Smiling up at him, Fiona felt the one thing she knew she had been lacking amid the love for Aylesbury blossoming in her heart. Hope. Trust. Perhaps she could have the one thing she had always longed for in life without losing herself along the way. “If I wanted to rally with the suffragettes?”
“I would gladly paint your signs for you,” he said promptly.
Fiona’s dimples flashed, pleased with his answer. “If I wanted to smoke a cigarette?”
Aylesbury made a playful grimace. “I should compel you to try cigars instead.”
Laughter bubbled up in her and she snuggled against his bared chest, adoring the feel of her flesh pressed against his. “What if I took to wearing trousers each day?”
Brows arching high over his widened eyes, he said in all seriousness. “Would you really? My God, what a delicious thought. I should be all too happy to see that.”
“You’re joshing with me,” Fiona chuckled.
“Not at all,” he said, running his hand over her hip and around to cup her bottom. “The very thought of seeing your bottom encased in tight trousers is even more tantalizing than the memory of you in your black corset … Of course, you are rather fine just like this.”
Fiona’s lips curved into a smile. “How fine?”
Some time later, the parlor darkening with the coming dusk, Fiona sighed sleepily in the circle of Aylesbury’s arms. The sofa had been left behind some time ago and the hard floor, despite the thick rug covering it, was proving painful. “I guess I should go. Francis and Eve and … everyone will be wondering where I am. I can’t begin to imagine what your staff is thinking.”
“You might have thought about that before you locked the door.”
With a pained wince, Fiona rolled out of his arms and climbed to her feet, searching for her clothes. She gathered up her skirt and petticoat, casting about for her undergarment before finding it hung on the flared wing of a side chair. Pushing himself up to the edge of the sofa, Aylesbury watched her for a few moments reading her anxieties and doubts easily enough. Passions spent, Fiona was likely reanalyzing every moment of the afternoon. “Let me take you home then.”
Fiona’s eyes darted from his face down to his bared assets, her cheeks flushing as she shook her head. “No, no. I can make my own way. It’s just two streets away, after all.”
Ayesbury stood, naked and half aroused, but Fiona studiously kept her eyes averted, her blush deepening. “With what happened, I could possibly let you go alone.”
“One of the stable lads, then,” she countered. She could hardly bare to face her brothers after how she had spent her afternoon. It would be even harder with Harry by her side.
Reaching for his trousers, Aylesbury jerked them on. “I will take you.”
“A footman.”
“Me.”
“No, Harry, I …”
Aylesbury caught her by the upper arms, stilling her with a little shake as he looked down at her sternly. “I said I will not press you and I meant it but I will not be pushed about like some lackey either. After what happened with Piper, I will always take better care with what I love. And I love you, you infernal woman. God help me,” he muttered under his breath as he turned away to retrieve his shirt and jacket from where they had been flung.
Fiona blinked hard, realizing that he had misunderstood her reluctance. Then felt her lips twist before she pressed them together to bite back a laugh. Hardly a peep escaped her but it was enough to recall Aylesbury’s attention. He lifted a supercilious brow as he shrugged on his shirt. “You think this is amusing?”
Something as close to a girlish giggle as Fiona had ever expressed escaped. “A bit, perhaps.”
Aylesbury rolled his eyes and knelt, searching beneath the sofa for his stockings. He confessed his love for the woman and not only did she not reciprocate, she laughed at him!
As if Fiona could read his thoughts, she said just then, “Perhaps next time a young, impressionable eighteen-year-old Scottish lass professes her love in a moonlit garden, you’ll remember this moment before you break her heart. Rejection is a bitter pill, is it not?”
Standing with a sock in each hand, Aylesbury raised a questioning brow. “Is that what this is? Revenge? Repayment for an ill-considered response prompted, I will remind you, by what was to me an utterly shocking confession?”
