The Importance of Being Wanton by Christi Caldwell

Chapter 24

THE LONDONER

QUESTIONS CONTINUE!

Who was the father, brother, guardian, or worse . . . former betrothed responsible for the attack on Miss Gately?

M. FAIRPOINT

Emma’s parents had always been contrary.

When she’d wished to gallivant freely over the countryside, they’d insisted she attend her studies.

The moment she’d devoted herself to more scholarly pursuits, they’d insisted her interests were too rebellious.

It only made sense that the moment she discovered she was head over heels in love with Charles, they should resist her relationship with him.

It was also why, even with her head throbbing and the world still more than slightly unsteady, she burst into the drawing room to demand the meeting they’d refused.

Her parents, locked in one another’s arms, immediately broke apart, both of them flushed and more than slightly disheveled. “Really?” she demanded. “This is how you’re spending your time?” Emma locked her gaze on the mural overhead, ultimately knowing the image of her mother righting her neckline was one that would burn her eyes and sear her mind forevermore.

“Why are you out of bed?” her father asked in a display of his usual bluster and concern that would have warmed her heart if she weren’t outraged out of her damned mind with him and the traitorous woman beside him. “It is late, and you are unwell.”

“I am fine,” she gritted out. At least enough to take umbrage to everything Isla had shared the moment she’d awakened a short while ago. Emma stalked over, her strides too quick, and she made herself adjust them. “You are forbidding me from seeing Charles?” she demanded, ignoring the way her head pounded. The discomfort was easy to forget when presented with this . . . nonsense.

Her mother rushed forward and wrapped an arm about Emma’s waist. “Come.” She guided her over to the same seat where all that ugly sin had just been committed between Emma’s parents.

She’d burn that sofa herself before sitting in it again. Emma folded her arms. “Now?” she snapped. “Now is the time you opt to let Father have control of a situation?”

“I beg your pardon?” her papa grumbled.

Both women ignored him.

“Now is as good a time as any,” her mother said. “Given that you were nearly killed.”

Her father frowned. “And furthermore, it is more that I’m forbidding him from seeing you.”

“That is the same thing,” she said bluntly.

“Is it?” He hemmed. “I don’t see it that way.”

“Very well.” Emma clasped her hands before her. “Then I’d like to see Charles.”

Her father’s nostrils flared. “No.”

Emma threw up her arms, and immediately regretted that sudden movement. She winced and reflexively touched a hand to the knot at the back of her skull.

“You really should not be out of your bed, Emma,” her mother chided as if she were still the small girl who’d sneaked from her chambers and wandered the household in the dead of night, when everyone else was sleeping, in search of the night’s pastries that hadn’t been eaten.

“I am fine,” she snapped, then promptly winced at the dull throbbing from the place at the back of her skull where she’d taken that rock.

“That!” her mother exclaimed, pointing at Emma. “That is precisely why you should be abed.” Wrapping an arm about Emma’s waist and another around her shoulders, she guided her toward the door. “Help me see her abovestairs, dear heart.”

Emma dug in her heels. “I am not leaving.” She ground her feet to a stop, so that if her mother continued forward, she’d be forced to drag her down. “And I do not want to be shown to my rooms.”

Her parents exchanged a look, and then reluctantly, Emma’s mother shifted course and led them over to a different chair, and Emma sat. They stared at one another. “Are you mad?” she demanded.

They gasped.

“And I am not asking or using that word as any manner of insult. I am just trying to understand, because nothing else could explain how you, the both of you who know Charles as you do, who have been pressing me to wed him, should somehow come to believe that he could hurt me.”

When she’d finished her tirade, her father made to speak, but his wife held up a hand, and commanded the floor. “He has hurt you, Emma.”

Emma stared back, waiting for her to say more. “When?” she cried out.

“By not honoring your commitment years ago. By establishing a rival club. Should I continue?”

Her father cleared his throat. “Because she can,” he interjected, and promptly sank back in his seat when mother and daughter sluiced glares his way. “As you were.”

“Now is the time when you decide to hear things that I told you years ago?” Emma asked incredulously.

“Your father has it on the authority of someone he trusts, whom our family trusts,” her mother corrected.

