Undoing of a Lady. Nicola Cornick

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       He had to speak to her.

      He looked again at the blank, dark windows of Fortune Hall. He could raise the whole house, of course, and wake everyone up looking for her. It would cause outrage, scandal. If she were found to be missing that would cause even more. Lizzie was already known to be wild. If word went around that she was not in her own bed in the middle of the night, gossip would simply speculate on whose bed she was in. Her reputation would be in tatters.

      He laughed mirthlessly. Reputation? Lizzie was ruined. If there was to be a child…

      His blood ran cold. He could not leave her to face that alone. He had never abandoned her before and he would not do so now. For the first time he thought about his rich marriage of convenience. He should have thought about it before since he was so desperately in need of money, but somehow his concern for Lizzie had blotted out all other thoughts. His marriage had been the perfect solution to all his financial problems. And Miss Flora Minchin would have been the perfect refined, biddable wife. She was Lizzie’s opposite in almost every way. He had never had the remotest desire to rip Flora’s clothes off and make love to her. No doubt she would have been utterly aghast if he had expressed such a desire. But Flora was rich—so very, very rich—and he needed the money so desperately. He was in a trap. People depended on him, his parents, his sister Celeste…The anger and fear tightened within him when he thought what might happen to Celeste if he let her down. He would never in a thousand years have thought himself the kind of man to succumb to blackmail and yet when his sister’s life, her future and her good name, were in the balance, he had not even hesitated. He knew he could not. It was his responsibility to protect those who relied on him. So he needed a fortune…

       Lizzie was rich, too.

      The thought slid into his mind and the relief flooded through him.

       He had to marry Lizzie.

      It was the perfect solution. It would put matters right. It would save her reputation, solve his need for money…

       Lizzie would be the wife from hell.

      The thought came swift on the heels of the others. The devil was in Lizzie, always had been, since she was small. Perhaps it was because she had had such a ramshackle childhood with a neglectful mother who had run off with a groom and a father who indulged her like a pet for half the time and forgot she was there the other half. When her father had died and she had come to Fortune Hall at the age of eleven to live with her half brothers, the sons of her mother’s first marriage, matters had barely improved for her. Neither of her brothers had any interest in her. Monty Fortune had engaged a governess for her to absolve his conscience. Lizzie had put mice in the woman’s bed and the governess had left. None of her successors stayed long, stating that Lizzie was unruly, undisciplined and out of control, a state of affairs that Tom Fortune in particular encouraged. Nat could still remember the first time he had met Lizzie when, as a university contemporary of Tom’s, he had come to Fortune’s Folly and seen a truculent girl in a grubby white dress, all tangled red hair and huge green eyes, climbing the trees in the home park like a tomboy. She had fallen out of an old oak tree and Tom had laughed and Nat had been the one to offer her a hand to help her get up again. And so it had started, with Nat easing Lizzie out of the scrapes she had got herself into, always there for her because neither Monty nor Tom cared a whit.

      But this…This was more than a scrape. This was a full-blown disaster. Yes indeed, Lizzie would be the most difficult, intractable, headstrong wife imaginable, the most unsuitable countess and in the fullness of time the least appropriate duchess in the kingdom. Marriage to her might well be a living hell. But hell was precisely where he was heading. He knew there was no escape.

      

      LIZZIE HAD CLIMBED IN at her bedroom window, scaling the ivy, reaching for the handholds that only she knew were there in the old stone of Fortune Hall. She had climbed in and out of the house this way for as long as she could remember, coming and going as and when she pleased, avoiding the discipline of her chaperones, such as it was, and with her half brothers in blissful ignorance of her behavior. Tonight Monty was still awake—when she had slipped past the window she had seen him drinking on his own in the library. There had been no sign of her other half brother, Tom, although the presence of another glass beside Monty’s on the table suggested that someone else had been there earlier that evening. Lizzie’s half brothers had patched up their quarrel now that Tom was no longer a wanted man. Monty had conveniently forgotten that he had disowned his brother and Tom had seemed prepared to forgive him. Lizzie thought that their rapprochement was largely convenience, since no one else in the village of Fortune’s Folly would give either of them the time of day now. Everyone hated Monty for his unscrupulous greed in applying more and more of his medieval taxes to fleece the populace, but people hated Tom more for his ruthless seduction and abandonment of Lydia Cole. Lizzie would not have set foot back in her brother’s house if it had not been for the fact that Monty had threatened legal proceedings against anyone else who gave her shelter. He had then neglected to find a chaperone for her with the result that Lizzie had no one to account to on nights like this. Or alternatively, Lizzie thought, one could say that no one actually cared what she did.

      She desperately wanted a bath. She was aching, her body sore there, between her legs, and sore inside. Not so raw as her heart, though. She could smell smoke on her clothes and in her hair. She could also smell Nat’s scent on her body like an imprint, but perhaps that was a trick of her imagination. She did not want to remember him holding her close enough to put his mark on her. She did not want to remember him inside her. She shuddered, closing her eyes, closing her mind.

      Cold water would have to do. She would have jumped into the moat when she had got back had it not been for the fact that she was terrified Nat would find her. Instead she lit one pale candle, making sure that the curtains were drawn so close that no light would show outside, and then she stripped off her tattered clothes. Usually she dropped her gown and underclothes on the floor for the maid to pick up but these were ruined, the laces torn, the hooks ripped out. That would cause gossip. That would be difficult to explain.

       Such passion. Such pleasure…

      She had thought that she would die from such pleasure. She had never imagined it, never dreamed it. Such bliss at Nat’s hands…She had felt as though her very body would melt, honey-soft, with satisfaction and fulfilment.

      She had felt a soul-deep contentment as well, but that had fled fast enough when she had seen the expression on Nat’s face. Some pain stirred deep inside her and she soothed it quickly back to sleep. No need to think of that. It was over. It was her secret and it would remain so.

      She bundled the clothes up carefully and hid them under a pile of blankets in the chest. She would take them out and burn them when she could, and watch the memories drift away on the smoke and ash. Nat would be married by then and gone from Fortune’s Folly with his bride.

      Avoiding her reflection in the long mirror, she started to wash herself with the cold water from the ewer and the cloth that was on the dresser. Her hair would have to wait until the morning. There was nothing she could do about that. She started with her face, the ice-cold water from the bowl shocking her a little, wakening her. Neck, shoulders, the curve of her arms…She paused as she raised the cloth to her chest, the irresistible memory intruding of Nat’s mouth at her breast, tugging, nipping, licking…Her body tightened, aching inside, wanting him again. It was impossible to erase that knowledge now. The hand holding the cloth fell to her side and she turned slowly to examine her body in the long pier glass.

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