“Perhaps just a wee bit.” Still grinning, Fiona took a step closer, running a hand under his still-open shirt and spreading her palm on his ribs and around his back as she pressed against him. She nipped at the bottom of his chin, licking away the sting while her other hand smoothed over his neck and urged him to look down at her. Her green eyes were dancing with amusement. His were not. “I’m glad you finally love me, Harry. For some reason what you said there, that ‘God help me’ assured me that you truly do as no other words could.”
Still holding his gaze, she caught his lips playfully with hers before her lips parted, deepening the kiss. Her tongue lightly traced his lower lip as her lashes fluttered and closed. Against his chest, Aylesbury could feel the warm, purring hum that began deep within her, hear it as it was released against his lips. The silken barrier that kept her bare breasts from meeting his chest as she brushed against him caressed and teased until his hands fisted around the stockings he still held and his arms encircled her, crushing her against him and lifting her until even her toes didn’t touch the ground.
Parting her lips farther, he plundered her mouth more ardently, his tongue plunging deep before retreating, dueling with hers as she rose to match his passion. Both hearts quickened and his blood heated until it was roaring in his ears. Their hard breaths, the deep moan that came from him – her? Them both? – the only sound in the room. Her body softened, surrendering against him and Aylesbury lifted his head, breaking the kiss. Her lids were half closed, her green eyes burning with the fire so easily lit between them. Her lips were swollen with his kiss, wet and full. Parted as she panted lightly trying to catch her breath.
That quickly passion could enflame them. Even after a long afternoon of making passionate love and exploring soul-shattering sex that they could want again so quickly!
With an agonized moan, Aylesbury set her firmly away from him. “Now get dressed, we need to get you home and have a talk with your brother.”
Talk with Francis? Fiona wondered numbly, trying to pull her thoughts together.
Ever perceptive to her way of thinking, Aylesbury clarified, “About the kidnapping attempts. You might not like it, but they have to be told.”
“Oh, yes. That.” Fiona bit her lip as she finished dressing and began looking for her hairpins. One by one she found them but by the time her hand was full, her mind was just as jumbled as the little stack of pins in her hand. Sitting on the floor, she stared down at them as if they might somehow hold all the answers. “Oh, Harry, how can I ever explain all of this when I hardly understand it myself? I honestly thought it would stop after what happened yesterday. How can I be worth a man’s life to them? How can any of this be worth it? What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to end it.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
From the diary of Lady Fiona MacKintosh – May 1895
I never knew my mother, of course, as she lost her life by giving me mine. (I love her memory for that alone if nothing else.) But if she were here now, I would have to ask her about what madness possessed her to burden this world with ten more MacKintosh males.
And if my father were still here, I’d want to know what he had been thinking to leave me in their care.
They will drive me to madness, I swear!
“She was what!”
Fiona winced as Francis’ deep voice boomed through the marbled foyer of the Eaton Square townhouse and echoed back from the plastered walls.
“Francis, can we take this somewhere else?” Fiona asked, laying a hand on her brother’s arm to gain his attention. His arm was taut, steely beneath her fingers as he tensed against the sudden news. Too bad h
e had been coming down the stairs as they entered, noting Fiona’s less than pristine toilette, and asked quite sharply where they had been.
Too bad Aylesbury had chosen to answer him with the truth of it so bluntly right there at the foot of the stairs. Fiona was nearly kidnapped this afternoon, Glenrothes. No points for subtlety for Aylesbury but she wasn’t about to air her laundry before the half-dozen maids and footmen who were lingering in the hall.
Glenrothes opened his mouth then snapped it shut, a muscle jumping visibly in his cheek as he clenched his jaw. With a curt nod, he turned and led them back up the stairs but instead of leading them down the hall to the privacy of his study, as Fiona expected, he paused at the head of the stairs and looked to the right.
“Oh, no, no. Your study. Your study,” she urged under her breath.
Then her brother turned and disappeared into the family parlor.
“Damn, damn, damn!” she cursed, her steps lagging.
“What?” Aylesbury asked as he caught her elbow and lead her up the rest of the way.
