“I came to see you, even if you do mistake giving a man orders for making small talk.”
She preceded him into a blue, white, and gilt parlor. A bowl of daisies graced the windowsill, and a lady’s work basket was open on a hassock.
“I’m simply reviewing the protocol with you. Her Grace has spoken well of you, which means you’ll have to blunder badly to ruin your reception by polite society.”
Miss Charlotte had left the door open, but she’d also assured Sherbourne that her aunt and uncle were not home. Had she done that on purpose?
“Were you attempting to blunder, Miss Charlotte? Leaving the house without an escort?”
She untied her bonnet ribbons and tried to pluck the hat from her head. Some hairpin or bit of hidden wire got caught in her coiffure, and the hat was thus stuck, half on, half off.
“Blunder by walking two streets from my own door without a chaperone, you mean? Drat this hat.”
“You’re making it worse.”
“A gentleman wouldn’t notice.”
How could Sherbourne not notice skeins of glossy red hair cascading around the lady’s shoulders? He moved close enough to grasp the bonnet.
“Hold still. I’ll have you free in a moment.”
“My objective was freedom. You’ve forced me to reschedule my outing.”
Sherbourne liked knowing how things worked, how parts fit and functioned together. Miss Charlotte’s bun had been a simple affair involving a chignon and some amber-tipped pins. To get the hat untangled, he had to loosen the chignon, which meant taking off his gloves.
“You were intent on larking about the streets of Mayfair on your own,” Sherbourne said, sliding a pin from her hair. “Being a woman of blindingly evident intelligence, you know such behavior will cause talk.”
“Maybe I was off to meet a lover.”
Another pin came loose, and he slipped it into his pocket. “Had you been intent on a tryst, you would have worn a plain cloak and bonnet, carried a market basket, and slipped out the back door. What is that scent?”
“Orange blossoms, mostly. You’ve undone me.”
He passed her the hat upside down, the pins piled in the crown. “You’re welcome.”
Though the sight of her left him undone too. Miss Charlotte was in a temper about something, and that put color in her cheeks and fire in her eyes—more fire than usual. Her hair fell nearly to her waist and shimmered in the sunshine streaming through the windows.
She was lovely—though she seemed oblivious to that fact, and to the impropriety of having her hair down while a gentleman paid a social call.
“I have come to a decision, Mr. Sherbourne,” she said, stalking across the room. “Perhaps your arrival was meant to modify my choice.”
“A gentleman aids a lady at every opportunity.” Or some such rot.
Miss Charlotte set the hat on the piano bench, stuck two hairpins in her mouth, and used both hands to bundle her hair up.
“I have decided to be ruined,” she said around the hairpins. “It’s either that or endure more years of being resented by the debutantes, proposed at by the dandies and prigs, and flirted with by the fortune hunters.”
“I’m sorry. My ability to translate the hairpin dialect is wanting. Did you say something about being ruined?” Deciding to be ruined, as if she’d decided to be a Roman centurion at a masked ball.
She twisted her hair this way and that, not braiding it, but looping it around itself and shoving a pin here or there. The whole business stayed up and looked as if some maid had spent an hour arranging it.
“I’m missing a hairpin.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because I count my hairpins, and this set was a gift from my aunt Arabella when I made my come out two hundred and forty-seven years ago.”
“Might we discuss your attempted self-ruin instead of your fashion accessories?”
She gave him a look. If he’d been eight years old, he would have produced the hairpin from his pocket, blushed, and stammered his remorse. He was past thirty and would keep that hairpin until the day he died.
“You want to discuss my failed attempt at ruin,” she said.
“My apologies for interfering with your schedule. Do you attempt ruin often, and might we sit while we don’t talk about the weather?”
She gestured to the sofa and took a place half a yard to Sherbourne’s right.
“I like you,” she said. “Somewhat. A little. I don’t dislike you.”
“My heart pounds with joy to hear it. I don’t dislike you either.”
