The Minx Who Met Her Match

by Christi Caldwell

  Her heart promptly sank as she came face-to-face with the unlikeliest of kitchen occupants.

  “Good God, Josephine, where have you been?”

  Bloody hell.

  And it was a welcoming party, at that.

  Henry and Nolan proceeded to launch questions at her. And, in the smallest of mercies, they didn’t allow her a word edgewise to answer.

  “We have had servants searching London for you,” Nolan cried. “My God, where have you been?” Stalking forward, he took her lightly by the shoulders and ran his hands down her arms as if assuring himself of her well-being. “Have you been hurt?” The threat of death blazed in his usually cheer-filled eyes.

  Through their questioning, Sybil remained silent.

  “I’m fine,” she said in soothing tones she’d used for the skittish mouser that had the roam of the house.

  “You are fine, Josephine?” Nolan’s face reddened. “You are fine?”

  Feeling eyes upon her, Josephine glanced over at her still silent sister-in-law. The other woman’s gaze took in Josephine’s wrinkled and wet cloak, and reflexively she scrunched her toes against the soles of her tight, wet boots.

  She knows.

  Unnerved by her sister-in-law’s all-knowing stare, Josephine looked at a far safer, and also far angrier, Henry. “Imagine my coming here only to discover you’d gone out today without your maid and that you hadn’t returned.” Henry released a sharp laugh, devoid of amusement. “And here I was, feeling badly about not allowing you to come visit my offices and having every intention of offering you the opportunity to involve yourself with my case.”

  So that was why Henry had come. He’d wanted her help.

  At last, Sybil spoke. “I believe this is a conversation best reserved for your offices.”

  “This is growing tedious and becoming too much of a common occurrence,” Henry snapped, and turning on his heel, he started from the empty kitchens toward Nolan’s offices.

  She hovered there, dripping water upon the stone floor, and followed her brother’s retreat with her gaze.

  All this time, she’d disavowed love and marriage. She’d relegated herself to an empty future, helping her brother in secret, thinking it was the best she could hope for. After all, unenlightened as Henry was, he would never have allowed Josephine anything more.

  Duncan, however, had shown Josephine that she could have exactly what she wished for in life, while at the same time being married. For marriage to Duncan wouldn’t ever see her taking on a submissive, subservient role.

  And I want that future.

  She wanted it all. Because it was no less than she deserved and entirely possible. She saw that now.

  As soon as the thought slid in, her heart slipped in her chest. Marrying Duncan was an impossibility. Because then she would have to tell him who she really was.

  “Jo?” Nolan asked.

  Josephine straightened. “I’m going above stairs and seeing to a change of garments. When I’m finished, I will join you and Henry.” Josephine stalked past a gape-mouthed Nolan.

  The moment she reached her chambers, she pushed the door shut behind her and scrambled out of her cloak.

  Her maid came rushing forward. “Oh, miss. Thank goodness. Everyone has been worried ill.” Muriel lowered her voice to a whisper. “And they’ve been asking me”—she stole a furtive look about—“questions.”

  Josephine’s stomach churned. “Questions?” she asked, presenting her back to the younger woman.

  Muriel made quick work of the laces along the back of her gown. Those same laces Duncan had undone a lifetime ago.

  “Questionnns,” Muriel confirmed, ominously stretching out that word. Flying over to the armoire, the loyal servant tossed the doors wide and fished around. “Where has she been spending her days?” Muriel ducked her head out. “The ‘she’ being you, miss.”

  “I gathered I was the ‘she’ in question,” she said, shivering in her undergarments, afraid to remove them because surely there were signs that she was no longer the innocent she’d been that morn.

  “Does Miss Pratt meet anyone in her travels?” As Muriel spoke, the girl’s words came muffled from within the heavy piece of mahogany furniture. “Has she ever been gone this long before?” The young servant emerged with a white dress, chemise, and shift.

