A Rake To The Rescue

Chapter Two

‘Stop embarrassing me, Magnus, and go away. I have made it clear to you time and time again I will not marry you. Do me the courtesy of listening for once and leave us be.’ Delphi sounded so weary Magnus’s heart thudded with dread, then slowed to a horrified acceptance that she really meant it this time. Now he would have to watch them both sail away and the thought of it nearly took him off at the knees.

‘What about Angela?’ he said bleakly as he stared at his baby with what felt embarrassingly like tears in his eyes. The baby laughed back at him and gigged up and down in her mother’s arms as if she liked him, even if Delphi didn’t any more. She was so like him his paternity should have been obvious to the whole world at birth and he longed to proclaim it to the rooftops and be her father for life.

‘She will be safe, loved and with her mother. That’s all you need know,’ Delphi said implacably, and defeat had never tasted so bitter for Magnus.

‘Unlike her father,’ he said flatly as his life stretched away from him in a long, slow road he almost wished was over and done with.

‘I am sorry, Magnus. It was never you, you see?’ Delphi said, as if his pain at the idea of never seeing his child again was so plain to see even she could no longer ignore it. ‘You were never the man I really wanted when I had to wed Drace, nor afterwards when he died and I was rich as well as free and he still didn’t come to comfort me for all those wasted years I had to endure without him.’ She spoke as if that grief was the one she might never get over. ‘You look so like him at the age when he loved me back, you see. I admit I could not help myself taking what I could get from one of you Hailes when you arrived, so eager to comfort me after Drace died, and he still stayed away, as if he didn’t care a snap of his fingers about me and how I still longed for all I could not have because he turned his back on me. He said he had to do his duty and never mind where his heart led him, but if I was in his heart he managed to ignore me when it all ended and I still had nothing—not even a child to make the emptiness less cruel.’

‘So you used me to make one and never mind if I was the wrong man to make it with? I was only ever a poor substitute for another man as far as you were concerned, wasn’t I?’ Magnus said bitterly, a terrible suspicion dragging him back to the shore like a heavy anchor chained to his waist as she turned to walk aboard the ship so she could get on with forgetting he even existed on the other side of the Channel. ‘For my damned brother, I suppose, since you always hated the old man nigh as much as I did,’ he gritted out at her stiff-backed figure and felt as if this last, bitter truth might poison him.

‘You Hailes look so alike, you see?’ she turned back to tell him earnestly, as if he might nod and agree, as if he had been a fool to ever think himself aught but a stand-in for the man she really loved and wanted all along when she’d taken him as her lover for six glorious weeks after her husband died.

‘All except Wulf,’ he said numbly, relieved his favourite brother was both too young and too like their mother to be the man Magnus had been a substitute for when he had helped Delphi make a Haile baby to love so soon after her husband’s death—even the rightful Drace heir had not argued Angela was Sir Edgar Drace’s get. Maybe the man had been so relieved Delphi had birthed a girl he’d made no effort to see the babe in full daylight and Delphi had kept her child very close. She’d had Angela baptised soon after birth on the excuse she might not survive. That lie had sent him galloping all the way to Drace Dower House to discover his child thriving and he’d fallen instantly in love with her as only a father could. Nobody would believe Delphi’s lie about her baby girl’s health if they could see her in her mother’s arms now, laughing at the strange sayings and doings of her elders and so full of life.

Magnus numbly marvelled that Delphi’s relief at leaving her native land and him behind seemed to have lulled her into trusting a stranger not to noise her affairs abroad, when she usually kept her feelings so firmly in check. He only wished he shared her confidence in the woman hesitating nearby as if she knew she should leave them to have this very private discussion in as much peace as could be got in such a place, but felt she could not walk away lest he became violent. Couldn’t she tell he would never hurt a hair on either of these two females’ heads if his life depended on it? Luckily her boy had already got bored with such adult puzzles and had gone to create more mischief behind his mother’s back.

‘Marry me anyway?’ Magnus pleaded and to hell with his pride and their audience.

