In fact, such was Grasby’s delight in witnessing his brother-in-law get his just deserts after all these years, and at the hands of his best friend, who had always threatened to rearrange Weasel Watkins’ facial features but had never delivered on this threat, that he quite forgot he was miserably angry, not only with William Watkins, but with Dair.
He was angry with William Watkins for having the audacity to think he was well within his rights to propose to Rory, and while fortified to the gills with alcohol. Grasby had returned to the shallop to a predictable berating by his wife, for abandoning her, and by the looks of him—he had taken a dip in the Thames on the way back from Banks House—he had had a lovely time of it without her. And in amongst her self-centered diatribe she happened to mention her brother’s intentions, and how she thought it the most wonderful news. His response—that her brother could be the last man walking this earth and he still would withhold his consent to such a match—sent Lady Grasby into a flood of tears. Grasby left her prostrate on the sofa, and stomped off up the jetty in search of Rory before William Watkins got a paw to her.
But what met his gaze as he rounded a bend in the path, was not William Watkins pawing at Rory, but the startling vision of his best friend making up to his little sister! He was so taken aback he wondered if it was a trick of the sun, and he was witness to a mirage. Or was he drunk or dreaming? What he was, was as mad as hellfire. His best friend since Harrow had broken the cardinal rule of best friends: Sisters were strictly off-limits.
Sisters were married off to nice chaps who were boring clods; preferably a chap who was as close to being a virgin as was possible. Which meant one whose sexual history was unknown to brothers and friends alike. A chap who went off on the Grand Tour and sowed his wild oats abroad but did not do so at home. A nice chap who did not have any surprises lurking in cupboards, or as in his best friend’s case, a Banks House with a past mistress and an illegitimate son, and a sordid sexual history known not only to himself, but to every member of White’s and beyond!
It was one thing to brag and exchange tid-bits about his best friend’s womanizing when the women were of a certain class and a certain type, but when it was his little sister Dair had within his sights, that was something altogether repugnant and unforgivable.
In fact, the sight of Rory and Dair as close as a couple could get without actually kissing, gave Grasby a severe jolt. He had never entertained the idea of his sister marrying at all. He liked the idea of her being a spinster aunt, living with him and Silla and the children. As for Rory being attractive to males, well, she was his sister, for God’s sake! If he thought about it deeply, he was glad she had an infirmity because it meant she would never have a suitor, and could be left in peace. She would always be his little sister and not another chap’s wife.
He might be irritatingly annoyed with Weasel Watkins’ presumption, but William Watkins’ motive was transparent. He did not love Rory, he wanted to marry her for the status it would bring him. At least the Weasel was obvious, whereas he had no idea what game Dair was playing. Possibly a whim of the moment, but one he should have resisted. The last thing on this earth he wanted was his sister falling in love with Dair Devil Fitzstuart. Only anguish and heartache could result, of that he was convinced.
So when he saw Rory sitting on the wall, and his best friend standing so close to her that it was obvious he was about to kiss her, shock and anger quickened his stride. He marched up to the wall about to demand that Dair unhand his sister, when to his amazement, William Watkins jumped up out of nowhere brandishing a stick, his intention clear. Grasby’s anger instantly vanished, replaced by incredulity. He was just about to shout out a warning when Rory did that for him, and his best friend dealt swiftly and violently with the situation.
Caught up in the moment, his angry purpose was forgotten in his admiration for Dair and his great satisfaction at seeing his brother-in-law finally get his comeuppance. He couldn’t wait to tell Cedric and the lads at White’s. He was confident a great many wagers would be settled, and a pile of debts cleared and made on the strength of that one punch.
Still, he did have a twinge of conscience watching the Weasel stagger about with a hand to his fractured nose, eyes blinded by tears of pain. When all was said and done, the man was his brother-in-law, and he knew Silla would fall all to pieces when she discovered her brother had suffered an injury, and, to his cost, at the hands of Major Lord Fitzstuart. He predicted bliss, domestic or otherwise, was about to become unobtainable within his household. And that reminded him of his sister, and Watkins’ marriage proposal, and his sympathy vanished. But before he had a chance to go to Rory, Dair called out to him, and Weasel Watkins found his voice in amongst his cries of pain.
