Temptation Read online

  Angus had been prepared for a reluctant, sulking female; he’d expected fights and even tantrums, and he had mentally prepared himself for them. But he had not been prepared for what Temperance did: She threw herself into society with a vengeance.

  And since the moment Angus had said the words, “Let me introduce you to . . .” he had not had a moment’s peace. From early until late, his house was full of visitors. There were girls fresh out of the schoolroom, giggling and nervous, who came to have tea with Temperance. There were women in their forties, unmarried, who came on Thursday afternoons to chat about books. Three hospitals in Edinburgh had weekly meetings in his house. Last week he returned home to find that his library had been recruited for bandage rolling. There wasn’t a moment when the household was awake that both parlors of his house weren’t full of young women who were having a meeting to discuss some good works they were planning.

  At the end of the first month, Angus had told Temperance to have her meetings outside his house. But Temperance had told him in the sweetest tone imaginable that a good daughter stayed at home and didn’t leave her family. Temperance said that she wouldn’t be a “dutiful daughter” if she flitted about Edinburgh unescorted.

  Angus had gritted his teeth, but his pride wouldn’t allow him to throw her or her zealously good friends out.

  Besides the earnest women, there were the males. As far as Angus could tell, Temperance had allowed the word to spread that she wanted to get married, even that she was desperate to get married. To Angus’s eyes, Temperance’s age was a handicap to a man who wanted to start a family, but Temperance’s beauty, her trim figure, and her inheritance seemed to make up for her age. The result was that there were as many males in Angus’s house as there were females. Boys and men, ranging in age from nineteen to sixty-five, were courting her.

  And, Angus thought with his fists clenched at his side, she fluttered her lashes, gave coy little smiles, and encouraged all the males to outdo themselves in their courting techniques.

  There was the time at three A.M. when Angus was awakened from a sound sleep by a young man who was serenading Temperance. He sang in a creaky, but very loud, voice while a band of Italian guitar players backed him up. Angus had to threaten to shoot them all to make them go away.

  Three times Angus had been awakened by rocks thrown at his window in the wee hours. He’d had to sling open the window and shout at the suitors that they had the wrong room. Once was a mistake, he thought, but three times? He knew that Temperance had purposefully told the men the wrong room.

  At work Angus was deluged with men using every excuse in the world to get in to see him to try to persuade him to put in a good word with Temperance. Angus had twice lost business because he had been so sure that the men asking about drapery fabrics were really after Temperance’s hand in marriage that Angus had shoved the men out of his warehouse.

  Now, looking back at his desk, he grimaced. And there were the bills. Temperance offered food and drink to every committee member, every do-gooder she invited to Angus’s house. She fed all the men who came to her, no matter how many times a day they showed up. Angus was sure that at least half the men “courting” Temperance were just poor students who were there for the free food.

  And what could Angus do? Send them all away? Every day there were letters in the mail telling him what a wonderful job he was doing with this committee and that committee. It seemed that Temperance refused to take any credit for herself but gave all the glory to Angus, saying that he was the one who really did everything. So if Angus threw them all out, he would look like a monster and he’d lose what business he had left.

  Besides the food bills, there were bills for Temperance’s clothing. She’d managed to spend thousands of pounds on outfits by Worth and Redfern, Paquin and Drécoll. At first it had bewildered Angus how Temperance could find the time to buy so much when she was constantly in one noble meeting after another. But it seemed that his busy stepdaughter could do half a dozen things at once, as Angus found out when he’d accidently walked in on a meeting of women dedicated to saving diseased cats or some such, and Temperance had been in her underwear trying on some lacy thing that cost the earth.

  There were bills for luggage, a couple of bicycles, a typewriter, even motion picture equipment, which she used to show historical films to a group of orphans who came every Friday afternoon and ate their weight in sandwiches and cakes.

  So far Angus had had to hire three new maids to help cook, clean, and serve.

  And in the six months since he’d been at home with his new bride, they had not had a single moment of quiet calmness together. He couldn’t eat breakfast alone with his new wife because Temperance always had some downtrodden group of women to join them. “They so want to meet the man who has made all of this possible,” Temperance purred at her stepfather.

  The result of Temperance’s vow to be “a good daughter” was that, one way or another, Angus was going to go bankrupt. He figured that at the rate Temperance was spending, he could last another two years at most. And truthfully, he was so agitated about his disruptive home life that he couldn’t concentrate on his business and consequently found himself making stupid decisions that were costing him money.

  On the other hand, if he threw all these soulful-looking, down-on-their-luck people out of his house, all of Edinburgh would rise up against him and he’d never have another customer.

  Either way, he was going to go bankrupt—or lose his mind—he thought.

  But for the last two weeks he had worked on ways to solve this dilemma. He could go traveling with his wife and stepdaughter. But who would run his business? He could give his stepdaughter her freedom, which, of course, he fully realized was what she was after; but Angus couldn’t do that. He had been raised in a time when men looked after women and he would never be at ease in his own soul if he allowed a woman under his care to live alone. For all that Temperance had become the bane of his life, she was a woman and she was his responsibility.

  On the other hand, his first responsibility was to his wife, and Temperance was making his household so chaotic that Melanie was a heap of nerves. So perhaps Angus should modify his original stand when it came to his stepdaughter. But to save his own pride, maybe he could work a compromise with her.

  And maybe he could use her ability to . . . to manage people, shall we say, to do something for him that he’d been working on for years but without success.

  So Angus had worked out a solution: He’d send Temperance to be under the care of his nephew, James McCairn, for a while. But he knew he’d have to give Temperance something to occupy her busy mind while she was there or she’d drive James mad, just as she was driving him, Angus, insane. And since there was a problem he’d been having with his nephew for a number of years now, maybe he could kill two birds with one stone.

  When the knock sounded on his library door, Angus drew in his breath and let it out slowly. The last time he’d had a private conversation with his stepdaughter had been in New York. And the result of that little talk was that he was now drinking half a bottle of Scotch every night.

  “Come in,” he said.

  “You wanted to see me, Father dear?” Temperance said as she demurely sat down on the edge of the chair on the other side of Angus’s desk. Still smiling, she looked at the watch pinned to her lovely bosom. “I think I have a few minutes before my next charitable meeting.”

  Angus knew that that watch had been made in Switzerland, handcrafted by a company that had been in business for over two hundred years, and that it had cost as much as the yearly salaries of two of his clerks.

  Might as well get to it, he thought as he stood and clasped his hands behind his back. How could his sweet wife have given birth to this virago? “I want to offer you a job.”

  “But a dutiful daughter would never take employment outside her home. A dutiful daughter—”

  He gave her a look that cut her off midsentence; then he saw her look down at her hands in an