Thank the gods of porcelain and silver, the tea cart rattled loudly as somebody pushed it along the corridor. Sherbourne thus knew to fall silent rather than expound about why he didn’t dislike Miss Charlotte Windham rather a lot.
A footman steered the tea cart into the parlor, and a maid came along to assist with setting the offerings on the low table before the sofa. The polite fussing gave Sherbourne a chance to consider possibilities and theories.
His mind, however, usually reliable during daylight hours, failed to focus on the facts as he knew them.
Charlotte Windham was seeking her own ruin. What the devil was she about?
* * *
Charlotte had hoped the ritual of the tea service would soothe her, but there Lucas Sherbourne sat, in morning attire that featured a waistcoat embroidered with more gold thread than some high church bishops wore at Easter services.
How could one be soothed when beholding such masculine splendor? His attire was distinctive, but so too was the sense of animal instincts prowling close to the surface of his personality. Sherbourne was alert, heedful of both danger and opportunity even in a duke’s drawing room. With him on the premises, Charlotte would never be bored, never feel invisible.
“You might not dislike me,” Charlotte said, checking the strength of the tea, “but many others find me…irksome. How do you take your tea?”
“Milk and sugar. I would have thought the shoe on the other foot. You find most of humanity irksome, if not most of creation.”
“People usually can’t help themselves when they are tiresome or ignorant. They do the best they can, that doesn’t mean they’re likeable. More sugar?”
“That’s enough, thank you. Too much sweetness destroys the pleasure of the experience. Get to the part about being ruined.”
“A lady can be ruined by flouting convention, such as by walking unescorted from the home of one family member to the home of another, traversing two entire streets on her own in broad daylight in the safest neighborhood in London. Mind you, the maids, laundresses, and shopgirls manage many times that distance without losing their virtue, but let’s not impose a foolish consistency on the rules of proper decorum.”
Sherbourne held his tea without taking a sip, which was mannerly of him, because Charlotte had yet to serve herself.
“A lady taking a short walk on her own would cause a few remarks,” he said. “I doubt she’d be ruined.”
Charlotte had planned to test her wings with a small but public gesture—a pathetically tame adventure, and yet, she’d felt daring as she’d put her hand on the door latch and prepared to negotiate the wilds of Mayfair alone.
“I was starting with a modest exercise in ruination. I doubt full-blown impropriety is within my abilities.”
“For which your parents are doubtless grateful. Aren’t you having any tea?”
“I prefer mine quite strong. Another path to ruin is to simply go mad.”
Sherbourne set down his teacup. “Charlotte Windham, you are the sanest woman I know. Who has afflicted you with this case of the blue devils?”
A hundred jealous debutantes and presuming bachelors had contributed to Charlotte’s low mood. So had a horde of happy, well-meaning, married relations.
“Viscount Neederby spoke to my papa before my parents left for Scotland. Papa’s letter arrived this morning, asking me to give the boy a chance.”
Sherbourne got to his fe
et. “Neederby is not a boy.”
“Nor is he a man in any sense that could merit my esteem, and yet, I was supposed to give him a chance.” The betrayal of that, and the lack of staunchly supportive sisters to commiserate with, had pushed Charlotte from a blue mood to a black mood.
What was the distance from a black mood to melancholia or some other form of mental instability?
“You are understandably upset, but why seek ruin? Windhams are nearly unruinable.”
Full-blown impropriety had no appeal, but perhaps…?
“If the right people came upon me in a torrid embrace with the right sort of man, I’d be ruined.” Charlotte took a sip of Sherbourne’s tea, which was perfectly hot, sweet, and strong.
He crossed his arms, regarding her as if she’d proposed building a bridge across the Channel. Fine idea—if daft.
“Have you ever been in a torrid embrace, Miss Charlotte?”
Charlotte rose, because that was not a question a lady answered sitting down. “I’ve never so much as said the word torrid aloud before, but the plan has merit. I thought I could put up with all the matchmaking, be the family project for a few years, then the doting aunt, but I’m alone now.”