“My nose! My nose, it’s-it’s broken! Dear God, you’ve broken my nose! You bloody bastard, Fitzstuart. You bloody brainless lout! You’ve broken it! Do you know what—”
“Button the language, Weasel or I’ll break your hand as well.”
William Watkins gave a snort of laughter that saw blood spurt from his nostrils and splatter the front of his exquisitely embroidered silk waistcoat. Despite the stabbing pain between his eyes he found the mental energy to snigger a reply.
“Language? What would you know about that? You can’t cobble two sentences together that make sense. I doubt a fatwitted numbskull like you can write more than your name—Dear God in Heaven, my n-nose!” He wiped his eyes free of tears, though they continued to water, and then ran a finger tentatively across his nostrils, saw the blood, then the blood on his clothes and collapsed crossed legged into the grass. “Jesu—I’m bleeding to death! The pain! I’m dying!”
“No, you’re not. Your nose is broken, and broken noses bleed—a lot. If you want to know pain, ask my batman. Having your mangled hand amputated, that’s pain. Four sentences and one conjunction, not counting this one. Grasby!? Give me your flask.”
The word conjunction had William Watkins turning his head to stare at the Major. As if seeing him for the first time, he had to wonder if, after all these years, he had read him wrong. But he quickly decided the quantity of wine drunk at lunch combined with the hell between his eyes had made him delirious. And when Dair winked at him with a twitch of a knowing smile, he knew it must be so.
“Grasby? Flask! The one full of cognac you always carry in your frock coat poc—”
“Hold on a dashed minute!” Grasby interrupted, a finger pointing at the Major. “You’ve grown a beard!”
Dair rubbed his cheek.
“There wasn’t much else I could do. Prisoners aren’t permitted shaving implements. They might use them for other purposes.”
“What other purposes?”
“Murder and suicide come to mind…” Dair murmured.
“Hold on to the reins! You’ve been let out of the Tower!”
Dair grinned. “Yes.”
“Good God, it becomes clear to me why the two of you are suited!” William Watkins burst out between groans, unable to listen to another minute of such inane conversation.
“Should I keep the whiskers?” Dair asked Grasby, ignoring William Watkins.
He glanced at Rory, but as she had her chin down, he wondered if she was doing her best to suppress a fit of the giggles at her brother’s remarkable lack of awareness. To goad her into lifting her head, he added, “I’ve heard ladybirds like a piratical beard. What do you think, Grasby?”
When Grasby looked to give the notion serious consideration, William Watkins shuddered with uncontrolled exasperation, the blood gurgling in his throat.
“Think? With a walnut-sized brain, and it located between your legs, I can’t imagine you think of anything else!”
“Walnut-sized?” Dair lifted an eyebrow.
“There’s nothing walnut-sized about him!” Grasby confirmed. “Brain or-or—Egad!! Is he supposed to do that?”
Grasby had saved himself from embarrassment when William Watkins started coughing uncontrollably. The secretary dropped his head
between his knees, and blood started pouring from his nose into the grass.
“Give me your handkerchief. Mine won’t be enough,” Dair ordered, and was about to turn away to attend to the injured William Watkins when his gaze locked on Rory. She had been watching him, and she did not look away. “Are you all right, Miss Talbot?”
“Y-yes. I will be fine directly, once you help Mr. Watkins.”
A moment, not ten seconds had passed between them, but Grasby caught it, and while he was not usually quick on the uptake, he was this time. He had a foreboding that his first summation upon coming round the bend in the path was the right one. Dair had been kissing his sister, and perhaps Watkins had caught them, attacked Dair and been punched for his efforts.
