Kitabı oku: «A Less Than Perfect Lady», sayfa 3

Kit handed her his purse, certain he would shortly regret it. Of course he had wriggled out of far tighter spots, but not encumbered by a half-conscious goddess.

‘Here’s for you, lads,’ the wench shouted and threw a couple of gold pieces and all the silver high in the air so that it scattered round the room.

As fighting broke out, she grabbed the swaying Venus by her other arm and towed her away from the wife-seller who was now striving vainly against the surging crowd. Shouldering open the one stout door in the place, Kit gasped in air that might have seemed rank if he hadn’t just spent hours in a stinking tavern.

The cooler air felled his goddess like a hammer blow. Cursing bitterly, and not sure if he was more furious with her or himself, he swung her over his shoulder and started to run. He stood little chance of avoiding pursuit, so he had no choice but to run for his ship when the door behind them opened so abruptly Kit was surprised the bang didn’t shake the wretched place apart.

‘Run to the Ellen May,’ he gasped to the tavern wench.

The so-called husband was straw in the wind, but Kit’s rival in the bidding was a hardy rogue. Burdened with a drugged woman, Kit knew he would need a wonder to avoid a fearsome beating, especially when his tavern wench melted into the night. Nobody was more shocked than Kit when a rich contralto voice bellowed out, ‘Ahoy there, Ellen May!’ at the top of a very healthy pair of lungs. ‘Help us, oh, God help us!’ she managed in an ever-weakening voice.

‘Well done, Venus,’ he gasped

At the very least she had won them a few seconds’ grace as his pursuers tried to remember where and what the Ellen May might be. Kit took advantage of everyone to spurt towards the sturdy sloop, but he knew he wouldn’t do it when taverns along the dock emptied and their patrons joined in for the thrill of the chase. He had betrayed his lost crew and now would very likely be torn to shreds while his dockside Venus fell victim to the mob.

Then came the relentless beat of a drum and regular treads on the cobbles, a disciplined body of men approaching at a sort of running march and the warning cry, ‘The Press! The stinking Press!’ spread along the waterfront.

The dock emptied even faster than it had filled and Kit was left panting and spent, helpless to defend himself or the beauty in his arms. Years at sea loomed ahead of him, and heaven knew what fate his Venus would meet at the press gangs’ brutal hands. It wasn’t the hard work and indignity, he decided, but the loss of all he had fought so hard to make from nothing that galled him. His blue-blooded relatives would be proved right and Christopher Alstone would come to nothing, just like his father and grandfather before him.

‘Damned high-nosed Alstones,’ he rasped as he sank to his knees on the cobbles, and his fair burden stirred across his broad shoulders and moaned in what sounded like despair, ‘whole pack of them can rot in hell!’

‘Already there,’ he thought he heard her murmur.

Then Venus had somehow found the strength to stand and was swaying uncertainly on her own two feet when the tavern wench appeared out of the shadows and tugged at her hand again. For a moment they sketched a pantomime of urgency and reluctance as the half-naked beauty clung to his shoulder, and then she let go and was gone just as if she had never been. Winded and shocked as any silly beau out on the strut in the wrong place at the wrong time, Kit glared into the darkness and saw nothing but inky shadows and silent menace. She had left him to the mercies of the press-gang!

The memory stung anew as he came back to the present. She couldn’t have known his ship’s master had made as much noise and commotion as he could and fooled the crowd into fleeing from him and his crew. Somehow it still stung that he had rescued his Venus from an appalling fate and then she had blithely left him to his fate without a backward look. Then there was the fact that it had taken him so long to forget the wretched female the first time round, and now he would have to set himself to doing it all over again.

When he had steeled himself to do his duty as host and welcome his latest cousin back to the fold, he had been in danger of letting Venus fell him twice as he was transported back to that filthy dock, on his knees and almost in despair. Instead of the hoyden he had expected Mrs Miranda Braxton to be, given her fabled elopement and disgrace, he had looked down and seen his tavern goddess instead. He had even managed to convince himself he must be mistaken, until the sight of the so-called tavern wench standing bold as brass beside her, daring him to say he knew her, scotched that hope for ever.