“Who?” she demanded.

There was a beat of silence, the faintest look passed between them, and Emma narrowed her eyes.

“We’ve sworn to secrecy,” her father finally admitted.

This time her vision blurred, and it wasn’t her injury but rather the bright flash of rage that blinded her. Someone had come to her parents with information that affected her future and her happiness, and they would withhold that name?

Emma took a deep breath, and tried again to reason with her parents. “This is Charles. Your godson. The man you played billiards with, Papa.” She switched her focus to her mother. “The man whom you once told me scraped his knees and you helped tend him when he was a babe.” For a moment, her mother’s expression wavered, and Emma thought she’d reached them. “He wouldn’t do what you are accusing him of.” She pressed her point.

And apparently pushed too hard.

Her papa grunted. “Then the investigation will yield as much.”

“The . . .” My God. Emma couldn’t even make herself finish that. But she had to. “You hired an investigator.”

“We are not necessarily saying he is guilty,” her mama hedged. “Just as we are not saying you can never see h—”

Emma cut her off. “When?”

“And we weren’t rude. We were very polite.”

A humorless laugh spilled from her lips. “Oh, I hope you are prepared to lose your lifelong friendship with Lord and Lady Rochester, because they will never forgive this affront.” Nor should they. This was an unforgivable slandering of a man who was good and who was honorable.

Emma’s warning managed to leach the color from their cheeks.

“Then so be it.” Her mother spoke quietly. “If they cannot understand, then our friendship is not one that should be saved.”

“We have issued no public declarations,” Emma’s father insisted. “We are simply saying we wish to be sure he wasn’t. We want to be sure that if you intend to marry him, that he is someone who is absolutely safe.”

The viscountess smiled gently. “When you have a daughter someday, Emma, you will discover that you will protect your child at any costs.”

“Even at the cost of her happiness?” she spat, unable to keep the bitterness from that query.

“Yes,” her mother said evenly. “Even that.”

She came to her feet. “At every turn, you have decided what is best for me.”

“Emma—”

“No!” She shouted her father into silence. “You will listen to me. You chose my future when I was but a child. You decided who I should wed without a regard to how I might one day feel, or what I might want.” Her entire body shook from the force of the resentment burning through her. “And then finally, when I realize it is Charles I love and want in my life, you would keep me away . . . once more deciding that you know what is best.”

Her father made to speak, but the viscountess lifted a hand.

“We are finally hearing you, Emma,” her mother said with a calm that belied the lingering echo of Emma’s cries around the room. “We failed to see you were hurt before. Now, we are looking with clear eyes: after you ended it, he started a rival society. After all his scandals, this is going to be humiliating, and we would protect you from this humiliation.”

That quiet pronouncement brought Emma rocking back on her heels.

For that had been the same thought and fear she’d carried—that in giving herself to Charles, she’d be opening herself up to humiliation. Only to see . . . how very little that had mattered. “I don’t care,” she said softly, the truth coming to her at last. “I don’t care what people say or how it might look.” And there was something so very freeing in that truth. A lightness suffused her chest. So much of what had caused her humiliation had been the absolute absence of control . . . but this? Deciding her own heart, taking ownership of who she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, was the greatest control she’d ever had over herself. She smiled. “I love him,” she said simply. And to hell with anyone—her parents included—who might judge her for it. With that, Emma started for the door.

“Emma,” her father called out imploringly.

Emma ignored that plaintive entreaty.

“Let her go. She needs some time,” her mama said as Emma brought the door shut behind her.

Time was what they thought she required?

She was done with it. Done letting others choose her course. Done letting her parents decide her future.

She knew what she wanted, and more specifically who she wanted . . .

Her heart lifted in her chest, with the sense of absolute rightness . . .

A short while later, she had a bag packed and her crimson cloak donned, underestimated by her family, as she’d always been. Emma found her way outside and went in search of a hackney . . . finding one stopped just across the pavement. She bolted for the carriage. Calling up instructions, she let the driver take her bag, and accepted his hand up.

The moment the door shut behind her, she settled onto the bench and gasped.