Fiona’s thoughts of the afternoon, terrifying and ecstatic both, narrowed down to one simple prayer. “Please don’t let them all be in there. Please. Please.”
“What was that?” Aylesbury said in response to her almost soundless plea.
“Please don’t let them all …”
But it was too much to hope. With the dinner hour nearly upon them, the parlor was indeed well populated. With a quick scan of the room, Fiona counted fifteen… no, there was Dorian, too. Sixteen heads turning toward them. Sixteen pairs of eyes taking in her torn jacket and stained skirt. Nearly half those eyes – the male ones – narrowed and shifted to Aylesbury with no little accusation.
Couldn’t any of them have managed to go out for the evening?
Aylesbury shifted uneasily next to her, reading the assumption as readily as she, and this time it was Fiona who blurted out the truth of it then in an effort to spare him. “A man tried to take me … kidnap me right off the golf course this afternoon. Har– that is, Lord Aylesbury – saved me from him.”
Exclamations rang out around the room. Disbelief. Shock. Angry demands that someone explain. In seconds, Fiona was surrounded by the soft, comforting arms of the MacKintosh women. With six of them present, including Eve’s sister, Kitty, who was as good as another sister-in-law, it took several minutes for her to be passed about, hugged, petted, and worried over before Francis commanded silence, which promptly fell.
Aylesbury firmly extracted Fiona from the women and led her to one of the many sofas populating the room while the others all gathered around them to hear what happened. “I feel as if I’m facing the Inquisition,” he whispered in her ear as they sat. “I could use a drink.”
Fiona chuckled under her breath. “Me, too.”
“Who was it then?” Glenrothes asked, standing over them with his arms crossed over his broad chest.
“For goodness sake, Francis!” Eve exclaimed, catching her husband’s hand and drawing him to sit, reluctantly, next to her. Cool eyes met Fiona’s and Eve nodded encouragingly. “Please. Can you tell us what happened?”
“In truth, I wasn’t aware of what was happening until it was almost over,” Fiona confessed, looking to Aylesbury for help. “But H– Aylesbury saw it all. I’m sure he could recount it all far better than I.”
Aylesbury felt Fiona’s cold fingers curl into his palm and squeezed them reassuringly as a tremor shook them. He hadn’t given her much of a chance to think on the kidnapping attempt over the course of the afternoon. No, he had kept her so preoccupied in his arms, leaving her little chance to truly consider the danger she had been in until now.
Now, they were both being given time enough to consider how closely death had brushed by them.
As concisely as possible, Aylesbury recounted what he had seen and his own observations on the events from the time he had arrived at Wimbledon Commons until he had swept her away. Fiona clung to his hand all the while, her grip tightening at times and becoming almost a death grip as he described warning her attacker off.
“Did you not call out the bobbies?” someone, Tam, Aylesbury thought, asked and others seconded the question with a low murmur of approval.
“No, at the time, all I could think about was getting Fiona as far away from the bounder as possible,” Aylesbury offered the truth in explanation. “This wasn’t the first time, either. To my knowledge, someone has tried to lure Fiona away or kidnap her outright at least three times before this.”
That revelation prompted a whole new round of exclamations and questioning from Fiona’s rightly concerned family. He hadn’t informed them of the other attempts to subject her to further trauma but simply because her family cared deeply for her and had a right to know – whether she thought so or not. Aylesbury could only hope that if Piper had been taken by a kidnapper that there was someone – anyone! – with her who could reassure her that she had a brother who loved her.
So Aylesbury continued, telling them about the cabby driver on Regent Street and the incident outside Harrowby’s before ending with the attack at the Empire Theatre the day before.
Other questions were bulleted at them as everyone tried to make sense of it all and Aylesbury answered as many as he could to spare Fiona any further trauma for the day. Already he could feel her energy flagging as she began to lean into him.
“Three times and you said nothing?” Glenrothes glowered at them.