The admission hurt as Papa’s ridiculous letter had not. Papa was simply being a papa—half blind, well-meaning, fallible.
But the aloneness…In less than a year, all three of Charlotte’s sisters had married well, and to men who lived very far from London, Kent, or Hampshire. The Moreland townhouse, always spacious, was now a maze of empty rooms and silent reproaches.
“You’ll be much more alone if you’re ruined,” Sherbourne said. “You’ll be packed off to some distant cottage, the only people to visit you will be other outcast women, some of them so poor they’ll impose on your hospitality for months. You won’t like it.”
Well, no. To be smothered by family was unbearable, but to be abandoned by them…
“I’m prepared to endure a kiss or two in the interests of broadening my options. Vauxhall should serve for a location, which means—”
Sherbourne moved so he stood immediately before Charlotte. “Shall I kiss you?”
Though he’d asked permission—to kiss her—the question was far from polite. The whole discussion was outlandish, for that matter, and Sherbourne’s tone was pugnacious rather than flirtatious.
“Why?”
“You think some dashing cavalier can buss your cheek and earn you a holiday in Kent for the next six months. Room to breathe and rest from the blows this year has dealt you. A buss to the cheek won’t cause any stir whatsoever. Your family will brush it aside, the witnesses will recall it as a harmless indiscretion on your part, a daring presumption from the gentleman.”
He was right, drat him clear back to Wales. “I must do something, Mr. Sherbourne. The present course is unsupportable.”
“Kiss me.”
Charlotte never, ever complied with orders given by men, but she occasionally compromised. In this case, she closed her eyes, raised her chin, and wondered if truly her reason hadn’t already departed.
“You kiss me,” she said.
Sherbourne obeyed her.
* * *
I must learn to discuss the weather.
On the heels of that thought, Sherbourne had another: Charlotte Windham could teach him to prattle on about the weather more proficiently than any titled dandy had ever discussed anything.
She looked bravely resigned. Her face upturned, lips closed, shoulders square.
Sherbourne started there, rubbing his thumbs over her shoulders, learning the contour and muscle of them.
“Relax, Charlotte. This is a kiss, not a tribute to your posture board.”
She opened those magnificent blue eyes. “Then be about the kissing, please, and dispense with the lectures.”
Sherbourne kissed her cheek and slid his hands into her hair. “A kiss is generally a mutual undertaking. You might consider putting your hands on my person.”
Her hair was soft, thick, and at her nape, warm. She smelled of orange blossoms with a hint of lavender.
“There’s rather a lot of you,” she replied. “One hardly knows where one’s hands might best be deployed.”
Deployed, in the manner of infantry or weapons. “Surprise me.”
Surprise him, she did. She put her right hand over his solar plexus, the softest possible blow, and eased her fingertips upward, tracing the embroidery of his waistcoat. Her left arm went around his waist, getting a good, firm hold.
As her hand meandered over his chest, Sherbourne touched his lips to hers. She neither startled nor drew back, so he repeated the gesture, brushing gently at her mouth.
Charlotte reciprocated, like a fencer answering a beat with a rebeat. Sherbourne drew her closer, or she drew him closer. She might have been smiling against his mouth.
The kiss gradually became intimate, wandering past playful, to curious, then bold—the lady tasted him first—to thoughtful, then on to daring. By the time Charlotte had sunk her fingers into Sherbourne’s hair and given it a stout twist, he was growing aroused.
He stepped back, keeping his arms looped around Charlotte’s shoulders. “That’s a taste of torrid, a mere sample. A lovely sample, I might add.”
“You torrid very well, Mr. Sherbourne. May I prevail on you to ruin me?”
Charlotte felt wonderful in his arms, real and lovely. She neither put on the amorous airs of a courtesan or a trolling widow, nor endured his overtures with the long-suffering distaste of a woman eyeing his fortune despite his lack of a title. He’d kissed a few of both and had thought those were his only options.