“Here,” Dair said to Watkins, going down on his haunches beside him and holding out one of the handkerchiefs. “The blood will stop soon, and then you can take a swig of Grasby’s cognac. The sooner you get back to the barge, and apply a cold compress to the swelling, the quicker it will subside. The bruising will take much longer.”
Watkins snatched the handkerchief and tentatively dabbed at his nose, eyeing the Major with loathing. The man was a gorilla-sized buffoon but he had to concede he could see why females fell into bed with him. Well, there was one woman he was determined to keep from his bed at any cost.
“I give you fair warning, Fitzstuart. Keep away from Miss Talbot. She is mine and I mean to marry her.”
Dair threw his head back and laughed. He gave William Watkins a shove, half playful, half forceful.
“You? Warning me? You and whose army? And to think I dared hoped I’d knocked some sense into you!”
“Don’t think I didn’t not know your game!”
“Dear me, Weasel, a triple negative, and you call me the language fatwit.” He unscrewed the cap and held out the flask. “Take a swig. You’ll feel better for it. Though why I should concern myself with you…”
The secretary took a mouthful of the cognac, swilled out his mouth and spat. He then took a sip, swallowed, and thrust the flask back at Dair.
“Molest Miss Talbot again and I’ll go straight to Shrewsbury with what I know about you—”
“You never fail to be predictable! You were a tale-bearer at School, too.”
“—you and your-your perverse pleasures.”
“Perverse pleasures? Kissing a pretty girl a perverse pleasure?” Dair gave a huff of dismissal. “Fat lot you know about perversity! In fact, fat lot of nothing you know about pretty girls!”
A hammer banged behind his eyes and he could feel his face swelling, but for all that William Watkins was determined to wrest the upper hand from this bearded baboon. With an over-inflated sense of his own cleverness, and an under-appreciation of the Major’s intelligence, he took it upon himself to inform his lordship, without spelling it out word-for-word, that he was well aware of the long standing wager that dared the devil to tup a cripple. If such a repugnant wager was to become generally known, it would be the end of the Major’s social acceptability. For while absurd wagers were the order of the day, there were some areas that were off-limits, even to the most base, hard-hearted gambler; the insane, the deformed, and the very young being top of the list.
“I know why you’ve taken a sudden interest in Miss Talbot,” William Watkins said, looking past Dair’s shoulder, to the wall, where Lord Grasby had retreated to speak to his sister, the siblings in quiet conversation. He brought his gaze back to the Major. “It must have taken all your powers of deduction to finally realize there was one of them on your doorstep. And there’s none finer than Miss Talbot, that when she is seated, one can almost forget her—disadvantage.”
“One of them?” Dair interrupted, at a loss to know what the secretary was babbling on about. He concluded the man must be concussed. “One of what?”
“Oh, come now, Fitzstuart!” William Watkins scoffed. “You’re stupid, not blind! Miss Talbot is a cripple.”
Dair’s jaw set hard and his hands clenched.
“And you have brown hair. Neither requires further discussion.”
William Watkins blinked. His eyelids felt heavy and huge. “She has a deformed right foot and is lame in one leg, which makes her a prime victim for your perverse wager, wouldn’t you say?”
Dair grabbed the secretary about the throat, high enough to close his jaw. He gritted his teeth and hissed in the man’s ear. “I’d say you’re about to add broken teeth to your list of injuries, if you don’t keep your bread hole shut!”
He then threw him off, rose to his full height and strode away, leaving the secretary spluttering for breath, mouth opened wide to take in air because his fractured nose was clogged with dried blood.
“He’s all yours!” Dair barked at Grasby. “Get him to his feet. His legs can’t be as useless as the rest of him.”
“But what about my—”
“I’ll take Miss Talbot as far as the jetty.”
“No. I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Grasby stated, coming away from the wall. “I’ll take Rory—”
“Your sister has blistered feet and cannot walk, and you cannot carry her the distance.” He pulled Grasby aside, saying in his ear, “If you leave me with him, I’m likely to beat the maggot to a watery pulp. Want that on your conscience?”
“Certainly not!
“Good! Then my way it is!”