Even if Delphi didn’t love him—and he was rapidly going off the idea of loving her back if his elder brother Gresley was truly the love of her life—he was the father of the little darling watching him as if she knew he mattered. Why wasn’t her mother agreeing with her? Delphi must have deliberately lured him into her bed to fantasise he was his elder brother when Gresley stayed sternly away and left her to find comfort in another man’s arms. It was never him she’d wanted and that felt bitter as gall as he nearly choked on the taste of it after all these years of being half in love with a woman he could not have. Delphi had loved and been loved by Gresley for a time before the dutiful heir married money to save the Carrowe estates from bankruptcy instead of lovely, not very wealthy Lady Delphine Bowers. So, she in turn had made a marriage of no affection to keep her true love alive in her heart while she flaunted Drace’s almost legendary wealth in her lover’s face and effortlessly outshone his new Countess at every turn. It seemed a poor reason for marriage, but what room had Magnus to criticise when he’d nearly married a friend for the sake of her fortune only a few months ago?

‘Wed me for her sake?’ Magnus begged huskily even so and leaned forward to kiss his baby daughter before she was snatched away for what could be for ever. The little minx gurgled at him and his heart lurched with love and his need to protect her against every harsh wind that might blow on her for the rest of her life. She was still his child, whether her mother liked it or not.

‘No, I won’t have her watch us tied together only by duty and not love. I lived in a hollow marriage for a decade after I could not marry the love of my life and I swore never to do it again the day Drace died. Angela is mine and her own, but she is not yours, Magnus.’

‘Explain that to anyone who ever lays eyes on her and has seen one of us Hailes first, then. You can call her by another man’s name as much as you like, but you can’t pretend Drace had any hand in her with those features and dark brown eyes and all that jet-black hair to give you the lie.’

‘I won’t have to if you stay away from us. If you truly love her, you will go away and leave us to live a good enough life in another country without you. I can afford to give her the best of everything and make sure she has a good education and all the things you can never afford, circumstanced as you are. You have nothing to offer her and I can give her everything. Now my maid is getting frantic and signalling we must get aboard, before she and my worldly goods are forced to cross the Channel without us, so get out of the way, Magnus, and leave us be.’

‘And that is all you have to say to me?’

‘Yes. You must live a good life and forget all about us.’

‘How can I?’

‘Take lessons from the man who knows how it’s done,’ she said with a thin, bitter little smile and waved a dismissive hand in his direction before she turned away with his child to be scurried up the companionway by the impatient Captain of the packet boat. Then she took herself to the other side to look towards Calais and away from him. At last the boat embarked with Magnus gazing after it like a fool, watching every step and sail they took away from him as if he had a wicked spell laid on him and there was nothing he could do to tell the world his heart had been ripped out.

‘Guv,’ a skinny young man said to the brooding figure Hetta was suddenly so reluctant to disturb. Magnus Haile stood stock-still now and looked as if everything he ever cared about had left him for ever and his life was meaningless and empty without them. She must have caught at his name, like carelessly thrown jewels, when Lady Drace dropped it into her bitter farewell. This man Lady Drace had refused so coldly looked as if he’d been broken by his lover’s final rebuff. Hetta almost cried for him and she was no watering pot and was nearly sure she didn’t like him. ‘We need to get home, Mr Magnus,’ the youth urged, clearly uneasy in the face of such raw emotion which seemed to come off his master in waves as he stood there trying so hard to be impassive and rocklike and failing at it rather badly. At a distance he might look so, but this close to he was clearly spent. He ignored his unlikely-looking rescuer as if his ears had shut down after Lady Drace’s last bitter words stung him to the heart.

‘Mr Haile, your man is trying to get your attention.’ Hetta spoke up at last, and thank goodness she was too much of a stranger to need to search for words of comfort when the man looked back at her as if he knew there was none to be had.

‘Eh?’ he managed to say, as if reluctantly realising he had a new world to live in now the two people he most wanted in it had left him. ‘Oh, yes. There you are, Jem. Horses calmed and dealt with, are they?’

‘Aye, stabled and fed and asleep already when I left—which you looks as if you ought to be as well, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Magnus.’

