None too modest to begin with, the smalls failed to hide the man’s long, long legs and the top half of a plump, moon-colored backside. His upper body was entirely exposed, revealing a broad, well-muscled back and a powerful-looking arm.
Davina gawked at her discovery for several moments, heat creeping up her face.
When he moaned again and thrashed about, ripping the smalls’ delicate linen and exposing even more of his backside, Davina snapped out of her trance, adjusted her line of sight above the waist, and edged toward the man.
Other than a few nasty scratches from the bramble patch and some wear to his bare feet, he didn’t seem to be injured. She cleared her throat, but received no response. She tried calling him, but that didn’t work either.
She started to reach out to his shoulder to shake him awake, but after considering his size, the breadth of his shoulders, and the amount of pain he seemed to be in, she thought better of it. She had no interest in bear baiting. One black eye was quite enough for her. She found a long stick instead, stepped away from the body, and poked it at a safe distance.
This proved to be the prudent course of action, for at first contact, the man lurched awake with a growl, grabbed the stick, and hurled it away with such violence it shattered against a rock in the stream. The man stumbled to his feet and spun around in her direction, muttering a string of oaths as vile as any St. Giles ruffian would have employed.
Now that the man was upright, things looked very different indeed. Davina had never seen anything quite like…well, quite like him before. She was considered tall for a woman and met most gentlemen at eye level, but compared to this hulking beast before her, she felt positively dainty.
Though hulking was not precisely the word to describe this man. Strapping. Towering. Well over six feet, with the broad shoulders of a soldier and the lean, well-worked body of a day laborer. Beneath the mud, corded muscle and sinew rippled with every movement, interspersed with the occasional scar—evidence of a life lived very hard indeed.
Whether his face was equally compelling or horribly misshapen, however, she could not tell. His dark hair was unkempt, and in desperate need of a barber, and his face hadn’t seen a razor in weeks, perhaps months.
But his eyes—his eyes! When they at last fixed upon her, forcing her to meet his gaze through sheer force of will, well, his eyes would never do. They were large and fringed with thick black lashes any woman would have envied. And they were gray—no, no, gray was too tame an adjective to describe those over-bright, over-intelligent spheres, as wintry and insurmountable as an iceberg.
Davina swallowed and felt her entire body flood with heat despite that arctic gaze. Was it just coincidence that the gossips’ description of Mr. Hirst matched this specimen before her?
She didn’t think it was. She’d never be so lucky.
This had to be…
“Mr. Hirst?” she squeaked.
“Who the bloody hell are you?” he demanded in an unearthly growl, traces of his East London upbringing glaringly obvious in every syllable he spoke—another unwelcome confirmation of his identity.
It took everything in her not to turn tail and flee back to Rylestone Green that instant, even if it meant running all the way in Leon’s awful boots. She’d made a dreadful miscalculation, for how could a man with those eyes and that voice not see straight through this ridiculous charade of hers?
She touched the corner of her bruised eye to remind herself of her resolve, and the deep ache it produced began to quell her panic. She couldn’t go back to Dalrymple. Besides, her reputation had been tossed in the dustbin the moment she’d stepped upon that mail coach. She doubted she’d even be welcome to so much as darken her mother’s doorstep again—not that she’d want to.
No, she’d rather this beast before her now than the ones she’d left behind.
Probably.
Maybe.
Good Lord, he was a beast, a hairy, muddy, naked untamed beast with eyes that could freeze the fires of hell. Eyes that were too intelligent by far. And the body of…
Well, she had extremely limited experience with naked men—her mother didn’t even let her view the Greek statuary in London museums. But she had snuck her fair share of scandalous verse and had a very vivid imagination. She could safely acknowledge that Hirst’s body outdid all of her fantasies.
Yet another complication she could very well have done without.
There was only one thing to do, and that was to brazen it out. She had found this man half naked in a ditch, after all. It had to give her an advantage. Somehow.
Taking in a steadying breath, she sketched him a bow—not a curtsy, as she still had wits enough to avoid a tell as blatant as that—and carefully avoided gawking at his poorly concealed nether regions. Cousin Edmund’s spectacles only seemed to be magnifying things.
She kept her voice as deep as possible. “I am Fawkes, Mr. Hirst. Your new…er, secretary.” Damn. Her voice was about as deep as a castrato’s.
Hirst’s gaze narrowed in suspicion.
“My…secretary, did you say?” he murmured in a husky tone that was only slightly less terrifying than his last.
She cleared her throat and searched for something a proper secretary might have said in this situation.
She came up with nothing. Well, nothing sensible, anyway.
“Not an indecent hour for someone of your…er, station to rise, to be sure.” It was past noon. “Shall I accompany you home and have the kitchens prepare you a tray? Coffee, I presume? Scones? Some marmalade?”
Good lord, what was she babbling on about? She sounded like a butler. Or a bedlamite.
She blamed his naked torso. It was doing all sorts of crazy things to her head.
