Molly waited, listening to the steady patter of raindrops on glass and the quickening sizzle of coal in his fire. Apparently he was not going to speak. Had they propped him up in his chair while he still slept? Time to find out.
She gave a bob curtsy.
“I’ve come to accept your proposition, my lord.” She felt the air change and heard his long legs fidget under the desk.
Sakes! Movement! And it was not quite eleven. Should The Times be notified?
“I would like to take you up on the offer of a loan.” Reaching into her reticule, she withdrew two folded squares of paper. Rain had smudged some of the ink, but the words were still readable. She’d worked on them while the carriage stopped at the Barley Mow on the road back to London. Now she placed both on the blotter for his perusal.
“What’s this?” he demanded gruffly.
Molly sneezed into her handkerchief. “As you suggested that night by the stairs in the kitchen, I have written a letter of agreement and calculated interest to be returned to you with the principle—” She snapped her lips shut while his opened in a long yawn. His fingers finally stretched, moving like large, slow centipedes toward the paper she’d laid before him.
“I’ve got eyes to read for myself,” he grumbled.
Only if they stayed open long enough, she mused. But Molly kept that thought to herself. She was still getting accustomed to the sound of her own voice in places where it was never formerly allowed to venture out, and it seemed especially loud and dreadful in his library. This was his sanctuary, a masculine place devoid of pretty, whimsical ornament, and imbued with a sense of rough-edged, stubborn contentment, as if to say that here he did as he pleased—truly as he pleased—and no one could force their way in to tidy or decorate it or rearrange a single piece of furniture. It was, she realized, the only main-floor room in the house that was not formally laid out, spotlessly clean, and prepared for guests to admire first, people to live in second. This was the only room he might call his, away from his sister’s influence. Apart, of course, from his bedchamber. Whatever that might look like.
As the silence lengthened, she began to wonder if the earl had fallen asleep in his chair. Finally he creaked forward into the slender beam of pale, shimmering light, and his starless midnight gaze took her in slowly. Like his library, the earl’s eyes had yet to know warmth this morning. One moment they were steel gray, and the next, black as pitch. Fortunately, Molly was not the superstitious sort, or she might have thought it was some special and terrifying magic from within that made them change color. But he was just a man with shortcomings like any other, not a frightening, mythical ogre. No matter how he managed to convince certain folk otherwise. Or what he believed of himself.
She once heard a young lady of questionable sense and evident moral turpitude giggling breathlessly about him. “Carver Danforthe is very, very bad, and when he’s not wicked, he’s awful.”
It was a reputation he apparently enjoyed maintaining.
Now those cold eyes turned to the paper. Whether or not he read the words inked upon it, she couldn’t tell. He was very still. Unlike her, he had no need to follow the words with his finger, but she supposed it would not say much for a university education if he did.
Rain blew hard at his window, reedy shadows casting a mottled, ever-changing pattern over his bent head. His dark hair stood on end, as if not even fingers had combed through it yet. She wondered what would happen if she straightened that hair for him, but since this thought led to a very unnecessary warmth under her skin, it was dismissed at once.
Molly refused to be distracted from her purpose by lusty thoughts. This was a practical matter, and she could afford no more pangs of mortifying, misplaced partiality for a man to whom she was merely a “mouse.”
Sorely tempted fingers clasped tight around her reticule, she took a quick survey of his library. A plate, perched precariously on one corner of his desk, held remnants of a pork piecrust and a brown apple core. A half-empty wine glass stood near with two drowned flies floating in it. She’d already noted his hat and scarf left in a chair by the hearth, and several lumps of mud on the carpet where he must not have scraped his boots properly before he staggered in the night before. One glove had been abandoned on the mantel, above the poker he must have used to stir up the fire when he came in. It was a savage, ill-tempered stirring too, from the amount of coal and ash spilled haphazardly over the grate and across the hearth tiles.
