“Get away from me or I’ll scream!”
More knocking, but next door this time.
“Sir?” said Nichols.
“Not on your life,” said Lisle.
“I hate you!” the woman cried.
“Elspeth, I’ve had enough of this!”
“I’ve had enough of you!”
“Don’t make me drag you back.”
“Like the brute you are?” Mocking laughter now.
More knocking, farther along the passage.
“You stupid woman. No one’s going to open the door to strangers at this—”
An abrupt silence.
Then another voice. Though he was too far away to understand the words, Lisle had no trouble identifying the owner: Olivia.
“Plague take her,” he said. He threw back the bedclothes and ran to the door.
Chapter 7
With a sob, the woman flung herself upon Olivia, who instinctively put her arms about her and drew her into the room.
Olivia turned the sobbing woman over to Bailey.
“Hoi!” said the man. “That’s my wife.”
Swallowing a sigh, Olivia moved back to the threshold. She did not mind a row, but marital disputes were not proper rows. The odds, she knew, were strongly in favor of the woman’s being the wronged party. Marriage was set up that way, giving all the power to the male.
Still, that didn’t mean that a wife couldn’t be acting like a nitwit. She strongly suspected this was the case at present. One could not, however, turn one’s back on a damsel in distress.
She hated marital quarrels.
She bestowed a dazzling smile on the man. He took a step back.
“Your wife seems to be distraught,” she said.
“Deranged is more like it,” he said. “She said—”
“I heard,” she said. “I reckon the whole town heard. Frankly, I think you could have handled it more cleverly. If I were you, I should go away and devise a better strategy. Sobering up would be a good start.”
“I’m not drunk,” he said. “And I won’t be ordered about by females.”
“You’re not making a good impression,” she said cheerfully.
“I don’t care! You give her back!”
He leaned threateningly toward Olivia.
Though he wasn’t tall, he was square and sturdy, with arms like a blacksmith’s. He could easily pick Olivia up and throw her out of his way if he so chose. Having reached the reckless stage of drunkenness, he might.
She rose to her full height, folded her arms, and tried to forget that she wore her nightclothes, and only her nightgown at that. Bailey hadn’t been able to find her dressing gown in the dark on short notice and Olivia hadn’t waited before answering the door.
She pretended she was not only fully dressed but fully armed as well. “Do be reasonable,” she said. “I cannot in good conscience give her back if she doesn’t wish it. Why don’t you try coaxing?”
“Elspeth!” he shouted. “You come out of there!”
That was his idea of coaxing. Men.
“Brute!” Elspeth cried. “Betrayer! Womanizer! Libertine!”
“Libertine? Dammit, Elspeth, all I did was take a turn in the stable yard. You’re being ridiculous. Come out of there or I’ll come in after you!”
He looked at Olivia. “Miss, I’d give her back or get out of the way if I was you. This is none of your affair.”
He took a step forward.
Then a sudden step back, as a white-clad arm grasped his and spun him around. “Don’t even think about it,” said Lisle.
“She’s got my wife!”
“So she does. But you may not go in after her.”
The man looked down at the hand on his arm, then up into Lisle’s face. Lisle was wearing the extremely calm expression that usually preceded his doing something violent. Most people had no trouble reading this expression.
The outraged husband must have read it because, instead of trying to break Lisle’s jaw, he turned to scowl at Olivia. “Women!”
“I sympathize, believe me,” said Lisle. “But you can do nothing here. It’s claimed that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Why don’t you go downstairs and wait for your helpmeet to come to her senses?”
“Silly fool female,” the man said, but halfheartedly. Lisle’s dangerously calm demeanor had sapped the fight out of him.
Lisle released his arm, and the fellow went away, muttering about women.
Lisle watched until the man was out of sight. Then he turned to Olivia. His silvery gaze skimmed over her, from the rat’s nest of her hair down over the muslin nightdress and down to her bare feet. She felt every inch of the survey.
She gave it back, letting her gaze move slowly down, from his tangled hair, over the bruised eye, over the nightshirt that covered only as far as his knees, and on down a length of naked, muscular calf to his bare feet.
Then she wished she’d stared at the wall behind him instead. She was remembering his scent and the feel of his body and the heat of contact. Low in her belly, something wicked stirred.
“Knowing you, I ought to believe it,” Lisle said. “The mind reels all the same. It’s the middle of the night. You came to your door—wearing almost nothing—and opened it to strangers.”
“I’m not wearing nothing,” she said. “Or if I am, so are you.”
As though on purpose to contradict her, Nichols glided to his master’s side and helped him into a magnificent green silk dressing gown with a lining the color of claret.
Never taking his gaze from Olivia, Lisle absently accepted his servant’s ministrations, then waved him away. Nichols vanished in the same discreet way he’d appeared. How a man like Lisle could retain this superior, sophisticated valet was as great a riddle to Olivia as the little pictures and squiggles Lisle drew in his letters, to illustrate one point or another.
