Once a Mistress

by Rebecca Hagan Lee

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all

  its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

  Edmund Burke, 1729—1797

  Wren awoke with a start. She opened her eyes and discovered that she was lying on her side on the blanket with her face pillowed against a firmly muscled thigh fashionably covered in buff-colored breeches. She stared down the length of the gentleman’s leg and noted the glossy black leather Hessian boot gloving his well-molded calf and his foot. Her heart thudded in her chest and her blood roared in her ears as she struggled to sit up.

  “Easy, Kathryn. Stay where you are. It’s all right.” His voice was warm and familiar and as soothing as the touch of his hand on her hair.

  She relaxed, rolled onto her back, and smiled. Looking up at him seemed the most natural thing in the world. “What happened?”

  Drew leaned forward and returned her smile. Feeling an almost overwhelming urge to kiss her, he bent close enough to feel the whisper of her breath against his mouth. He paused, waiting for some sign that she wanted him to continue. But she didn’t seem to notice his desire, so Drew sat back and answered her question with words instead of kisses. “You were tired. You fell asleep.”

  “How long?” Her throat was dry and scratchy and her voice sounded foreign to her ears.

  He looked up to gauge the position of the sun. “An hour or so.”

  Still too languid to move, Wren covered her eyes with her forearm and groaned. “I can’t imagine what came over me.”

  He shifted his weight and stretched his arms over his head. “I’d like to think you enjoyed my company,” he said wryly. “But it was probably the wine.” He yawned. “See? There’s no need to be embarrassed. We shared a meal, a bottle of wine, and a sleepless night. It’s perfectly natural for you to need a nap. I was tempted to curl up beside you and take one myself.”

  “Why didn’t you?” She surprised herself with the question and he surprised her even more with his answer.

  “Who would have watched over you and kept you safe from roving packs of foxhounds and their owners?”

  “Margo’s not here,” she said. “I’m safe from all foxhounds and their owners.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.” His voice was low and husky, filled with meaning. “Margo may be a huge temptation for the hounds to resist, but I guarantee that finding you here like this—seeing you like this”—Drew slid his hand down her skirts, smoothing them over her knees and calves, covering the soft purple blooms and the delicately rendered butterflies peeking from among the tangle of pale green vines winding their way up her black silk stockings—“would be an even bigger temptation for the hunters.”

  Drew frowned. Those stockings of Wren’s were a world of temptation in themselves. He’d accidentally revealed them when her skirts had become twisted around her legs when she turned in her sleep. He had grabbed hold of them and tugged the fabric loose, intending only to untangle her but managing to expose the enticing length of her legs and hidden artwork in the process.

  The timbre of his voice and the expression on his face alarmed her. She stiffened instantly.

  So did he. But for an entirely different reason.

  “This was a mistake.” Wren scrambled off his lap and onto her knees. She haphazardly gathered her pens and charcoal and began shoving them into her knapsack. Drew had behaved in a gentlemanly fashion by watching over her and making certain that her black muslin skirts kept her decently covered, but that didn’t change the fact that she had been sleeping on a blanket miles away from the main house oblivious to the world around her. “I didn’t think about the hunters. I didn’t realize…” She glanced around. “I’ve always felt safe here, but now…” If Drew hadn’t been there she would have been alone and helpless, completely vulnerable to anything or anyone who happened along.

  She reached for her sketchbook, but Drew intercepted her, covering her hand with his own. “There’s no reason for you to be alarmed. You weren’t alone. You were safe here with me.”

  Wren shivered in reaction. He’d protected her from trespassers. But he had made no secret of the fact that he wanted her for himself. Who was going to keep her safe from him? Who was going to keep Drew Ramsey from taking what he wanted?

  Drew let out an exasperated sigh. When she looked at him like that with her penetrating gray-green eyes he almost believed she could see right into his soul. “You were asleep,” he began. “I didn’t see the harm…”

  But he had seen the designs painted on her stockings and those images haunted him. Drew couldn’t stop thinking about the exquisitely detailed features of the tiny blue-eyed wood nymph he’d glimpsed winking at him from behind a purple blossom decorating the inner portion of her right thigh, just below her garter. The images she painted on her stockings were a complete contrast to the precise, scientific color plates of the plants and animals she painted to illustrate Flora and Fauna Native to Britain or the canvas watercolors the British Museum had commissioned for its displays. The paintings destined for public display were true-to-life representations of nature, painstakingly re-created in exacting detail. Her private artwork was a lush, exuberant foray into the realm of fantasy, where wood nymphs and water sprites, fairy children and pixies and elves cavorted in flower gardens turned tropical jungles.

  “All right! I admit it. I apologize. It wasn’t the gentlemanly thing to do, but I took advantage of the opportunity to—”

  Kathryn wrenched her hand out of his grasp and scurried to the edge of the blanket as far away from him as possible. She stared at him with eyes as round as saucers. Drew wanted to check to see if he’d suddenly sprouted two horns and a pointed tail to go along with his other male appendage. He recognized that look of stark fear. He’d seen it on the faces of scores of men and boys on the battlefield, but never in peacetime and never on the face of a woman.