Anger was one emotion his best friend rarely, if ever, exhibited, so Grasby made no further objection. He watched Dair stride over to where his sister sat, silent and observant, hands in her lap, an unsettling feeling making his stomach tighten. William Watkins’ persistent coughing made him reluctantly turn away to offer his brother-in-law his assistance. Which was just as well, because there was no mistaking the emotion writ large on Rory’s face when the Major handed over her walking stick he found discarded in the grass.
DAIR HAD SCOOPED up the stick and was about to offer it to her, when Rory lifted her head so he could see her face under the brim of her hat, and all the anger instantly vanished. He was so taken aback by her expression that he stopped dead in front of her, speechless. He had meant to apologize, for his violent reaction to Watkins’ behavior, for her having to bear witness to such an unseemly sight, and for leaving her sitting in the sun. But all those words, already formed but yet to be said, were swallowed back down his throat and forgotten.
She was smiling at him, but it was not just any smile, it was a joyful, loving smile, and it was the last thing he was expecting from her, given present circumstances. It was the most beautiful smile he had ever seen. It made him smile in return without even knowing he was doing so.
“You do remember me,” she whispered, so only he could hear her. She took her stick from him and laid it across her lap, then held out her hand. He took it without a second thought, and she drew him closer. “When you apologized earlier for kissing me, I heard what you said, but I wasn’t listening. If that makes sense. But now, sitting here and thinking about that kiss—which was a nicer way to pass the time than watching poor Mr. Watkins’ bleed into the grass—”
“I regret hitting him in front of you, but not that I hit him.”
“—I recalled what you said to me earlier. You said: I’m sorry, Delight. That is proof, is it not, that you do remember me from Romney’s Studio! You weren’t drunk at all, were you?”
He picked her up without a word, and carried her through the gate and along the path.
“You’ve had a touch too much sun, Miss Talbot.”
“And you, my lord, cannot tell a fib after you’ve kissed me! Admit it!”
He strode on.
“Miss Talbot, would you be so kind as to look over my shoulder and tell me if you can see your brother and the Weasel.”
“Call me Rory or call me Delight, but I am done with you calling me Miss Talbot! You are being stubborn because I found you out!”
“Can you see your brother or not?”
She lifted her chin, looked over his shoulder and shook her
head.
“No. There are trees and they must be out of our line of—Oh! Alisdair! What-what are you doing?”
He had ducked into the shrubbery. Behind a hedgerow, he slid her to her feet, pulled her tight to his torso, and before she could straighten her hat or her petticoats, or knew what to do with her walking stick, stooped under the brim of her hat and kissed her on the mouth. It was only one kiss, but it was enough to bring the smile back into his dark eyes and lift the corners of his mouth.
“Now I feel much better. Thank you—Rory.”
She dropped her stick and put both hands about his neck and went up on tiptoe to kiss him. “Was it Grasby who told you not to remember me from Romney’s Studio?” She smiled shyly and looked through her lashes. “I remember you—all of you…”
“You, my Delight, are a baggage! No. Not Grasby. Your grandfather.”
“Oh! That makes much more sense. Grand must have wanted to spare me the shame of such a predicament.” She giggled. “Or wanted to spare you and Grasby the shame of yours! Will you kiss me again?”
“Not here. Not now. Not with your brother breathing down my neck.”
Rory pouted and pretended disappointment. “But you will kiss me again, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And with those whiskers?”
“Ha! So you truly do like my piratical beard?”
“I am not a ladybird, but I do have a sense of discrimination. And all I can tell you is that I am yet to determine which incarnation of you I prefer: American savage or pirate… But I will let you know after due consideration.”
He laughed out loud and then quickly stifled his mirth by clapping a hand to his mouth, though the laughter still danced in his eyes. When he could speak he said huskily, “You are incorrigible!”
“And you must be sorely missed at Banks House,” she said and scooped up her stick. “I feel dreadful for taking up so much of your time when you should be spending it with your son, and on this of all days.”
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