  “And what did you tell them?” she asked haltingly, more than half fearing the girl’s response.

  Muriel bristled. “Told them, aside from a young girl you found and helped home, you keep to yourself.”

  She resisted the urge to plant a kiss on the devoted maid’s cheeks. If there were funds, a raise would have been warranted.

  “Out of those garments now, miss. You’ll catch your death.”

  With swift, perfunctory movements, Muriel helped Josephine step out of the sopping garments and into warm, dry ones. Next, she started on Josephine’s hair.

  “I’ve never seen your hair tangled so,” the young woman lamented as she dragged a brush through the wet tresses.

  Forty minutes later, properly put together, Josephine stood outside her brother’s offices. With a calm she didn’t feel, she reached for the door handle.

  Nolan and Henry stood shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the room.

  Oh, yes, this was dire indeed.

  As long as they’d been drawing breath upon this earth, never had it been side by side. And Josephine took the only course available to her—she took command of the discussion. “You may sit,” she said with a flick of her hand.

  “We may…?” His eyes round with confusion, Henry looked hopelessly at their brother.

  “Sit,” she supplied for him. “It is the act of bending one’s knees and placing one’s posterior upon some surface. Be it a chair, a bench, or some other piece of furniture. Though, I suspect, even a place upon the floor or earth should suffice.” Making for the sideboard, Josephine assessed the bottles and settled upon a decanter of brandy. Pouring herself a snifter, she raised it to her lips for liquid fortitude and found Henry’s and Nolan’s eyes like moons.

  “What in blazes are you d-d—”

  “Doing,” Nolan finished for Henry.

  His cheeks florid, Henry jabbed a finger in the air. “That. What in blazes are you doing?” he at last managed to get out.

  “I am taking a drink,” she said as if schooling a lackwit. Josephine widened her eyes. “Forgive me. Would you like me to pour you one?”

  Henry’s mouth moved, but no words emerged. He looked to Nolan.

  Her eldest brother shook his head.

  They went on that way for three more silent exchanges.

  Yes, if they were unsettled by her pouring herself a warming glass of brandy, whatever would they say if they discovered she was serving as a clerk for Duncan?

  As always, Nolan proved the braver of the Pratt men.

  “Since when did you begin drinking?”

  Ah, she’d been granted a reprieve, then. Keep them unsettled with one scandal for the other.

  “I haven’t taken up drinking. I’ve taken a drink.”

  “Of brandy,” Nolan said slowly.

  “Yes, because why should I not? It is…” She took a sip and promptly choked. Deuced awful, is what it was.

  Her eldest brother winged a single eyebrow up. “You were saying?” he drawled.

  How smug he was, but then, all men were.

  Nay, not all men.

  “Your being a woman in search of work is hardly an offense. Plenty of women work, Miss Webb.” He took a step closer. “In fact, I believe women are as capable as any man.”

  Josephine hid a smile behind the rim of her glass. She made herself take another sip, proud when she didn’t dissolve into another paroxysm. “It has a warming effect,” she said. Or at least, she’d read as much somewhere in one of the many books she’d picked up after her broken betrothal.

  “Either way, we aren’t here to speak about your drinking spirits—”

  “That transgression will be
a matter for another time,” Henry cut in.

  God love poor Henry’s wife. Josephine couldn’t even begin to imagine what marriage would be to a man so bent on proper that he’d contort himself to fit with Society’s mold.

  Unlike Duncan.

  Duncan, who with his views of women and their place in the world, had proved himself enlightened in ways she’d not known a man could be.

  Josephine set her snifter down hard on the sideboard. “And what makes you think that my going out and living my own life as I would is somehow a transgression? Because I’m a lady?”

  That effectively silenced the pair of them… for a moment.

  “Yes, because you are a lady. That is the way of Polite Society.”

  “As is honoring one’s betrothal contract, and yet, you didn’t adhere to that, Henry.”

