Falling for the Marquess - Julianne MacLean Page 0,27
some would argue that I encouraged him, and maybe I did. My sister had just married a duke and I was feeling pressured to follow in her footsteps and marry well. I didn’t like it.”
“So, you rebelled.”
Clara felt suddenly agitated. Not at the marquess, but at the subject matter of this conversation. Why were they talking about this? She had wanted to bury it.
Yet she also wanted to be an open book.
The marquess raised his hands in mock surrender. “Please, I’m on your side. I fully support a good rebellion from time to time. Lord knows the world has witnessed a number of my minor social revolts. You didn’t marry him, I take it.”
“Of course not.” She chose not to reveal how close she had actually come to marrying Gordon. How her father had arrived just in time, as they prepared to board a ship ready to set sail for Europe, with plans to tie the knot in the middle of the Atlantic.
Thank God for her father.
“The story has a happy ending, then,” Lord Rawdon said. “And you had an adventure. Well done.”
The marquess was certainly relaxed about scandals and social blunders, which was probably a good thing. She doubted she would ever tell any of the other London gentlemen what she had just shared with the marquess. She couldn’t imagine how the Duke of Guysborough would respond.
“So, if your younger sister doesn’t succeed in America this Season,” he asked, “will she come to London next year as well?”
“Probably.”
He glanced in the other direction. “The newspapers were right. It is becoming a stampede.”
Clara threw him a cantankerous look.
He chuckled. “What? That’s not why you’re here? To bounce back from your close brush with social pauperism and, as you said, marry well?”
She shook her head at his insolent manner. “I am here to find a decent and respectable man to share my life with. It doesn’t matter to me if he has a title or not.” She shifted on the chair, raised her chin high, then turned to look at him when she sensed his amusement. “You don’t believe me!”
Still smiling, he shook his head. “To be honest, no. You seem ambitious. Like the sort of woman who wants the very best after narrowly avoiding disaster once before.”
“What I consider to be the ‘best’ might surprise you. Perhaps it has nothing to do with a mere accident of birth.”
She heard the sarcasm in her tone and knew she was the one being insolent now, but she couldn’t help it. He was always teasing her and trying to provoke her. She suspected he enjoyed watching her fight back. It amused him. Perhaps it amused her, too.
“I don’t think anything about you could possibly surprise me,” he said.
Clara lowered her voice and regarded him intimately. “It often feels like you are trying to steer me toward trouble. You say the most improper things. Or maybe it’s the way you say them.”
Other guests, two by two, began to trickle into the room. Clara sat up straighter in her chair, resolving not to get pulled into the tempting heat of this man’s flame just yet. She had to be more careful. She was still not entirely sure she could trust the marquess to be “decent,” therefore she could not allow her passions to take her to what might be a dangerous, ruinous destination.
“I would prefer if we changed the subject now,” she said.
Lord Rawdon stretched his legs out in front of him and began to look bored. “A decent and respectable man, you say. I guess that counts me out.”
He was unbelievable. “And you are no doubt relieved.”
“Intensely.”
The room filled up and they had to refrain from speaking so candidly with each other. It was time to stop, anyway. Clara recognized the marquess’s body language and the tone in his voice and knew that he was both pulling back and pushing her away. Their conversation had become too serious, and he wanted only to flirt.
She felt a stab of disappointment.
From everything he’d said tonight, it was obvious that he sought only brief, frivolous affairs, not deep soulful ones. He was not the sort of man who was suited to a marriage based on fidelity—like that of Clara’s sister, Sophia, and her husband James. They were devoted to each other in every way. They knew each other’s hearts as well as they knew their own, and they had no desire to stray.
Feeling discouraged, Clara watched the pianist take a seat on the bench. He placed his