Lucy Ashford - The Outrageous Belle Marchmain

She jumped up from the chair as if it burned her. He pushed the door shut, folded his arms and studied her. Belle in turn acknowledged the spectacular lines of his tall, broad-shouldered figure with bitter eyes. Handsome. So handsome .

And trying so very hard to be a gentleman, she’d heard people say. But she didn’t think anyone would dare to say that to his face. Whatever his origins, this man was formidable. And most women would simply—melt.

‘Ah, Mrs Marchmain,’ he said. ‘Still here, I see.’

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but, yes, I am.’

He looked at his watch. ‘I can spare you ten minutes,’ he said.

Outside the afternoon sun had vanished behind dark clouds. She thought she heard the ominous rumble of thunder in the distance—which was apt, since Thor the thunder god, in the person of Mr Adam Davenant, had her in his lair. Oh, Lord …

Belle took a deep breath and began. She explained how Edward had been heir to a much-diminished estate but was working so hard to hold his inheritance together. ‘And then there were the new taxes on landowners,’ she went on, ‘and the weather was truly dreadful …’

She saw Davenant’s dark eyebrows rise in faint contempt. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘So these iniquitous taxes and the unkind weather landed solely on your brother’s portion of Somerset, did they?’

She coloured hotly. ‘I see it pleases you to mock me, Mr Davenant. But I haven’t finished yet! A year ago, as you well know, Edward sold some of his land to you because of pressing debts. And you paid him a truly pitiful amount for that land …’

Something happened then. The previously impassive features of his chiselled face had become hard as granite.

‘I paid him two thousand guineas,’ said Davenant.

Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘Two thousand ?’

‘Yes.’ His narrowed eyes never left her face. ‘You see, I guessed that the old quarry there might benefit from reinvestment. I told him this and also offered him some shares. He turned down my offer and told me I was wrong. Nevertheless I paid him the two thousand—far more than he’d have got from anyone else.’

‘Because you knew you could make that amount many times over from the stone!’

‘Have you any idea,’ he countered grimly, ‘how much it costs to invest in equipment and labour for a re-opened quarry? It will be years before I start to see a profit; certainly no one else would have paid your brother so much. But fool that I was, I felt sorry for the young idiot.’

Outside thunder rumbled again. Davenant went to light the lamp on the table where the model engine was; his movements were lithe, almost graceful for such a powerfully built man …

Stop it. Stop it, you fool .

Two thousand guineas. Belle sank into the nearest chair. Now Davenant was saying with lethal politeness, ‘I take it there’s some discrepancy over figures. Am I right?’

Belle thrust aside a long bonnet ribbon that trailed down her cheek. ‘I don’t know—I might have misunderstood—’

‘I doubt it,’ he cut in crisply. ‘Try asking your brother again. On this occasion you might find that he remembers the truth.’ His expression was glacial. ‘You could ask him, at the same time, why he stole my livestock.’

Belle was truly floundering now. ‘It must appear to you as theft, I know. But that was all a mistake.’

‘I suppose he told you that my sheep had strayed on to his lands,’ he drawled icily. ‘Told you that it was my fault, for not maintaining my fences.’

The hot blush rose to Belle’s cheeks. That was exactly what Edward had said.

‘I maintain my fences very carefully, Mrs Marchmain,’ went on Davenant. ‘In fact, every detail of my life is conducted with the utmost rigour. Now, I’m a busy man …’ he glanced again at his watch ‘… it’s gone four, and I’m sincerely hoping you’ve come here with some concise suggestions as to how your younger brother intends to pay back the not inconsiderable sum he owes me for selling off my sheep. Which is a criminal act, incidentally.’

Adam Davenant usually kept his emotions on a tight rein, but by now he was deeply angry. Somehow this woman had got under his guard and he shouldn’t have let her. Turquoise and pink, for God’s sake—he had to blink every time he looked at her! He should have abided by his first instinct and ordered her off his premises.

‘Mr Davenant,’ she was saying, that pointed chin still tilted defiantly, ‘you must realise that it has been extremely difficult for my brother to see our heritage so diminished.’

She wasn’t giving up yet , registered Adam. ‘Ah,’ he answered. ‘The precious notion of blue blood and entitlement. Spare me, Mrs Marchmain. The Hathersleigh estate has been lurching towards ruin for generations, thanks to a fatal mixture of greed, complacency and sheer carelessness. Have you observed the way in which your brother conducts his business? Have you seen the great piles of unsorted paperwork that litter his so-called study?’

‘He is busy,’ Belle faltered. ‘His wife is not well …’

‘And so he sends his older sister to make his excuses for him. I repeat, I bought that land at an excessive price from your brother—not out of generosity, nor out of greed, but because I simply had no desire to have a bankrupt neighbour in Somerset. It’s not good for appearances.’

Belle gazed at him whitely. This man was surely as cold and hard as the rock his men hewed from the ground. She rose to her feet. ‘Exactly how much does my brother owe you for the sheep?’

‘I don’t see how you can hope to pay me off. You must have even less money to spare than he does.’

