Perhaps she had made a mistake.
“Indeed you have forgotten something, Mrs. Whittaker. Something a bit more important than the tea and crumpets we’ve just shared.”
Pru could not find her voice, so she simply stared at him past the annoying rim of her ugly brown bonnet.
His breath was warm on her cheek as he leaned close. For one delicious, horrifying moment, she thought that he might kiss her there in the entrance hall of a ducal mansion, with the stern butler standing by. But instead of his lips, it was one broad fingertip which rose to her cheek, and brushed a curl back. It had come loose from its pins, threatening to fall into her eye. Robert Waters stood close and let her hair curl around his finger, as if it loved him, as if it wished for him to stay close. Pru knew that she must say something, anything, to set this man down. But her reason had deserted her along with her voice.
“What shall we be paying you then, Mrs. Prudence Whittaker? What price would you put on my sister’s marriage?”
Pru blinked at him, frozen like a rabbit that had scented the hunter. She wished fervently that her good sense would return from wherever it had gone. She also wished that he would touch more than just a stray curl.
When she still did not answer, Robert Waters smiled at her, looking down her body as he might at a horse he wished to purchase at market. His eyes seemed to linger on her breasts, hidden as they were beneath the brown worsted of her gown. He met her gaze again, and she felt her cheeks flush.
She opened her mouth to give him the dressing-down he deserved, but she felt as if he were laughing, not at her, but at himself. There was such a light of good humor tucked away behind the blue of his gaze that, for the moment, her anger vanished like smoke. She almost laughed herself. He was a charmer, of that there was no doubt. She would have to guard against that charm, along with everything else.
“I suppose twenty pounds per annum will suffice, Mr. Waters, paid each quarter.”
“Only twenty pounds? Great God, Mrs. Whittaker, you hold yourself too cheap. I don’t think you realize the monumental task you have set yourself. We’ll be paying you twenty pounds per month, and that only to start. If you manage to marry her off, I’ll throw in a five hundred pound bonus, which ought to set you up for life.”
It was difficult to understand him, and Pru couldn’t be sure whether it was the fact that he was still standing so close, or that his Scottish burr was clouding his words, making her have to listen hard, and longer. But before she could object to such an outrageous sum—far more than the Harringtons had been willing to pay—Mr. Robert Waters had taken her arm, just like a gentleman, and had led her down the town house steps to a waiting open carriage.
“I must go and fetch my things from my aunt’s house,” she managed to say at last. “I’ll return before dark.”
“Aye, that you will. For I’ll be driving you.”
He did not hand her into the carriage, but raised her bodily onto the seat. His hands were hot on her waist. She could feel the sweltering effects of his touch through her thick gown and stays. She clutched her reticule, desperate to take herself in hand.
Sudden wealth and overwhelming attraction after years of poverty and loneliness might seem like gifts from heaven, but she knew she could not allow herself to fall into the blue of Robert Waters’s eyes and ruin herself. No matter how much she enjoyed his touch, she was still a lady. A widow might indulge herself in frolics between the sheets, but gently reared virgins could not, even at the ripe old age of twenty-five.
Or so she told herself as she watched Robert Waters vault into the carriage, sitting so close to her that his thigh pressed against hers. She took in the warm, crooked smile he sent her way and felt her heart shift along with her breath. She was in for more trouble than she had bargained for.
God help her. God keep her from seductive Highlanders. God keep her safe from herself.
Four
Pru was not certain how she would explain the mysterious presence of an overlarge Highlander in the entryway. She simply hoped that her aunt might not notice him when Pru came by to pick up her bag. Thank the stars that at least she had already packed.
She spent a precious shilling to send written word to Miss Harrington that she would be unable to attend her because of a family crisis. Mary Elizabeth Waters was not family, per se, but drawing a blade in the middle of Hyde Park and the social ostracism that was sure to follow was certainly a crisis.
She tried not to speak to Mr. Robert Waters in an effort to keep him from speaking to her. Even just sitting near him in the open carriage overwhelmed her senses. How could she be expected to keep herself from touching him if she had to listen to the music of his voice as well? He spoke with the sound of a deep bassoon, with words that carried a lovely lilt that made her think of a stream running over stones in some enchanted place, a place she had never visited and would never have wanted to leave.
Pru shook herself as the carriage stopped in front of her aunt’s house. Though he was not from London, Mr. Waters seemed to have an unerring sense of direction that a homing pigeon might have envied. She certainly envied it. She walked through Hyde Park often, but she still lost her bearings, and she had been visiting London since she was five. Of course, before her twentieth summer, it would never have occurred to her to walk alone anywhere.
“And this is your aunt’s home, Mrs. Whittaker?” Robert Waters asked politely, staring down at her. His voice, while musical, was perfectly bland. His polite tone completely belied the fact that he was still sitting too close to her, his thigh pressed tight against hers. She felt overheated, and disguise or no, cursed herself for wearing worsted wool in June.
“It is. Mr. Waters, if you will wait here, I will be only a moment.” She forced herself to move away from his bulk, feeling as if she were a bird leaving the safe haven of a great tree. She need not have bothered. Graceful for so large a man, Robert Waters leaped down to the roadside and offered her his hand before she could even take hold of her reticule.
