A Beastly Kind of Earl

by Mia Vincy

  “I can’t take yours!”

  “Take it!”

  “How noble and self-sacrificing of you, my lord! To go without dessert! So stoic. So honorable. So—”

  “Shut up and eat your blasted syllabub.”

  With an impish smile, she did just that, with such blatant pleasure it was sheer torment to watch. Rafe gulped at his wine, but it failed to dull his desire. She seemed unaware of him, all of her senses engrossed in her sweet solitary pleasures. And he… Damn it, he was jealous! Of a blasted spoonful of blasted whipped cream!

  The glass scraped empty, she dabbed at her lips with her serviette and smiled at him.

  No, she didn’t simply smile. She cast her smile over him like a fisherman cast a net. It wrapped around him and made him long to draw near.

  He stood so abruptly the table rocked. “I bid you good night.”

  She leaped to her feet too. “Must you go so soon? We could…”

  “What?”

  “Um. Play billiards?”

  “You don’t know how to play billiards.”

  “If you please! I excel at the game,” she protested. “That is, I shall excel, once I learn how to play. I can teach myself, from a book, but it would be much more diverting to play with someone else.”

  Rafe wavered. It would indeed be a pleasant way to pass the evening. He would enjoy teaching her, watching her frown of concentration, her triumphant joy when she sank a ball. Perhaps she would need guidance positioning her cue, and he would stand behind her, wrap his arms around her as he showed her how to find the angle. He would press his lips to the fragrant skin at her neck, perhaps nip at her ear so she would leap backward in surprise, and then run his hands up—

  “Play with Sally and Martha,” he said.

  “They’re staff.”

  “I shouldn’t think you’d care about that.”

  “I don’t. But those are the rules.” She nudged the empty plate in front of her. “Rules are so unspeakably silly, don’t you think? You know, when Pa made his first fortune, we moved to a nicer part of town, and I wasn’t allowed to see my old friends anymore. So I made new friends. Then Pa lost his fortune, and we moved again, and my new friends weren’t allowed to see me. I started again. Made new friends. And again Pa got rich, and again we moved, and so on. All these rules about who can be friends with whom and who can marry whom, when we’re all just people, aren’t we? But not you,” she added with a wan smile. “You’re not people.”

  “Right.”

  Rafe spoke automatically, seeing only her faltering smile, the way she straightened her shoulders as if bracing for more disappointment. He dragged his eyes off her, onto the empty plates between them, the debris of their fleeting domesticity. He didn’t want to be yet another person shutting a door in her face. True, his original plan was to ignore her, but that was an eon ago, back when she was nothing but a name.

  “Never mind,” she said brightly. “I shall be quite content to read. How do you usually pass the time after dinner?”

  “I read.”

  “Then perhaps you might enjoy one of the books I collected today.” She gestured at a trio of books on the small table by the settees. “It makes no sense for you to sit over there reading, and for me to sit here reading. It’s a waste of…” She trailed off as she glanced at the empty fireplace.

  In cooler weather, it would indeed be wasteful to sit in separate rooms with separate fires. In winter, if they sat together reading by the fire, would the light of the flames pick up the mix of colors in her hair? Would her ears and nose turn pink when she ran in the snow? She would throw snowballs at him, of course, and he would not hesitate to retaliate; he’d aim to hit her, to make her squeal and laugh and jump back up to throw snowballs at him again. Eventually he would run at her, tackle her, and they’d fall into the snow together…

  “Have I said something amusing?” she said.

  “Hmm?”

  “You looked amused.”

  “Hmm,” Rafe said, and fell into the empty settee.

  Thea flew into a flurry of activity, carrying over their wine goblets, then dropping into the other settee and gathering the books.

  “What would you like? First up, Leonora by Miss Edgeworth.” She flipped it open. “Oh. Some sentences are underlined.”

  Rafe tensed and his heart skipped a beat. Blast. He should have foreseen this. Thea appeared not to notice, as she frowned at the page.

