Notorious Lord, Compromised Miss Read online

  So Viscount Maldon extended his hand through the palm fronds to shake that of the elderly lady who was practically dancing on the spot in consternation.

  “You must be Katherine’s chaperon! So pleased to make your acquaintance. Allow me to introduce myself. Tarquin Fortescue-Simmonds. Viscount Maldon.” His bow being somewhat impeded by the palm fronds, he stepped past Katherine and out into the lobby. While the lemon-clad chaperon was still wondering how on earth she ought to deal with a situation that no book of etiquette gave any guidance about, he plowed on, “It is such a pleasure to meet a fellow botanist in a place normally so devoid of the true intellectual.” He gave her his most dazzling smile. The one that rarely failed him when any of his own aunts were on the verge of giving him a well-deserved trimming.

  “Is it?” she asked, completely bewildered by his sangfroid, at a moment when she must have expected him to be uttering excuses.

  “Oh yes, quite remarkable. So remarkable in fact, that I am afraid we got rather carried away by our discussion of what ails this particular specimen of um…” he trailed one of the fronds of the palm through his gloved fingers “…Vertiginous Veridium.”

  From within the alcove, he heard Katherine utter something that sounded remarkably like a snort of suppressed laughter.

  And then, apparently unwilling to be outdone by his execrable example of half-forgotten schoolboy Latin, she opened her reticule, produced a pair of spectacles and hooked them over her ears. The effect was startling. In an instant, she turned from a lovely, lush young wood nymph, into a rather owlish-eyed and frumpy-looking provincial.

  “It is a rather puny specimen, for its type, Aunt Twining,” she explained, bending to peer closely at the very frond he had just drawn attention to, her slender fingers trailing over some streaks of brown amidst the greenery.

  “We were discussing what particular form of blight has struck it, and whether it will recover. I am afraid we rather forgot about the impropriety of entering any sort of discussion, without a proper introduction, in the heat of our exchange.”

  “Heat?” The aunt was looking from one to the other of them in complete bewilderment.

  “Yes, I am afraid we disagree as to the root cause of the problem tonight. You see, I believe that a case of Impecunious Vulgaris can be easily cured by an application of Matrimonium Ingratus, whereas, if I am not mistaken, your delightfully frank niece believes that this is the very last solution to apply to any kind of plant.”

  “Indeed it is,” Katherine replied, “but in this particular case, I believe the problem is only that of position.” She indicated the alcove with a magnificently disdainful sweep of one gloved hand. “Nothing could thrive in such an unhealthy spot.”

  “You may be correct,” he conceded gravely. “Certainly, there is something of a chill to the air, which could shrivel the most rampant of foliage.”

  To his shocked amusement, she could not help taking just one, swift glance at the front of his breeches, then coloring guiltily when he caught her looking.

  “Well, my dear,” her aunt twittered, saving either of them the necessity of digging themselves in any deeper. “I never knew you were so knowledgeable about plants. Very commendable, I am sure, but you know, you really should not draw apart with a gentleman, no matter how fascinating your discussion. Especially not to contradict him. Not the thing at all!”

  “I assure you, I do not mind in the least,” Viscount Maldon put in, when Katherine’s hitherto ready wit appeared to have deserted her. “It has been refreshing to meet with such an original—dare I go so far as to say, unconventional—young lady as your niece. In fact, it would give me great pleasure if you would grant me permission to escort her onto the floor for the next dance. Then he enquired of Katherine, “If you are free?”

  “You have not been properly introduced!” twittered the aunt in the manner of an overgrown and entirely flustered canary bird.

  “Viscount Maldon,” he repeated, executing a graceful bow.

  “Miss Katherine Malahithe,” replied his worth adversary, dropping him a regally disdainful curtsy.

  Viscount Maldon held out his arm, and Katherine, having shown all her teeth in a parody of a smile, rather ungraciously laid her hand upon it.

  His entrance, just as he had feared, caused something of a flutter amongst the other occupants of the ballroom. Yet somehow, with Katherine on his arm like a shield and her chaperon bringing up the rear, the whispers had no power to hurt him.

  Though Katherine, judging by her expression when she faced him in the set that was forming, had overheard quite enough to have formed a correct impression of his financial straits.

  “You are one, are you not?” she accused him, in an undertone. “A grubby fortune hunter!”

  “I believe,” he replied, when the movements of the dance permitted him to reply without risk of being overheard, “in the precepts laid down by Beau Brummel. I bathe daily and,” he explained loftily, “my linen is always spotless.”

  Katherine was only nonplussed for a moment. With that swiftness of wit he had come to expect, she replied, “Very well. I acquit you of grubbiness. But I should just like to point out,” she said with a smile that could have curdled milk, “that your technique for catching heiresses falls lamentably short of the mark. You will never be successful, if you mean to spend the entire season lurking behind plant pots.”

  “You have discovered my fatal flaw.” He smiled as he twirled her under his left arm in the execution of a particularly complicated step. “The prospect of matrimony sends me into such a quake that were it not for half a dozen younger sisters, all relying on me to provide them with some kind of dowry…” He sighed mournfully, causing Miss Malahithe, contrarily, to look as though she was about to burst out laughing.