“I will escort you inside, Mrs. Whittaker. Far be it from me to leave a lady unattended.”
Pru heard the mocking tone in his voice, and wondered if he was making fun of her or himself. She met his eyes almost against her better judgment, and saw that it was a little of both. She smiled in spite of herself.
“There’s that smile I’ve been waiting all afternoon for,” he said. “The world can be a grim place, ma’am, but there’s humor in abundance, too. You need to laugh a bit more.”
Pru heard the truth in his words and felt herself freeze up at the unintended criticism. With her family dead and her life in shambles, she had little to laugh about. But the merry light in his eyes did not falter, and she wondered what pain he might have seen in his charmed life.
It could not be easy to be a man from the Highlands after the wars of the last century. Pru wondered how his family had survived those wars without being completely decimated or transported away from their homeland. Indeed, how had such a family come to be close companions of the Duchess of Northumberland? Impertinent questions tumbled about her head, all warring to escape, but she held her peace. She barely knew this man. She could not go on quizzing him about such personal subjects, no matter how warm and inviting his blue eyes might be.
She forced herself to look away from those eyes as he lifted her down from the carriage. Her heart lodged in her throat and then started to beat double time as he set her on her feet once more. She fought for control of herself, and gained it.
“I thank you, Mr. Waters. But I must ask you to let me do the talking where my aunt is concerned.”
“Ashamed of us, are you?” His smile was still in place, but she could see a wariness come into his eyes that had not been there before. Reading his looks was like reading a book that had fallen open to her favorite page. She chastised herself for being an overly romantic fool.
“No, Mr. Waters. I as
sure you, quite the opposite. Indulge me, if you will. If you insist on coming inside, I must warn you that the interview will not be pleasant. All we can hope for is that it will be of short duration.”
His look of wariness gave way to smugness. “Your aunt is a woman, is she not?”
She frowned. “Of course.”
“Then I will charm her. There’s not a woman walking that I couldn’t charm, given five minutes.”
Pru found herself amused at his audacity, but in spite of his smugness, he seemed certain of himself. She wondered if that was a trait he shared with all of his countrymen, or if he was unique.
She did not answer him, but took his arm and led him toward the door. Robert Waters leaned down and spoke low in her ear. “I charmed you, didn’t I?”
So when her aunt’s housemaid opened the door, Pru was laughing.
* * *
Robbie found that he loved to hear her laughter. It was light and lilting, like the burn that ran over rocks back home. He listened to it as he might to a new piece of music. He would have to find other ways to make her laugh, for the sound pleased him. The sound of her joy made him glad to be alive.
“Prudence,” a voice said, from beyond the door of a tiny sitting room. Robbie would have said that it sounded like a voice from beyond the tomb but for the fact they were in a lady’s home. An older lady, who seemed to like a good deal of lace tatting. He wondered how many cats he might find lurking about. He had better watch where he put his feet.
The house smelled like an old lady, of camphor oil and lavender. He sneezed almost at once, but Mrs. Prudence did not look at him. She did not take her eyes off the door of the parlor, waiting for what lay beyond it.
A battle-ax stepped into the poky entrance hall. The woman could not have been over fifty, and her gray gaze was sharp as a blade. She was whip thin, with the narrowed eyes of a snake who had been stepped on one time too many. Her graying hair was pulled back severely beneath a lace cap.
Oddly, three curls unfurled along her brow, in some strange attempt at attractiveness—an attempt that fell far short. Those curls told him all he needed to know. He set aside all thoughts of the tomb he had entered, and of any cats that might even now be approaching to gut him with their claws. He smiled at the lady before him, and bowed as he might have done to a queen.
“Good afternoon, ma’am. Do me the honor of allowing me to present myself. I am Robert Waters of Glenderrin. And you must be Mrs. Whittaker’s lovely aunt.”
At his use of the word lovely, he felt his companion glare at him, all but singeing the hair on the right side of his head. He paid her no heed, but kept his eyes on his quarry.
The lady took him in from the top of his bicorn hat to the tips of his booted feet. Unlike most women, she did not seem at all moved by what she found. He might have her measure, but it seemed that she had his as well. The lady sniffed, as he had heard Mrs. Prudence do more than once. God willing, she wouldn’t winnow down to look like this woman by the time she was fifty.
He did not stop to consider why he was thinking that far into the future with the lady at his side, when he had yet to know her a full day. He ignored his odd, wayward thoughts, and the warm fondness for Mrs. Prudence that had spawned them, and returned his focus to the woman in front of him.
“Are you the nabob from Bombay then? My niece never mentioned that you were of the Scottish persuasion.”
It took Robbie a moment to unpack those sentences, so filled with mystery they were. He thought for a moment that the lady was dotty before her time. Then Mrs. Prudence stiffened beside him, and he realized that the woman knew more of what was going on than he did.
“Well. Ma’am, I fear I’ve never been to India, though I understand that the Taj Mahal is very fine.”
