The Games the Earl Plays_Heirs of High Society_A Regency Romance Book

by Eleanor Meyers

  "God, what a wonder you would have been with a proper season. Was there no money to send you?"

  "Rude, Brandt. That's hardly something you ask a proper young lady."

  "When I see one, I'll keep that in mind. I saw you crawl into a wall today. Should I not ask?"

  "No, it's fine. My parents died about the time it would have been discussed..."

  "And when they died, nothing else seemed important."

  "Yes. Exactly. And they settled a goodly sum on me, and whatever his flaws, Edwin would never let me go without house and home. At least, I hope he wouldn't, though he has written a few times in the past few years to see about my marriage prospects."

  "What's that?" Brandt sat up straighter and looked faintly incensed, though she had no idea why.

  "Well, I suppose he worries about me being lonely out here, or perhaps he has met a man he thinks might suit me..."

  "More like he wants to be relieved of a burden and thinks that is one less thing for him to worry about," Brandt said.

  Caroline felt a spark of anger.

  "Please, you have no knowledge of my family to speak of us this way! My brother has his flaws, but he has been good to me. I am sure that if he wants me to marry, it is due to the best of intentions."

  "When was the last time your brother came out here to visit you?"

  "What does that have to—"

  "Just answer the question. Was it in the last three months? Or the last six? Did you see him at Christmas or the previous Easter?"

  "Brandt, stop being awful!"

  "I know the answer to that, without your even telling me. The answer is no, he has not come to see you, because he was too busy wasting his money in London. I know this, you see, Caroline, because I believe I have seen him more than you have in the past year, and from what I saw, he is a wastrel, a man who risks things without knowing their true worth."

  "I don't have to listen to this! I may have you as a guest in my house—"

  "Which your brother lost."

  "But I do not have to tolerate you being awful about my family, my only living kin! Good night, Brandt, and I hope you have perfectly wretched dreams!"

  She slammed her journal closed and meant to storm past him, but instead, he caught her by the elbow. She tried to keep going, but it was like tugging against a brick wall, and impatiently, she turned to look at him.

  To her shock, there was an expression of actual repentance on his face.

  "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said any of that; it is none of my business."

  "That's right," she said, but her voice came out shaky and soft. Caroline thought for a moment that it was simply her nerves being shaken from yelling at Brandt, but she knew it was more than that. She was so close to him. The warmth from his hand seemed to bleed through the sleeve of her muslin gown, and when she looked down at him, his eyes in the dim light were nearly black.

  "I just... don't like to hear of you being taken advantage of or sold to the highest bidder."

  "Brandt, my life is hardly the stuff of penny-dreadfuls. My brother is careless, but he's not some theater villain. Honestly, you suit that description more than he does."

  "Is that so?"

  "You swoop down on the innocent girl and her elderly aunt, propose to turn them out of house and home—"

  "You are a young lady with an inheritance, as you just told me."

  "You might as well have a mustache to twirl as you talk about how you will ruin me in the eyes of all Society unless I do as you say."

  "Would you like me better with a mustache?"

  "Goodness, no."

  "Good."

  With no more warning than that, Brandt tugged her onto his lap, curling his arm around her waist and keeping her close.

  "I suppose I ought to make good on my villainous reputation then..."

  His mouth closed over hers, and after she stifled her mad urge to giggle, Caroline found herself swept away by the passion that always seemed to slumber between them. It woke up inside her like some kind of banked fire, ready to roar and destroy everything in its path if it couldn't get to who it wanted.

  It wanted Brandt. She wanted Brandt; there was no other way to put it. She craved his hands sweeping over her body, the way his tongue explored her mouth in that intensely bold and demanding way.

  She knew that this was how girls got ruined in the eyes of all Society, as Brandt had put it, but when his tongue breached her lips, she could finally understand how it was actually so very tempting. Right then, she didn't care if the whole village was watching through the window as long as Brandt kept touching her, kept kissing her.

  She shivered as his fingertips stroked the sensitive nape of her neck, his mouth roving down to kiss her throat.

  "God, you are delicious," he murmured, the masculine hunger in his voice waking her up. He was kissing her throat, and then he would quickly find the buttons that lined the back of her dress, and then, she knew that she would be utterly lost.

  "No! Stop that at once!"

  Brandt froze, but she could still feel the hunger in his body, the heat between them.

  "Do you really want me to?"

  No, her mind said, even if she said "Yes. This is indecent."

  Brandt allowed her to push away, the expression on his face inscrutable.

  Caroline took a deep breath, almost painfully aware that he could convince her to come back close to him with remarkably little effort.

  "I am going to bed, Brandt. I suggest you do the same. We have a full day ahead of us tomorrow."

  She expected him to complain about more work, or perhaps to brush her objections aside and keep kissing her. Instead, he rose and gave her a short bow, as utterly decent as if he hadn't been kissing the living wits out of her just a moment ago.

  "Of course, Caroline."