Crumpled pages of a newspaper lay on the carpet by his desk, as if tossed aside in frustration. A waistcoat, discarded here for some reason instead of his dressing room, hung over the winged back of the chair in which he sat. Molly tried to imagine the circumstances that might cause a gentleman to unbutton his waistcoat and shrug out of it before he even went upstairs to bed. But then she decided it had better be none of her business.
Although it was she who invaded his private, intimate place, Molly was now the one surrounded and in danger of breathing too much of it in. Too much of him in. The heady essence of a seductive brute. It was somehow even worse, she realized, when he was in repose, not even trying.
Just like now, for instance, as he bent over his desk, and that dark lock of unbrushed hair tumbled carelessly over his brow.
“What are you looking at, Mouse?” He spoke without glancing up from his desk. “Lady Mercy would be appalled by my untidy habits, would she not?”
“You do seem to be taking advantage of your sister’s absence, my lord. A dust rag and a broom would not go amiss.”
He sniffed, still studying the contract, his wide, strong shoulders hunched forward over the desk.
“But what you do and the state of your library is not my concern,” she added. “All I want from you”—she took a deep breath—“is the coin.”
Now he looked up, fixing her in a stare that was potent, definitely heated this time. It almost drained the strength out of her knees. “A remarkably mercenary attitude, Mouse.”
“Yes, my lord.” She sighed. “I would feel ashamed of it, if I could afford the sentiment.”
Three
She wasn’t the first woman to want him for the money, of course, but she was the first to admit that was all she wanted. It was refreshingly honest, actually.
Carver was amused, and that seldom happened so early in his day.
The Mouse had drunk in every joking word he’d said and drawn up a contract in workmanlike fashion, also producing a copy so they could both keep one. Several misspellings and some odd punctuation, he noted, but for a country girl with no formal education, she had a neat hand. Obviously she picked things up as she went along, absorbed them quickly, and was determined to lift herself up out of the sphere in which she was born, even to the extent of abandoning her own wedding.
“Most women of your age and in your position,” he pointed out, “want a husband to make fat and miserable, and a litter of screaming, snot-nosed brats to herd about.”
“Then clearly I’m not most women, my lord. With your financial assistance, I won’t have to be.”
She drooped—yes, drooped, no other word for it—before him in a weather-beaten hat and coat, her small face solemn as an undertaker. But the eyes were large and bright, full of more hope than he’d ever felt directed at him before.
“You’ll amount to naught, boy,” he could still hear his father hissing in his ear. “It is my greatest regret that I must leave this estate in your hands, but such is God’s punishment for me.”
That was when he was expelled from boarding school for fighting. The second time. His father never wanted to know why the fights happened. His only concern was that Carver had an unpredictable side, a temper he could not hold, and he did not seem to have much respect for rules or punishment.
“That school was supposed to turn you into a gentleman!”
To which ten year-old Carver had replied, “But nobody asked me whether I want to be a gentleman. I’d rather be a blacksmith or a carpenter. At least they make things.”
As the blows came down around his ears, his father shouted until he was hoarse. “You will bring shame to this family. I might have known, but what choice do I have? Worthless boy! Good-for-naught!”
He heard that name so often it ceased to hurt. Yet this plain wisp of a girl, who looked as if a strong gust of air might shatter her bones and leave naught but a pair of boots and a crumpled frock on his carpet, regarded him with something new. With hope.
She sneezed again, loudly. Although she quickly buried her face in an oversized kerchief, it was too late to catch the fine mist that shot out of her and into the air of his library. Carver winced, leaning farther back in his chair.
“I know most folk—my own family, for instance—will say I’m getting above my place,” she mumbled into her handkerchief, “but I can’t help thinking that life should move forward, my lord, not lie stagnant. Isn’t progress the very essence of being alive?”
