by Louise Allen
This was dangerous folly, she knew it. However honourable a gentleman, it was asking too much of him to have an available female positively quivering with desire under his very nose.
Still, she thought, struggling to get her fantasies under control again, when he did look at her properly in good light at least there was the comfort that he knew the worst already and she would not have to see surprise be succeeded by pity or contempt in those grey eyes.
He was aware of her height, had carried her weight, and he had probably even noticed the freckles, the disastrous final straw as far as her looks were concerned, so he couldn’t be too surprised. He’d had enough warning to manage to keep the reaction off his face at any rate.
There were two basic ways men looked at Decima. Depressed resignation if they were male relatives, or alarm if they were potential suitors lured into meeting her and finding themselves confronted with a befreckled, awkward beanpole. In return, she judged them simply on whether they were polite enough to cover their dismay for however long it took them to tactfully disengage themselves from the encounter.
Except for Sir Henry Freshford, of course. Henry came up to her eye level and quite cheerfully agreed with her that the last thing they wanted to do was get married to each other, not while they were perfectly good friends and could sympathise with each other over the matchmaking wiles of their respective relations. With the exception of Henry, she had felt hideously self-conscious with all unrelated men. Until now.
She came round from her reverie to find herself the subject of an equally thorough, silent, survey.
‘Well, Decima? Do I pass muster?’
How long had she been silently studying him, and how long had he been aware of her doing just that? Decima smiled brightly. Keep it light. Apparently the words wanton virgin seeks kisses were not emblazoned across her forehead, or if they were he was well able to ignore them.
‘You do. Provided you can keep that range in.’
‘I’ve put bricks in the oven to heat and the kettle on the hob.’
‘Oh, good. Nothing has exploded, then?’ She sank down in one of the Windsor chairs and untied the strings of her cloak. ‘Pru’s gone to sleep. I’ve lit fires in all the rooms, including yours. I drew the curtains as well.’
One dark eyebrow rose, very slightly. ‘You lit the fire in my bedchamber? Thank you, Decima.’
Decima felt herself flush at the fancied criticism. ‘I do not see why you should go to a cold bed simply to save me from the shocking sight of a gentleman’s chamber, my lord.’
‘Indeed not, and with any luck Mrs Chitty had cleared away the scandalous prints, the empty brandy bottles and the more outrageous items of underwear. And my given name is Adam. Will you not use it?’
As he had no doubt hoped, the ridiculous nonsense provoked a smile from her before she could decide to be stuffy about first names. ‘Very well, as I imagine we are going to be housekeeping together for several days. Adam.’
It was a good name, and it suited him. Decima let herself relax a little.
‘Can you cook?’
‘Oh…more or less,’ she replied cheerfully, suppressing the truthful answer that she couldn’t boil water and they would almost certainly starve if it was up to her. Perhaps Bates could cook. ‘Shall I have a look and see what food there is?’ After all, how hard could cookery be?
She had just put her head around the door of the larder when the crash and the yell came. Adam was across the room, the back door banging, before she could wrap her cloak around her and snatch up the largest lamp. In its light she saw the sprawled figure of Bates in the middle of the patch of treacherous, glittering ice that spilt out from the base of the horse trough.
Even from that distance there was no mistaking the implication of the way Bates’s lower right leg was twisted at an angle that was totally unnatural. The snow had ceased and everything sparkled with a hard cold.
Ducking back inside, Decima snatched up Pru’s cloak and made her way gingerly across the glassy surface. ‘Here.’ She tucked it around the groom’s shoulders. ‘Have you hurt anything besides your leg?’
‘No, and that’s enough of a bl…No, miss, thank you.’ He was white to the lips and, as Adam touched his leg, he recoiled convulsively. ‘Hell and the devil! Leave it be, damn it!’
‘Oh, yes,’ Adam said sympathetically. ‘I’ll just leave you here, nice and comfy, to freeze to death, shall I? And watch your language while Miss Ross is within earshot.’
‘Let him swear,’ Decima urged, ‘I’m sure it will help. We really ought to splint it before you move him,’ she added.
‘No time. It will hurt, but that’s better than frostbite. Up you come, Bates.’
