He’d grasped her wrist, stilling her ministrations and holding her hand flat against his stomach. She raised her face to his. He was smiling at her once again, gentle amusement in his expression. And once again the lightness of his clasp pierced her emotional armor as nothing else could have done. He must have been a dirty fighter.
“How is it that someone once married to what I presume was a man knows so little of the appetites of men?”
“I do!” she clipped out, stung. “Just because I choose to define liaisons less crudely than you doesn’t mean I am incognizant of them.”
He laughed, tugging her hand off his stomach and across his body, pulling so that she leaned over him, trapped. Startled, she looked down into his blue-green gaze.
“Fine. Then let’s further our acquaintance,” he murmured, and raised his free hand to cup the back of her head.
She could have broken free. He was weakened by blood loss and Grammy’s tea. He wasn’t even trying to hold her. Instead, he was persuading her, his fingers combing the pins out of her hair at the nape of her neck, his fingertips spanning her skull and coaxing her closer…closer…
His breath, warm and fragrant, fanned her cheeks and eyelids, drifting them shut. His mouth touched hers in a soft caress that set her lips tingling and then was gone.
“Oh.”
She felt herself falling, and he caught her, cushioning her against him before turning her deftly on her side. And then he was over her, above her, his mouth drifting down her temple, along the crest of her cheek, to the angle of her jaw, down her neck, and slowly, with excruciating purposefulness, to the shallow indention above her collarbone. The tip of his tongue swirled in a little circle there, dizzying her with the extraordinary intimacy of the touch.
“Oh!”
He chased moist, searing kisses back up her neck, touching his tongue into the corner of her mouth. She started, but he held her face for this new experience, languidly sliding his tongue along the seam of her lips, coaxing her mouth to open, to allow his slow, deliberate exploration.
His free hand moved down her arm to her waist and drifted back up again, brushing over her breast. Beneath her prim white blouse, her nipples ached at the scant attention and her back arched.
She capitulated without consideration, without hesitation, one moment sighing in his arms, soaking up sensation like parched earth did a spring, the next, wrapping her arms tightly around his neck to deepen their kiss, tangling her tongue with his.
“Good God, Fanny,” he muttered thickly, his hands bracketing her face, shaking with self-imposed restraint. “You’re—”
Thud!
The window shutter banged against the inner wall.
Startled, Grey jerked upright, putting himself between Fanny and the window. She peered past him at a huge dark feline shape standing on the sill, silhouetted against the bright sky. It was the carriage house tomcat. With a sound like dough landing in flour, he dropped weightlessly to the floor and paced toward them, an ominous sound rumbling low in his throat.
“For the love of God, what the hell is that?” Grey asked.
“It’s the carriage house tom,” Fanny said, watching it in stunned fascination. The animal was wild. It did not come into the house. Ever.
“What’s it doing here?”
“I have no idea. It’s feral. It’s never tried to come inside before!” She felt a frisson of trepidation at the creature’s inexplicable appearance.
Grey shoved himself upright and swung his legs off the bed as Fanny scrambled off the other side. The cat paced slowly toward them, its gaze fixed and hypnotic.
“Fanny?” Amelie and Hayden appeared in the door. “What’s going on?”
“Close the door and stay out,” Grey said. “There’s a feral cat in here.”
Amelie looked around and spied the cat, who’d stopped and was eyeing the newcomers. Her face broke into a wide smile. “It’s just the carriage house cat. It won’t hurt you.”
She hurried in, Hayden beside her, and would have dropped to her knees beside the huge beast had Hayden not stopped her with a hand to her elbow.
“No, Amelie!” Fanny cried out, rushing forward. “It’s not safe.”
Amelie laughed. “Oh, it’s all right. The old puss has rather a soft spot for me, doesn’t he, Lord Hayden? No animal would ever hurt me. Remember MacKee’s horses? And remember only last week when we were having tea with Mr. McGowan, Caesar let me pet him?”
Oh, God. The girl had convinced herself she had some power over animals. The only reason Caesar had allowed her touch was because Fanny had been listening raptly to the sweet strains of violin music on a phonograph recording Bernard had brought back from Edinburgh.