‘Wouldn’t that be a handy trick?’ Mr Haile said softly, as if he hadn’t slept properly for longer than he cared to remember.

‘Whatever it is, you needs to come away now. Mr Wulf will skin me alive if I get you home in an even worse state than you was in last Easter when—’

The young man stopped himself and eyed Hetta as if he had suddenly realised she was a total stranger and couldn’t be trusted to keep a still tongue in her head about his master’s family and their obviously very tangled affairs.

‘I am no gossip,’ she reassured him earnestly and turned to meet Mr Haile’s dark eyes. Shock and a terrible weariness looked back at her. There was a faint glimmer of the man he ought to be looking at her with a tepid sort of interest, as if she was a being who knew far too much about him and he ought to care, but could not quite make the effort to do so. He seemed to have shut down all the power and vitality that made him so memorable at first sight, even if her motherly instincts had been on the alert for her son’s welfare at his furious hands at the time. This man now looked as if he was too tired and battle-weary to care what anyone did to him. Toby could dance on the topsail of the next ship to come in and drop on his head to break his fall and he would shake him off after a few stunned moments and go on with hardly even a blink to admit he had a headache.

‘I think you had best find this gentleman a good meal and a clean bed for the night, young man,’ she advised his unlikely companion gently, as if she knew he was being left to deal with a casualty and might need a little advice from a woman who was all too used to wrenching comfort out of spartan lodgings and a sometimes less than perfect life of her own.

‘You’re in the right of it there, missus. Rode here as if the devil was on his tail, he did. Ought to know better, but I can take care of him now,’ the youth said as if he was decades older than the man Lady Drace had just whistled down the wind as if lovers like him were ten a penny. Magnus Haile seemed almost broken and the last thing in the world to make him feel any better would be the pity of a strange woman. A part of her that should be ashamed of itself mourned for him as her fantasy lover. She could only imagine having a man like him in her own bed in her wildest dreams. Lady Drace was obviously made of finer stuff, though, and, since he was used to a lover of such graceful beauty and elegance, he would have no eye for a plain Mrs Champion even if he wanted another lover to comfort him, sensible Hetta argued. Being second-best would feel more hellish than being alone with all these feminine longings and frustration when she sought her lonely bed tonight. No, it was time she got back to real life and forgot Magnus Haile and her odd welcome to a country that had never felt like home to her.

‘Reassure your master, once he is refreshed and well enough to listen properly, that I never gossip,’ she said with a nod to say You can trust me. The lad returned with a wary Maybe I can nod back.

‘Heaven send I never see you or your brat again to test you on that assertion, ma’am,’ Magnus Haile said as if her words had woken him from a stupor. He looked so revolted by the idea that she felt stung, but before she could summon up a sharp answer he marched off as if it was her fault he had suffered such a felling blow at his ex-lover’s hands today.

‘The feeling is entirely mutual,’ she muttered into the damp and empty air even as she gazed at his fast-retreating back and noted his loping stride had already taken him well out of hearing distance, proving he had more energy than she’d thought. ‘Of all the rude, abrupt, bad-tempered m-m-monsters...’

No, that won’t do. Hetta stopped herself in mid-stammer as words failed her. She refused to let him take words away from her, even if he wasn’t here to sneer at her. An ill-mannered, bad-tempered, unshaven and arrogant apology for a gentleman would not turn her back into the silenced little mouse she’d nearly become under her grandmother’s roof when Papa had sent her back to England after her mother had died and he didn’t seem to know what else to do with his only child.

Back then the Dowager Lady Porter was determined to turn her skinny, suntanned and rebellious grandchild into a meek and mild young lady who did as she was told without questioning why. Why on earth Hetta’s father thought a stay under his mother’s roof for Hetta and his grandson would work this time, she had no idea. It was a disaster last time and, after enduring two years of being forever in the wrong, Hetta had been desperate enough to elope with the first man who had asked her to in order to avoid spending one more day under her rigid and forever disapproving grandparent’s roof. This time she had a bright and rather rebellious seven-year-old son with her as well and felt no more inclination for polite society than she had last time she had to live with the Dowager Lady Porter. Sir Hadrian Porter had made the arrangement behind Hetta’s back, though, leaving her no chance to refuse and stay on the other side of the Channel while he was in England.