  “That reminds me. Today I saw a strange marking in the…” She flicked a glance at him, then returned to the book. “Never mind. Let’s see what the previous reader underlined. ‘What a misfortune it is to be born a woman!’ Well, that’s cheerful. And maybe not for you.”

  She tossed it aside and grabbed the next book.

  Rafe realized he was jiggling his leg and pushed his hand onto his knee to make himself stop. Stop. He had to stop this. Across from him, Thea chattered on, oblivious.

  “Here is poetry, much more manly: Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field. Flodden? What kind of word is that? Really, Walter Scott. Our intrepid reader has been here too, and has underlined… ‘O, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive.’ Um. Ha ha. Well.”

  Cheeks pink, eyes averted, Thea tossed the book at him. Rafe caught it in one hand and pressed a sharp corner into his palm.

  Thea picked up the third book and considered its plain cover. “I begin to get a sense of our unknown friend’s character. First, I deduce it was a woman.”

  “It was Katharine,” Rafe said abruptly. “The underlining,” he added, at her questioning look. “It was a habit Katharine had, underlining sentences that she said…” He hesitated. How to explain that Katharine believed the books were sending her messages? “Had particular meaning to her.”

  It was only to be expected that the subject of Katharine would arise, sooner or later, given Thea’s curiosity. Rafe watched her turning the book over in her hands, and he was still trying to decide whether to leave or stay, when she looked up.

  “She was your wife,” she remarked.

  “Hmm.”

  “Were you in love with her?”

  “We agreed no talking.”

  She opened and closed the book a few times before saying, “You ran away to America to avoid the army, and you took Katharine with you.”

  “Sounds like you already know everything.”

  “I don’t know whether you were in love with her.”

  “We were so young and…” No. Katharine deserved better than that. “Yes,” he amended softly, and let himself remember, the naive, adventurous eighteen-year-old he had been, and Katharine, a few years older and bolder. Yes, he had been young. Since then, he had aged a thousand years.

  Thea’s expression was soft now, and somehow that softness made it easier to speak.

  “Have you ever seen a wild horse?” Rafe said. “Katharine was like that. Reckless, untamable. She refused to marry any of the men Ventnor chose for her. Her family was staying here, and she overheard me arguing with my father about joining the army, and it seemed we had much in common. When I told her I was thinking of sailing for America, she wanted to come. We sat up one night talking, spinning out tales of the adventures we would have, and by the time the sun rose, we had decided to run away together. We sailed from Bristol two days later.”

  How full of hope they had been, he and Katharine, standing on the ship’s deck and yelling their joyful farewells to England, while the briny wind whipped at their clothes. A far cry from Katharine’s final days, when she cursed him and fled. When the ship’s captain married them, they had promised to look after each other always. A promise Rafe had failed to keep.

  “And then?” Thea prompted.

  “And then…”

  The conversation unfurled in his mind, the questions Thea would ask, the answers he would have to give, hauling up the unchangeable past like some slimy, crumbling remnant of a shipwreck, turning Katharine’s story into her post-dinner entertainment. Soon, Thea and her cur
iosity would depart for her next escapade, but those resurrected memories would remain; better they lay buried, where they were easier to manage.

  “She became unwell,” he finished brusquely. “It was better for her to return to England. She wrote to her parents. Ventnor came to take her home. The end.”

  “But you came back too, didn’t you?”

  Rafe stood and bowed, painfully aware of his comically stiff politeness. “I bid you good night. Thank you for your company. Now I shall retire.”

  He headed for the door, but with a swish of skirts, Thea skipped ahead of him.

  “Please forgive my impertinent questions,” she said. “It was thoughtless of me. My curiosity gets the better of me. I did not mean to upset you.”

  “I’m not upset.”

  “It’s just that it was all so long ago, and you need not be lonely.”

  “I’m not lonely.”

  “Very well.”