The resulting language as Adam hoisted the man up and carried him across the yard made Decima clap her hands to her ears, then cautiously remove them out of sheer curiosity. The groom did not seem to repeat himself once. She shut the door behind them and regarded Adam. ‘Here on the kitchen table? It is warm and the light’s good.’
‘No, I’ll take him upstairs. I don’t want to have to move him once it’s set. Which room did you light the fire in for him?’
‘First on the right.’ Decima ran on ahead up the stairs and cast a rapid glance around the room. The bed would have to move. She dragged it out from the wall, her muscles protesting, and shoved it back at right angles so there was access to it on either side. As Adam came in she pulled off the top bedclothes, then lit all the candles. ‘There. Now, what do we need?’
‘Go downstairs, please, Miss Ross.’ Adam was bent over the bed, his gaze rueful as he met the groom’s eyes. ‘I do not think we are in for a very enjoyable quarter of an hour.’
Decima sighed. Men. Even this one, whom she had put down as sensible and non-patronising. She began to think out loud, counting off items on her fingers. ‘A sharp knife to cut off the boot and his breeches. A nightshirt so we can get him into that first to save moving him later.’ Bates sent her a look compounded of shock and outrage. ‘Splints, bandages and laudanum. I’ll go and see what I can find.’
When she returned Adam had got the groom out of his upper clothes and into his nightshirt, draped modestly to preserve everyone’s blushes. She handed him the knife and began to pour laudanum into a glass. ‘Miss Chitty has an admirable stillroom, thank goodness. Here, Bates, drink this, it will help. Do you think some brandy as well, my lord? I’ve brought a bottle.’
The groom swigged back the drug and Adam shrugged. ‘Give him a stiff tot, it can’t do any harm; he has a head like teak.’
‘I’ve got the best straight kindling wood I could find for splints and I’ve torn up a sheet that was in the mending basket.’
‘Thank you, Miss Ross, you are most resourceful.’ Adam pulled off the boot from the uninjured leg, then fell to studying the other thoughtfully. ‘Now go away, please.’
Decima turned to the door. She did not want to stay and see Bates suffering. She certainly did not want to see whatever removing that boot revealed and what would happen next. But it felt like cowardice to go meekly off downstairs like a good little woman when she could be helping.
She got as far as the landing before the sobbing intake of breath drove her back into the room and onto her knees next to the bed. ‘Shove off, miss,’ Bates snapped.
‘You swear as much as you like,’ she said encouragingly, hoping she wasn’t as green in the face as he was. ‘Just hold on to my hands and it will soon be over. And, no, my lord,’ she said as Adam began to speak. ‘I am not going to shove off downstairs, whatever either of you says.’
‘Have you ever met a woman who wasn’t as stubborn as a mule, Bates?’ Adam remarked conversationally.
‘Can’t say as I have, my lord.’
‘I have to say I am shocked at your language, Miss Ross: you must be mixing with the most uncouth men. Right, Bates, that’s the boot. Now for the breeches. Are the horses all right, or am I going to have to drag over there after I’ve patched you up and sort them out?�
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Decima half-turned indignantly, recalled Bates’s state of undress and turned back in time to see him produce a twisted grin. ‘They’re all right and tight and rugged up, my lord.’ Adam was talking to him to keep his mind off what was happening, she realised.
‘Gig gone? Bates? Pay attention.’ The groom, whose eyes had begun to roll up in his head, snapped back to consciousness.
‘Yes. Gig’s gone and the riding horse. Looks as though the lot of them went off for marketing and couldn’t get—bloody hell!’
‘Sorry. I needed to check if there’s just the one break. Hmm. Skin isn’t pierced at any rate. I’ll set it now, there’s no point in hanging around and letting the swelling get worse. You may faint any time you see fit, Bates.’
‘Thank you. My lord.’ Bates sounded anything but grateful. Decima shifted her position so that she blocked off as much of his line of vision as she could and smiled encouragingly. There was a minute of major unpleasantness while Bates went even whiter and she thought her fingers were going to be crushed in his calloused grip. Adam swore softly and continuously under his breath. Then Bates gasped and fell back, unconscious.
