Much Ado About Jack

by Christy English

  “I will thank you not to speak to my aunt in public,” Ravensbrook said, sounding like a prig. “I must also ask you to stay away from her home.”

  Angelique rounded on him, her weariness falling away like a cloak she had cast off. James watched her eyes take fire and felt his admiration for her flare to life as well. He had experienced the edge of her wrath himself, and now he was going to see her tear into her ex-lover. James relaxed for the first time since Ravensbrook had entered the room and settled back on his heels to enjoy the show.

  “I will speak to whomever I wish, whenever I wish, Anthony. You no longer have any rights where I am concerned.”

  “I have the right to keep my family above gossip.”

  “Do you indeed? And with your wife throwing knives at everyone in sight, how is that going?”

  Anthony Carrington took a deep breath as if trying to rein in his temper. James almost laughed to see him do it. He had not known Angelique long, but he knew that he had never met a more provoking woman. Ravensbrook was going to lose this battle, and James was going to savor his defeat.

  “Leave Caroline out of this,” Anthony said.

  “Get out,” Angelique countered.

  “I will leave, and gladly, as soon as you tell me that you will not take tea with my aunt.”

  “Then we are at an impasse, because I will take tea with whom I wish.”

  Ravensbrook forced his breath out between his teeth, his right hand flexing. James kept a sharper eye on him after that, for he knew the look of a man wishing for a weapon. But the earl did not reach into his coat or into his boot, but turned from her to pour himself a glass of brandy instead.

  “One of your glasses is missing,” he said.

  “I had to break it. Hawthorne touched it,” she answered.

  Ravensbrook turned back to her, his brandy forgotten. “Hawthorne was here?”

  “He left just before you arrived.”

  James smiled as he waited for the jealousy he felt to flood the face of her old lover. He was well rewarded. At the sound of Hawthorne’s name, Ravensbrook seemed to pale beneath his tan.

  “Hawthorne is dangerous,” Ravensbrook said.

  “I gather that,” she answered.

  “He is the source of the gossip that you and my aunt are trying to squelch. I tell you again, Angelique, leave this alone.”

  “Hawthorne started the false rumors about Arabella?” Angelique asked.

  “Who the hell is Arabella, and why should I care?” James asked the room at large.

  Angelique and Ravensbrook both turned to him, as if they had forgotten he was there. The earl’s eyes narrowed, but it was Angelique who spoke.

  “Arabella is the Duchess of Hawthorne. She is also my best friend. Someone has started a rumor that she was an unfaithful wife…”

  “And now her reputation is ruined,” James finished her sentence for her.

  “Yes.”

  James thought of his own sisters, the eldest, Margaret, and the other four girls whom the men of his family would die to protect. He had not seen the girls since he had gotten leave last Christmas while he was in port at Aberdeen. But they wrote him letters perfumed with scent, written on expensive parchment so that the ink would not run if the pages got wet.

  He had a trunk with his personal belongings stowed in it, and tucked away into the leather lining, his sisters’ letters were hidden from the prying eyes of the world. He took them out and read them from time to time, to remind himself of home.

  He spoke without thinking of anything but keeping his sisters safe. He knew what he would do if some man, duke or no, had threatened them.

  “He deserves to be shot,” James said.

  “Jack, isn’t it?” Ravensbrook sneered. “Captain Jack, a man does not simply murder a peer of the realm.”

  James was almost certain that Ravensbrook remembered his real name and simply meant to taunt him with the false one. His anger, usually banked, caught flame behind its wall of steel.

  He kept his rage tempered, unused, except as fuel in a fight. He knew he would not strike Ravensbrook in Angelique’s drawing room, no matter how much he might enjoy it.

  “A man should ne’er get away with threatening a defenseless woman.” James couldn’t help the accent that rose to his lips whenever he got angry.

  “Keep your plaid and your war paint in their trunk, Jack. In London, amongst your betters, you’ll find that we deal with things differently.”

  Angelique stepped between them before James could show Ravensbrook exactly who had the better left hook.

  James’s hands flexed at his sides. There was little he loved more than a street brawl.

  Ravensbrook did not take his eyes from James’s face. “I am leaving now before I violate the sanctity of your home. But I warn you, Angelique, leave Hawthorne be.”

  James felt the need to smash the earl’s smug, good-looking face. He clenched one fist and breathed.

  “Consider me warned,” Angelique said. “Good evening, Anthony.”

  The earl did not speak again. He did not look at her or touch her, but still there was some awareness between them, some old flame that had not yet died. James saw it even as Ravensbrook left the room. It lingered in the air after he had gone, like the remnant of heat lightning.

  “That bastard threw you over for the blonde at the ball?” James asked at last. “He’s a damned fool.”

  Angelique laughed then, and James felt the tension run out of her. She rang for her servant, and when a footman came in, she asked for red wine from Burgundy.

  “Will you take a glass with me?” she asked him once the servant had left.