  The figures of the dance separated them, but when they drew near again, he leaned in and whispered, “Are we half way through the dance yet? Or must I wait until the very end before persuading you that you have entirely captivated my heart?”

  At that, she did burst out laughing, drawing several disapproving looks in their direction.

  “You are the most insincere, preposterous…”

  “But not grubby. You have to admit I am immaculately turned out,” he interjected.

  “…impossibly exasperating man I have ever met,” she finished. “It would serve you right if I accepted a proposal from you this very minute.”

  “I have not made one!”

  “But if you did, and I accepted, I suspect you would run screaming from the ballroom and throw yourself into the nearest river.”

  He looked pained. “I have never, and will never, do anything so unmanly as to utter a scream. I might,” he admitted, “retire to some secluded spot and shed just one or two tears. Into a handkerchief.”

  “A silken one, no doubt,” she riposted in a withering tone, “since you are clearly as vain as a peacock!”

  “You wound me—” he sighed tragically “—by reminding me that all my silk handkerchiefs have had to be pawned.”

  The music reached a crescendo. The dance was over. Miss Malahithe and Viscount Maldon stood quite still for a moment or two, regarding each other as though neither were quite sure just what they were doing there.

  “Thank you,” he said, coming to himself with a start. Taking her hand, and pressing it, he said, “I did not think I could do this.” When she looked a question at him, he explained, “Making up to women I do not like.” When her expression turned stormy, he hastily put in, “But I do like you, Miss Malahithe. Oh, do not look so alarmed. You are not in any danger from me.” He patted his breast pocket absently. “You are not on my list, you see.”

  “List?”

  He took her arm, and turned her in the direction of the chaperon’s bench. “All fortune hunters worth their salt arm themselves with a list of the heiresses most likely to succumb to their wiles.”

  Miss Malahithe wrinkled her nose in disgust and averted her face. When they reached the chaperon’s
bench, though she thanked him mechanically for the dance, her face was so devoid of expression that Viscount Maldon felt as though some of the lights in the ballroom must have been snuffed. He stared at her, nonplussed, as she dwindled from a vivacious, amusing companion, into a dowdy dumpling, merely by sitting down, hanging her head and hunching her shoulders.

  Feeling rebuffed and bewildered, Viscount Maldon made for the exit.

  And immediately cheered up.

  He had done enough to persuade Acton he was following his advice. He had gone to Almack’s and danced. The fact that it was not one of the females on that damnable list that he had danced with filled him with a rebellious sense of satisfaction.

  And a sense of anticipation too.

  He was looking forward to furthering his acquaintance with the completely unconventional Miss Malahithe. He was going to thoroughly enjoy provoking her into showing her claws, unleashing the personality she seemed so determined to conceal from every other man.

  Oh, yes! He grinned, sauntering down the steps and out into the night air. Teasing her out of hiding would be like opening a window and breathing in fresh air, whenever his personal prison walls crowded in on him too oppressively.

  Chapter 2

  Katherine scanned the ballroom surreptitiously while her aunts greeted some of their acquaintances who were lingering just inside the entrance. She had not seen Viscount Maldon for three days, and if he was not here tonight—she sighed—she would be in for yet another evening of suffocating boredom.

  Viscount Maldon might make her by turns, furious, exasperated, shocked or amused. But never—she smiled to herself—no, not once, had she experienced a minute’s boredom in his company.

  She was glad now that she had not carried through with her decision, made in the wake of that dreadful first meeting, never to speak to him again. After spending a sleepless night going over every second of the humiliation he had inflicted on her, she had decided that the only way to deal with a man like that would be to freeze him out with that icy civility she had seen her aunts employ to such devastating effect on encroaching persons.

  But he had ruined her attempt at frosty manners within seconds of their next meeting.

  “Good evening Miss Malahide,” he had said, bowing over her hand.

  “Malahithe,” she corrected him, annoyed that the interlude which had so shocked her had been of such little account to him that he could not even remember her name.

  “Oh?” he had raised one eyebrow, a mocking gleam in his eyes, “Why is it then that whenever I think about you, the connotation of hiding springs to my mind?”

  “The one hiding was you, I believe, Viscount…Walden,” she retorted, deliberately getting his name wrong, just to demonstrate she had not been thinking about him at all.

  He shook his head, clicking his tongue in rebuke. “Come, come, kitten, you can do better than that. You must have heard the gossip about me. Doting mothers warn their daughters, in thrilled accents, to beware of me lest I am tainted by the ‘Maldon Madness,’” he wagged his finger at her reprovingly, “not the er…Walden…er…”

  “Weakness,” she had put in scornfully.

  “I was going to say ‘Wildness,’” he said, then lowered his voice and leaned closer. “If they must gossip about me, let us at least give them something meaty to get their teeth into.”

  She did not know whether it was his closeness or the low timbre of the words he was drawling right into her ear that had made her mouth begin to water, and her tongue snake out and lick her lips before she even knew she had meant to do it. Furious with him for having the power to evoke such a reaction, without even touching her, when she thought him quite the most obnoxious male she had ever had the misfortune to run into, she had stepped smartly back and let rip with a volley of insults that would have made any other man take to his heels in disgust.