  Color fired on her brother’s cheeks, and for a flash of a moment, there was a modicum of something she’d never thought to see in her elder brother’s eyes—shame.

  “That is what this is about, then,” Nolan said quietly.

  What did he think this was about?

  “Your wandering off. All these days spent by yourself, doing… whatever it is you’ve been doing, alone, it’s a product of Lord Grimslee.”

  Oh, God in Heaven. The silent prayer in her head hung unspoken on her lips. Why must it be that, after the end of a relationship, the world saw a woman as downtrodden and sad and nothing more?

  “This is your fault,” Henry said, pointing a finger at Nolan. “You and Sybil are so absorbed in your babe and in your far-from-lucrative ventures that you’ve neglected Josephine’s care.”

  “I beg your pardon,” she sputtered. Josephine, however, went ignored.

  Nolan stared back at Henry with stricken eyes.

  Of course, because he’d forever taken the guilt for all their family’s failings and circumstances. She gritted her teeth. “Enough,” she shouted, bringing both her brothers’ attention swinging back her way, where it should be. “Where I go or what I read or how I spend my time has nothing to do with Lucas.” That statement was met with dubious stares. “Is it so very hard to believe that I simply enjoy that my time is now my own? You needn’t worry about me. Truly,” she said for good measure.

  Nolan dusted a hand over his mouth. “Going forward, I want your maid and a footman with you at all times.”

  “What of a nursemaid?” she shot back archly. “Or mayhap a governess?”

  “This is about your reputation and your safety,” Nolan said solemnly. “I, as much as you, wish that Society had different expectations than they do, and yet, the truth remains this is the world in which we were born to, Josephine. You may not care about your reputation or marriage now, but someday, you will, and I’d not have you have regrets.” Not more of them.

  He might as well have spoken those four words aloud.

  Josephine tensed.

  Nolan came to stand before her. “I love you and care about you, and I don’t want to see you hurt again.”

  “Just as you don’t wish to see me contribute to the family’s finances or decisions related to business?” Before he could answer, Josephine whipped her stare over to her other brother. “Just as Henry doesn’t wish to allow me a role in working at his legal offices?” She looked to Nolan. “And so, in the name of love and caring about me, you’d coddle me as you do your babe.” Giving her head a frustrated shake, Josephine started for the door.

  “It isn’t the same thing, Josephine,” Nolan called after her.

  Stopping abruptly, she spun to face him. “Isn’t it?”

  She took the smallest of victories in his silence.

  Henry cleared his throat. “I should point out that I came to offer you the opportunity to assist me in my case.”

  What must it have cost her brother to state that before Sybil and Nolan in the kitchens and now again here in his older brother’s presence?

  She felt Henry awaiting her response.

  There was a time when she would have leaped at the opportunity to help Henry. She’d believed herself enlightened. Now, she saw that Duncan had given her that which she’d always wanted and had also believed impossible to find—an ability to have her ideas heard. Duncan took her help, and yet, he also challenged her and made her think in ways she never had. Theirs was a partnership, and that was the relationship she desired. The one she deserved. Not the one-sided one she had with Henry, who was ashamed of her but also desperate enough to take her help only to benefit himself. “I’ve no interest in helping you, Henry,” she said gently. “It is your case.” And she’d not betray Duncan or Lathan Holman.

  With her elder brother calling out for her, Josephine left.

  Chapter 15

  When Josephine returned to work, it might as well have been any other day before it.

  She had rushed into his offices, said but one hullo, and then disappeared into the newly reorganized room, where she’d been for two hours—Duncan stole a sideways glance at the longcase clock—and fourteen minutes.

  It was as though the intimate moments they’d stolen at Hyde Park and then in his offices had never been.

  They’d returned to the formal businesslike relationship between them.

  Balancing his pen on his left index finger, he fixed on the distracting task.

  There came a muffled curse, and maintaining that precarious positioning of the pen, he glanced off to the open doorway. And he found himself grinning.