‘He’s fainted.’ She was not going to be sick.
‘Good. Look, I need another pair of hands. Can you grip his leg just above the knee and hang on while I pull to get the bones aligned?’
Don’t think about it. Just do it. If it was a horse you’d do it. She fixed her eyes on the top of Adam’s bent head, held on and prayed that Bates would stay oblivious.
‘All right. You can let go now. Decima? Let go.’
‘Oh. Of course.’ She forced her fingers open and sat back on her heels. ‘The splints and the bandages are…’ Decima swallowed and got up. ‘I’ll go and get the hot bricks.’
She managed to get to the kitchen simply by talking to herself all the way down the stairs. ‘Hot bricks for Bates and Pru. Might as well do all the beds while I’m at it. I must find something to wrap them in. Check the kettle, see the fire is all right in the range. We’ll need something to keep the bedclothes off that leg.’
The admirable Mrs Chitty kept a stack of neatly hemmed flannel squares in the stillroom. Decima wrapped four bricks and made her way unsteadily upstairs to meet Adam on the landing, a bolster under each arm. ‘I can’t find a stool the right size, but these should do to keep the weight off. You’ve got the bricks? Admirable woman. Here, give me one and you go and see to your maid.’
Pru was sleeping soundly and even Decima’s touch on her hot forehead and the insertion of the brick at the foot of the bed did not rouse her. Decima hoped she would stay asleep until morning, but rather feared she would not. This could be a long night, and she only wished she did not feel quite so queasy.
She put a brick in her own bed, then opened Adam’s door to tuck the remaining one between his sheets. From Bates’s room came a gasp of anguish, cut off by the sound of Adam’s voice. It was too much; to hear someone in so much pain clutched sickeningly at the pit of her stomach. Decima doubled up, retching feebly and unproductively over the lovely porcelain basin on the washstand.
‘Decima? Where are you? Oh, my poor girl. Here, come and sit down and I’ll fetch you something to drink.’
She clutched at the glass blindly and gulped, then choked as the fiery spirit burned down her throat. ‘That’s brandy!’
Chapter Four
‘Brandy will do you good. Drink it all down.’ It would probably make her drunk as a lord, given that none of them had eaten since breakfast, but anything was better than that pinched look around her mouth and those wide, shocked eyes. Adam took the glass from Decima’s shaking hand and set it on the bedside stand. ‘You were a heroine. I could not have managed without you.’
‘It was just when I could feel the bone move—’ She broke off and passed a hand over her face. ‘I am better now. How is he?’
‘He will be fine. I got another shot of laudanum down him and he went out like a snuffed candle. If I can keep him unconscious all night, it won’t be so bad in the morning.’
‘How do you know?’ She looked at him with curiosity as she asked and he saw with concern the greenish tint of her skin. Otherwise it was very nice skin: smooth and pale and covered with those delicious freckles as though someone had dusted fine bran over her nose and cheeks. How long would it take to kiss each one? It would be like kissing the Milky Way. He found himself wondering if they appeared anywhere else on her body.
‘I had the same bone break when I fell out of a tree when I was fifteen. I watched the doctor, while I wasn’t yelling my head off, that is.’
Decima started to get up, then sat down again on the bed with a thump, eyes closed. ‘My, I am dizzy. It must be the shock of it, I suppose.’
Adam smiled. She had had enough spirits on an empty stomach to knock her out for an hour or two. ‘That’ll be it. Now if you just lie back and close your eyes, you will feel better in a moment.’ He eased her back onto the pillows, murmuring soothingly. With a sleepy mutter Decima curled up in the folds of the soft coverlet. ‘There you are, just rest.’ She was asleep.
Adam stood looking down at her, visited by a strange feeling of tenderness. She was hardly a fragile little bloom, but there was something very vulnerable about her, despite her height and age. Something vulnerable, yet she had plenty of courage to fight, too. He imagined any other single lady of his acquaintance undergoing what Decima Ross had that day without succumbing to hysterics, and failed. What she was doing unmarried he couldn’t imagine. Her height was against her, of course, but with those unusual looks and lively mind, there must be scores of tall gentlemen who would have snapped her up.