‘I run a successful dressmaking business!’

‘Not successful enough.’

She sat down again. Adam watched the turquoise ribbons, ridiculously flippant, fluttering from her straw bonnet and reflected that her brother was a goddamned weakling. Adam had rashly hoped to help young Hathersleigh by buying that land, but the fellow was a fool, and a liar, too—he’d not even equipped his rather pluckier older sister with the truth.

And the fact that she was still assuming her goddamned superiority , and laboured under the misapprehension that he, Adam, was somehow under obligation to show leniency, sent bitterness surging through Adam’s blood.

He knew that people like her despised and feared men of Adam’s mould, who were a symbol of things to come, of old values passing. She thoroughly deserved humiliation at his hands. Yet even while she glared up at him as if he was the devil incarnate, he felt something simmer, damn it, that was very like lust in his traitorous loins. Felt the longing to take her very firmly in his arms and plunder that sweet, rose-pink mouth with his lips and tongue …

Jarvis had clearly tried to make her his at some point in the past. Jarvis had failed.

Adam could see her hands trembling now. Yet still she faced him with that damned defiance, still she came up with fresh excuses for her sibling.

‘My brother does not deserve prison, Mr Dave na nt.’

‘Really?’

‘Indeed. You see, he has a wife who is expecting their first baby very soon—’

‘He’ll have that in common with many of his fellow-prisoners in Newgate gaol, then.’

She tightened her fists. Then: ‘You are despicable,’ she said quietly. Her voice was steady, yet he noted how her small, high breasts heaved with distress beneath that tightly buttoned little pink jacket. ‘Despicable,’ she repeated. ‘Both in your behaviour to me now, and your deliberately not telling me who you were that afternoon on Sawle Down. Your deception was truly dishonourable.’

Dishonourable? Damn it! She’s a greedy little widow, angling for money . Adam went in with all guns blazing.

‘Your kind talk always of honour and status,’ he retorted harshly. ‘Would you say your brother was showing honour , in sending his sister to me to plead his cause? There are names for that kind of behaviour.’

She recoiled as if he’d struck her. ‘It was my decision to come here! If you think that Edward intended—’

‘I think,’ he cut in, ‘that your cowardly brother told you about his plight in the hope that your feminine charms would soften my steely peasant heart. If that’s an example of blue-blooded behaviour, you can keep it. In my world, we call it pimping.’

‘Oh! I think—my brother did not mean—’ She was stammering now, and backing away; somehow her dangling sleeve caught the little steam model and it went crashing to the floor.

She let out a cry of dismay and bent to start picking the pieces up.

‘Leave it,’ he commanded harshly. ‘A footman will see to it.’

‘No!’ She was still flurrying around the floor. ‘No, I will pick it all up and then I am going, you hateful, hateful man! Edward was right to say you are a boor and a tyrant. And—and I will see Edward and I in gaol together before I grovel any more to you!’

With that she bobbed down again, to pick up more pieces of the ill-fated model. As she did so she was presenting that very pert, very rounded derrière to Adam’s narrowed eyes. Hell. He did try to look away. He despised himself for registering even the slightest flicker of interest. But a picture of her unclad appeared rather tantalisingly in his mind, and his body responded accordingly.

Adam had decided long ago that marriage was not for him. He had neither the time nor the inclination to play the games of courtship, flattery and lies that a permanent commitment would involve. God knew he was offered enough suitable brides; they were pushed before him at every opportunity, thanks to his wealth.

But the example of his parents’ marriage had put him off for good. Miner Tom’s only son, Charles, had been so rich he was able to choose a bride from the aristocracy, but his well-born wife—pushed into the marriage by her parents—had thoroughly despised her low-born husband and after producing two male heirs she’d embarked on a string of affairs.

Adam had spent a good deal of his childhood trying to protect his young brother, Freddy, from their mother’s promiscuity and their weak father’s rages. Both parents had died years ago, and Adam felt not the slightest desire to emulate their unhappiness; hence his custom of keeping suitable mistresses to satisfy his own male desires.

He treated them generously, but always Adam made the terms quite clear: ‘This ends when I say it ends. Afterwards, if we happen across each other in society, we will acknowledge each other civilly. No more and no less.’

Most of his former mistresses knew better than to cause him any trouble; Lady Farnsworth, his latest, had been an exception. Adam had quickly wearied of the elegant widow’s clinging possessiveness and her withering contempt for any suspected rivals.

The trouble was, he hadn’t yet chosen himself another woman for his bed. Usually they were either widows or amicably separated from their husbands and the choice was plentiful. But no one had tempted him to make an offer, since …

Since he collided with this little minx, who’d insulted his name to high heaven one March afternoon on Sawle Down.

The realisation struck him like a thunderbolt. No . He couldn’t have held back from singling out a new chère amie because he was thinking of Belle Marchmain. It was damned impossible! But …

She’d come here to ask him a very big favour, but her plans—so far—had come crashing round her pretty ears. Now he looked at her again as she furiously picked up the last bits of his model from the floor.