The woman sniffed again, whether at the mention of the heathen burial place or at the fact he was indeed not a nabob, he could not tell.
“Is it that you have a hankering to go to the subcontinent, ma’am? I am sure we could help procure you a ship, if you wish.”
She glared at him, and there, for the first time, flashed a resemblance between herself and the woman beside him.
Before the lady could speak, Prudence intervened.
“Aunt, I am no longer employed by Miss Harrington of Bombay, but by the Waterses of Glenderrin.”
“That is hardly an improvement, Niece.” The eagle eye was turned on Prudence, and Robbie had to hold himself very still. The urge to step between them and shield Prudence grew until it became difficult to resist. He had never before met a woman he didn’t like, but it seemed there was a first time for everything.
“I assume this Glenderrin is someplace north of Gretna Green?”
Robbie almost laughed out loud to hear the Lowland refuge of errant cads and their runaway brides mentioned in the same breath as his home. But then, not only did the English know nothing of his homeland, they knew nothing of him. Their belittling opinions reflected not on him and his, but on them.
“It is, Aunt. But we will be staying here. Miss Waters has need of a companion, and I have need of employment.” Prudence turned to him then as if her rude and disapproving aunt were not even there. “I will fetch my bag and return in a moment.”
He watched as she sauntered up the narrow staircase, away from him. He did enjoy watching a fine woman walk away.
Robbie took his eyes at last from Mrs. Prudence’s delectable, rounded backside only to find her aunt staring at him again with narrowed eyes.
“I hold you accountable for her virtue,” the harridan said.
Robbie reminded himself of his manners, the manners his mother had spent all of his youth and some of his early manhood drumming into him. As his anger rose, he turned his mind to the sound of the burn near home, and the way the wind sang coming down over the mountains. He thought of the Gathering that would come in August. Whatever happened with Mary Elizabeth and her mad dodging of a husband, he would be there, among his own kind, where people like this could not touch him.
“Your niece’s honor is safe with me, ma’am.” He did not look at her again, for he found he had lost the stomach to do so. So much for his fabled charm.
He stood with the woman in silence in her entry hall for the five minutes it took for Prudence to find her way downstairs again. She had only one bag and one hatbox, both of which he took from her.
“Good day, Aunt. Thank you for your hospitality.”
The woman did not smile or move to offer her hand. “Good day, Niece.”
The housemaid appeared again as if by magic and opened the front door. Without another word, Robbie nodded to the woman inside before following Prudence back out into the street. The walnut door shut with a decided thump behind him.
Once her bag was stowed and he had helped Mrs. Prudence into the carriage, he clucked to the horses and pulled away from the curb. He waited one long, meditative moment before he spoke his mind. “I don’t mean to speak ill of your kin,” he said. “But I would rather face a lion in his den than go into that house again.”
She sighed, relaxing at his elbow. With every foot of road that came between her and the house behind them, the softer she felt beside him.
“I know that I will never return,” she said. “Five years in that place was long enough.”
That reference to her past sparked his curiosity, but Robbie did not press her. He simply touched her knee with his and slapped the reins so that the duchess’s horses might go faster.
Five
Pru sat alone in her new, borrowed room. The sight of it was as strange as looking at an apparition. She did not believe in ghosts, and she did not believe in good fortune as extravagant as this. And yet, here it was.
Along with the ridiculously generous salary, of which Robert Waters had paid her the first installment upon their arrival at the Duchess of Northumberland’s town house, the Waters clan
had gone on to set her up in a room all her own. Not in the servants’ wing, as might have been appropriate, but in the guest rooms along the third floor.
For the first time in five years, Pru sat surrounded by the luxury she had always taken for granted as a child.
The watered silk bedclothes exactly matched the watered silk window dressings of light pink and mauve. Though such a color would never have appealed to her under normal circumstances, the combination, used sparingly, seemed to add a certain warmth and sophistication to a room that otherwise might have seemed cold.
A cheerful fire burned in the grate. Since it was June, it was a small fire, but the very sight of it warmed her heart. Her aunt had been very stingy with coal, and the last five winters had been harsh indeed. As Prudence gazed at the room about her, she was not sure why she had never gone looking for work before. Though certainly, if she had, she never would have found a situation quite like this.
Upon first hearing of her exorbitant salary, Pru had feared that Robert Waters expected more from her than simply tutoring of his sister in the ways of genteel life in the south. But though he had touched her cheek, and sat too close to her in the carriage both coming and going from the duchess’s house, in every other way he had behaved as a gentleman. He had allowed a housemaid to escort her to her room, saying simply that he would see her at dinner at seven o’clock.
When he had not brought her upstairs himself, she had almost been disappointed.
Prudence was more than a little shocked at her reaction to him. When she was young, before her father’s death and her brother’s disgrace, she had been courted by many young gentlemen, and only one had ever caught her fancy. The rest of them had been nice enough, and one or two had even been attractive, but not one had ever tempted her to lose herself in contemplation of the strength of his thighs, or the sound of his voice. Robert Waters’s very presence seemed to invite her to sin, and not to count the cost after.
How to Wed a Warrior Page 3