  Those cornflower-blue eyes called him a liar, but her expression was caring and earnest, her lips slightly parted. His cheeks warmed with the memory of her palms, and his fingers craved to caress her sun-kissed face in turn. The edge of her pale-green gown drew his eye to the swell of her breasts, to the fine muslin cascading over the promise of a waist and hips and thighs. Rafe wasn’t upset and he wasn’t lonely, he wasn’t, but he was a hot-blooded man and Thea was a captivating woman who made his blood run hotter; he had vowed not to touch her, but neither could he summon the will to return to his empty room.

  A knock at the door had them leaping apart. They loitered awkwardly while the servants cleared away their dinner plates. No one batted an eyelash at them; all were caught up in the fiction of their marriage.

  “Why was the countess not served syllabub?” Rafe asked the last footman before he left.

  “No!” Thea cried. “Please don’t mention it.”

  The man was frowning. “I don’t understand, my lord.”

  “The countess had no syllabub on her tray.”

  “Her ladyship eats her dessert first, my lord. The empty glass was on the sideboard.”

  Where Rafe had not noticed it. Well played, Thea. He pivoted to face her. She stood against the wall, eyes wide in feigned innocence. The footman hurried to escape, and once more Rafe was alone with Thea.

  Alone with her playfulness and mischief and delight.

  A giddy recklessness washed over him, and he was advancing on her before he even knew what he was doing.

  “You eat your dessert first?” he said slowly.

  She pressed back against the peach-colored wall. “The best countesses always eat their dessert first.”

  He used his arms to cage her in, which had the added benefit of keeping himself steady, for her hands were on his chest and his legs were ready to collapse, that he might fall to his knees and slide up her skirts.

  “And do the best countesses always eat the earl’s dessert too?”

  “The best earls always give the countesses their dessert. You, my lord, are an excellent earl.”

  “And you, my lady, are not an excellent wife.”

  Her eyes were so bright, her spirit so lively. It would be a small matter to take one more step, to brush her hair away from her face and slide his lips over hers. If he were a different man, he would.

  If he were a different man, he would tease and play with his bright, lively bride; he would revel in these prizes of pleasure and delight and joy.

  But he was not a different man.

  How did this keep happening? He kept forgetting. One moment he was heading for the door, the next he was thinking of taking her to bed. It was as though Thea’s presence transformed him somehow, but like all magic, it could never be real.

  That realization hit him like cold water and gave him the strength to wheel about and march out the door.

  But his own rooms had become echoing and dull, where nothing held his interest, so he sought out Martha in the parlor downstairs. She pointedly remarked on the countess playing billiards alone in the next room, but he pointedly ignored her, and demanded that she give him some bhang to test tonight. The way he was feeling now, a little pain-relieving intoxicant would go a long way.

  “There, that got rid of him,” Thea boasted to the empty settees, but the furniture was not fooled; it knew as well as she did that she had wanted him to stay.

  More than that. When she had stood so near to him, enclosed in his heat with her palms touching his chest, so near that his woodsy scent intoxicated her and his eyes saw inside her, she had longed to trace the contours of his body. The mysterious folds of his neckcloth had tempted her to strip it away and bare his throat, and his wicked coat taunted her with notions of sliding it aside. And the lingering sensations under her skin, where their single kiss bounced around excitedly, warned that she wanted him to do similar things to her.

  So. This was the sinful desire ladies were warned about. How right they were, to call passion dangerous, for it perilously banished rational thought. But after some coaxing, rational thought returned to remind her that Luxborough believed them married, and would be furious when he learned the truth. If she succumbed, she would ruin herself, and ruining herself would ruin her plan of restarting her life as if there had been no scandal.

  She calculated the days. Surely she would hear from Helen tomorrow? Surely. And tomorrow she would leave.

  Resolutely, Thea laid out the three books on the table, but they only made her think of Rafe and the story he refused to tell, so she decided to practice billiards instead.

