LITMIR.BIZ

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we must take it.” Emma steeled her resolve. She didn’t want to attend a ball. Ash would most certainly prefer a needle to the eye. But Davina needed this, and she couldn’t let the girl down. “You’d better go before you’re missed. I’ll call the carriage to take you home.”

      Minutes later, Emma walked a tearful Davina down to the coach and bid her farewell with a tight hug.

      After the footman closed the carriage door, Emma rapped on the window. “I almost forgot to ask,” she said loudly, as to be heard through the window glass. “Who is hosting this ball?”

      Davina half-shouted in reply as the carriage rolled away.

      Her answer destroyed Emma’s appetite.

      Ash confronted Emma in the entrance hall, just as she closed the door behind her. “Who was that? Why didn’t you wake me?”

      “There wasn’t time to explain.”

      “There’s time now.” He followed Emma as she mounted the stairs.

      “I’m sorry. There truly isn’t. I’ll need to pack my things, but that can wait until tomorrow. First I must come up with the gown.”

      “The gown?” Ash was utterly lost. What the devil was she on about? “You need to slow down and tell me everything. From the beginning.”

      “The girl in the parlor was Miss Davina Palmer. I used to stitch her gowns at the dressmaking shop. She’s young, she’s pregnant, and she’s absolutely terrified, with nowhere else to turn. I promised I’d help her. I have to help her. That’s why we’re going to a ball tomorrow.” She glanced at the clock. “It’s properly tonight, I suppose.”

       What?

      Once they’d moved into her bedchamber, he shut the door behind them. “I fail to understand how our attendance at a ball is going to help a young lady who finds herself in a such a situation.”

      “It’s quite simple. I’m going to invite Miss Palmer to visit me at Swanlea. However, she will need her father’s permission to accept the invitation. In order for that to happen, we need to make the acquaintance of her father. Therefore, we are going to a ball.”

      Emma passed into her dressing room and began rifling through her wardrobe, choosing a pair of stockings and silver-heeled slippers, then bringing them back to the bed. “Drat. If only the red silk hadn’t been ruined in the rain. I’ll have to come up with something else, and quickly. Thank heavens I ordered you a new tailcoat and black trousers when I chose your wardrobe.”

      Ash leaned his elbow atop the chest of drawers, exhausted. It was the middle of the night, after all. Perhaps he was dreaming all of this.

      “I’m not attending the Palmers’ ball.” He added, “Neither are you.”

      “It’s not the Palmers’ ball.” She paused. “It’s the Worthing family’s affair.”

      Ash required several moments to recover his powers of speech. “The Worthing family?”

      “Yes.”

      She wanted to attend a ball at Annabelle Worthing’s house. Jesu Maria. Unthinkable.

      She said, “Believe me, I’m not happy about it, either. Of course I’d rather it were anywhere else. But it isn’t, and this must be done.”

      She’d gone mad. He blamed her delicate condition. Apparently pregnancy took a woman’s sense and launched it out the nearest window.

      “Ash, please. I would never ask for myself. But Miss Palmer has no one else.”

      “What of the child’s father? What of her own family?”

      “She can’t confide in them.”

      “What makes you so sure?”

      “The fact that she told me so. She may be a young woman, but she is a grown woman. She knows her own mind . . . even if she does not understand the precise workings of human breeding organs.”

      “How would inviting her to Swanlea help?”

      “She wants to give birth in secret and find a family to raise the child. If she does so in the country, she can return to London for the Season next June with no one the wiser.”

      “No.” He pushed a hand through his hair. “No. Never mind the ball. You’re not going to make off with a pregnant young woman and embroil us both in a months-long deception. I will not permit it, and I will certainly not be a part of it.”

      “Ash, please. If you truly—”

      He held up a hand. “Stop right there. Do not play that game.”

      “What game?

      “The if-you-loved-me-you’d-do-as-I-ask game. Because I can volley it right back at you. If you loved me, you wouldn’t ask. If you loved me, you would trust my judgment. If you loved me, you’d give me back my draperies. It’s nothing but a weak attempt at blackmail, and if you’re going to sink that low, at least demand something that involves jewels or nakedness.”

      She found a pair of elbow-length gloves and added them to the growing heap on the bed. “One of us will have to give. We can’t both have our way on this.”

      “Then I get my way.”

      “Why?”

      “Because I am a man, and your husband, and a duke.”

      Emma responded to that the way he suspected she would—by skewering him with an irritated look. However, at least she stopped careening about the room like a billiard ball.

      She sank onto the edge of the bed. “I have to help her, Ash. You must understand why. That could have been me.”

      “Yes, but it isn’t you.” He crossed to sit beside her. “Be honest. Are you doing this for Miss Palmer, or for yourself?”

      “I’m doing it for Miss Palmer. And for myself. And for all young women who find themselves punished for no greater crime than following their hearts. Davina has only a few choices left to her, but those choices belong in her hands. Not her lover’s, not her father’s. Most definitely not yours.”

      “That would be all well and good, and I would not argue with it—if you weren’t planning to use my house for this deception.”

      “I’m not using your house. I’m going to use my house. The one you promised me from the beginning.”

      “What do you mean?”

      She gave him a matter-of-fact look. “You told me I could go to Swanlea once I was pregnant. Well, I’m pregnant.”

      Despite the early-morning darkness outside, for Ash the room was suddenly unbearably bright. Clocks ticked and the fire crackled, and the sounds were a clamor in his brain. He needed to shut them out. To shut everything out.

       Oh, God.

      Emma was absolutely correct. He had told her, in their first week of marriage, that she might go to Swanlea as soon as she was with child—and not before. And from that day on, she had worked quite diligently to make that pregnancy happen.

      “So this isn’t a recent plan you’ve devised. You’ve been planning this from the start.”

      “Don’t do that. Don’t fault me for having practical reasons for accepting your proposal, when you know very well you did, too. It was a marriage of convenience for us both, at first.” She rose from her bed and went to her dressing table.

      He passed a hand over his face. “This explains everything. Why you were so keen to have Swanlea readied by Christmas. Why you peppered me with all your little endearments. You told me you were infatuated. Carnally attracted to my body, the freakish horror it is. God, how laughable. You must think me a fool.”

      He

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