The open and friendly smile that had curved Mrs Miranda Braxton’s lush mouth upward had almost charmed him all over again, until fury roared through him like a tornado. Then an image of the composed and lovely widow superimposed itself over that of his wild young Venus, with her heavy eyes and sensual smile, and desire had torn through him in a merciless fever. How he got through the next few minutes without either strangling the wretched female, or throwing her over his shoulder and carrying her off to the lofty luxury of his bedchamber, he couldn’t say even now.

Staring grimly into the glowing fire, Kit unconsciously tightened his grip on the brandy glass until the fine glass snapped and blood and spirit mingled when he opened his hand at last. So much for the fine control he had once prided himself on. Now all he had to do was to overcome this need to seize the witch and carry her off to some isolated lair where no one else would find them and he might be free of her spell at long last.

Even as he considered forgetting her, his lips curled into a sensual smile as he fantasised about Mrs Miranda Braxton, lying sated and sleepy-eyed in his bed. If he couldn’t force oblivion on his raging desire for her, he would see her so, he vowed to himself. Then he rang the bell to confess at least some of his folly and have his wound fussed over with due ceremony before the blood ruined the carpet. Oh, yes, he decided while he was waiting for the inevitable fuss to die down, before she left Wychwood the incomparable Miranda would be emphatically his and then he could set about learning to forget her once and for all.

Only denial had made her memory so potent that every woman he bedded was measured against an impossible standard of beauty. Well, this time his revenge would be sweet and very complete and Miranda Alstone would be his mistress before she left Wychwood. He had seen something of his own driven desire in her blue gaze before she veiled it and left the room with such offended dignity that he could not but admire her anew. The lovely Miranda did not want to want him, but she couldn’t quite help herself and eventually that desire would seal her fate.

That kiss should be a warning to him to let her go, for it had rocked his certainties and demolished all his defences. He should leave her strictly alone, but the yearning to feel her writhe in ecstasy beneath him all night long was powerful, and how the devil could he let her go back to her isolated Welsh valley once he had experienced such a luxury of the senses?

He decided Kit Stone was as big an idiot now as he had been that night he first cursed her loss so harshly. Then he had been one huge ache of frustrated passion, but this time he wouldn’t burn alone. Their first kiss had told him it wouldn’t take much persuasion to tip Mrs Miranda Braxton from cool sceptic into warm and very willing lover and he longed for that abandoned little sensualist as if he had only lost her yesterday, instead of five years ago.

There was a bright fire burning in the grate of Miranda’s old room and Leah was waiting with the promised tea. For one dangerous moment Miranda felt as if she was truly home. Then, remembering how effectively his new lordship dealt with such unworthy souls as herself, she shivered and wondered for a wistful, wasted moment what it might be like inside the magic circle she knew by instinct he would cast about those he loved.

‘I thought you were in a great hurry to put off your travelling attire,’ her maid chided, before falling significantly silent.

Surely Leah didn’t think she had lingered below out of some insane desire to cultivate the new earl’s interest?

‘I am,’ she insisted calmly and eased off her half-boots with a sigh of relief to prove it. Rubbing her feet to get some warmth back into them, she sank down in front of the fire and wriggled her cold toes in the welcome heat.

‘Ladies don’t sit on the floor,’ Leah rebuked mildly, before saying with apparent carelessness, ‘His new lordship’s a very handsome gentleman, don’t you think?’

‘If you admire that kind of dark, damn-your-eyes looks.’

‘As any sane female would.’

‘Then you’d better write me off as insane,’ Miranda told her firmly, recognising the calculation in her friend’s eyes, ‘his lordship will need to work a little harder to win my appreciation.’

‘Maybe,’ murmured Leah in an infuriatingly smug undertone and Miranda only just suppressed the urge to throw something at her.

‘Having behaved madly once over a handsome face, I have no plans to repeat the mistake,’ she said lightly instead, ‘and if I ever take another husband, I intend to make a dear friend of him first.’

‘That sounds a shrewd enough notion.’

‘Well, so it is.’

‘And awful dull, Miss Miranda.’

Part of her wanted to agree, but the Miranda of recent years overrode it, and wondered if there was a man alive who could persuade her to take another tilt at matrimony. Of course his lordship had no such honourable intent, or he wouldn’t have fallen on her like a hungry wolf. Even the thought of being more than friends with Christopher Alstone sent such a shudder down her spine that it convulsed her whole being and left her fighting a heady sense of promise. Experience told her it was a mirage, yet still her lips throbbed at the memory of his wicked mouth teasing and demanding there.