He didn’t even tell her about his plans to keep her out of the way this time until France was fading from view and it was too late for her to refuse to cooperate with them. If only he hadn’t been so devious about it, she and Toby could have found refuge from the relentless heat of midsummer on the Normandy coast and let the polite world pass them by, again. But her father had other ideas and Hetta was very suspicious about them now she was actually in England and the pall of drizzle, stilted manners and her dread of being forced into an empty society marriage was on her once more.

How she cursed the promise her father had wrung out of her that she would agree to be sent somewhere safe with her son whenever Sir Hadrian thought they could be in danger from one of the secret villains he pursued for his country. This time he had invoked the promise to get her to agree to go somewhere she did not want to be even more than usual. She ground her teeth at the memory of making such a blasted promise when she had finally managed to track her father down after her husband, Brandon Champion, had died and her son was a mere babe in arms. With all the failed romance and blighted hope behind her, Hetta was desperate for the old life she’d lived with her wandering parents until her mother died and had been so desperate to escape England she’d rashly made the promise Papa demanded of her as a condition of her staying with him at all. He had held her to it ever since.

Of course, Toby was a wondrous gift from those wretched years and he made every minute of it seem worthwhile. But even though Hetta felt horror at the very idea of being sent back to England, her father knew she would never break her promise to him. Her word was her bond as surely as any gentleman’s and she knew Papa’s trade was a dangerous one, but she was growing very weary of being bent to his will when he chose. It was time to settle into a life of her own making somewhere, she decided, and with a sidelong look at Toby she knew it must still revolve around his needs. He was old enough for school now and she would have to settle for this dull and rainy land at least in term time. He would probably be his grandfather’s heir one day, if Sir Hadrian didn’t make an April and December marriage and beget a direct heir, so Toby would have to learn to be an English gentleman whether either of them liked it or not. To do that he had to go to school here and she would have to live here as well, at least for most of the year. The prospect didn’t please her, but neither did the idea of leaving her son at school and travelling the world without him. Somehow or another this trip to England had to be the start of a new life for both of them.

Anyway, never mind all that now. Brought back to the present moment, Hetta refused to let Magnus Haile’s hurtful words make her lose control of her words for the first time since Toby was born. If that was the sort of gentlemen she was likely to meet here she wished herself in France more than ever. Never mind the sea. She would brave it again right now to avoid ever having to meet him again. Probably.

‘Mama, he said he’d smack me himself if he ever heard of me pulling another stunt like that,’ Toby told her as he ran towards her as if sensing her fury with the stranger might outdo her anger with him if he worked at it hard enough.

‘Good. If you truly ran under a horse’s hooves as he said you did then you should be beaten to make sure you never do it again,’ she said briskly and gave him a hard stare to say And stop right there if you’re thinking of denying it.

She knew her son far too well not to know when he was lying. However furious Magnus Haile made her with his last contemptuous look, she was still not going to fall for any of her son’s clever tricks.

‘I saw a puppy,’ Toby said sulkily, as if of course that explained why he’d darted across a road just as a high-nosed aristocrat was cantering down it.

‘Well, it won’t be the last one you see in England, so you had best get used to the sight if you want me to think you deserve a dog of your own one day.’

‘I want one now,’ Toby insisted.

‘I wanted an angel boy for a son and a house in France where we could stay all summer without a care in the world, but instead I got you and the next place we need to be on your grandpapa’s list. Life is hard, my son.’

‘Why can’t we have a dog?’

‘Because a dog needs a home and we move around so much the poor beast would never know if it was coming or going.’

‘Then we should stop moving around and make a home for it.’

‘You would be bored within a week, Toby, and I would end up looking after the animal. Now that’s enough of the whole subject, unless you would like me to spank you instead?’

‘No,’ Toby said, eyeing her warily.