Possibly there was a large and anxious fiancé somewhere who might be expected to call out Viscount Weston when he learned what had transpired. Not that anything would, of course, but just being alone with him was scandal enough. He was going to have to give some thought to that.
Meanwhile, what to do with a sleeping Miss Ross who was wiffling, gently, as she slumbered? She was not going to be very comfortable when she awoke to find she had slept in her shoes, let alone with her stays laced. The thought brought with it the recollection of her body as it had slipped through his hands to the ground in the yard.
With a grimace for his own over-active imagination, Adam flipped the other side of the coverlet over her and walked away.
He checked upstairs twice more as the evening wore on. The fires needed keeping in; he set water by the bedsides of the maid and Bates, both thankfully still unconscious, and made himself stay away from Decima. She did not need to wake up to find herself in a man’s bed with the man himself in the room: that would be conducive of hysterics.
At one point he cut a wedge of cheese from a wheel of Stilton in the larder and fished some of Mrs Chitty’s pickles out of the jar to go with it, but by seven o’clock Adam was thinking that he was going to have to forage for food or starve.
Then the kitchen door creaked and Decima was standing on the threshold, her face flushed with sleep, a shawl round her shoulders and her hair in tousled disarray. It just made him want to tousle it some more. Adam got hastily to his feet, then came to the conclusion that staying sitting with his legs carefully crossed would have been a better decision.
‘I’ve been asleep,’ she said accusingly. ‘In your bed. Charlton would be outraged.’
‘I imagine Charlton would be even more outraged if I had carried you off and put you in your bed. Do you think he will call me out?’
That provoked a deep chuckle as she came in, pulling her shawl snugly around her shoulders. ‘What a wonderful image that conjures up. Charlton does not have the figure for duelling, let alone the temperament. Bates and Pru are still asleep and I am starving.’
‘So am I. Now, you said you could cook, more or less.’
‘I exaggerated…no, I lied.’ Decima flushed and regarded her toes. ‘I might as well be truthful about it. I haven’t the first clue. Shall we look in the larder and see what there is?’
The meal they spread on the kitchen table—Decima having put her head around the dining-room door and pronounced it fit only to act as an icehouse—owed nothing to any culinary skill whatsoever.
Cold mutton, cheese, the heel of a loaf, butter and plum cake were washed down with ale, or, in Decima’s case, with water. Adam could not recall enjoying a meal more.
For a start it was a pleasure to eat with a woman who showed a hearty appetite and didn’t starve herself and pick at her food in an effort to appear ladylike. Then, Decima did not stand on ceremony either: she forgot to take her elbows off the table when they were in the middle of an argument about the Prince Regent’s taste in architecture, she waved her knife in the air to make her point when she lectured him on horse breeding, and she completely forgot herself and doubled up laughing when he recounted a particularly wicked story about two of the Patronesses of Almack’s and the Duke of Wellington.
‘No! They didn’t? Not both of them,’ she gasped, emerging from her fit of the giggles, pink and glowing.
‘I should not have told you that,’ Adam confessed ruefully. The trouble was, she seemed so at ease with him, and had such an individual character, that it was like talking to one of the dashing young matrons he was used to in London society. Only Decima had a delicious innocence that none of those sophisticated ladies had shown for many a year.
‘No, I don’t expect you should,’ she agreed with a twinkle. ‘But I am glad you did. They were so beastly to me when I came out, it is wonderful to be able to imagine them in such an embarrassing fix.’
‘Why were they beastly?’ It was hard to imagine anyone being unkind to Decima. ‘Did you break one of those tedious rules and waltz before you’d been approved or something equally heinous?’
‘Waltz?’ She stared at him as if he was mad. ‘Who on earth would ask a girl five foot ten inches tall to waltz with them?’
‘I would,’ he replied simply. ‘Do you mean you cannot waltz?’
‘I can, I just never have for real. Charlton insisted I learn. Poor Signor Mazzetti. He did his best, but he came up to…’ she coloured and waved a hand vaguely in the direction of her bosom ‘…up to there and I don’t think he knew quite where to look. And I trod on his feet a lot because I was embarrassed. So it was a good thing I was never asked.’