She moved a little closer to the fire and rubbed her feet in the hope that the movement would disguise her reaction to the very thought of being intimate with so much untamed masculinity from her shrewd maid.

‘Much depends on one’s expectations, I suppose, but have you found out all that’s happened since we left yet?’ she asked.

‘Even I need more than half an hour for that, Miss Miranda.’

‘You must be more tired than I thought,’ she said lightly, then insisted Leah went downstairs and took tea with the other upper servants in the housekeeper’s room. ‘For you’ll be busy enough later on and might as well indulge in a good gossip while you can.’

Protesting that she never gossiped, Leah went all the same and Miranda settled in the armchair by the fire with a sigh of relief. Obviously she was deeply attracted to the new earl, whether she liked it or not, and she was fairly sure that she didn’t. All hope of finding happiness with a man like him had died the night she eloped with Nevin, for she would never be his mistress and he would never ask her to be anything more. Heaven knew she had received enough dishonourable offers over the last few years to steel herself against another one, but this time, unfortunately, she would be fighting herself as well as the importunate gentleman in question.

Chapter Four

At least Miranda had had no illusions that there would be a true welcome awaiting her in the home of her ancestors when she set out on the long journey from Nightingale House, so she really shouldn’t be disappointed. Yet nothing could have prepared her for meeting the new Lord Carnwood, and suddenly she longed for her little sisters with a familiar pain she knew could never be soothed. Although she knew in her heart they were better off away from her, and from Wychwood at such a time, they were the only living Alstones she cared a snap of her fingers for.

Trying to think of them instead of a certain darkly handsome nobleman, she attempted to rest after that tedious journey in preparation for the ordeal dinner would certainly be. Every time she closed her eyes, images of a certain arrogantly handsome nobleman imprinted itself on her mind. All in all, it was a relief when Leah came back to begin the tedious task of dressing her mistress for a formal dinner.

‘His lordship’s expecting the lawyer at any minute and Mr Coppice was instructed to tell everyone not to stand on ceremony. Her ladyship will have something to say about that, I dare say,’ Leah observed as she set about the task of subduing Miranda’s hair to some sort of order.

‘The sky will fall before my aunt allows her standards to drop,’ Miranda replied wry as the fiery mass stubbornly crackled and curled even under Leah’s skilled fingers.

‘Good, I’m not having that high-nosed maid of Miss Celia’s looking down her nose as if I’m incapable of turning you out properly.’

With a militant expression Leah finally wound her mistress’s hair into a neat chignon and secured it firmly, allowing only one or two curls to escape and kiss her brow. Then she triumphantly produced the beautifully pressed lilac silk gown that Miranda’s godmother had insisted on having made up by her London dressmaker when Miranda put off her blacks and went into half-mourning for a man who had ignored her for the last five years of his life.

After Leah had gone to so much trouble to iron it, she could hardly refuse to wear the cunningly cut gown, but once it was on Miranda was beset by doubts. For some reason Lady Rhys would never be persuaded it was better for her goddaughter to dress quietly and do nothing to attract undue attention to herself, and this time she had clearly been determined on the opposite effect.

‘Nonsense,’ Lady Rhys had said brusquely when Miranda protested the gown clung a little too lovingly to her curves. ‘Hiding a fine figure and a lovely face like yours behind black crepe and that wretched cap is nigh on criminal. Kindly consider us poor souls who have to look at you for a change.’

Miranda cautiously surveyed the end result in the full-length pier glass she had once vainly insisted on owning, so she could survey her younger self with misplaced complacency. She froze as she recalled what a vain fool she had once been. Reminding herself stalwartly that a great deal of water had flowed under the bridge since then, she turned away to pick up the dark shawl she would surely need in Wychwood’s lofty hallways.

‘I look very fine,’ she admitted flatly. Leah just sighed and stood back to critically survey her mistress.

‘That you do. Time you put some flesh on your bones, though. The gowns you left behind here would go round you twice.’

‘You don’t mean they’re still here?’

‘In the clothes press, just as if you left yesterday. I don’t know how I am supposed to fit all your current ones in. Not that you have half enough of them to clothe a lady of fashion.’