“I would rather not ruin you,” he said, stepping back. “I am far more interested in marrying you.”
The softness faded from Charlotte’s eyes, and Sherbourne was sorry to see it disappear. He’d put it there, with his kisses, and now—with his honest proposal of marriage—he’d chased it away.
“If you’re jesting, Mr. Sherbourne, your humor is in poor taste.”
“I’m entirely in earnest. Look at the facts logically, and you’ll see that marriage to me offers you much more than being ruined would.”
He expected her to laugh. Charlotte was as blue-blooded as he was common, and she’d been turning down proposals for years. His reconnaissance mission had gone badly awry—wonderfully, badly awry—and proper society set a lot of store by courting protocols.
Which did not include torrid kisses during an initial call.
“Shall we sit?” Charlotte said. “Not that my knees are weak, of course, but the tea will grow cold.”
Sherbourne’s knees were weak.
He sat, taking the enormous, torrid liberty of positioning himself a mere fifteen inches from his possible future wife.
* * *
“Have I been at the modiste’s long enough?” Esther, Her Grace of Moreland, asked her spouse.
Percival, Duke of Moreland, consulted his pocket watch. “By my calculations, you’ve only just arrived there, and I’ve barely opened the newspaper at my club. Do we approve of Sherbourne or not, my love?”
The Welsh upstart had come striding along the walk, handsome as love’s young dream, but sadly lacking in flowers, French chocolates, or proper taste in waistcoats. Percival and his duchess had seen Mr. Sherbourne on their doorstep—the ducal suite afforded an optimal spying perspective—and modified their plans accordingly.
Her Grace took a sip of chocolate. She was a surpassingly lovely blonde of mature years, her proportions those of a goddess, her social power greater than the sovereign’s. At present, she was barefoot and tucked next to Percival on their cuddling couch.
“We give Sherbourne a chance, Moreland. I thought Elizabeth and Charlotte would have each other for company, but then Haverford stole a march on us, and there’s Charlotte.”
“The last of the regiment,” Percival said. “Most soldiers would rather perish defending the colors than be taken prisoner.”
Her Grace kissed his c
heek, a half-amused, half-exasperated sort of kiss. After more than thirty years of marriage, Percival was a proficient interpreter of his wife’s kisses.
“Marriage is not a military campaign, sir. What flag is Charlotte defending? She’s a dependent female approaching spinsterhood. Her future might include a modest household of her own, if her papa can be talked into it. For the most part, she’ll be a traveling auntie if she remains unmarried. Her sisters and cousins will think they’re being kind, inviting her all over the realm, but Charlotte will be confronted over and over with Windhams in love.”
Percival delighted in the state of his family, when they weren’t driving him daft. “But Sherbourne? His dearest aspiration is to pile up coin to flaunt at his betters.”
Percival approved of a man improving his station through hard work, ambition, and good fortune, but Sherbourne was…
Running around in public wearing waistcoats that should have blinded the tailors who’d created them.
“What does it say about me, Esther, that I’ve begun to think exactly like my father?”
“Your father was a wonderful man who knew a love match when he saw one. We give Sherbourne a chance—Haverford spoke well of him—but twenty minutes with Charlotte is as much chance as any proper gentleman should need to leave a good impression.”
Charlotte could leave a bad impression in less than thirty seconds, unfortunately.
Percival rose and offered his hand to his duchess. “Twenty-three minutes, to be exact. I was once a bachelor, you know. Twenty-three minutes in the hands of an enterprising young fellow is a very great chance indeed.”
Esther toed on her slippers, a pair of gold house mules lavishly adorned with silk flowers.
She patted his lapel. “You simply want to intimidate poor Sherbourne, but you forget, he’s been neighbor to Haverford for years. A duke will not overawe him, not even the Duke of Moreland.”
A Rogue of Her Own Page 3