The elegant gown had to be the valet’s doing. Lisle was not a man who cared about his clothes. Olivia had always supposed that dressing him must be a thankless task. Yet the valet stuck with him, and braved the hardships of Egypt with him.
She felt a surge of envy, which she quickly crushed. What was so enviable about spending one’s life being invisible?
Meanwhile, with Bailey occupied with the hysterical wife, only Olivia was wearing almost nothing
“It was an emergency,” she said. “One can’t wait to be properly attired when someone in trouble seeks help.” She gestured toward the woman, who was blowing her nose in what looked like one of Olivia’s handkerchiefs.
“A damsel in distress,” Olivia went on. “What would you have me do?”
Lisle shook his head. The light from the sconce behind him made a hazy glow of his sun-streaked hair, like a halo—as though his angelic good looks needed enhancement.
She shifted her gaze lower, to resist the temptation to run her fingers through his sleep-tousled hair. She stared at the sash of his dressing gown instead, but that only reminded her of the taut waist she’d clung to hours earlier. She didn’t know where to look.
“I’d have you think,” he said.
“No, you wouldn’t,” she said. “You’d have me sit quietly, waiting for a man to come along to do my thinking for me,” she said.
“Even I know better than to expect you to sit quietly,” he said. “I thought you knew better than to get mixed up in a marital squabble. Do you never listen to your stepfather? Isn’t that one of Rathbourne’s rules?”
She was desperately aware of his bare feet, inches from hers. “I believe he taught you a rule about arguing with ladies as well.”
“Thank you for reminding me,” he said. “You are and always have been impulsive to a suicidal degree. It’s a waste of breath to argue with you at any time, especially
in a frigid corridor in the middle of the night.”
“You’re the one in the cozy dressing gown,” she said. “I don’t feel cold.”
His gaze slid downward, to her breasts. She didn’t follow the gaze. She didn’t need to. She was well aware of the state of her nipples.
“Part of you feels it,” he said. “But you’ll argue about that, too, and I’ve had enough.” He turned and strode down the corridor.
She stood for a moment, watching him walk away from her.
He always walked away . . . or rode away . . . or sailed away—off to his adventures, to his mistress, Egypt. He’d come back only long enough to unbalance everything. For a time she’d have her friend and ally back, but after he’d gone, she’d be more restless and discontented. She’d wait for his letters, to share his life, and he—oh, he’d forget all about her if she didn’t write to him constantly, reminding him she existed.
She clenched her fists and went after him.
Lisle entered his room and closed the door behind him and leaned back against it, eyes closed.
Ye gods! Ye gods! Olivia half naked.
And standing in the doorway of a public hostelry for all the world to see. Elspeth’s husband had certainly had an eyeful: Olivia’s tits standing at attention under that paltry excuse for nightclothes.
Lisle’s cock was standing at attention, too, as though it hadn’t wasted enough energy in that way already.
“Go down and get me a glass of brandy,” he told Nichols. “No, better yet, a bottle. Make it three bottles.”
“I could prepare a posset for you, sir,” said Nichols. “Very quieting after so much agitation.”
“I don’t want quieting,” Lisle said. “I want oblivion. These cursed women.”
“Yes, sir.”
The valet left.
The door had scarcely closed behind him when the knocking started.
“Go away,” Lisle said. “Whoever you are.”
“I’m not going away. How dare you turn your back on me. How dare you scold me and order me about and—”
He pulled the door open.
She stood there, as inadequately dressed as previously, her arm upraised to knock again.
“Go back to your room,” he said. “What the devil is wrong with you?”
“You,” she said. “You haven’t been about for years. You come for a short time, then you go away.” She made sweeping motions that pulled the muslin tautly over her breasts. “You have no right to order me about or interfere. As you took such pains to point out, you’re not my brother. You are not related to me in any way. You have no rights over me.”
More dramatic gestures. Her hair tumbled in wild disarray about her shoulders. One of the ribbons tying her bodice was coming undone.
“If I wish to let ten women into my room, you have no right to stop me,” she railed on. “If I wish to let ten men into my room, you may not stop me. I am not your property, and I won’t be ordered about. I won’t be castigated for doing what I think is right. I won’t be—”
She broke off with a shriek as he grabbed one of her flailing arms, pulled her into the room, and shut the door.
She shook him off.
He let go and stepped back.
“This is very aggravating,” he said.
“On that we’re agreed,” she said. “I had completely forgotten how provoking you can be.”
“I had completely forgotten that you lose all sense of proportion—as well as all sense of where you are—when one of your—your moods—takes hold of you.”
“It isn’t a mood, you thickhead!”
“I don’t care what you call it,” he said. “You can’t go about barely dressed, making scenes in public. If that poor fellow hadn’t been besotted with his temperamental wife—or if it had been another sort of man—or a pair of them—when you opened the door, the consequences—No, I refuse to contemplate them. Devil take you, do you never think before you act? Do you never take a moment—an instant—to consider what might happen?”
“I know how to take care of myself,” she said, lifting her chin. “You of all people ought to know that.”
