The Wife Trap

by Tracy Anne Warren

  “That’s right, girl,” he called. “You’d better run, else I catch you and carry you back.”

  Jeannette laughed again and raced on, knowing it wouldn’t take much to encourage him to come after her, half worried she might not really mind.

  “What in the world happened to you? Did you decide to take a swim in your clothes and boots?”

  Chilled and miserable, Darragh looked daggers at his friend Lawrence McGarrett. In Gaelic, he made a short but crude suggestion about where Lawrence could put his questions, then stomped toward the staircase.

  Lawrence laughed and shook his carroty head. “ ’Tis the truth and nothing but that I’ll be having out of you later, my lad,” he called after Darragh. “Don’t imagine I won’t.”

  And Lawrence did, slowly prodding the tale out of Darragh over a delicious supper of succulent roast lamb, buttery mashed potatoes and tender braised leeks.

  “Tossed you in the pond, did she?” Lawrence chuckled, motioned for the footman to clear away their empty plates.

  Relaxed and pleasantly warm again thanks to a dry suit of clothes and the healthy fire that crackled in the dining room fireplace, Darragh leaned back in a comfortable Chippendale chair. He downed a last swallow of wine, then placed the fine, Waterford crystal goblet on the elegant linen-clad table.

  “She sounds a wildcat, that one,” Lawrence said.

  Darragh hadn’t told his friend everything, but enough. More than enough. “She’s spirited, I’ll grant you that.”

  “Well, ’tis to be expected from an Irishwoman. I’d enjoy meeting her, this fire-breather of yours. Tell me now, is she redheaded?” Lawrence grimaced, stuck a finger toward his head. “Cursed with the same flaming thatch as myself?”

  Darragh reached for the crystal decanter in the center of the table and poured himself another draught of wine. Setting the stopper back in with a light clink, he raised his goblet and drank.

  At length, he returned his glass to the table. “She’s blond. Pale, golden blond and pretty as the first rays of a new sun. But she isn’t Irish. ’Tis English, she is.”

  Lawrence frowned, his eyebrows meeting like a pair of bright flags in the middle of his forehead. “Oh.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, oh?”

  “You know very well what it means. English girls are nothing but trouble, especially the aristocratic ones. I assume she is an aristocrat.”

  Darragh thought of Lady Jeannette and her pampered, self-indulgent ways. “Oh, aye, she’s as aristocratic as they come. Merriweather’s cousin and the daughter of an English earl. Some Society scandal back home brought her here, so I understand.”

  “Even more reason, then, to put an end to these games the pair of you have been playing. Why didn’t you tell me from the first she was Merriweather’s cousin? Are you knocked in the head, boy-o? You know how na Sasanaigh feel about Irish lads, even ones with good money and fine old titles.”

  “Well, I don’t see the problem. It’s not as if I’m in any danger of turning sweet on the girl.”

  Lawrence snorted and reached for the decanter. “Are you not? She’s all you’ve talked about the whole evening long.”

  “At your insistence.”

  “And then there’s that look in your eyes.”

  “What look?”

  “That look. The one you get when you’re halfway to falling in love with a lass. It’s there staring back at me even as we speak.”

  Darragh bristled, jaw tightening to the consistency of rock. “There is no look, only the gleam from one too many glasses of wine.” He raised his goblet, downed what remained. “And if you’re suggesting I’m in love with the girl, you’re crazy as old man Maguire, who says he takes tea every Sunday evening with the little people. She’s a beautiful lass, but love…” He broke off, gave a dismissive grunt. “I’ve no love for that one. Most days she’s naught but a thorn in my side.”

  Lawrence looked plainly unconvinced. “If you say so. I just don’t want to see you lured in then left with a shattered heart. Marry a good Irish girl as your mam told you to and leave that one alone.”

  “Not to worry, Lawrence, my lad. I’m heart whole and there’s nothing over which you need be worried. Work will start again as usual tomorrow, and the boys’ll move along at a grand pace. We’ll be done and gone before the first flakes of snow hit the ground. And she’ll be gone back to England.”