“It’s true,” Hayden admitted, looking none too happy about it. “The dratted cat almost let her pet it down in the garden.”
“Miss Chase,” Grey cautioned, “have a care. It’s growling.”
Once more, Amelie laughed. “No, it’s not. It’s purring!”
Disbelievingly, Fanny bent her ear and strained to listen. Good heavens, Amelie was right. It was purring, a deep, sonorous rumbling sound as rusty as it was oddly sensual. What was going on here?
She looked at Amelie. The girl smiled, confident and a little smug. She thought she’d bewitched the cat.
“Purring or not, that thing is doubtless a breeding ground for all sorts of disgusting vermin, and it is not allowed in this house!” Fanny declared. Snatching the blanket from the bed, she swung it out toward the cat with the flourish of a bullfighter.
Startled, the cat backed away.
“Git!” Fanny said, snapping the blanket toward it.
“Fanny, I can just—”
“No, Amelie. You cannot. This is a wildcat, not a pet. Don’t deceive yourself otherwise!” she advised with another flick of the blanket.
The cat finally realized it was not welcome. With a sudden fluffing of its tattered pelt and one last baleful glance backward, it leaped through the window and disappeared.
With a sigh of relief, Fanny turned around just in time to see Grey sit heavily back down on the bed. He was still bare chested. Still battered and rangy as that old tom. Still just as dangerous to her.
And like Amelie, Fanny thought, hastily snapping open the blanket and settling it over Grey’s all-too-obviously-male form, Fanny ought not deceive herself otherwise.
Chapter 28
Grey cast a jaundiced eye at Fanny surreptitiously re-pinning a loose coil of luxuriant black hair. Then, without sparing him a glance, she swept up the tray and hurried from the room, pausing in the hallway only to intercept Violet with a sharp word that sent the girl on another mission. With that, she disappeared.
Coward.
Grey stared broodingly at the ceiling while at his side Hayden and Amelie began yet another long-winded conversation wherein they yet again discovered they enjoyed absolutely everything the other enjoyed, including, but not limited to, Gilbert and Sullivan music, American penny dreadfuls, long walks on misty mornings, quince jelly, badminton, and Jack Russell terriers. The only interruptions to this inanity were the breathless silences during which, Grey imagined, the pair stood gazing raptly into each other’s eyes. Rather like poleaxed beef.
God, but young people in love were boring. Wasting all that valuable time exhorting one another’s poor taste when they could be, well, tasting one another.
His body reacted at once to the carnal thought, and he shifted uncomfortably beneath the blankets. The problem was, instead of growing gradually inured to the effect Fanny had on him, with each passing hour he simply grew more sensitive to it.
His skin anticipated her touch; he grew warm at the distant sound of her voice; he vibrated like a tuning fork whenever she entered the room. Unfortunately, his senses were not the only parts of him to grow alert in her presence. All it took was a look from her, the scent of her lavender-washed hair, the sight of the light sliding over her skin, and he readied like a schoolboy at a peep show.
&n
bsp; He’d kissed her only to spare her embarrassment. Her hand had been traveling too low on his stomach, and his kiss had been meant to distract her from seeing that portion of his anatomy that was becoming all too obvious. But once he’d touched her, higher motives collapsed under an avalanche of desire.
Oh, hell. What higher motives? He had no higher motives where Fanny Walcott was concerned. He never had. He simply wanted her—passionately, intensely, wickedly, wantonly, and frequently.
He supposed he ought to feel indebted to the damn cat for interrupting his near surrender to Fanny’s wiles.
What was he thinking? What wiles?
The woman was about as capable of premeditated seduction as Hayden was of wearing mismatched socks. In the few days since he’d been here, she’d pronounced him rude, out-of-date, and old; tried to throw him out of her house; and called his nephew a ne’er-do-well. Gads, she was magnificent! But these were hardly the actions of a woman intent on seduction.
