by Nicole Byrd
This was madness!
And then—he had tried so hard not to look, not to see—he suddenly realized what he had also glimpsed in that half moment of seeing. Just as she climbed onto the bed and lay precariously on the edge of the mattress, pulling the blanket up to wrap around her, he whirled and pulled it off again so unexpectedly that she cried out in surprise and dismay.
“What?” Lauryn exclaimed.
But he had lifted her nightgown in a totally dispassionate fashion to gaze at the dark bruises covering her thighs and buttocks. “Why didn’t you tell me? You must have been in agony today! You could have ridden in the carriage—or, better still, you could have stayed behind at the lodge when I went back into town!”
She was flushing, though from what cause, he wasn’t sure.
“No, I do like to ride, as I said. Only it has been a while since I have ridden, so I am out of shape, hence the bruises from riding most of the day yesterday. They look worse then they are, truly. I did not want to stay behind today, nor ride in the carriage. After the first hour, I hardly felt them. I’m all right, just a little sore.”
“A little sore?” He raised his dark brows and shook his head. “I will fetch the maids and have them fill a hip bath with warm water so you can soak your bruises.”
“No, indeed. They’ve all gone back to the village by now,” she protested. “And I would not trouble the housekeeper. I’m all right.”
“I do not think—”
“Please! I don’t want to make a fuss,” she said, putting one hand on his arm.
He pressed his lips together, frustrated that she would not listen to sensible advice, that she seemed determined to consider the servants’ feelings on a par with her own. He looked over the dark purpling bruises once again and shook his head.
Flushing, she pulled her nightgown down to hide the marks.
Some would-be poet’s verse flashed through his mind—“My vision of paradise?” he murmured.
She blushed.
“Then if you will not allow me to soak you into more pliable comfort, at least”—he turned and considered, then walked across to a large chest on the far wall—“I think there might be something here that could help.” He bent over a large chest and raised the lid, looking through a variety of feminine trinkets and cosmetics, left from former visitors, until he found what he sought. He came back to sit on the bed beside her, carrying a glass jar, and when he unscrewed its lid, it proved to hold a sweet-smelling cream.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Cream for your skin,” he told her. “I’m going to rub your bruises to help them heal.”
She looked doubtful. “Don’t rub too hard,” she suggested.
He nodded. “You may tell me if I am not gentle enough,” he assured her. “But we must do something to assuage your bruises and your aches.”
Or perhaps he simply ached for an excuse to get his hands on her? He refused to examine that thought too closely.
He took some of the scented cream in his palm and touched her thigh very softly. He felt the quiver of her response. He was sure she was very sore, so he stroked the cream on her skin with light, delicate strokes, down into the soft skin of her thigh and calf, kneading with a feather soft touch, one thigh, then the other.
He cupped her buttocks with both his hands, rubbing them with a light circular pattern, rolling her onto her stomach, so that he could knead her skin, still with a gentle touch, barely moving the skin. But he knew that she was very aware of his movements, that her cheeks had flushed, and that her fingers had curled slightly, almost into fists, and she made soft sounds deep in her throat. She moved her hips against the sheets, and he almost growled, too, at this sign of her wanting.
They were both breathing quickly. He felt his own response to her grow, and he allowed his hands to drop lower, his fingers to slip deeper, rubbing gently, teasing almost into the folds of her sweet inner lips where they would soon both be lost—
Now, she was quivering from more than just the soreness of her bruises. In another moment, neither of them would be able to stop—
Someone screamed.
Ten
They broke apart, and Lauryn sat up. “What is it?” she exclaimed.
The earl had already jumped to his feet. Pulling his robe tighter around him, he picked up a candle from the table by the bed and strode for the door.
Tugging her nightgown down, she hurried after him. The only other woman in the house, since the servants slept outside the lodge itself, was the contessa. What could be wrong? Had someone broken in? Or perhaps it was only a nightmare….