‘Just as well I am not such a delicately useless article, then,’ Miranda replied stalwartly, but she found the notion that her grandfather had ordered her room kept as she left it less comforting than she would have expected.

So much love had been wasted in stubborn pride on both sides that she felt tears threaten, before she reminded herself she could not afford to indulge in sentiment. She had her aunt and cousin and a far more significant foe to outface in his new lordship before she could even think of doing that.

‘Do with my old gowns as you think best, Leah,’ she ordered. ‘I’m a different person from the one I was then, as well as a thinner one.’

‘I could take them in for you—fashions haven’t changed that much,’ Leah offered, in the teeth of her own interests. After all, discarded gowns were usually regarded as ladies’ maids’ perks.

‘No, I don’t care to be reminded of the past,’ Miranda refused with a shudder.

‘Mumchance in this place.’

‘True enough, but I want no extra reminders of my past folly and they are a young girl’s gowns, so get rid of them for me, would you, please?’

‘Of course, Miss Miranda.’

‘Thank you. You have always been a better friend to me than I deserve,’ Miranda admitted ruefully.

‘Nonsense, now get along out of my way, do. If I’m ever to get your things unpacked and stowed away, I need to clear the shelves straight away.’

Miranda thought of the quantities of over-trimmed gowns she had once thought essential for her comfort, and marvelled at such vanity.

‘Thank you,’ she said sincerely, mighty relieved to be spared the task herself, ‘and don’t wait up. We’ve both travelled interminably these last few days, so just this once pray don’t argue with me.’

‘If you promise to ring if you need me,’ Leah cautioned.

‘I will,’ she lied serenely. ‘Now go and charm Reuben out of his wits again and forget about your duty for once.’

‘A breath of fresh air before supper might just do me good, after being cooped up like a broody hen for days.’

‘I dare say it might, but don’t break his heart.’

From what she had seen earlier, the youthful head groom had matured into a very well-looking man during the years she and Leah had been away from Wychwood. Miranda knew her maid too well to mistake the gleam of interest in her eyes when they dwelt upon the suitably dazzled Reuben.

‘Just so long as you take care not to get yours broke either,’ Leah cautioned shrewdly.

‘I’ll guard it like the crown jewels,’ Miranda said with heartfelt ardour. Not that Nevin had exactly broken hers; more trampled on her pride and then smashed any remains to dust.

Kit allowed himself the luxury of lurking in the shadows for a moment as he watched the former darling of Wychwood descend the stairs like a fallen queen. The multicoloured mane he remembered so well was subdued and pulled back from a heart-shaped face that was now a little too calm and controlled, as if she had been chastened by life into hiding whatever emotions animated her. Those blue, blue eyes would still steal a man’s soul away if he only let it slip, but look closer and you could see a deep wariness. Impatient of just looking after so many years of not being able to touch, he emerged from the darkness and stood in the open space at the foot of the stairs, waiting for the beautiful Mrs Braxton to step into his web.

As Miranda descended the last few steps her heart thumped a tattoo she was thankful only she could hear at the sight of him waiting for her. She was conscious that the cunningly cut lilac gown emphasised the sway of her hips, the swish of silk against her long legs seemed very loud in the stillness and she felt that her figure was outlined rather too emphatically by the soft fabric that clung lovingly to every movement. For some reason she longed for him to see beyond the gifts nature had lavished on her, but knew it was too much to ask. Miranda tried to hide whatever regrets she felt from his sharp eyes.

In evening dress he looked even more magnificent. An immaculate black coat fit his broad-shouldered figure superbly, knee breeches and stockings only emphasised his leanly muscled legs. His snowy linen made his dark eyes and hawkish features more arresting than ever. She stepped down beside him at last, just in time to see a flare of heat flash through his dark brown eyes before he ruthlessly controlled it. It was just as well that she was a woman of the world, she told herself, for no unfledged girl could have stood her ground in the face of such an untamed rake.

‘We are both very fine tonight, are we not?’ she asked calmly enough.

‘As fivepence,’ the earl replied blandly and offered her his hand.

Stiffening her backbone yet again, she laid her gloved hand in his. Through the soft kid she felt his strength and sensuality threaten her self-imposed isolation. She stamped hard on the promise that threatened to surge into life between them once more. She could do this, Miranda assured herself, and raised her chin to challenge any resolution he might have to the contrary.