  “Bloody hell,” Josephine mumbled.

  The lady was free with her curses. It was just one more way in which she was wholly different than the rigid, cool creature he’d married… and, well, any woman he’d ever known. His mother had been as careful with her language as a queen at coronation.

  Josephine exited the room so quickly, so unexpectedly, that he whipped his head down and returned to his most recent notes on Lathan Holman.

  The soft tread of Josephine’s footfalls drifted closer and then stopped on the other side of his desk. He made a show of reading while Josephine’s gaze burned fierce upon his bent head.

  “You don’t have to pretend,” she said without preamble.

  Calling forth the mask he’d perfected while trying cases, Duncan lifted his head. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I know you’re not working now, and I know you weren’t working before either.”

  And he, who’d made an art of words, found himself failed by them in this instant. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Your pen hasn’t moved in some time. Not with the continuous fluidity it usually does.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “About your work habits, or the fact that you’ve not written a sentence today?”

  “Both.” He bristled. “And I’ve written a sentence today. Several of them, which by the very nature of the definition, makes it a paragraph.” Granted, they weren’t altogether very good sentences. He made himself stop rambling.

  She dragged out the same chair she’d set alongside his desk, the same out-of-place chair that Duncan had—for reasons he didn’t himself understand—opted to leave where she’d put it.

  Josephine sat. “Is there a problem?”

  His ears went hot. Had there ever been a woman more direct than the one with her arms folded at her chest before him?

  “With your case,” she clarified.

  Oh, bloody hell. “Uh… yes.” Which wasn’t a mistruth. He’d not, after all, given a proper thought to his case that morning, which was certainly… a problem. “No.”

  “Ah.” Josephine sat back in her chair. “It is something else, then.”

  Of course she’d have latched on to that revealing statement on his part.

  “It is because we made love, isn’t it?”

  Duncan swallowed wrong and dissolved into a fit of coughing. She might as well have said the tea or the weather for as casually as she spoke about the passionate exchange that had robbed him of a steady stream of coherent thought since t
hey’d joined their bodies as one.

  With that same insouciance, Josephine leaned over and thumped him with an impressive strength between the shoulder blades. As he struggled for air, the minx stared on with mischief dancing in her eyes. “We… should speak on it,” he said when he’d finally righted his breathing.

  “About us having made love?”

  Us. With that one word, she joined them as one, lending an added layer of intimacy more dangerous than any moment that had come before… for it stirred a longing he’d not thought to ever feel—a yearning to share his life with another. Nay, it wasn’t simply anyone. It was her.

  “What took place between us was inappropriate,” he said quietly. “You are in my employ, and it was caddish and ungentlemanly—”

  “Those have the same meaning.”

  “Yes, I know. I—”

  Her eyes sparkled. The minx was enjoying herself immensely with this.

  “It was dishonorable,” he said flatly. “And I pride myself on being—”

  “Honorable?” she supplied.

  “Exactly.” He waved a finger. “Yes. That.” At least, that was the goal he’d set out for himself years earlier. After Eugenia’s death, his whole life, as well as his name, had been left in tatters. In chasing after her, he’d deserved the aspersions Society had cast upon his character. Since that night, he’d lived an entirely aboveboard existence. Not for himself, but for his daughter and her future. “As such”—his gaze slid past her shoulder—“I am not one who’d put his hands upon a woman in my employ.” Which he had done. And which, scoundrel that he was proving to be, he wanted to do again. Bastard. “As such, I should marry you.”

  His heart beat loudly in his ears. He’d proven rot as a husband. He’d not been able to make his late wife happy in any way. He’d likely fail Josephine… but the idea in the morn, with her before him, scared him… less. In fact, selfish bastard that he was, the alternative—not having her in his life—left him cold and empty inside.

  And with his own shock reflected in Josephine’s eyes, it was hard to say who was more stunned by that statement.