Mac stood on the threshold. He came inside, and Curry quickly closed the door behind him.
“Fellows looks like a drowned rat. Don’t worry, Ian. I took care.”
“It is kind of you to come fetch us,” Beth said, trying not to sound impatient. “How is Isabella?”
Mac looked blank. “How the devil should I know?”
“You saw her home last night.”
Mac turned a wooden chair around and straddled it back to front. “I got her into her carriage and paid her coachman to ensure she arrived home and didn’t leave again.” Beth frowned at him. “You didn’t go with her?”
“No, I did not.”
Most vexing of him. “She showed me the painting you did of her.”
“Did she? That trifle?” Mac spoke casually, but he tensed. “Not a trifle. It’s beautiful. She travels with it—obviously, or she could not have shown it to me. She takes it everywhere, she says.”
“Doubtless trying to find the perfect spot to throw it into the sea.”
“Of course not.”
Mac clenched the chair so rightly Beth feared he’d splinter the wood. “May we not speak of it?”
“As you wish.” Beth frowned, but she dropped the subject. By the time Curry had got Ian fully dressed and Beth had drunk a cup of tea, someone else knocked on the door.
Mac hastened to open it, but he slipped out into the hall without letting Beth see who it was. She heard a rapid exchange of French, and then Mac came back in with his pugilist valet, Bellamy, and a man in a long black-buttoned cassock and rosary.
“Good heavens,” Beth bit out. “Are we having a fancydress party? So many more people to slip out the back.” Ian turned around. “We are leaving by the front door. Be damned to Fellows.”
“I thought you said he was ready to arrest us.” “Why should he?” Ian’s voice hardened, and he glanced at her with a look she didn’t understand. “He has no reason to arrest a man for spending a night in a pension with his wife.”
Beth stopped. “But I’m not your . . .”
She took in the priest, Mac’s expression, Curry’s innocently blank face.
“Oh, no,” she said, her heart sinking. “Oh, Ian, no.”
Chapter Thirteen
They all stared at her, Curry with amusement, the priest with a worried frown, Bellamy nonplussed, Mac in impatience. Only Ian remained expressionless. He could be a man waiting for someone to tell him whether or not there were any eggs for breakfast.
“Why the hell not?” Mac asked. “Ian likes you, you get on, and he needs a wife.”
Beth squeezed her hands together. “Yes, but perhaps I don’t need a husband.”
“A husband is exactly what you need,” Mac growled. “It will keep you and my wife from running about in illegal casinos.”
“Mac.” Ian’s voice was quiet. “I’ll talk to Beth alone.” Mac ran his hands through his russet hair. “Sorry,” he said to Beth. “I’m a little on edge. Marry him, do. We need at least one sensible person in this family.”
Without waiting for her reply, he got the priest, the maid, Bellamy, and Curry out of the room and shut the door. Rain beat against the windows, the sound grainy in the silence. She was aware of Ian’s gaze boring a hole in her head, but for once she couldn’t look at him.
“I determined not to marry.” Beth tried to sound determined, and failed. “I decided to live as a wealthy widow, traveling, enjoying myself, helping others.”
Her words sounded feeble, even to herself.
“Once you are my wife, Fellows can’t touch you,” Ian said as though he hadn’t heard her. “His superiors ordered him to stay away from my family, and when you marry me, you’ll be my family, too. He can’t arrest you or harass you. My protection, and Hart’s protection, will extend to you.”
“It hasn’t much stopped him from bothering you, has it?” “He won’t be allowed on the grounds of Kilmorgan, and Hart will make trouble for him if he tries to approach you anywhere else. I promise you this.”
“Didn’t you say Hart was in Rome? What if he doesn’t want his protection extended to me?”
“He will do it. He hates Fellows and will do anything to thwart him.”
“ But . . .”
The suddenness of it all took her breath away, and she groped for arguments. She found one.
“Ian, there’s something you don’t know about me. My father was never a French aristocrat. He told people in England he was a viscount and they believed him. He could ape the manners of the nobility very well indeed. But he was as lowborn as any in the slums of the East End.” Ian’s gaze slid away from her. “I know. He was a confidence trickster fleeing arrest in Paris.”
Beth’s breath left her. “You know?”
“When I decide to learn about someone, I learn everything.”
Her throat tightened. “Do your brothers know?”
“I saw no reason to tell them.”
“And you still want to marry me?”
“Yes, why not?”
“Because I’m not the kind of woman a duke’s son should marry,” she almost shouted. “My background is sordid—I was little better than a servant. I’d ruin you.”
He lifted his shoulders in a very Ian-like shrug. “Everyone believes you the daughter of an aristocrat. That will be good enough for the stuffy English.”