‘You’re even lovelier than rumour reported you,’ Lord Carnwood informed her and raised her hand to his lips with apparent sincerity, drat him.

The depth and range of his quiet voice reflected the mighty physique that produced it, but somehow she managed to blame the frosty night for a shiver that ran through her like quicksilver. She couldn’t possibly be feeling the warmth and threat his mouth promised through her supple glove.

‘Am I? Reputations often lie, don’t you think?’ she challenged him.

‘I always form my own opinions, Mrs Braxton, and once they are made I rarely find need to change them.’

‘Then I must argue for more flexibility of mind. It is the gift of great men, and should be cultivated by the mightiest of us. After all, Rumour seldom deals well with her victims, does she, Lord Carnwood?’

‘You may argue for whatever you please of course, ma’am, but we’re all at the mercy of our reputations, I fear, although I suppose we can prove whether or not they are deserved by our actions.’

‘Excellent, so pray let us join my aunt and set about witnessing that theory in practice, Cousin Christopher.’

With the very tips of her fingers brushing his offered arm, she let him lead her down the lofty hall to the state drawing room Lady Clarissa insisted on using, however few of them were assembled for dinner. Knocked off balance by the ridiculous urge to tremble at the contact of his firm flesh under her over-sensitive fingers, Miranda felt her composure waver for a perilous moment. She slanted a furtive look at the new earl’s impassive face and almost succumbed to an urgent desire to turn tail and bolt back to her room, declaring herself too tired to face this ordeal so soon after her journey.

‘Do the Reverend and Mrs Townley join us tonight?’ she asked more or less at random.

‘Not unless they have abandoned their new living.’

‘I suppose it’s foolish of me to think all will be as it was after so long.’

‘Not so very long, surely, Cousin?’ he replied with a quirk of his eyebrows that told her he thought she had been angling for that very compliment.

‘When a lady has as many years in her dish as I have, she eschews exact calculation, my lord.’

‘Nonsense, my dear. You can’t be much more than seven and twenty,’ he baited her with a touch of his initial hostility, as if he found her assumption of the air of a bored society beauty distinctly irritating.

While he was cross with her, at least he would not be slanting her any more of those disturbingly perceptive glances from his sharp dark eyes. ‘I could even be a little bit less,’ she said with a bland smile and hoped he had waited in vain for an indignant glare when he set her age five years beyond reality.

‘Age is largely irrelevant when experience is added into the equation,’ he replied cynically.

‘Now there, my lord, you are quite wrong. Age is never irrelevant and you may ask any woman between eight and eighty for corroboration of that particular truth.’

‘Thank you, I’ll take your word for it.’

‘My, that will be a novelty,’ she returned smartly and thought she had won that round, until she saw his mouth lift in a sardonic smile and knew it had just been a skirmish he thought too unimportant to contest.

By the end of it, though, they had reached the drawing-room doors and the butler nodded regally to the head footman, who solemnly opened the double doors as if admitting supplicants to the royal presence.

‘The Honourable Mrs Braxton and his lordship, the Earl of Carnwood, your ladyship,’ the butler announced, and Miranda wondered how long the man of power beside her would tolerate being announced as if he were a guest in his own home.

Lady Clarissa waved a regal acknowledgement from the largest and most comfortable chair in the room, staring at the newcomers in a fashion that would have been considered distinctly ill bred in a lesser aristocrat. Then a frown twitched her brows together, probably in vexation at the sight of her scapegrace niece dressed so finely and standing at the side of the heir as if she belonged there, so Miranda just smiled blandly under her basilisk glare.

Celia adhered determinedly to her sofa, while somehow finding the energy to smile a languid greeting at the new Lord Carnwood. She ignored Miranda regally, obviously satisfied that her warning needed no repetition despite Miranda’s position at his new lordship’s side.

‘Niece,’ Lady Clarissa acknowledged flatly, ‘you may kiss me now you are not travel-stained.’

‘Why, thank you, Aunt Clarissa.’ Miranda placed a peck on the cold cheek offered to her like a royal favour. ‘As I remarked earlier, you look well.’

‘I cannot return the compliment, but I suppose it is not possible to live the sort of life you do and not have it show in one’s face.’