He continued to stare at her as if trying to freeze her where she stood, but she refused to squirm under the scrutiny. She’d lived too many years under her mother’s despotic thumb to let this absurd, nearly naked man unsettle her. Nevertheless, she was thankful the smalls were managing to keep the most crucial part of his anatomy veiled. She glanced down despite herself and felt her face bloom with heat once more.
She pushed her spectacles up her nose, for once thankful for the way they blurred her vision.
“Bricks,” he finally said.
She paused at the non sequitur and tried to translate his meaning. She was not acquainted with any other denizens of St. Giles, but she was beginning to suspect that their use of the English language would prove as foreign to her as Chinese.
She gave up. “I beg your pardon?”
“I said, bricks. I believe I spoke quite clearly. My kitchen serves me bricks, not scones. And bootblack, not coffee,” he said, sounding rather…petulant now.
Petulant she could handle. “Then perhaps a pot of tea–”
“Horse piss. Mrs. Bundleby collects it from the stable floor and calls it tea. Wouldn’t drink a pot of her brew on a wager. She’s been trying to poison me, but I’m on to her.” He waved his fist in the air, but the movement as well as the impassioned speech seemed to tax his reserves, for he dropped his fist to his brow, winced, and shivered.
This had to be the most bizarre conversation she’d ever had with the most bizarre human she’d ever encountered—and Sir Wesley was her brother. Suddenly, he didn’t seem quite so intimidating. Some of the tension unspooled in her shoulders, and she no longer felt as if she’d jump out of her skin every time he opened his mouth. “Bootblack it is, Mr. Hirst.”
“I did not know they bred Exquisites like you this far north,” he declared contemptuously, as if he wanted to call her something else even less flattering but was holding himself back. She wondered why he bothered.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I wonder if you are a man at all beneath all of that… that…” He waved one large hand in front of her cravat. “…fluff. This is all Bones’ doing, damn his eyes. I told him I was through with secretaries, but of course he didn’t listen. He never heeds me when I’m being serious,” he muttered to
himself, retracting his hand and scratching his backside.
“I can’t imagine why,” she said dryly, though inside she was quaking. Had he seen through her so quickly?
He gave her a ferocious-looking scowl just as his smalls began to inch down his hips, revealing a rather intriguing trail of hair that led toward…
Davina stifled a gasp and tried valiantly to keep her eyes on his torso.
He staggered in her direction and dragged a hand through his shaggy mane, making the tangle there even worse. He paused an arms’ length away from her, and she got a whiff of pungent Yorkshire mud, stream water, and something earthy and male and…not at all unpleasant.
He glared around the ditch, as if it were nature’s fault he’d landed there.
“Where the devil have I got to this time?” he muttered.
Ah, so this had happened before. She was not surprised.
He brushed past her and started up the embankment. Davina’s jaw nearly hit the ground at the sight of his broad, well-muscled back, perfectly rounded bottom, and long, powerful legs in motion. He was magnificent. There was no other word for it. The heat rose in her cheeks yet again, proving her sex as clearly as if she had waved a red flag. She was thankful he was turned away from her.
He strode to the top, stretched his long, lean body, and belched.
Well. That cooled her down quite a bit. He might have been pleasing to the eye, but he was a philistine through and through.
As if he sensed her watching him, he fixed those too-sharp eyes on her. “Are you going to piss the day away down there, lad?” he growled.
Davina snapped out of her stupor and scrambled up the embankment to his side. Leon’s inexpressibles didn’t fare so well this time around. She glared down at her dirty knees. “It’s Mr. Fawkes, sir, and I’m five and twenty, hardly a lad,” she reminded him, brushing away the dirt. The last thing she needed was Hirst sending her away for being too young.
“You? Five and twenty?” he scoffed. “Your chin looks as if it has never even seen a blade.”
“Neither does yours.”
He looked momentarily surprised by her retort, and she feared she’d gone too far. She closed her eyes and braced herself for a blow. Dalrymple would have certainly given her a good coshing for her impertinence. So would her mother, for that matter.
When a blow never came, however, she opened her eyes to find him simply studying her with those uncanny eyes of his. He didn’t look angry. In fact, something in his shoulders seemed to have loosened, the harsh lines bracketing his tired mouth smoothed away. He almost looked amused—or as amused as an extremely irate lion with a thorn in his paw could look.
It was almost as if he enjoyed her insolence.
“Was it just my imagination, Fawkes, or did you poke me in the shoulder with a stick earlier?” he demanded gruffly, but with amusement underlying his tone.
She couldn’t remember why she’d ever been terrified of this odd man. He wasn’t a lion at all, was he? A tomcat, perhaps, who liked the sound of its own growl. “Why, yes, I did poke you in the shoulder with a stick.”
“Are you going to ask me what I was doing in a ditch?”
God, that was something she didn’t want to know. Ever. “No, Mr. Hirst.”
One dark brow lifted. “Indeed? Why not?”
“It is none of my affair how you spent your night.”
His shoulders relaxed even more. She’d given the right answer somehow. He cleared his throat, looked down at his bare feet, and finally realized the sight he must have presented. He didn’t seem too concerned even then, though he did rather half-heartedly haul his drooping unmentionables up his hips.