And, too, he believed Fanny’s story about her marriage to Alphonse Brown and her subsequent involvement in his confidence game. He knew it was an inane belief on his part, another act of misguided trust, relying on emotions rather than facts, but ever since he’d come here, facts seemed to have lost their importance to him.
Besides, she had answered questions that had plagued him for years: If Fanny wasn’t the young lady she appeared to be, where could she have learned to depict one so proficiently? And if she was a lady, how had she ended up married to a low-life poseur like Brown?
Her explanation felt true.
But the best liars often stuck as near the truth as possible, and certainly Grey was honest enough to admit he wanted her story to be true. The question was, how much did he want it?
He twisted irritably. He could torment himself for days with such nonsense, and to what good? There was no certain way of knowing whether she lied, told the truth, schemed toward some hidden end, or was simply what she appeared to be…and just what was that?
“Bloody hell.”
“Oh, Lord Hayden, you’re groaning! Are you all right?”
Damn, his rasp of frustration had drawn Amelie’s attention.
“Fine.”
“I’m ashamed. We didn’t mean to ignore your discomfort,” the girl said solicitously. She had swiveled around and was clasping her hands to her chest in an agony of self-recrimination. When the bloody hell had she and Hayden become a we?
“I wasn’t groaning. I was muttering. Now, why don’t you two toddle off and leave me to a good doze?”
“Oh, no,” Amelie said. “Fanny made us promise to stay with you until she’s returned.”
“Impertinent wench. I am fine by myself. Better, actually, since I will rest more easily when it is quieter.”
“Sorry, old man,” Hayden said. “We’ll be quiet as church mice.”
And they were. They hovered at the foot of his bed, dividing their glances between pitying ones at him—oft accompanied by rueful shakes of the head—and longing ones into each other’s eyes.
If he didn’t still feel light-headed, he would have gotten up and thrown the young pup out by the scruff of his well-laundered neck. As it was, he endured for ten minutes and was just about to stop enduring—loudly and possibly physically—when someone called from down the hallway, “Miss Chase? Amelie!”
Bernard McGowan, flushed and disheveled-looking, appeared in the doorway. “Violet told me to come up here. She said there’d been an accident.” His gaze found Amelie. “My God. I thought… I was afraid someone might be hurt.”
Poor sot. Amelie had eyes for no one but Hayden and—only by reason of association—to some degree himself.
“Lord Sheffield risked his life to save ours. He saw one of the planters on the balcony above the terrace falling and shepherded us to safety,” Amelie said.
“I didn’t shepherd. I shoved,” he said. “That’s all.”
“But he was injured in the course of saving our lives,” Amelie asserted forcefully, ignoring his protestations.
She sounded like Fanny. He might like the girl after all.
“Not in the course of saving anyone’s anything,” Grey said. “Afterward. I was looking at the place from which the urn had fallen and was hit by another. Being felled by a flowerpot is hardly the stuff of epic poetry, Miss Chase.”
“Lord Sheffield is modest,” Amelie insisted.
At this, Hayden, taken aback by this obvious lack of insight on the part of his beloved, opened his mouth to correct her, but, upon witnessing the stubborn set of that same beloved’s little jaw, he apparently thought better of it. “Modest, yes,” he repeated.
“Bernard, I am so sorry not to have greeted you properly.” Fanny entered the room, her face wreathed in tender smiles. “Violet seems to think Sheffield is having a salon up here rather than recuperating.”
Twenty minutes ago she’d been on her back in his bed, returning his kisses. Enthusiastically. There was no possibility he’d imagined or exaggerated her response. So why the hell was she regarding McGowan so fondly? Maybe she thought she could retreat to safer ground. And who could be safer than McGowan? Ha. Let her try.
“Not at all, Mrs. Walcott,” Bernard said, stepping to Fanny’s side and taking the hand she spontaneously held out. He gazed warmly into her eyes. “I am afraid I didn’t wait to ask questions but came straight ahead.”
Why, the bloke was nothing but a cad, Grey thought incredulously. A thin-blooded, overstarched, broody-looking, stamp-collecting cad. He probably thought he’d marry the heiress, then enjoy the widow.
“You are too kind, Bernard.”