  An odd melancholy he refused to consider settled over him. Inevitable, he realized, that one of these days Jeannette Rose Brantford would be traveling back home, setting not only a country but an entire sea betwixt them.

  Gratefully, he let Lawrence change the subject. The two of them talked of sport and horses over bites of cheese and fruit, savoring robust, ruby-hued port out of small glasses until sleep could no longer be avoided.

  Yet Darragh didn’t sleep, lying awake in his bed long after he should have found himself lost deep in the world of dreams.

  All he could think of was Jeannette.

  Lawrence’s fault, he decided as he punched an irritated fist into his feather pillow and rolled over onto his side.

  Love Jeannette?

  Impossible.

  Yet he couldn’t stop thinking about her, especially the kisses they had shared earlier today. Like the creamiest spun honey, they were, those kisses, sweet and warm and rich. If he was honest with himself, he had to confess he’d never known finer. She might be flighty and willful, but damn if she didn’t know how to make a man’s head reel.

  And her mouth. Sweet Mary, she had some of the softest lips he’d ever touched. Pink and silky smooth as tender young rose petals, her skin every bit as fragrant. He could spend all the day long with his nose pressed to that skin, drinking in her luscious feminine scent.

  He closed his eyes and could nearly smell her, taste her, feel her again pressed close inside his arms. Desire pumped through him, blood rushing to all sorts of parts best left dormant. Especially considering the fact that kisses were the best he could honorably expect to enjoy from Lady Jeannette unless he wished to offer her a wedding ring. And he had absolutely no intention of doing any such thing.

  Up until now, he hadn’t had the time nor the inclination to consider taking a wife—he’d been far too busy studying and traveling and concentrating on doing what was necessary to rebuild his family fortune. Not that he’d been bereft of feminine company over the years. No indeed, far from it. But the kind of women he dallied with knew what she was about and didn’t expect promises of undying love and commitment.

  When he did marry, it certainly wouldn’t be to a coddled English beauty who thought herself better than most of humanity. Instead he wanted a gentle lass, sweet-tempered and caring, simple in spirit and expectation, who would fill his life with happiness and love. Not some wild-willed vixen who would see to it he never knew another moment’s peace for all the rest of his days.

  Still, he had to admit a life spent with Lady Jeannette would never be dull or boring. Excitement and surprise would lie around each corner while passion smoldered hot beneath the surface, ready to burst into flames at any time of the day or night. He groaned at the explicit images that flashed through his mind, shifting restlessly against the sheets as his body responded in unsatisfied demand.

  Lord, what if Lawrence was right? What if he was getting in too deep and this hunger he felt was more than a case of simple lust? What if these games he and the Little Rosebush were playing amounted to more than juvenile tricks and pranks? What if, heaven forbid, they were part of some sort of elaborate mating ritual?

  He climbed out of bed and paced across his bedroom to the window, open to let in the night breeze. He stared out, barely aware of the moonlight spread like a shimmering river over the night-blackened lawn. An owl hooted somewhere in the distance.

  Mad, he was, crazy mad to be entertaining such nonsensical delusions. Lady Jeannette delighted in testing and challenging him. And he did a fine job reestablishing the limits. Even now he could cheerfully str
angle her for all the trouble she’d caused him today with the missing workmen’s tools, not to mention the unexpected swim she’d sent him on in the Merriweathers’ pond.

  He growled beneath his breath, then had to smile and shake his head at her outrageous antics.

  Yet Lawrence made a good point. Playing these games with a girl like her was akin to striking a flint near a pile of oil-soaked tinder. If he kept it up long enough, wasn’t he sure to end up burned? Better to withdraw before it became too late.

  He gazed sightlessly out into the night for several more long minutes. By the time he returned to his bed, he was resolved to focus on the task before him, finish his work and push a certain fiery young miss from his mind.

  After the job was done, he would leave and make sure he didn’t let himself look back.

