presence myself, and intended to warn you straight away so you might...prepare yourself. That woman, too, has only just arrived, or so Hetty Greenlaw reported when she called on me this morning.’ Her tone turning to annoyance, Jane continued. ‘Knowing of my “close connection to a distressing incident involving my maternal family”, she felt it her duty to warn me that the Duchess was in Bath—the old tattle-tale. Doubtless agog to report to all her cronies exactly how I took the news!’

‘With disinterested disdain, I’ll wager,’ Alastair said, eager to encourage this diversion from the subject at hand.

‘Naturally. As if I would give someone as odious as that scandalmonger any inkling of my true feelings on the matter. But,’ she said, her gaze focusing back on his face, ‘I’m more concerned with your reaction.’

Alastair shrugged. ‘How should I react? Goodness, Jane, that attachment was dead and buried years ago.’

Her perceptive eyes searched his face. ‘Was it, Alastair?’

Damn it, he had to look away first, his face colouring. ‘Of course.’

‘You needn’t see her, or even acknowledge her existence. Her whole appearance here is most irregular—we only received word of the Duke’s passing two days ago! No one has any idea why she would leave Graveston Court so quickly after his death, or come to Bath, of all places. With, I understand, almost no servants or baggage. I highly doubt a woman as young and beautiful as Diana means to set up court as a dowager! If she’s angling to remarry, she won’t do her chances any good, flouting convention by appearing in public so scandalously soon after her husband’s death! Although if she did, I’d at least have the satisfaction of being able to cut her.’

‘That might not be feasible. Robbie has struck up a friendship with her son,’ he informed her, making himself say the word again without flinching. ‘He invited the boy to meet him again in the gardens tomorrow.’ Alastair smiled, hoping it didn’t appear as a grimace. ‘So I can take them both for cakes.’

If he hadn’t been still so unsettled himself, Alastair would have laughed at the look of horror that passed over his sister’s face as the difficulty of the situation registered.

‘I shall come up with some way to fob off Robbie,’ Jane said. ‘It’s unthinkable for you to be manoeuvred into associating with her.’

Recalling the strength of his nephew’s single-mindedness when fixed on an objective—so like his mama’s iron will—Alastair raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘If you can succeed in distracting the boy who chattered all the way home from the Gardens about his new friend, I’ll be surprised. Besides, if Diana goes about in Society, I’m bound to encounter her from time to time.’

‘You don’t mean you’ll chance seeing her again?’ his sister returned incredulously. ‘Oh, Alastair, don’t risk it!’

‘Risk? Come now, Jane, this all happened years ago. No need to enact a Cheltenham tragedy.’

Pressing her lips together, Jane shook her head, tears sheening her eyes. ‘I know you say you’re over her, and I only pray God it’s true. But I’ll never forget—no one who cares about you ever could—how absolutely and completely bouleversé you were. The wonderful poetry you wrote in homage to her wit, her beauty, her grace, her liveliness! The fact that you haven’t written a line since she jilted you.’

‘The army was hardly a place for producing boyish truck about eternal love,’ Alastair said, dismissing his former passion with practised scorn. Besides, poetry and his love for Diana had been so intimately intertwined, he’d not been able to continue one without the other. ‘One matures, Jane, and moves on.’

‘Does one? Have you? I’d be more inclined to believe it if you had ever shown any interest in another eligible woman. Do you truly believe all women to be perfidious? Or is it what I fear—that your poet’s soul, struck more deeply by emotion than an ordinary man’s, cannot imagine loving anyone but her?’