  But Viscount Maldon was not like any other man she had ever met. There had been a gleam of something like triumph in his eyes as he had bowed politely over her hand and escorted her, still spluttering, onto the dance floor.

  That really would have been the end of their association, had not her aunts decided they needed to warn her that he was not an eligible party.

  “You ought not to be encouraging the advances of a man like that, my dear,” her Aunt Twining twittered, the next morning at the breakfast table.

  Encourage him? She had done the very opposite, did they but know it. And she fully intended to give him the cut directly, the next time he tried to foist himself on her.

  “There is bad blood in that family,” Aunt Berry had ponderously intoned. “Everyone knows about the Maldon Madness.”

  She had carried on buttering her toast, on the surface taking their advice to heart. But inside she was seething. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, so irritating, as being told to do something she had already decided to do.

  “To be fair, it does sometimes skip a generation,” Aunt Twining had pointed out.

  Hah! They had not seen him cowering behind a potted palm, nor had they been manhandled in a positively loathsome manner! The madness had clearly not skipped this particular generation.

  But at that point, Aunt Berry had frowned at Aunt Twining and shaken her head so sharply her jowls had quivered. And no matter how hard Katherine pressed them, they refused to divulge what form the madness took.

  Naturally, the next time Katherine ran into him, she simply had to satisfy her curiosity. She had been certain that a man who could grab her in such an ungentlemanly fashion, then be rude enough to make her feel as though it was her own fault for trying to appropriate his hiding place, would not scruple to shield her ears from indelicate topics of conversation. Nor did he.

  The afternoon they spent strolling around Hyde Park had been an education.

  “You wish to know all about the Maldon Madness?” he had echoed, looking wary. “Why?”

  “Because my aunts,” exactly as he had predicted, “have told me it makes you completely ineligible, yet they will not tell me what form, exactly, it takes!”

  “Ah!” His eyes had lit with amused understanding. “Now I understand. Forbidden fruit.” He had grinned in a positively wicked manner. “Nothing is more enticing, is it? But sadly—” and then his expression had sobered “—I do not suffer from it. My father was of the opinion that I am a changeling. It always shocked him when I managed to make my allowance last until the end of the quarter. Occasionally, I have even been unnatural enough to pay my tailor.”

  She could well believe that. His vanity would make it essential for him to keep on good terms with the man who was responsible for his appearance.

  “So…the Maldon Madness is only an inability to handle money?” she asked, somewhat crestfallen.

  “Alas,” he said tragically, “would that it were that simple. Our estate has been brought to the verge of ruin countless times over the generations, through the excesses of the head of the family. My own father had the ailment in a mild form. He merely spent all his waking hours at the races, when he was not throwing good money after bad in card games at his club. It was my brother who had it in its truest form. He was never satisfied with the commonplace wagers that any man might make. He had to be more…creative in his profligacy. In an earlier age, I think he might well have become a pirate…” He paused then, smiling wryly. “I do not think I should sully your ears with the sordid details. Trust me when I say that the extent of his mania has left me with the unenviable task of having to marry someone wealthy, yet still so desperate for a husband she will overlook the family taint.”

  “It seems unfair,” she said thoughtfully, “that you should have to pay the price for his excesses.”

  “It is not for myself I mind so much,” he admitted, for once sounding perfectly sincere. “But for our sisters. They will all want to make respectable marriages in due course. But without decent dowries, who would have them? And why should they have to forfeit all this?” He waved his hand around, encompassing the fashio
nable people bowling along in open carriages. “Girls dream about having their season, do they not? Coming up to London, and having dozens of beaus?”

  She flushed and turned away at that. “As a rule, I suppose…”

  “Ah, I do not count you as a girl with romantic dreams, Miss Malahithe,” he assured her. “The purchase of that hat,” he said, eyeing the elaborately decorated bonnet she had allowed her Aunt Twining to persuade her into buying, “makes its own statement. Coupled with the gown you have on…” he had paused then, in the middle of the pathway, to examine her at his leisure through his quizzing glass “…A mushroom,” he breathed, tucking his glass away with an expression of satisfaction. “That is what it makes you look like. A little mushroom on legs. Come,” he said with a smile, offering her his arm, “and let us give it a chance to work its repelling power on as many of those with pretensions to your hand as we may meet.”

  She had not been able to suppress the giggle that rose up within her in a bubble of pure enjoyment. He knew she had picked the hat because it was the most unflattering item of headgear she had ever tried on. And yet, even though he cared so much about his own appearance, he was prepared to walk through the park with her looking, as he had just informed her, like a drab little mushroom with half a forest strapped to her head.

  And find the disdainful looks of true aspirants to fashion highly amusing.

  That night, when he had asked for a dance in proper form, she had accepted willingly. She’d had time to reflect on his behavior and see it in a new light. To begin with, he really did have sisters. The first time he had mentioned them, she had believed he was inventing them, merely to score a point off her. Now she could see that he was pursuing the women on his list, not for himself so much, but to undo the damage their older, irresponsible brother had done to them all.