‘Then accept the fact your hen-witted conduct makes it less likely I will agree to what you want instead of the other way about and stop trying to look like a waif. I am a wonderfully kind and patient mother and, luckily for you, there is far too much for me to do right now to see that you get your just deserts. We must find our carriage and get to London so Grandpapa can start work. I doubt even you will be bored for long in such a great bustling place as London, although I would quite like you to be right now, so you should spare me a few moments to repent your stupidity in diving under a moving horse when you are nearly eight years of age and quite old enough to know better. You are supposed to be bright, are you not?’

‘What good is one of Grandpapa’s mysteries without a dog to help us track down the criminal?’ her son muttered disgustedly and carefully ignored her question, as if intelligence had nothing to do with his longing for a pet.

Hetta silently gave him full marks for determination, although her headache wished he would accept defeat and be a good, quiet boy for once. Other women did seem blessed with adoring little angels for offspring, though, and sometimes they made her son seem a little devil in comparison.

And how boring such perfectly behaved little cherubs must be to live with, her inner rebel whispered.

She wished it would be quiet and go away while she got on with her headache and a nice cup of tea in a peaceful and preferably darkened room, but that was never going to happen, was it? No, now she must find Papa and get him and her son to London, then hope for a rest when they got there.

‘Where has your grandpapa got off to now?’ she asked, smoothing Toby’s wildly curling mop like the doting mother he certainly didn’t want her to be. She chuckled when he shrugged her off and made a wry face. ‘Find him for me and I might try to forget you put ten years on my life with your latest duel with death, my son, but first promise me never to do anything so stupid again.’

‘I promise,’ he muttered with a fine show of reluctance, so she wouldn’t think it was too easy. ‘The man scared me when he shouted, but I suppose he was right,’ he admitted at last.

Progress indeed, Hetta decided as Toby scampered off to do as he was bid for once and she organised the transfer of their luggage to the inn where a fast carriage would be waiting to whisk them up to London. At last Sir Hadrian emerged from a ship’s chandler’s shop with a neatly wrapped package in his hands and Toby at his heels like a well-trained sheepdog. Sir Hadrian Porter looked vaguely about him as if he might have forgotten something, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was. His smile when he saw his daughter was genuine, but Hetta did wonder for a moment if he was even capable of the sort of love she had longed for so badly when her mama died and he sent her back to his own mother like an unwanted parcel. Perhaps it was time she made an independent life for herself and Toby? But even though she had loved so many of the places they’d visited over the last seven years, none of them felt quite like home. She sighed at the drizzle now soaking determinedly through her cloak and put it aside as a problem for another day—this one had quite enough trouble in it to be going on with.

Chapter Three

If there was a lovely cool room with fresh sheets and a kindly breeze fluttering through it to be had in London, Hetta certainly hadn’t found it, she decided wearily, as the shabby old carriage rumbled along for a few steps, then ground to a halt again. She was being pushed from pillar to post in this confounded country yet again and the headache she’d come ashore with in Dover was still plaguing her three days on. Two days ago, her grandmother had declared she could not and would not endure her great-grandson’s presence in her usually quiet and stately home in Grosvenor Square a moment longer. Henrietta must send the ungovernable brat to school straight away, even if most of them were closed for the summer, or take him away. So Hetta had gone to crumbling old Carrowe House to ask her father for advice on finding suitable lodgings, and the new Earl of Carrowe’s sister, Lady Aline Haile, insisted they stay there while she found somewhere.

Then Toby managed to find a way up on to the roofs of the decayed old mansion and Lord Carrowe had been so furious with him they’d had to leave that house as well, so here they were, back on the road again. The traffic was stubbornly blocked on the way to their next temporary lodging for the night. Most businessmen still in London now summer had finally arrived seemed to be fleeing the city for the villages around it to spend time with their family. She promised herself she would find somewhere cool and clean and suitable for a longer stay as soon as she had her breath back and got a decent night’s sleep. She could use the few days Lord Carrowe had offered them at his mother’s nearly restored house to regroup and decide what to do next.