‘What a fast existence you do credit me with, Aunt Clarissa,’ Miranda replied lightly.

‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ Lady Clarissa barked. ‘I will not put up with your impudence now, my girl, any more than I did six years ago. If I hear any more of it, I shall pack you off back to Nightingale House, and good riddance.’

‘I believe it is five years since I lived here, not six, and I am not here now by your invitation, but my grandfather’s, so you will just have to ignore me for the next few hours, will you not? After so many years of practice, I dare say it will come easily enough.’

‘Impudent hussy! If I had my way, you would never have darkened these doors again. I cannot imagine what Papa was thinking of, ordering you must be here before a word of that section of his will could be read.’

‘Neither can I, but I plan to restrain my curiosity until a more appropriate time.’ Miranda couldn’t be sorry for answering back, even when her ladyship was powered by fury to actually rise and ring the bell herself.

‘Mrs Braxton will be taking dinner in her bedchamber,’ she announced as the doors opened too rapidly for anyone to doubt the butler had been well within earshot.

‘Don’t trouble yourself, Coppice,’ Lord Carnwood intervened coolly. ‘Mrs Braxton is far too conscious of the extra work it would cause the staff to put them to so much trouble. Lady Clarissa overestimates the tiring effects of her long journey on her niece’s excellent constitution, do you not, ma’am?’

Lady Clarissa’s chilly grey eyes locked with the Earl’s fathomless dark ones, then fell before a more implacable will than even her stubborn one. ‘Apparently,’ she conceded as if it might choke her. ‘You may go, Coppice, unless dinner is ready?’

‘Not quite, my lady.’

‘Then you had better find out what is delaying both Cook and our guests, had you not?’

Lord Carnwood let that ungracious order pass. From the look Coppice sent him and the faint shake of his dark head, Miranda doubted it would be carried out anyway.

As the doors shut behind Coppice, Lady Clarissa glared at her erring niece with a venom that would have set the gauche Miranda of five years ago trembling in her satin evening shoes. Now she returned her aunt’s hard look with an insincere smile, before subsiding on to a gilt chair at a healthy distance from the roaring fire.

Celia continued to stare into the fire as if she was lost in a world of her own. Miranda draped herself across the chair in imitation of a notorious beauty she had met scandalising a neighbour’s party she once attended with her grandfather, before she became notorious herself, of course. Having been given a bad name, she might as well hang herself in style.

Ignoring both Celia and the artistically draped Miranda, Lord Carnwood engaged Lady Clarissa in stilted conversation. Miranda was annoyed to find that she was so attuned to the dark timbres of his voice, even across the formality of this great room, that she missed not a single word he said.

It was a relief to hear voices in the hall just before the doors opened to admit her grandfather’s middle-aged lawyer, along with a handsome couple possibly ten years older than she was herself. When she was introduced to the Reverend Draycott and his lively wife, Miranda soon decided she preferred them to the stuffy couple who had inhabited Wychwood Rectory when she was a girl. She detected none of the sour disapproval she would have met from the Reverend and Mrs Townley for her sins, so she sincerely hoped they were not ignorant of them.

The Earl of Carnwood greeted his guests genially, but Lady Clarissa managed only a stiff nod in the lawyer’s direction as Celia pretended to be lost in a world of her own. Unable to watch another greeted as uncivilly as she had been herself, Miranda gave him a warm smile.

‘Mr Poulson, I hope you are recovered from your journey?’

‘As much as can be expected at my age,’ the rotund little man replied with a self-deprecating smile. ‘Fancy you remembering my name after all these years, Mrs Braxton.’

‘Since you used to give us children peppermint drops whenever you came to visit Grandpapa, I was very unlikely to forget it, sir.’

‘So I did! Those were happier times for us all, were they not?’

‘Indeed they were—would that we had them back again.’

For a brief minute Miranda allowed herself the indulgence of the might have been. If only her brother had not caught an epidemic fever at school, and come home so weakened he had to be accompanied by a tutor. If only she had listened to Grandfather’s fierce pronouncements on her infatuation with Nevin Braxton, said tutor, and, above all, if only Jack had not died weeks after her defection. Of all her regrets, that was the heaviest of all, she realised now—it far outran the thought that, if Jack had been here, she would not have to steel herself to avoid Christopher Alstone’s eye whenever possible.