  He knew what she intended, almost before she did. He came up on his knees and reached for the hem of her skirt. He caught hold of her foot instead and her half-boot came off in his hand. In the blink of an eye, her demeanor changed from one of stark fear to one of deadly determination.

  She abandoned the idea of fleeing and turned to fight. Drew recognized the battlefield reaction. She’d decided to kill or be killed. Her demand, when it came, was cold and unemotional and all the more threatening because of it. “Kindly give me back my shoe.”

  She wasn’t armed, but Drew was careful to move slowly as he got to his feet and handed her the boot.

  Wren snatched it out of his hand. “What have you done?”

  “Nothing,” he answered softly.

  “Then why did you apologize?”

  “I apologized for not being more of a gentleman.”

  “How much of a gentleman weren’t you?”

  “I looked,” he said. “At your artwork.”

  She blinked at his explanation, recovered slightly, then skewered him with her big gray-green stare. The expression in her eyes contained a message more powerful than anything she could have said. It told him she’d been expecting an admission far worse than the one he’d given her.

  “You looked at my sketchbook? While I slept?”

  He shook his head. “I looked at your other artwork.” He winced when he realized she still didn’t understand, but he refused to lie. “The flora and fauna painted on your stockings.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

  Drew expelled a sigh of relief. Not because he’d rendered her speechless, but because she no longer looked terrified or ready to kill and she no longer looked at him as if he were a monster. He took that as a good sign and decided a little levity was in order. “I particularly liked the wood nymph winking from behind the purple flower.” He glanced up to gauge her reaction. “I believe it’s on your right thigh, just below your garter.”

  He grunted in pain as her half-boot bounced off his chest. “For God’s sake, Kathryn! All I did was look!”

  “How could you!”

  “Your skirts were tw
isted around your legs almost up to your waist,” he said. “I’d have to have been blind not to notice.”

  “A gentleman would have made sure I was decently covered.”

  “I did.”

  “After I woke up,” she accused. “After you looked your fill!”

  “Any gentleman who could make sure you were decently covered without looking would have to be blind, a fool, or a eunuch. And I don’t happen to be any of those things.” He bent to retrieve her shoe and handed it back to her. She flinched when he brushed her fingers, but Drew reached for her hand again anyway. Her hand was ice cold. Drew caressed the back of it with his thumb. “I know you may think otherwise, but your trust in me hasn’t been misplaced.”

  Wren snorted in contempt, but she didn’t pull her hand out of his.

  “I looked at your legs while you slept,” Drew said. “Where’s the harm in that?” He continued to soothe the flesh on the back of her left hand with his thumb as he tilted her chin up with the index finger of his other hand so that he might look her in the eye. “I looked, but I didn’t touch.”

  “You did it while I slept.” Her voice trembled with emotion and Drew was afraid her words would give way to tears at any moment. “You allowed me no say in the matter.”

  “Would you have lifted your skirts and shown me your stockings if I’d asked?”

  “Of course not!”

  Drew shrugged. “That’s why I didn’t ask.”

  “That doesn’t excuse you.”

  “Maybe not,” he agreed. “But it doesn’t make me a monster either. I looked at your legs. And while your legs are incredibly lovely, I was able to contain myself. The sight of your legs, or any other woman’s, no matter how lovely, isn’t enough to provoke me into tossing your skirts over your head and forcing my unwanted attentions on you.”

  Drew knew he’d said the wrong thing the moment he heard her involuntary gasp. He watched her eyes widen as she jerked her hand out of his grasp and backed away. Now he understood why she’d reacted so strongly. He hadn’t attempted to toss her skirts over her head and force himself on her but someone else had.

  Think, he told himself, think.

  “Kathryn.” Drew spoke in the soft, tender tones used to calm frightened horses and children. Stafford had been an old man, but it was possible. Why else would Kathryn have left him standing at the altar and married Stafford weeks later? “Did Bertrand Stafford force himself on you? Is that why you married him?”

  Kathryn shook her head. “Bertrand never… He would never…”

  “But someone did.” It wasn’t a question.

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. He knew the answer. She’d already told him.

  Drew’s palms grew sweaty and he began to shake. His heart seemed to plummet to the pit of his stomach and his gorge rose in his throat. “Kathryn…”

  Her gray-green eyes were filled with compassion. “It’s in the past,” she said. “Don’t ever speak of it again. If not for my sake, then for Kit’s and your own.”

  Wren dropped her shoe onto the ground and stepped into it, then quickly gathered the lunch basket, her drawing supplies, and her blanket and loaded them onto the cart. She climbed onto the seat of the pony cart, gathered the reins, and turned the pony for home, leaving Drew to collect his horse and follow.

  Chapter Twelve

  Things are not always what they seem.

  Plato, c. 427—347 b.c.