She must have picked that up somewhere on a seditious pamphlet. “Perhaps I should be more diligent about the reading matter allowed inside my house,” he muttered. “Servants who learn to read have done themselves a disservice. It will end only in discord, because it puts ideas in their heads, and they can no longer be trusted not to pry into their master’s business.” It was something his father would say, and it came out of him like anything else learned by rote—a conjugated Latin verb or a mathematical formula.
“Rest assured, I wouldn’t want to pry into your business,” she replied tartly. “As for ideas—my own are plentiful. Believe it or not, they occur to me without being put there by some man.” Pausing for another fretful sigh, she added, “I often wish they did not. I wish I could be ignorant and oblivious of things. Like the colors in clouds.”
“Clouds?” He was trying to follow but had briefly become lost in the dewy, shimmering depths of her eyes.
“It is quite a burden for a poor, lowly but honest girl like me to have any thoughts at all, especially when they do not coincide with the ideas of other folk.”
Carver studied her somber face. Her countenance was calm, but there was a lot going on beneath that placid surface. He’d never heard her speak much before this, and now she was, he suspected, testing her new boundaries, kicking up the grass like a filly released from its bridle and let out in the paddock to run. Yes, a long-legged pony. She was tall for a woman. The length of her bones had outgrown her clothes and outpaced her ability to put much flesh upon them. It was one of the first things he’d ever noticed about Molly Robbins, because it made him nervous to think she might eventually grow tall enough to look him directly in the eye. Who knew what parts of him she could one day reach to prick with her sly pins?
He pressed his aching head into the chair back, lifted her contract with one hand, and glanced over it again in the light from his window. Surely she’d underestimated the costs.
“Two hundred pounds will not get you far,” he muttered, although he really had no idea how much a dressmaker charged for her services. If his mistress desired new clothes, he told her to charge it to his account, and then the matter was taken care of by Edward Hobbs, who handled all such affairs. In fact, Carver didn’t really know what anything cost, except for a good racehorse. Since there was little the Danforthe coffers couldn’t afford, prices were mostly moot.
“I did not want to ask for more than I could pay back in a reasonable amount of time,” she replied. “The sum I request from you is just enough to help with rent and materials until I am established. If I asked for more, you might expect something in return, and I have my virtue to consider.”
He almost dropped the contract. “Your virtue?”
“That’s right, my lord. I don’t suppose you come across one often, but I’d like to keep mine unbesmirched.”
A sudden ripple of laughter threatened his stern composure, but somehow he thwarted its determined progress up his throat and returned his gaze to the contract, where his attention was caught by a line of words, thickly underscored in the last clause. “What’s this?” he demanded.
“No Tomfoolery, my lord. You needn’t try to seduce me. Ours will be a business arrangement and nothing more. In light of your reputation, I thought I’d better put that in, so there could be no misunder—”
“Hush, woman!”
The threat of laughter successfully vanquished now, Carver scowled at the paper and felt that throbbing ache pounding in his temple with renewed force. For this he got out of bed? He ought to toss her damnable contract into the fire, send her away with a few stern words about never darkening his doorstep again, and then go back to his warm and cozy bed. When he looked up once more, the sanctimonious wench was suddenly at the side of his desk, closer than before. She’d moved with such stealth that when he saw her suddenly in a new place, his pulse quickened. It was as if he’d just found a spider on his blotter.
“I think you’ll find it all quite in order, my lord.”
No Tomfoolery, indeed! As if he might be tempted by her—his sister’s former servant, and a dull, scrawny bag of bones into the bargain! Carver had his pick of society beauties and certainly would never choose a melancholy creature, adaptable to dark corners, and in possession of a sinister ability to move from one spot to another without sound. Carver preferred noisy, colorful women who were too loud to creep up on him and take him by surprise, too shallow to require more than a few expensive presents to keep them content. Spinsters with iron petticoats were of no interest to him.
Why, he wondered suddenly, had he ever suggested he might loan this Mouse money? He didn’t even know how he’d learned about her aspirations of starting a business. Surprising what he picked up around his own house, like lint.
