Never Fall for your Fiancée, page 25
“Perhaps he should keep the remaining businesses and the house and simply extend this visit here? You never know, in a few months you might miss Boston, too.”
“There is nothing holding us in Boston. Jeremiah was an only child and his parents are long dead. Besides, he spent so many years living here when he was a diplomat, most of his friends are here, too. Alongside a few canny investments he made along the way. He has always had a peculiar talent for speculation and can do that just as well here as across the Atlantic. No. . . . We are agreed. It is better to move on with a clean slate. You can help me look for a house! Won’t that be fun?”
“Olivia, there is something you should know. . . .” The words died in her mouth. As much as she didn’t want to lie to his mother, she couldn’t betray Hugh either. She owed him that at least. “We would prefer you to remain at Standish House.”
“Good heavens no! As much as I love this place, a new bride needs to become mistress of her house and not have an interfering mother-in-law poking her nose in. Which obviously, I will not be able to resist doing. You might have noticed I am quite a bossy woman.”
“Not at all . . .”
“You are such a bad liar, Minerva. It is one of the things I like most about you.”
If only she knew.
But it wasn’t her place to tell Olivia the truth— it was Hugh’s and tonight she would tell him in no uncertain terms. “In fact, there is nothing I dislike . . . apart from your singing, of course.”
“Diana says my singing sounds like a bag of cats being strangled.”
Olivia chuckled and grabbed a handful of hairpins. “Hugh is such a naughty boy to have set us both up like that. But with hindsight, it was a funny evening. Your singing . . . your mother . . . the sherry . . .” Sharp blue eyes assessed her in the mirror. “How is your mother now that we are a house of temperance?”
Vee had saved the day over dinner that fateful day of the kiss on the beach, when it became apparent a servant had apprised Olivia of the inebriated Lucretia in her bedchamber. When Minerva was too emotionally drained and had nothing left in her to think of an excuse, her baby sister had stared down at her plate mournfully and said their mother had taken to drinking too much in the dark days after their father died but was working hard to control her habit. Miraculously, it worked, and both Olivia and Jeremiah had had nothing but sympathy for the woman and had bent over backward to support her since. All the decanters had disappeared, the spirits were locked away, and only water or elderflower cordial was served at mealtimes. They were such good people.
Another thing Minerva felt guilty about. Lies heaped upon lies. So many it took all her wits to keep up with them. She was starting to wish Lord Bellingham would return simply to bring an end to them. And an end to seeing Hugh every day and hurting.
“You have such beautiful hair. I think that gown demands a loose style, don’t you? But obviously piled on your head to do those jewels justice. It is long past time someone did. I was always too short to carry them off. They rather swamped my squat neck. I am delighted they have found a new home.”
“I really cannot accept them . . .” A statement that would inevitably also lead to revealing the truth if Minerva dug her heels in. “But I shall be delighted to borrow them for tonight.”
“Have it your way. We shall call them borrowed if that makes it easier for you to accept them, but I shan’t be taking them back. They are my wedding gift to you.”
“But we are not married . . .”
“But you will be and I am delighted about that, too. I confess I had my doubts. With Hugh’s transient relationship with the truth and his reluctance to even consider marriage for so many years, I had convinced myself his engagement was a sham. . . . Even when I met you, I had grave suspicions. I think I was so convinced I was being deceived I saw fault in everything and perhaps gave you a hard time because of it. I am ashamed of that now because it is obvious you and my son are deeply in love . . . and lust.” She paused, grinning, and waved the brush.
“Oh, don’t look so surprised, dear! Did you think you were being subtle? I see the way he looks at you and the way you look at him when neither of you thinks anyone is watching. It is wonderful! Such devotion and passion cannot be forged. I am not surprised you have anticipated your vows.”
“We really haven’t!”
“I am not a prude, Minerva. Such things are natural when a lady meets her soul mate. Why do you think I never made a fuss when the pair of you ran away the other day? I remember what it felt like to want to be alone with my man before I married him. The fizz of excitement . . . the utter perfection of it being just you and him. No pretense. No airs and graces or stifling politeness. A little taste of marriage and how it should be between two lovers . . . Although, in view of your little lapse, the pair of you are playing with fire delaying the wedding until Valentine’s. Have you heard back from your father’s family in Scotland?”
“Not yet.”
“Then perhaps the letter got lost in the post? We shall draft another one tomorrow and have it sent by special messenger.” Olivia pushed in a final pin and stepped back to admire her work.
“Beautiful . . . You shall be the belle of the ball and must dance with every young buck there to make my son horrifically jealous. Such things keep a besotted husband on his toes and will do Hugh good.”
“I dance as well as I sing, Olivia, so it is probably best if I stick to watching.”
“You don’t dance at all? But Hugh said the pair of you waltzed. . . . It was such a lovely story . . .”
“I can waltz.” Minerva smiled reassuringly in the mirror, not wanting to trample on another of this lovely woman’s misconceptions. It had been Hugh’s lie long before he had enticed Minerva to assist with it. She would be breaking her heart enough by running off with her son’s best friend. “Just about.” At least she’d had one lesson before that was ruined.