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  6

  CHAPTER

  SIX

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  "Have you happened to look up in the last twenty minutes?"

  "What a strange question, Brandt."

  "I notice you didn't answer it. Has it actually, then, escaped your notice that the sky is turning a rather dark and grim shade?"

  "You know, given what you have told me about hunting and all of the pleasures of being a gentleman, I would hardly have thought that you were going to fuss over a few drops of rain coming down."

  "We've been dealing with a few drops of rain all morning. That looks like it's going to be a true deluge."

  Caroline looked up at the sky, needlessly shading her eyes. At nine in the morning, the sky was already intensely overcast, giving it a look somewhat closer to early evening. To Brandt's wary regard, Caroline looked unconcerned in the extreme as they trudged along the path through to the deeper trees.

  "Well, even if it does start to rain, there are a few places to take shelter on our way to the abbey. It won't be so very bad, Brandt."

  Brandt almost wished he could be angrier with her. She had, after all, told him he could stay behind for her expedition out to the ruins of the abbey, even suggesting that he take his horse to town to explore the inn and the two shops there. Instead, for some reason, he hadn't liked the idea of Caroline wandering through the ruins on her own, no matter what she said she’d found in her ancestors' notebook.

  "I have a very good feeling about this," she said as they walked. "Great-grandfather's journal says that the abbey ruins have stood as they are for a long time; all of the Masseys knew about it, and there are some very particular sketches that were drawn by a Massey ancestor I found elsewhere."

  "And you think those sketches might have been a map to the treasure. Doesn't that sound rather terribly Gothic to you?"

  "Well, we Masseys are rather known for our taste for drama. And anyway, if someone has hidden a treasure, they must surely want it to be found, don't they?"

  Brandt was far from certain about that, but he didn't
say so. There was something in him, some instinct, that wanted to avoid crushing Caroline's hopes any more than he was going to when she gave up this mad hunt. Instead, he followed along after her, gazing up at the sky occasionally with some trepidation.

  The abbey was a medieval edifice that had been leveled to stones during the last conflict of Church and State. Caroline explained that it was part of Shawly Grange, and he wondered absently whether it was worth rebuilding. There was a tracery of walls where one could see the bailey and what he guessed was the place where services were held, but the only structure even vaguely intact was the bell-tower.

  When he saw Caroline eyeing it, Brandt shook his head.

  "Under no circumstances."

  "If it caught my eye, it could have caught the eye of someone who needed a good hiding place."

  "And it looks like the slightest breath is going to bring the place down to the ground. If you are going to go scaling ancient towers, you should not do it with a storm threatening at least."

  Caroline scowled at him.

  "I am not certain why I brought you along at all."

  "Because I will at least prevent you from killing yourself when you have burrowed halfway into a wall?"

  Caroline hesitated and started pacing along the outer wall. Brandt thought she decided to drop the question entire, but then she spoke again, softer this time.

  "Thank you for that."

  "What was that? I'm not sure I caught it."

  She glared at him.

  "I said thank you! Must you make everything an ordeal? I realized somewhat late last night that I never thanked you for what you did. You were right. I should have been more careful, and if you hadn't been there, I would have been crushed and perhaps killed for a bit of rotten butter."

  She turned back to the wall, but Brandt knew she wasn't concentrating deeply on the hunt, not when her cheeks were that pink.

  He hitched one shoulder against the remnant of a stone wall, watching her carefully.

  "You should have come to me last night."

  "Last night?"

  "When you realized that you were wrong and you found that you wanted to say you were sorry."

  "I'm sure you would have loved me in your room at four in the morning telling you that you were right about it all."

  "As a matter of fact, I like being told that I am right no matter what time of day it is, but the idea of having you in my room, late at night, when no one knows what we are about... I'll admit that holds some interest."

  She shot him a venomous look, but Brandt noticed that her cheeks were rosy and her dark eyes very bright.

  "My goodness, is this how you talk girls into your bed in London? I am beginning to think that the girls of the West Country are simply made of sterner stuff. I am not so very easily seduced."

  She turned back to the wall’s foundation, but before she could walk on, Brandt came up behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist. Her body was warm against his, and though she stiffened, she did not pull away.

  "What are you doing?" she asked, her voice not much more than a whisper.

  "Putting a little more effort into seducing you," Brandt murmured in her ear. "You should tell me how I am doing."

  Caroline opened her mouth, no doubt to say something tart, but then she gasped instead as Brandt leaned down to kiss the side of her neck. God, but she smelled good, and she tasted as good as she smelled.

  She shivered in his arms, as delicate as a little bird despite her fire, and Brandt grinned wolfishly as she relaxed back into his arms. His kiss trailed up the side of her neck to her ear, where he tested the sharpness of his teeth against her earlobe. Caroline made a startled cry that quickly turned into a whimper of pleasure as he stroked the very tip of his tongue across the sensitive skin before her ear.