  Chapter Nine

  Jeannette tread cautiously over the next couple days, remaining indoors rather than risking a fresh encounter with O’Brien. He’d looked none too happy about his impromptu swim the other afternoon. It had been worth it, though, to see his look of stunned panic seconds before he’d splashed like a floundering trout into the pond. Too bad she hadn’t been able to share the humorous tale with her cousins, but Bertie and Wilda simply would not understand.

  Nor did they fully understand the tale of the “missing” tools, wondering aloud how such a strange circumstance could have occurred. Amid much puzzlement and speculation at the dinner table, Jeannette listened to her cousins discuss the matter.

  Cousin Bertie recounted that when he questioned O’Brien, the architect had apparently shrugged and claimed to be at a complete loss.

  “Makes no sense at all, does it now?” O’Brien had remarked. “No accounting for the odd peculiarities of people, particularly thieves and pranksters. ’Course, it could be the work of faeries, as the men say. Crafty, mischievous imps, faeries are. Any way you look on it, ’tis a pure mystery.”

  Faeries indeed, she had marveled with an amused half smile. Much as it galled her, she admitted a reluctant admiration for O’Brien and his highly inventive explanations. He’d certainly managed to get her cousins to consider the possibility of faerie folk as tool thieves, despite the fact that Bertie prided himself on being a man of science.

  Far more superstitious, Wilda had discussed the event with her housekeeper, Mrs. Ivory, a forthright, energetic Irishwoman, who’d convinced her to have the servants set out a glass of milk and a small plate of victuals each night. The offering, the housekeeper maintained, was a well-known way to appease the Good People or any other restless spirits that might be roaming the land.

  Now, days later, Jeannette snorted at such nonsense, shaking her head as she moved her drawing pencil over the piece of sketch paper balanced against her updrawn knees. With the fields wet from a steady morning rain, now thankfully ceased, she’d decided to stay inside again.

  Tucked into a window seat in one of the guest bedrooms, she sat snug and comfortable, enjoying a stellar view of the construction site below. The workers were again hard at their labors, their rhythm reestablished as though the interruption over the missing tools had never occurred at all.

  She had feared after that first morning that O’Brien would retaliate by having his men begin work extra early. But she’d awakened to the sound of their toil at seven, realizing to her chagrin that she’d been dreaming of O’Brien’s kisses.

  Her pencil slowed, her skin tingling anew at the memory before she shook off the phantom sensations. No, she admonished herself, she was not going to spend the afternoon dwelling upon Darragh O’Brien’s kisses. His delectable, delicious, pulse-pounding kisses that occupied her thoughts in daylight and plagued her dreams at night.

  Despite every attempt, she could not contain those dreams, amorous fancies that left her restless and edgy, longing for a male touch that was not there. Any other unmarried lady of her class would have cringed in mortification to wake and find the sheets twisted around her limbs, heat burning high in her cheeks and low in her belly. Yet secretly she couldn’t deny a certain pleasure, her nocturnal wanderings rousing her passions in ways she had never thought to explore. Still, what she craved at night had to be held strictly at bay in her waking life. To succumb in a dream was one thing. To do so in reality was something else altogether.

  Through the window, O’Brien passed into view below. His pantherlike stride catching her eye, hints of auburn glinting in his dark chestnut hair like bits of copper in the sun.

  Catching her lower lip between her teeth, she followed his progress across the lawn to the high, thin table where he spread out a long, familiar-looking sheath of parchment. His plans.

  He consulted something on one of the pages before glancing up to call an order across to a pair of his men.

  As usual, he was dressed in ordinary attire. Leather boots, plain brown trousers, a simple green cotton waistcoat, white neckerchief and shirt that he scandalously left unbuttoned at the throat and sleeves. He’d rolled them up again, those sleeves, revealing the solid muscles of his forearms, the intriguing sprinkle of dark, masculine hair on their length.

  She wet her lips and sighed, then caught herself in the act.

  Irritated, she pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and set her pencil in motion. Slowly over the next half hour, O’Brien’s likeness came to life. Starting as simple lines and dots and flourishes, the picture evolved into what she decided was a very competent sketch of the man in her sight.