It was only a few steps down the hall to the other bedchamber. The earl beat his fist on the closed door. “Contessa?” he called. “Alexanderine, are you all right?”
For a moment, there was no answer, then Lauryn heard another scream.
The earl wrenched open the door. The room inside seemed very dark. Holding up his candle, he took a step inside. “What is amiss?”
Lauryn tried to make out what was wrong; the room was filled with shadows. “Are you all right, contessa?” she called, thinking that perhaps the room’s inhabitant would wish to hear a feminine voice.
“There is a creature!” the contessa shrieked, her voice sounding muffled. She was in the bed, it appeared, although Lauryn could see nothing except a large lump beneath the covers—she seemed to have pulled all the bedclothes over her head. “Save me!”
“What?” Lauryn said. She could make out nothing moving except for the quivering mound that was the contessa in the middle of the bed.
But the earl uttered an exclamation perhaps not suited for ladies’ ears, and she didn’t ask him to repeat it. Was there a rat that had emerged from behind a wall? What had frightened the contessa? Lauryn looked nervously about her at the floor.
Then something moved, indeed, but it was a shadowy shape that flickered at the corner of a ceiling beam. Lauryn bit back a gasp, and the contessa screamed again, though how she had seen it from beneath her bundle of bedclothes, Lauryn could not have said.
The earl swore once more. “Hush,” he said, “you’re only exciting it.”
“Is it a bird?” Lauryn asked, ducking as it swung past, its flight strangely erratic. “How did it get in?”
The contessa shrieked.
The earl held his candle higher as he tried to make out the thing. Then the long wingspan and uneven flight pattern clicked in her brain. Lauryn knew the truth even as the earl set down the candle on a table and looked around for something to marshal against the intruder.
“Oh, my God,” she muttered. “It’s a bat.” Lauryn sat down rather suddenly in the chair beside the bed. There was a scarf lying on the arm of the chair; she grabbed it up to wrap about her hair. Her maid at home had always said that bats loved to tangle themselves in one’s hair. Her sister Juliana’s husband, an amateur zoologist who studied animals, said that was a folktale. But just now, Lauryn decided she didn’t care to risk it. Let Juliana be the sample case if she preferred!
Marcus had found a long stick somewhere—no, it was a parasol—he was waving it at the bat, who simply flew faster when harassed. That seemed to accomplish nothing except that the bat was weaving up and down and around through all parts of the bedchamber. The contessa was now shrieking almost without taking a breath, and Lauryn didn’t feel too happy, herself. She crouched lower in the chair.
She looked around to see if there might be a more effective weapon than the parasol. The contessa had left pieces of her wardrobe lying here and there about the room. There was a rather formidable set of cagelike corsets, but the bat would simply fly out the top…no, that wouldn’t do.
There was a thickly knitted shawl, however. Lauryn looked at the long piece of wool and swallowed hard, gathering her courage. They couldn’t chase this beast all night, and the contessa was going to have a nervous spasm, or at least lose her voice—though that might not be all bad, as Lauryn’s ears were ringing already—if this went on much longer
.
With considerable reluctance, Lauryn gathered the ends of the shawl in her hands and climbed up to balance herself on the chair, watching the bat until it came her way again. The earl saw at once what she intended to do and tried to herd the bat toward her, but driving a bat was not exactly the easiest thing to do.
Twice he tried to send it flying toward her, and twice it zigged and zagged another way entirely. But finally, when he had waved it accidentally toward the other corner of the room, it took a sharp turn and then zoomed right into the shawl. Lauryn was able to pull it down, trapped in the folds of the thick woolen cloth.
“Careful, they have sharp teeth!” the earl warned.
“I know,” Lauryn said, shivering as she quickly wrapped the shawl over and over the small animal, then held it out at arm’s length. Sutton came just as swiftly to take the struggling bundle from her.
The door to the bedchamber suddenly opened once more. Yawning, Carter stood in the doorway and stared at them.