  In the billiard room, she heard muffled female voices. Thea opened the door to see Sally and Martha sitting together in the neighboring parlor, one with sewing, the other with a book, and both with guilty expressions. Thea did not cast them out, and they did not invite her in, so she closed the door and played billiards alone.

  At one point, she heard Lord Luxborough arrive and exchange inaudible words with Sally and Martha. She froze, straining to hear, wondering if he would play billiards with her after all, but then he left and she heard nothing more.

  Finally, long after the other women had retired, Thea blew out the candles and headed back to her rooms. As she walked along the corridor, a movement in the courtyard garden caught her eye and she opened a window to look out.

  In the garden stood Luxborough, half dressed, his white shirt bright in the moonlight. Thea tried to puzzle out what he was doing, but he seemed only to be staring at a pink flower. He poked the flower like a perplexed cat, and then picked it. Moving as though his arms were unnaturally heavy, he plucked a single petal, which he studied from various angles. Then he threw it into the air and watched it drift away, before repeating the process with the next petal.

  With a shiver, Thea closed the window and kept walking, chilled by the baffling scene and the realization that the earl remained a mystery to her still.

  Chapter 12

  The next morning, Thea coaxed Gilbert into taking a rowboat with her on the lake, where her first efforts at rowing had them turning in circles.

  “Are they treating you well, Gilbert?” she asked, once she had figured out how to make the boat go straight.

  “Aye, this household’s as jolly as bonfire night. Mind the reeds there, my lady,” he said, his cheerful tone at odds with his nervous grip on the boat. “That Mrs. Sally, she knows how to run a house and keep the staff happy.”

  “She’s been doing it a while, I suppose.”

  “Not so long. It’s only a few years since his lordship gave her the position. Maybe he knew what she was capable of, from when she was his first wife’s companion.”

  One oar snagged in the water and the little boat lurched. “But Sally said Katharine never lived in this house.”

  Although no one had explained how Katharine’s books came to be in the library. Thea had not thought to ask.

  “Maybe not,” Gilbert said. “But when his brother was the earl, his lordship and his wife and Mrs. Sally lived in the Dower House here on the estate. A
ll three of them together, cozy as puppies in a pile of hay. Until his wife fell off her horse. They say she wasn’t right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s all they say, that his lordship’s wife wasn’t right. Then their mouths shut tighter than a poacher’s snare. Ah, maybe I should take the oars now, my lady?”

  Thea surrendered the oars and Gilbert rowed them back to shore. She was no longer enjoying herself anyway, and besides, rain clouds were gathering. And how could she think about rowing with this discovery that Luxborough and Katharine had lived in the Dower House, with Sally as Katharine’s companion, and the vexing puzzle of why neither Luxborough nor Sally had mentioned it?

  Sternly reminding herself that it was not her concern, Thea marched up the lawn toward the house. At first, when a horseman came cantering up the driveway, she paid him no mind. But then she realized from his saddlebags that he must be a fancy express messenger, and a peculiar jolt made her knees and elbows giddy. News from Helen! Then it was over. Already. Today. Of course, she had to leave, before she entangled herself further, but… Not yet. She wasn’t ready for it to be over yet.

  That thought was enough to spur her foolishly weak knees into a run.

  Rafe saw the messenger through a window, and he had barely thought, Thank God, it’s over, and Not yet, please, before he was tearing down the stairs, skidding on the floors in his haste.

  It must be news from Ventnor. Only Ventnor thought his communications so important he would bother with an express. Ventnor’s letter would inform him that the woman Rafe had married was not Helen, and Rafe must feign shock and send her away.

  But not yet.

  Besides, he’d not received confirmation that the trustees had released his funds. Or that Thea had her dowry. And where would she go without money?

  So no, not yet. He wasn’t ready yet.

  He charged out of the house as if he could somehow stop the messenger from delivering the news, just as Thea came running up the lawn, pink-cheeked and panting.

  “Give it to me!” she cried breathlessly, as the messenger reached into his leather saddlebag.