  The seductive devil in her sight.

  Yes, exactly, she judged, an impish quirk spreading over her lips.

  The expressions on his men’s faces should have warned him. That and the laughter trailing him the next morning as Darragh walked onto the construction site.

  He called out the usual round of good mornings and got smirks along with their replies. Smirks and stares. Long expectant stares, as though the men were watching and waiting for an explosion of some kind to occur. Perplexed, he glanced around, found nothing at all out of the norm.

  He was striding along the new north wall a minute later when he saw it, propped atop the first level of scaffolding like some rude crimson smear.

  Now it was his turn to stare.

  Hell’s teeth. Lady Jeannette had painted him as Satan, and done a damned fine job of it too. Putting her artistic skills to work, she had accurately captured his likeness, leaving no room to mistake his identity. His eyes she’d turned from blue to red, backlighting his dark hair and the horns above with an evil golden glow that gave the effect of smoldering fire. She’d coloured the rest of the paper in shades of red and black so he looked as if he’d just ascended from the furnace pits of Hades itself. Humorously, though, she’d tucked a pencil behind one horn and set his architectural plans afire, leaving him to use his forked tail and clawed hands to tamp out the flames.

  Minx. What did she think she was about? Was she deliberately trying to anger him? Or was this merely a new salvo, her way of gaining his attention in their unfettered game of give-and-take.

  He suspected it was a little bit of both.

  But would he take the bait?

  Suddenly he noticed the hush, almost deafening in its volume as every one of his men waited to see what he would do.

  Striding toward the picture, he plucked it down off its lofty perch and studied it. Suddenly the absurdity of the piece struck him and he astonished them all—including himself—by tossing back his head on a long, hearty laugh.

  “A fair likeness, wouldn’t you say?” he called out as he turned. “Especially the tail and the horns. Fair warning, though, that I’ll use them on the pack of you, together with the pitchfork, if you don’t get straight back to work.”

  Laughter rumbled in a wave from man to man. Rory approached and gave him a good-natured slap on the shoulder before consulting with him about more serious matters.

  Once done, Darragh crossed to the small wooden table where he kept his architectural renderings and plans. Setting down the painting, he covered it with a large rec
tangle of paper, then did his best to forget about its exasperatingly lovely creator.

  In a sad funk, Jeannette sat in a chair and watched a trio of raindrops chase one another across her bedroom window. She sighed against her boredom, this afternoon as dull as many of the others she had endured over the past four weeks, with nothing but her cousins and her own solitary pursuits to entertain her.

  Because of the rain, the building crew had gone home for the afternoon, the house silent except for the drum of droplets on the roof, and the drip and gush of water flowing through the gutters.

  Of Darragh O’Brien, she saw virtually nothing these days. Not that she wished to see him, she strove to assure herself. She was relieved he had chosen to voluntarily absent himself from her life, really she was. But her encounters with the man had helped to pass the time and his unexplained withdrawal had left a noticeable void.

  She remembered back to the morning when she left her painting of Darragh, the Devil for his workers to see. Awakening early, she had rushed to one of the guest bedroom windows, where she would have a bird’s-eye view of his reaction. At first, she had laughed along with his men as each one of them came forward in turn to view the caricature. Brimming with mischievous delight, she had waited for O’Brien to arrive, glimpse her latest handiwork and explode.

  But beyond an initial burst of laughter and a few teasing comments, he’d shown little reaction. Perhaps, she had thought at the time, he was saving up his true feelings for a tête-à-tête with her later that day or the next.

  So she had waited, expecting him to seek her out. Only he had not, leaving her to grow increasingly annoyed and deflated as each day drifted monotonously one into the other. He hadn’t even let Vitruvius run loose, keeping the dog on a lead so the half-grown, house-sized lummox couldn’t molest her in the gardens or in the fields as she came and went during her afternoon painting sessions. Not that she wished to see the canine monster, since she’d been slobbered over and ravaged by enough dirty paw prints to last a lifetime.