“Didn’t I pay you enough when you were my sister’s lady’s maid?” he muttered. “You ought to have some savings, surely.”
“Much of what I earned went home to my family in Sydney Dovedale,” she replied, looking down at her hands where they clasped around her reticule. “I saved a little, on Lady Mercy’s urging, but there was always something at home to be paid for.”
He knew she came from a very large family where the children were all sent out to work as soon as possible. Molly’s wage, so his sister told him once, was greatly relied upon by a sick mother after the father was killed—run over by a speeding carriage one evening as he stumbled home from the local tavern. Carver seldom listened to his sister’s gossip, but whenever she spoke to him about her lady’s maid it sank in. Probably, he mused, because Molly Robbins was such a mysterious creature and would never volunteer information about herself. Neither could he let anyone see him interested enough to inquire. Yet he felt as if he needed to amass these little pieces of knowledge about her, merely to prepare himself.
For what he had no idea. Possibly against another attack upon his person.
“If you no longer wish to loan me the money, my lord, I’ll understand, of course. If you don’t feel up to the risk of investment. If, when you made the offer that evening, you thought to get something from me that I am not prepared to give. Or if you have lost your courage.” She pressed her lips together. They were well-shaped, softly—one might even say invitingly—curved when she allowed them to relax. But it was as if she was afraid of what they might say or do when given too much freedom, so she kept them under close guard. “I wouldn’t want to impose upon you. I daresay there are other places for a girl to find investors in this town.”
“Indeed. Now you’ve dragged me out of bed at this unholy hour just to be impertinent to my face, I suppose you can be content, traipse back out again, and sully my name to all and sundry.”
She continued somberly, “Since I am no longer employed here, I am not your responsibility, and you have no obligation toward my welfare.”
“Quite. Let the rejoicing commence.”
“I ask only that”—she paused for a quick sneeze—“should the peelers return my drowned body here to Danforthe House, you take pity on me and don’t tell my brothers that I was driven, ou
t of desperation, to end my own life.”
“Wait, do I hear violins?”
“I wouldn’t want to be buried outside the church wall with the sinners and those unbaptized. For then I might have to come back and haunt…somebody.”
She already did, he mused, thinking of the scratching inside his wainscoting. But she didn’t hide from him today. She’d stepped out of the shadows to get his attention. Her bonnet he vaguely recognized now as one that previously belonged to his sister. Molly Robbins must have altered it slightly, taken away some of the decoration and restyled it to fit her less flamboyant personality. Her cheeks were thinner than his sister’s, the skin a little darker. Dimples, pouts, and fluttery lashes had no place on Miss Robbins’s face. There was no artifice, such as he often detected painting the features of his mistress. Molly didn’t need anything of that sort; hers was an honest face, unwavering, composed, fearless.
Carver watched her thoughtfully. Perhaps she was not so very plain after all. Or perhaps he had simply never observed her closely enough.
“Is there something amiss?” she inquired, very polite. This slender girl, sneezing all over his library, dampening his air with her germs, had the gall to ask if there was anything wrong with him. “You look a trifle pale, my lord.”
He stabbed a finger at the No Tomfoolery clause in her contract. “This won’t be necessary.”
“I’d like it there all the same. Just to be sure.” Bloody woman didn’t even blink.
“Well, it’s your ink wasted.” He smirked. “Mouse.”
“Better be safe than sorry, my lord. Like I said, if you don’t feel up to it. If you prefer that I seek funds elsewhere, from some other gentleman who—”
“Hush, woman!”
He would never hear the last of it from his sister if he turned Robbins away from his door, and to be perfectly honest, he didn’t like the idea of her going to others for assistance. He supposed this strange pinch of anxiety might have something to do with being dragged up and out of his own bed so blasted early, but he could not allow her to go to anyone else. Not with those wise-beyond-their-years brown eyes and lips that grew bolder by the minute.
Miss Molly Robbins Designs a Seduction Page 3