“To be fair, Aylesbury did insist that I tell you but I thought after what had happened with Preston, it would worry you unfairly,” Fiona said apologetically. “Better me than the children, I thought. I thought I could defend myself or that whoever it is wouldn’t be foolish enough to try to take me in broad daylight. But I was wrong, Francis. I’m sorry for not saying something sooner.”
“Three times, Blossom,” her eldest brother repeated, reaching across the space between them to take her hand. “I’d rather have the choice of worrying needlessly over you than losing you.”
“It wasn’t just the three times,” Fiona confessed, surprising even Aylesbury. “There were others Lord Aylesbury knows nothing about.” She told them about the black carriage that she had seen in the park and on the streets several times and about the seer at the exhibition while Aylesbury fumed by her side, knowing that she had lied to him. “And I think … I would wager … Do you recall that little girl in the park?” She looked from him to Eve. “That little girl who said she had lost her nanny and needed help finding her? She seemed quite determined that I go with her alone and when Harry insisted on coming as well, she fled. Do you remember?”
Eve nodded, biting her lip as she looked at her husband seeking comfort at the thought. “She did seem dead set on leading you off. Do you think there could have been someone waiting for her? For you?”
“Lord Aylesbury thought it might be someone after my purse, but …” she shrugged.
“It was no kidnapper after ransom. It was Ramsay, of course.”
Fiona straightened again at Glenrothes’ harshly submitted conclusion. “Oh surely not, Francis!” she exclaimed, but all around heads were nodding in ready agreement.
“That day he came to my club, he didn’t only spill his plans to lure you into eloping. He all but threatened to take you by force if necessary,” Glenrothes said. “To take you off, see you ruined in Society’s eyes, and force a marriage whether you agreed or not. I had thought it nothing more than the arbitrary blather of an infuriated fool at the time. It never occurred to me that he would set words to action. If you had come to me sooner with this, I would have done more than blacken his eye then or let him off with the beating he received last night. Good God, Blossom, he’s still out there now. We dumped him at his uncle’s, but I doubt he’s still there.”
“Come to you sooner?” Fiona gaped at his disclosure. “My God, Francis, you should have told me all this sooner! First you hide from me the fact that Ramsay was nothing more than a fortune hunter and now this? Whe
n I came to you the other day, why didn’t you say something?” Fiona swallowed back the lump forming in her throat at the thought that the man she had been planning on marrying was not only a fortune hunter but a felonious brute, one quite possibly capable of murder as well. “When I think of how many times he tried to get me into his carriage … Damn it all, Francis! All of this could have been avoided if you had just said something! Why? Why didn’t you just tell me?”
She clutched Aylesbury’s hand tightly, an anchor in the madness mounting around her. His other arm came around her shoulders and pulled her securely against him. Burying her face in his shoulder, Fiona focused on his warmth, the safety of his embrace. The knowledge that he would never let anything happen to her. He would fight for her again as he had twice already.
And perhaps she might even be able to trust him more than the man she had trusted most in her entire life. Wouldn’t that just be an odd twist of fate?
“I suppose I thought to protect you, Blossom,” Glenrothes said softly. “You are our wee lass. Our only sister. I did what I thought was right to keep you safe. Both of us hiding the truth, keeping secrets from one another kept us from putting the puzzle pieces together earlier.”
Aylesbury held Fiona tightly to his side, soothing away the tremors that shivered at intervals through her body. The other MacKintoshs were talking among themselves, trying to reason out what delusions Ramsay might have in thinking he could get away with such a crime and still think Fiona would wed with him. That they all wouldn’t line up to kill him for bringing any harm to their only sister.
Only Glenrothes was still looking at them, Aylesbury realized. Or studying them, it seemed. The earl’s eyes were narrowed, one finger tapping thoughtfully against his lower lip as his gaze traveled over them, noting Aylesbury’s arm around Fiona, their hands still tightly clasped as Fiona curled against him.
“Is there anything else you have been keeping from me?”
A Question for Harry Page 26