“I am just relieved no one was gravely injured.”
“I was injured,” Grey said.
Fanny ignored him.
Bernard raised his brow questioningly. A thin brow. Unmanly.
“Lord Sheffield will survive,” Fanny said.
Bernard smiled. “If there is anything I can do, sir, please let me know.”
Don’t call me sir, you little pipsqueak.
“No, no, McGowan,” he said. “You can return to your Yellow Camel Humps or whatever it is. No need to hang about here. I am in good hands.” He cast a lazily proprietary look at Fanny. “Very good hands.”
He waited, inwardly gloating and not caring the least that it was an unworthy sentiment, but Bernard, the dull-witted dolt, only nodded blithely. Amelie and Hayden had already returned to whatever little impenetrable sphere they currently occupied, oblivious of everything but each other. Only Fanny understood the innuendo. Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped momentarily ajar, then snapped shut.
“Ah, well, you’ll let me know if I can be of any service,” Bernard said.
Grey considered giving an even more provocative reply, but the quelling glare Fanny visited on him made him reconsider. The intent was to get rid of McGowan, not be asked to leave himself. “Too kind.” He managed a smile.
Now that he’d seen the heiress was well and Fanny was still doting, Bernard seemed inclined to stick around. At Fanny’s behest—didn’t the woman realize he was exhausted and did not want company?—Bernard took a seat and crossed his legs. “You say a planter fell?” he inquired seriously.
“Yes,” Grey replied.
“From the balcony rail?”
“Yes.” Go home.
“But those planters must be heavy. What do you think happened?”
“We don’t know,” Hayden awoke from his trance to say, his expression taking on the portentousness of the gravely concerned. “We hope it was simply an accident. There was no evidence of its being anything else.”
“A cat tipped it over,” Grey said. The moment the monster had made his ill-timed entrance into the bedroom, Grey’s theory that the cat had knocked over the urn became a certainty.
Amelie shot a quick glance at him.
“You think a cat tipped it over,” Fanny said.
Bernard looked from Fanny to him. “Am I missing something?”
“Mrs. Walco
tt believes someone might be responsible,” Grey explained.
“Really?” Bernard asked solicitously. “I thought no one took the letter seriously.”
“Someone wrote that letter,” Grey said. “What they meant to achieve by sending it to Collier remains in question.”
“Could it be Grammy Beadle?” Amelie asked, clearly nervous.
Grey reassured her. “As Grammy herself so deftly pointed out, she wouldn’t even know where to send such a letter.”
“’Taint Grammy. She wouldn’t waste ’er time throwing pots at ye. She’d hex ya and be done with it,” Violet said, entering the room with the makings for a light tea.
“The vicar?” Amelie suggested, clearly distraught.
“The vicar wouldn’t have the guts,” Violet answered, setting the tray down.
“Succinctly put, Violet,” Grey said.
“But then who wrote it?” Amelie asked.
Fanny was watching her young charge worriedly. He wanted to set her mind at ease.
“Anyone who knew about the odd terms of Collier’s guardianship. A barrister, a banker, a friend, an acquaintance—Collier has a regrettable tendency toward indiscretion. Collier may well be the reason the letter was sent, not you.
“What if someone wanted to interrupt Collier’s immediate agenda? What better way than to appeal to his sense of duty and force him to abandon his immediate plans by coming to Little Firkin? But instead of going himself, Collier sends me. Which means someone would be thwarted in his objective.” Grey paused, thinking. “When is the next train due in Little Firkin?”
“Tomorrow,” Fanny answered slowly.
Grey looked at Hayden. “We should be on it when it leaves. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that someone was trying to disrupt Collier’s travel plans, and since he is traveling to see to his various business interests, one of them is likely the target of whatever scheme is afoot.
“The authors of the plot may be revising their plan even as we speak. If we follow your father to the Continent quickly enough, we might be able to determine who they are and what their objective is. But we won’t be discovering anything here.” He pushed himself up on the pillows. “Make arrangements to leave as soon as possible, Hayden. We owe it to your father to try to discover the intention of this letter.”
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