A tall figure sat in the shadows, and she immediately brought up her reticule to bring it across the stranger’s face . . .

“Don’t!” he cried out, holding up his arms protectively. “It is me.”

Through the shock of discovering someone in her conveyance, Emma slowly lowered her reticule and stared at the familiar person opposite her. “Owen?” she asked incredulously as the carriage lurched forward. Oh, thank God.

“I thought you might be in need of . . . assistance.”

God love him.

“You scared the devil out of me,” she said, tugging off her gloves and pushing back her hood. “I am ever so relieved it was you.”

“Your parents are not happy,” he ventured, adjusting his spectacles. “With good reason.”

Good reason being . . . the erroneous thought that Charles was somehow guilty in what had occurred this day? A healthy dose of annoyance replaced any earlier relief at finding him here.

Emma had reached for the curtain, to tug it back and peer out, when Owen spoke.

“They are worried about you, Emma . . . as am I.”

Something in his tone froze her efforts, and she gripped the edge of the fabric before releasing it. And even in the dark of the carriage, she saw a hardness she’d never before seen in Owen’s eyes. A manner that she would have said him impossible of possessing . . . and it chilled her from the inside out.

Have a care with that one, Emma-love . . . You’re going to break his heart . . . That gent is eyeing you with romantic eyes . . .

Oh, God.Dread swirled in her belly.

And this time, she did grab for the curtain, and peered out at the passing scenery. “Where are we going?” she demanded; fury lent a tremble to her voice.

“He is not right for you, Emma. He never was. A man who would create a rival league to challenge yours, and who would”—color flooded his cheeks—“defile you in public as he did at Lady Rutland’s.”

Lady Rutland’s? Then the memory of what she and Charles had done and shared returned.

She blanched and dropped the curtain as if burnt.

“Yes, I heard the both of you,” he said matter-of-factly, drawing off his gloves. “And you should be fortunate I did. I sent our sisters on their way and stood guard to ensure no one discovered you so.”

Mortification brought her toes curling. That he’d listened in on something so intimate, something so special, left her physically ill. “Oh, my God.” Horror pulled that whisper from deep within her chest.

“You needn’t worry,” he said with a casual matter-of-factness. “I do not blame you. I know he seduced you.”

Emma considered her reply, and the man across from her. He believed he was right in this. He believed he acted out of friendship. He thought she was a woman incapable of knowing her own mind. Unlike Charles, who challenged her and embraced the fact that she made her own decisions. “I wanted to be with Charles,” she said. “I want to be with him still. And I intend to, Owen.” Emma rapped on the roof, urging the driver to bring the conveyance to a stop.

The hack, however, continued rolling along at a brisk clip.

“He is not going to do that,” Owen explained.

Her heart kicked up a beat as for the first time—in this moment and in all the years knowing Owen—she became genuinely afraid of him.

Emma made another attempt. “I command you, stop this carriage and get out this instant.”

“You don’t want me to do that. I know you are just proud, and like to be in control of your own decisions, but—”

God save her from interfering people. Only Charles had applauded the self-control she’d allowed herself these past months. “You presume to tell me what I want?” she demanded.

He chuckled. “Yes. It is funny, that. He said the same thing to me.” At the questioning look she gave him, Owen clarified. “Lord Scarsdale. After I confronted him, warning him away from you.”

“You confronted him,” she whispered.

Owen’s spine grew several inches, as if she were praising him for that interference.

“I did.”

And all the while, Charles had said nothing. He’d let her to her friendship with Owen, not interfering or seeking to influence her relationship with him.

How she wished he had.

But would she have listened? Could she have believed Owen would prove to be this man before her?

And here all these years she’d passed judgment upon Charles, and held Owen in the highest esteem. Pride—yet again it proved her pride which had been so blinding.

“Where are we going, Owen?”

“Scotland.”

“Scot . . .” A chill scraped along her spine as she frantically looked out the window at the passing landscape of the London scene. Familiar streets had since given way to fewer familiar ones on the fringe of London.

“What are we doing there?” she asked, even as she already knew.

“Why, I’m saving you.”

“Saving me?” she echoed.

“We are going to Gretna Green. I am marrying you.”

Bloody hell.