“Even better! Then you shall only dance with Hugh and the whole neighborhood can witness how much you adore each other!”
“Absolutely.” There was no point in telling this grievously deluded woman not to hold her breath. There would be no dancing anymore, just as there weren’t any private conversations in the gallery between them any longer either. Like the tide on that beautiful beach, Hugh had receded and not even the moon could influence that. “But please make excuses for me if I am pressed to dance with another.”
“Leave it with me. I am a more convincing liar than you could ever be.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“But it is the last waltz!” His bloody mother would not be swayed. “Neither of you have danced a single dance all evening and I am sure nobody here will begrudge the pair of you one waltz.” She pushed Minerva toward him. Despite sparkling in vibrant rubies, her green eyes were hardened emeralds. Cold and hostile. “And I’m sure they will all be delighted to have something to gossip about when you two lovebirds inevitably dance it scandalously too close.” If just gazing at her made his heart weep, holding her would be pure torture.
“When you put it like that, how could I refuse?” He held out his hand and she took it, sending every one of his nerve endings spiraling out of control. But her touch, like her expression, was as detached as their now hideous relationship.
Hugh was in agony. Miserable, wretched, confused agony, and he had absolutely no clue what to do about it as he walked Minerva onto the floor. After enduring a week of her frigid avoidance, and the latent hostility he didn’t fully understand, he had been dreading this. He would have to hold her again— knowing full well he would never properly hold her again. This would be the absolute last time.
It didn’t help that she looked more beautiful than he had ever seen her, in a figure-skimming red silk gown that also, he noted with irrational jealousy, drew a great many admiring stares from the other gentlemen present. Or that she had been aloof toward him since the day he had confessed his feelings toward her despite claiming she felt the same way about him. Or that his blasted eyes had been drawn to her for every second of the never-ending two hours they had been here, enviously watching her laugh and chat with everyone who didn’t have the misfortune to be him.
With him she was coldly monosyllabic. Disinterested. Distant. Even her fingers were stiff in his as they took their positions. He spun her into his arms and she smiled. It was a smile he was paying sixty pounds for, because it didn’t touch her eyes.
He hated it. The pain felt like an anvil on his chest.
The orchestra played the first bars, and she stepped on his foot as her uncoordinated body fought the music. He could feel her frustration at herself beneath his palms and seriously considered leaving her to flounder because she had rejected him, before he remembered his part of this impersonal transaction. They had to put on a show even if he wasn’t feeling particularly inclined to do so.
“Back, side, together— forward, side, together— ” He felt her body relax in his arms as she finally found the rhythm, anticipating his movements rather than listening for the beats in the music her endearingly tone-deaf ears couldn’t hear. He loved that imperfection. Almost as much as he loved holding her.
She was content to dance in silence. Probably just as well as he was out of meaningless things to say. They did a lap of the floor, managing to dance such an intimate dance like total strangers— bodies scandalously touching because she couldn’t dance the steps otherwise, eyes averted and souls in completely different counties.
“You need to tell your mother the truth.” Hugh fumbled the next step at the abruptness of her tone. “Things have gone too far. She’s given me rubies.”
Another thing to feel guilty about. “You can leave them when you go.”
“Yes . . . that’s exactly what I should do. Callous disregard when she has been nothing but kind to me. I hate lying to her.”
“Giles will be back any day. I’ve written to him demanding he return so we can finally end this charade. Then you can stop lying.” While he continued in her absence.
Although the heartbreak would be painfully real. After days of suffering it, the persistent pain in his chest was bordering on acute. He wanted to blame the dress, but knew it was her he missed. Them.
“It was never supposed to last this long. I agreed to stay for a few days once your mother arrived— a week at most.”
“It cannot be helped.”
“She thinks we are . . . lovers.” As if. “And that I might be already with child . . . She’s excited.”
Hugh didn’t reply, because oddly he was mourning the loss of that imaginary child now as well as Minerva. Another blasted what-if that would never come to pass.
To compound his misery, he could see Sarah and her husband had just entered the assembly room. Then behind them, Sarah’s mother. Clearly fate or the Almighty wanted to make tonight the most god-awful of his life and send every possible bane to poke his open wounds.
Typically, she spotted him and raised her hand in a wave. He pretended he didn’t see it but wasn’t quick enough to disguise his discomfort from his dancing partner, whose gaze wandered to the spot his had just vacated, and widened.
“Mrs. Peters is here . . .”
“Is she?”
“You know she is. Why are you ignoring her?”
“We are dancing.” It was easier to deflect than kick that hornet’s nest. “And I am well aware of the fact you have gone above and beyond what you signed up for these last few weeks, but I promise you the day Giles drags his sorry behind back will be the same day you get to leave. In the meantime, leave my mother to me.”
“Because that has all been going so well, hasn’t it? The banns are being read for the second time in the morning and then directly after, I am being fitted for my wedding gown. As I said . . . this has gone much further than I ever anticipated.”
“What do you want? More money? Name your damn price, Minerva, and let’s be done with it!”