“Oh, do you?” he said. “Then take care of yourself, Olivia.”
He wrapped an arm about her and pulled her close.
“Oh, no, you—”
He grasped her chin and kissed her.
Olivia did know how to take care of herself. She reached up to dig her nails into his wrists. She had her leg poised to thrust her knee into his soft parts.
But something went wrong.
She couldn’t move her face because he was holding her chin, gently yet firmly. And that left her no way to escape the shocking feel of his lips and the pressure of his mouth, determined, demanding, insisting. He was stubborn to the core, and whatever he did, he gave it all his concentrated attention, leaving her unable to turn away or ignore it. She couldn’t not respond to it. She couldn’t not savor the feel of his mouth and the taste of him.
Then the evilly tantalizing male scent wafted into her nose and swam into her head and filled it with dreams and longings and heat. The ground beneath her feet fell away, as though she rose in a hot-air balloon.
She slid her hands up to his shoulders. Then her arms were around his neck, and she was holding on, as though she’d drop a hundred miles to the cold earth below if she didn’t.
She was supposed to kick him in the shins. Instead, her bare foot slid up along his leg. The hand not holding her chin slid down her back and down and grasped her bottom, and he pulled her close, against his groin. Only a few thin layers of muslin and silk came between them. They hid nothing, protected nothing. His arousal, hot and heavy, pushed against her belly.
She was no pure innocent. She’d felt a man’s arousal before, but the heat had not raced through her like a flame along a line of gunpowder. She’d been titillated and aroused before, but she hadn’t ached as she did now. She hadn’t felt this wild restlessness.
He fell back against the door, taking her with him, and everything she knew fell away. All her knowledge and guile passed into nothingness. All she could do was yearn, and it was no pretty romantic longing but a madness. She rubbed herself against him, and opened her mouth to draw him inside and taste him. It was hot and lewd, a kiss of tangled tongues and thrust and withdraw, like the coupling every instinct screamed for.
She heard the sound, but it meant nothing. A vague sound that could have been anything.
Something beating, somewhere. She didn’t know where. It could have been her heart, making every pulse point thump with physical awareness of every inch of masculine body pressed against hers. It could have been the beat of wanting, that seemed to have gone on forever.
There was a knocking, but her heart knocked against her rib cage, with heat and need . . . and fear, because what was happening was out of her control.
More knocking. A voice.
“Sir?”
A male voice. Familiar. On the other side of the door.
DeLucey survival instincts, refined over generations, yanked her from whatever mad universe her feelings had taken her to. She came back to the world: a chilly place, suddenly.
She felt Lisle stiffen and start to draw away.
She untangled herself from him.
She dared a glance at his face. It was perfectly composed. No danger of his feet leaving solid ground.
He calmly tugged her nightgown back into place.
Not to be outdone, she straightened his robe.
For good measure, she patted his chest in a friendly way. “Well, then, let that be a lesson to you,” she said.
She pulled the door open, gave Nichols a regal nod, and sailed out, head spinning and legs trembling, and hoped she didn’t crash into a wall or fall on her face.
&nbs
p; Half past six o’clock in the morning
Sunday 9 October
In the dream, Olivia wore a very thin piece of linen. She stood at the bottom of a set of stone steps, beckoning. Behind her was a deep darkness. “Come, see my hidden treasure,” she said.
Lisle started down the steps.
She smiled up at him. Then she glided through a door. It slammed shut behind her.
“Olivia!”
He beat on the door. He heard answering thunder. But no, it wasn’t thunder. He knew that sound. Rocks, rolling into place. A booby trap. He looked back. Darkness. Only the thunder of the great stones rolling into the entrance.
Crash. Crash. Against wood.
What was that noise?
Not stones. A door.
Someone pounding on the door.
Lisle came completely awake, as he’d trained himself to do years ago in Egypt, when being able to shake off sleep instantly could mean the difference between life and death.
He sat up. The dim light filtering through the window curtains told him the sun was rising.
Where the devil was Nichols? At this hour, on the point of rising from a maidservant’s bed, very likely—or had he found his way into one of the female guests’ bedchambers?
Cursing his valet, Lisle hauled himself out of bed, dragged on his dressing gown, shoved his feet into his slippers, and stomped to the door.
He pulled it open.
Olivia paused, hand upraised.
He shook his head. He was still dreaming.
But no. The passage behind her was filled with the same grey light as his bedroom.
She was fully dressed. His sleep-clogged mind slowly took it in: the over-decorated bonnet . . . the high neck of the carriage dress with its fashionably swollen sleeves . . . the slim half-boots. Traveling clothes, his sleepy mind informed him. But that made no sense.
“What?” he said. “What?”
“We’re ready to go,” she said. “The servants’ vehicles have gone ahead. The ladies are in the carriage.”
He had no idea what she was saying. His mind cast up images of last night: she, nearly naked . . . he, losing his mind. A blunder. A whopping, great, nearly fatal blunder.
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