“What in blue blazes are you making all this racket about? Can’t a fellow sleep in this house?”
“Now you finally wake? We could all be dead three times over!” Sutton told him. “Here, you get the task of taking this brute outside and letting it go—mind you go far enough so that it flies away, far away, and doesn’t end up in the lodge again.”
Carter drew back in alarm. “What the hell are you giving me?”
“Don’t drop it! A perfectly bloodthirsty beast the size of a mouse, you goose,” his brother said. “And mind you don’t let it bite your fingers.”
Looking suddenly pale, Carter took the well-wrapped bundle as gingerly if he had been handed an asp, holding it at arm’s length.
Sutton sighed. “I’d best go with him,” he said to Lauryn.
She was looking at the bed. The contessa had at last stopped shrieking, but judging from the sounds coming from beneath the heap of bedclothes, she was now sobbing.
“I think I should stay here,” she said quietly. Remembering what they had been doing so pleasurably before the interruption, she said it reluctantly, but she didn’t feel she could leave the contessa, who seemed truly disturbed by the invasion of wildlife.
He nodded. Lifting one of her hands, he kissed it gently, which made her flush with pleasure. Then he turned. “I will go with Carter, just to be sure that we have no more casualties tonight,” he told her.
She smiled and nodded. When the men had departed and shut the door behind them, she went to the bed and cautiously pulled back the blankets. “Contessa? Are you all right? Did it bite you?”
The usually immaculately groomed aristocrat looked very strange with her hair mussed and her eyes swollen from weeping. “Non,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “It iz is only that I do not like”—she shuddered—“I have the horror of zuch beasts. They are zo nasty, oui?”
“Yes, I know. But it’s gone, now. The men have taken it away.”
“C’est vrai?” She looked about the room as if she expected a few more bats to spring out of the woodwork. It would have been funny if the contessa had not been so sincerely frightened. Lauryn was not tempted to laugh. She sat down on the bed and put out her hand.
“It’s gone, truly. We caught it in a shawl.”
“My shawl?”
“I’m afraid so; it was the first thing I saw that was thick enough to wrap it in. But I will wash it for you when they bring it back.”
The contessa shuddered. “Non, non, I never vant to touch it again if it ’as touched that creature! Put it in the fire!”
“Whatever you say,” Lauryn agreed. “Why don’t you try to sleep. Would you like me to get you a little wine?”
“Oui, or perhaps a brandy,” the contessa said, her voice wan. “For the nerves.”
It occurred to Lauryn that she should have made sure she knew where the wine was before offering—then she recalled there were bottles in the sideboard in the dining room. So she went back to find her slippers and wrapper and made her way downstairs to pour a glass for the contessa and bring it back up. And, indeed, when the contessa had sipped some brandy, she was more composed and agreed to lie back and try to sleep.
But the other woman still appeared very worried about the chance of another bat emerging from the shadows of the room, and not until Lauryn offered to lie down with her, like a mother with a fretful child, did she at last shut her eyes and fall into a troubled sleep.
Lauryn made herself comfortable on the other side of the bed and pulled the blankets up around her. It looked as if she were here for the night. And how unexpected that this cosmopolitan aristocrat, who was older than Lauryn and experienced in so many things, could still have such unexpected fears.
One never knew. C’est la vie, as the contessa herself would have said.
And even Lauryn jumped when the windows rattled in the breeze. “Nonsense,” she muttered. The odds of another bat getting into the house tonight must be very long. She shut her eyes and, eventually, drifted off to sleep.
The next morning, everyone slept late and seemed to wake in a less than perfect mood. But at least the contessa seemed composed again, although she sniffed when she saw her own reflection in the looking glass. She sent the maid for a cold cloth—there were no hothouses here to grow cucumbers in—and had tea and toast in her bedchamber, then went back to bed with more cold compresses on her still swollen eyelids.
“I vill rise in ze good time,” she told Lauryn. “When I look more presentable, non?”