  "Tell me how I'm doing, Caroline," Brandt whispered into her ear. "Should I be putting some more effort into it?"

  "You're… you're doing not terribly, I suppose..."

  "That sounds like a challenge."

  He turned her around, pressing her back against the stone wall nearby. Instead of being accusing or frowning, her face had a dazed look to it, dazed and, underneath it, a hunger that fed his own.

  Brandt couldn't resist leaning in to kiss her again, stroking the side of her neck with gentle fingertips as he did so. She tasted so good, and when she started shyly, timidly, to kiss him back, heat roared through him.

  "What a perfect girl," he crooned, and suddenly, her hands came up and pushed him away. Brandt stumbled back a step—Caroline was stronger than she looked—and looked at the redhead in surprise. A look of startling bitterness twisted her face, and she turned away from him.

  "Not very impressed?" he managed to get out. It was hard to think when every bit of his blood demanded he take her in his arms again.

  "In all fairness I was, until I realized it was just a game for you. My goodness, the idea of you calling me your perfect girl... Is that what you say to all of the young women you kiss?"

  Brandt shrugged, stung in a way that he didn't quite understand. He had always been a bit easy come, easy go when it came to women, and if one turned him down, well, there were usually a half-dozen more who wouldn't. It should not have hurt to be turned down by some little slip of a girl in the ruins of an abbey.

  "It's one of the things, I suppose," he said. "What would you like to hear instead?"

  "What does any woman want? To be special, perhaps? To be spoken of in a way that fits only her and not dozen other women who would be adequate to meet your needs?"

  It was on the tip of Brandt's tongue to say that 'redhaired bad-tempered girl with dirt under her fingernails' was far more of a mouthful than 'perfect,' but then he frowned, gazing out into the forest that fringed the abbey.

  "Did you hear that?"

  "What, are you trying to frighten me now?"

  "No, listen."

  She blinked, doing what he said. He could see the moment she heard it, too.

  "Something is moving in the forest. It's probably deer. We get many of them here. The Herefords' hunting preserve butts onto Shawly Grange close to here."

  "Hm. And where there are deer; there are poachers. Caroline, we might want to cut this venture short, at least for today."

  "Oh, really, you cannot be serious. Just because of a noise in the woods? You told me yourself that you hunted. Surely, you cannot be this startled by every noise in the woods."

  "That's just it," Brandt said tightly. "Can you hear anything else?"

  For a mercy, she listened, and when she spoke again, her voice was subdued.

  "No. I don't. What happened to the birds?"

  "I don't know, but I think there might be something nastier than deer in the forest. Come on. We're getting out of here."

  Brandt sent up a silent prayer of thanks as Caroline nodded, and without thinking, he took her by the hand. They should get back to the house in something like an hour. That wasn't so bad.

  Of course, that was before the sky opened up, and the deluge began.

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  7

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

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  Caroline was drenched in seconds, and the sky had darkened almost to night. Her wet hair fell straight into her eyes, and all she could do was hang on to Brandt as he led her forward.

  "Are you sure you know where you are going?" she called. The last thing they wanted was to be drenched and lost at the same time.

  "There's only a single path back, I think I can handle it," Brandt replied tersely.

  The soaking rain, interrupted by occasional near-deafening thunderclaps, drove all thoughts of mysterious threats in the forest from her mind. Instead, she grimly considered the mundane threats that faced them instead, from the flooding of the nearby river to simply becoming lost in the woods.

  "We should have stayed in the tower."

&nbs
p; "I would rather be wet than crushed," retorted Brandt. "Come on, hurry up, I saw a cottage just a little way off the path back here..."

  "Well, you would be slow as well if you had soaked skirts to deal with!"

  Despite her skirts and the serious chill beginning to slow her down, they gained the cottage that Brandt saw earlier quicker than she would have thought. Brandt pounded on the door twice, and when there was no answer forthcoming, simply opened the door.

  Being out of the pounding rain felt like heaven, but Caroline barely had any time for relief before she started to shake. She tried to stop her teeth from chattering together and wrapped her arms around herself, trying to get the shivers under control.

  "What is this place?" asked Brandt, looking around.

  "Old groundskeepers' cottage, I believe. Featherford died when my father was still alive, and I suppose it has been empty ever since."

  Brandt shot her a look she couldn't read, but only handed her a blanket that was folded over the narrow bed pushed against the wall.

  '"Get your clothes off and wrap up in that."

  She stared at him.

  "Have you gone quite mad? I'm not taking my clothes off with you!"

  Her indignation probably would have been a great deal more impressive if she hadn't sneezed right in the middle of it.

  Brandt gave her an impatient look.

  "While it might make things a little easier on me, I have no interest in watching you shiver yourself to death. Stop being such a prim country mouse. I won't look."

  It was dim enough in the cottage that Caroline reasoned he wouldn't be able to see much of anything, and as she watched him suspiciously, he examined the wood that had been laid close to the wood stove.

  "You said that no one's been out here since your gamekeeper died?"