Her green eyes narrowed, hardening further. “Money will not right the wrongs we are doing to a generous and unsuspecting woman! Or to Jeremiah, who has been nothing but lovely. They are moving back here. Did you know that? Jeremiah is selling everything they have in America to be here with us! She is turning her life upside down for a lie . . .”
Hugh felt sick. This wasn’t just going to leave him heartbroken— it would crush his mother, too. What a hideous, seething mess!
“It will all be over before anything undoable will be done.” He would hunt Giles down and drag him kicking and screaming back to Hampshire if he had to. “There are just a few days left of this torture at most and then I shall repair the damage it has caused.” If it could be repaired, which he doubted. He certainly wouldn’t get over it, and that wasn’t just the loss of Minerva. He had betrayed his mother when she had been betrayed quite enough already— how did that make him any better than his father?
“The extensive damage.” Her gaze bore into his in accusation, and he mourned the loss of their easy friendship, too. How could one kiss and one short conversation so effectively kill all they had? “Very likely unrepairable damage. Tell me, Hugh, was it worth it?”
“No . . . of course not! I am not a fool, Minerva. I do know I have made a royal hash of things. With hindsight, obviously, I would have dealt with things differently.” He wouldn’t have invented a damn fiancée and then there would have been no possibility of kissing the siren on the beach and offering himself to her. Nothing had been the same since. Everything was spoiled. “I would have told my mother the truth before she sailed to Boston, told her I wouldn’t be marrying anyone or giving her those longed-for grandchildren because I couldn’t! I daresay the guilt of breaking her heart two years ago would’ve been better than all the hurt and pain this sorry debacle has caused me.”
“ ‘Debacle’? A word which rather minimizes your part in it all. This is all your doing, Hugh. Every last bit of it. And it was entirely selfish.”
Oh, how he loathed his tainted Standish blood!
“It was self-defense!” Agitated, he clumsily twirled her to the farthest part of the floor. Away from prying eyes, listening ears, and the newly arrived but timely reminders from the past currently standing at the refreshment table. “Selfish would have been to allow her to wear me down. To be dishonest and disingenuous. To marry some poor, unsuspecting woman then ruin her life as countless other men in my cursed family have done before me!”
“Because the Standish male makes for an exceptionally bad husband.”
“At least I acknowledge my failings.”
“Is philandering such a glorious pastime? Is that why you cannot make promises?”
“I’ve told you why I cannot risk promises.” Vows were meant to last forever. “The Standish male has notoriously wandering eyes.”
“So you keep saying . . . although I only have your word on the matter.”
“Then allow me to enlighten you to justify my actions. My father was a philanderer, so was his father and his father before him.” Baring the soul was meant to be cathartic, yet all Hugh felt was anger, frustration, and shame admitting it.
“Aside from you, I’ve never heard a cross word said about your father.”
“That is because he could charm the birds from the trees, exactly as I can, and people only see what they want to see. Myself included. He used that dubious talent to his advantage but irrespective of the feelings of others.”
“He wasn’t a good man, then? Everyone else is wrong?”
“He was a good father. A good landlord. An excellent politician. He was forward thinking and liberal. He did a lot of good. To the whole wide world he was a good man. A great one, even, and certainly better than his father, who was universally hated. But behind closed doors, in his personal life, he was different from the public façade he cultivated and not that much different from his own father despite regularly listing that callous bastard’s many faults.”
Fifteen years of distance did nothing to prevent the bitterness rising to the surface. “Like my hideous grandfather, my father was also a liar who pursued his own pleasures to the detriment of everything and everyone else. He was unfaithful to my mother before he had even walked her up the aisle and continued to betray her throughout their marriage. Something I only learned in the weeks before his death because they both kept it from me!” When they had ripped the floor from beneath his feet, they also tore the rose-tinted veil from his eyes, and ever since he had vowed to himself he would never allow his hereditary defects to wreak such destruction.
“That doesn’t automatically mean you are of the same ilk.”
“I spent my formative years trying to emulate a man who wasn’t the man I thought he was! It is his voice in my head! His blood in my veins! By the time I realized I shouldn’t model myself on him, it was too late. The die was cast. I am more him than not. . . . Two peas in a pod. Isn’t that what everyone says?”
“They do, but . . .”
He didn’t want to hear empty platitudes. “You’ve seen all the pictures in the portrait gallery, Minerva. If you take away the clothes, the years, and the name plaques, those Standish faces are one and the same. Interchangeable, intrinsically selfish, and entirely incapable of falling in love or remaining faithful to one woman.” Deep affection wasn’t love. The constant ache in his chest wasn’t love either. The need to make her his didn’t guarantee forever.
“Have you ever tried?”
She wasn’t listening! “I know what I am, Minerva. Up until you came along, I avoided romantic attachments, knowing full well there was not enough within me to sustain them.”
“That sounds more like a convenient excuse for untangling yourself from unsavory entanglements!” Her nose was in the air, and she deigned to look at him down it. “Are you not in control of your own actions? Your own destiny?”
Her sudden resort to sarcasm galled. “I am in control of my own destiny.” Couldn’t she see that was the reason he was being so damn noble?