“Whatever you say,” Lauryn agreed. She herself dressed and went downstairs. She found the earl and his brother in the dining room, which was thankfully absent of any animal life.
“How is the contessa?” their host asked, his tone polite.
“Better,” she told them. “Although she is not ready to come downstairs just yet.”
“Ah, I see,” the earl said, bringing Lauryn a cup of tea himself. “Do try the scones, the cook here has a very light hand with baked goods.”
Carter watched this unusual show of favoritism with some surprise. “You told me not to eat you out of house and home, Marcus.”
“So?” The earl sat down after Lauryn did, and turned back to his brother, looking totally unrepentant. “Not everyone eats like a starving ox, Carter. Besides, Mrs. Smith is the heroine of the hour. She actually caught the beast last night, throwing a shawl over the thing as it flew through the air.”
“Really?” Looking impressed despite himself, Carter stared at her. “I say, good show.”
“A clever idea, better than mine,” Sutton said. “All I did was make the confounded creature more frantic.”
Lauryn blushed. “It was a lucky guess, that’s all. I have had experience with them before. They would sometimes fly into our attic at home and have to be chased out.” At once, she realized she had wandered into dangerous territory.
Both of the men looked interested.
“And where is home, Mrs. Smith?” Carter asked, his tone only civil but his eyes revealing a spark of curiosity.
“Oh, the north of England,” she said, and lowered her gaze to her plate as she reached to take a scone, still warm from the oven, and a spoonful of jam and a knife’s edge of butter for her pastry.
She applied herself to the excellent breakfast and said little more, hoping that no one would ask more questions. By the time she finished eating, Carter had risen from the table.
“At least,” the earl said to him quietly, “the incident with the alarming wildlife will be a good excuse for you to take the contessa into a hotel in town.”
“Yes, but—” his brother began, looking alarmed.
“Not to worry,” Sutton told him. “I will see that you are not in need of funds.”
“Oh, well, then,” Carter grinned. “In that case, you are a trump, Sutton. You may call on me for any favor that you need.”
“So I shall,” the earl said, his tone dry.
Lauryn kept her gaze on her plate, not sure what she should comment on, or pr
obably, better not to remark on this exchange at all. But when Carter had gone out, she ventured at last to glance up at the earl.
He caught her eye. “At least we will have our privacy back, soon,” he said, his voice low.
She smiled at him. “Are we going back into town today?”
He shook his head. “You are going to stay inside and rest your overworked body; I think you should stay out of the saddle for at least one day. We could use the carriage, of course, but with bruises like those, I think perhaps even driving might be too much. One day should not make any difference in our quest for answers about the mysteries surrounding the ship and its cargo. And I will not abandon you to entertain our guests all on your own.”
She grinned ruefully at him. “That is most kind.”
“It would be a woeful way to repay you for your courage last night.” Once more, he took her hand and lifted it to his lips, a simple gesture but one that made her heart seem to swell. She looked up into his eyes, and for a moment, they seemed as close as they had ever been….
Why had he pushed her away, of late? What was it that she was not doing, for what did she not satisfy him completely—if he did not tell her, how was she to know!
Frustrated, she caught her lower lip between her teeth for a moment and wondered if she should try to speak openly to him, and yet—
A footman came into the room with more hot tea. The earl put down her hand, and she looked back at her plate as the servant poured the steaming liquid into the earl’s cup and then into her own, and the moment was lost.
She sipped her tea and finished her breakfast. Then, when the earl went out to the stables, Lauryn rose and went back upstairs to check on the contessa. She found her dozing, so she did not disturb her.
She went back downstairs and found Carter in the sitting room playing solitaire, and the earl still outside, apparently; he was nowhere in sight. She had no great wish to sit and chat with his brother, so after glancing over the bookshelf, Lauryn looked out the window for a moment. The day looked to be a fine one. She decided to go back upstairs to fetch her hat and gloves and take a stroll outside; she had seen little of the grounds.