Proposals without an audience were preferable, he was certain.
And yet, still, she remained hesitant.
She caught her lower lip in her teeth, worrying it. “I thought I had given you my answer already.”
“You had. The wrong one.”
She sighed heavily. “My lord…”
“Torrie,” he supplied. “And you cannot think to tell me that wandering about London, with no home to call your own and scarcely any hope of finding a suitable situation, is preferable to becoming my wife. I am not a poor man, Miss Brooke. I promise to see to your comfort and provide for you. I promise to weather the storm of the scandal I have caused. What more can you wish?”
Miss Brooke hesitated, an emotion he couldn’t define flickering over her face. “What more, indeed? My life has been a series of disappointments, and the future you offer me is quite beyond the realms of anything I ever previously imagined possible.”
He didn’t like the solemnity in her expression. Nor the way she spoke about her life before. He wanted to know how the devil she had ended up where she was, a governess to Eugenia’s children, wearing ill-fitting and unbecoming gowns and hiding her hair beneath a cap. He wanted to know why she had been left to provide for herself, why she had no one to protect her. He wanted to know the disappointments she spoke of. But first, he had to rectify the damning wrong he had done her.
“Marry me, Miss Brooke,” he repeated, his thumbs traveling over the tracery of veins in her hands.
Such delicacy. She was fine boned and lovely, shapely where it mattered. Having this woman in his bed would not prove a hardship by any means.
The door to the salon opened.
And then, at last, the words he longed to hear fled his wary governess’s lips. “Very well, my lord. I shall.”
CHAPTER5
“His lordship asked that a bath be drawn for you, Lady Torrington.”
Viscount Torrington was seeing to her comfort. The gesture was a simple one. Likely, by rote. Still, it was…unexpected. It made a strange, fluttery sensation take root within her. One she banished promptly, knowing it was nothing more than utter foolishness to entertain any tender emotions at all toward him.
Elizabeth stared at the fire, merrily crackling in the grate. It was a beautiful, warm fire. Her chamber in the Worthing town house had been without a fireplace, and it had only been when she had been a guest with the Duke and Duchess of Montrose that she had discovered the divine indulgence of being warm. Not even Lady Andromeda, with whom she had been fortunate enough to spend her unsuccessful Seasons, had possessed the financial fortitude for excess fires and candles.
“Will you be bathing now, or would you prefer to wait, my lady?”
At the question from her new lady’s maid, she turned to the servant, blinking twice, then thrice. But still, the girl was standing there, her oval countenance pleasant and polite and eager to please. It was the title, more than the servant, however, that astounded Elizabeth the most.
Lady Torrington.
She was Viscountess Torrington. She had a husband. They had married that morning in a small, private ceremony attended solely by the Duke and Duchess of Montrose. It all felt like a dream from which she would soon wake.
Except, it was real. She had wed the viscount she’d once watched from afar. And yet, there was precious little joy, no sense of happiness to be derived from the fact. For he hadn’t married her for any of the reasons her former, naïve self would have wished. It had been, despite his polite arguments to the contrary, a marriage made in pity. An act of contrition for the tremendous scandal that had ensued from that perilous evening, thanks to the Countess of Worthing’s vicious tongue.
“My lady?” prompted the lady’s maid.
Ah, yes. The tub filled with sweetly scented water, gently steaming across the chamber.
“Now is fine,” she said, forcing herself to form words. To act nonchalant, as if marrying the lord she had longed for as a desperate, awkward debutante were a commonplace event.
Her confidence, never strong, faltered, making heat creep up her neck. Why did she make the effort of pretense? It would be plain as Elizabeth herself to anyone that she did not belong here. That Lord Torrington hadn’t wanted to marry her. That he had shown her mercy, offering her the trappings of respectability after her colossal fall from grace.
She ought to be swimming in gratitude instead of shame, but she couldn’t seem to keep her mind from wandering, worry from swirling. What must the servants think of her? Or anyone else, for that matter? She had met the domestics in a flurry of activity upon her arrival at Torrington House. The viscount’s mother, the dowager, had been present as well, just as disapproving as she had been for the days during which Elizabeth’s rushed marriage to Lord Torrington had been hastily planned.
She couldn’t blame the woman for her lack of enthusiasm at the match. What mother would wish for her son to enter a marriage whilst embroiled in vicious scandal?
“Would you like me to assist you, my lady?” the maid asked brightly.
She hadn’t had a servant to attend her so personally. Not ever. The prospect of the younger woman aiding her in her bath was foreign. Elizabeth wasn’t sure she could accustom herself to such luxury.
“Not this evening, Culpepper,” she said, keeping her voice soft to blunt the sting of her refusal.