“I didn’t hire you,” he finally said, apropos of nothing. “My man-of-affairs did, and he must have had help, since he’s as illiterate as a donkey. It is a conspiracy by my entire staff to torture me.”
What to say to that…
“Yet here you are, boots and all.” From the obvious disdain in his eyes as he studied the tassels of said boots, he didn’t like the Hobys any better than she did. Then he gestured in the general direction of her eye. “What the bloody hell happened to your face?”
She decided that sticking as close to the truth as she dared would save her many headaches down the road. “An earl knocked me off my feet, sir.”
He snorted, the disdain in his eyes only deepening. “Bloody toffs. Think they rule the world,” he muttered. “What was it, then? Did he take issue with your boots? Have enough of your lip?”
Well, he’d quite inadvertently hit the nail on the head with that last assessment. And just thinking about her argument with Dalrymple got her blood up. Never mind the black eye: his willful ignorance of proven scientific fact pained her even more. “He thought the sun circled the earth.”
Hirst rolled his eyes in a manner that conveyed his utter contempt for the earl’s ignorance. “Literally?”
“Literally,” she confirmed. “I merely set him straight.”
His brow arched at that and his mouth twitched as if he were tempted to smile but couldn’t be bothered. “Good lad. Didn’t take his correction well, did he? I hope you returned the favor.”
Davina imagined how Dalrymple’s pride must have been smarting, with a sister hared off to Gretna Green with a penniless dandy, and a bride who’d left him at the altar (if anyone had even noticed she was gone yet, which she doubted), and gave Hirst a grim smile. “Oh, yes, he received quite a fitting comeuppance.”
His brow arched even higher.
Still unbothered by his near-nakedness, Hirst wiped his muddy palms on the sides of his soiled linens and started marching down the lane at a soldierly clip, as if this was a normal routine for him. Which it very well could be, for all she knew. Perhaps he spent every night, drunk and naked, in ditches around his property.
“Come along, then, Fawkes,” he called after her. “I’ll let Mr. Bonnet deal with you.”
That sounded ominous. Whoever this Mr. Bonnet was—the illiterate man-of-affairs, she presumed—she somehow doubted that he was any less peculiar than his employer. Not knowing what else to do, Davina retrieved her valise and trotted to catch up with him.
They passed most of their walk to Arncliffe in awkward silence, though Hirst occasionally cursed when his bare feet encountered something painful. She marveled at the ingenuity of the obscenities that spewed from his mouth. Never had she heard language like it, but then she remembered that Hirst thought she was Leon. She supposed that was one advantage—or disadvantage, depending on how one looked at it—of being a man: the ability to curse freely and creatively in each others’ presence.
When they came upon the sprawling grounds of the castle, Hirst muttered something about keeping her mouth shut. Before she could respond, however, the man disappeared into some shrubbery bordering an overgrown garden off to one side of the castle.
She stared at his retreating form in complete bewilderment.
Well. She supposed she wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see her in such a state, so she shouldn’t have been overly shocked to be abandoned by her employer in his own home. But still, this was not a promising start to things.
She knew then and there that, should she survive for any length of time in this man’s employ, he was going to be as difficult and hard to please as her dragon of a mother.
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity her life had suddenly become. But she was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. She was simply glad Hirst seemed to have accepted her for the man she claimed to be.
As for how long she could keep up the ruse, that remained to be seen.
Chapter Three
Rogue: A History
Julian Hirst had not drunk nearly enough last night. If he had, he would have awakened in his own bed with a devilish hangover, preferably with a warm female body next to him to help him forget his troubles. Instead, he’d come to a mile from his castle, half-drowned in freezing Yorkshire mud, with a severe case of blue balls, and a
London Exquisite poking him with a stick.
It was a damn vexing way to start the day, and though the Exquisite was new, everything else was becoming far too familiar. His somnambulism was always worse in the summer, for that was when Freddie had died, along with countless others in St. Giles who’d fallen victim to the typhus scourge that horrible year.
After nights like these, he could still smell the deep miasma of the Thames at low tide seeping up through decaying floorboards—as complex a bouquet as any toff’s fine wine. It was the stink of the place his brother had died, where Julian should have died as well, if not for some perversity of fate.
In his nightmares, he always tried to flee that hovel, as he’d not been able to in reality. He’d been too wasted from the disease to so much as crawl. It was no wonder he always woke up outside, since any four walls must have seemed to him a coffin in his dream-addled state.
Compared to his last excursion, though, when he’d nearly stepped off the battlements of this damn rotting pile, he’d come out relatively unscathed. Bones told him that he’d found him just in time, pulling him back from the castle ledge before he’d unwittingly leapt to his death.
If he killed himself, he intended to be very conscious. He’d not want to miss what might prove to be his one redeeming moment in a lifetime full of nauseating folly. But ending his miserable life wasn’t even a consideration. Not now, not when he was so close to his revenge he could taste it.
All those years ago, and just weeks without mam, he'd managed to lose his little brother to an invisible enemy—one he'd not even seen coming. He'd already protected Freddie from the worst of humanity with his fists and wits, but there had been no protection against typhus.
Miss Benwick Reforms a Rogue Page 3