  “Of course,” he said. “Though I’ve always been a whisky man myself.”

  “I fear I have none,” she said.

  “Not to worry,” he answered. “Compared to the rotgut on board my first ship, your Burgundy will be ambrosia.”

  She laughed again, as he had meant her to. She sat down on her settee, and he settled himself comfortably beside her, careful to leave enough room between them so that she would not feel trapped, so that she would not feel his net closing until it was too late.

  He leaned back, his boots toward the fire, watching the flames dance over the bits of broken glass in the grate. They sat in silence as the wine came and stayed silent as the footman poured it. James toasted her silently, and she bowed her head in acknowledgment. They both drank, companions in arms, as if they had come through a battle together unscathed.

  “So, there’s Hawthorne and Ravensbrook,” James said. “How many more rivals do I have?”

  Fourteen

  Angelique laughed out loud for the third time in ten minutes. She felt her laughter rising from her belly. It came on her almost like a sneezing fit, and once it started, she was afraid she would not be able to stop.

  “As charming as your laughter is, you haven’t answered my question.”

  She caught her breath, wiping the tears from her eyes with one finger. She would not let herself be drawn into verbal sparring over Anthony and Hawthorne. Both men were gone, and she was glad to see the back of them. The fact that James Montgomery would ask about them so openly made her like him more.

  Angelique drank deep, finishing off her glass of wine. The carafe sat where her butler had left it, but instead of ringing for a footman as one of her more rarefied acquaintances might have done, she refilled her own glass, leaning over to top off Montgomery’s as well.

  “This wine is not bad,” James said.

  “I should hope not. I paid the smugglers enough for it.”

  It was Montgomery’s turn to laugh at her. “Why, countess, I would never have taken you for the smuggling type.”

  She smiled at him. “I must admit, I did not do the run to shore myself.”

  His blue eyes rested on her face. She could fee
l their touch almost as if they were fingertips. There was a warmth in his gaze that seemed to have nothing to do with lust or their usual game of wits. For once, she thought she actually saw affection in a man’s face. Though it might just have been the glow left by the wine.

  “The war is over now,” she said. “I no longer need to patronize the smugglers of Brittany.”

  James smiled. “I imagine the smugglers’ prices are lower in peacetime.”

  “No doubt. But I am a patriot.”

  “I could tell that about you as soon as we met.”

  Angelique shifted on her uncomfortable sofa. Despite the brocade pillow behind her back, she could feel the wood digging into her spine from the frame of the settee. The longer he looked at her, the tighter her gown felt. Her stays dug into her sides, reminding her of propriety, of the fact that she did not want to let her guard down with this man, or anyone.

  James leaned close enough that she could take in the scent of cedar on his clothes. His fingers touched hers, but barely, as he lifted her wineglass away. Her tongue had thickened with drink and rising desire, but she managed to speak anyway.

  “I’m not done with that.”

  “I may give it back, once you’ve answered my question.”

  He set the wine down on the table beside him, then turned toward her. He slid close to her on the narrowing settee. That sofa had seemed so much roomier when she had first bought it in Paris. Now, it felt as tight and enclosed as the gown she wore.

  She tried to rally her wits. “What question is that?”

  “How many rivals do I have?”

  “I lost count,” she said.

  His breath was warm on her skin. Though he had not touched her, he leaned close, the heat of his body like a furnace beside her, or a small sun. She wanted to come even closer to it, and to him, and lose herself. She knew that she should not, but his nearness was so tempting, she was having trouble remembering why she had sent him away in the first place.

  “Maybe I can make you forget them all,” James said, his hand coming to rest on her cheek. He took her lips with his kiss, very gently, as if he had all the time in the world to partake of her, as if she had offered herself to him on a plate.

  Angelique knew she should push him away. She knew that she had no time to take a lover, even an amusing one. Arabella needed her, as did her husband’s bastard daughter. She needed to find a new captain for her ship. She needed to counter Hawthorne’s attack on Arabella’s future.

  The laundry list of things she owed to others paraded through her mind like sentinels. She acknowledged them all, even as James’s other arm came around her shoulders and slowly drew her toward him.

  His lips were soft, but there was heat behind them. The heat was banked for the moment, but Angelique knew that if she gave him the least encouragement, those embers would catch fire.

  His wool coat was rough against her palm as she raised her hand to his arm. She moved her hand across his chest to push him away. Instead, she found herself sliding her palm past his waistcoat, to the softness of the linen shirt beneath it. His heart beat steadily under her hand, and she opened her mouth beneath his.

  James Montgomery did not need more of an invitation than that. His mouth slanted over hers as if he would devour her, as if he had fasted for days, and she was meat and bread together. The strength of his ardor swept her thoughts away. Like twigs on an incoming tide, she watched her worries splinter apart, just as the warm heat of his hands suffused her with desire.

  Angelique pressed herself against him, her hands going up into his hair. She found the leather thong that tied it back, and she loosened it, so that his hair surrounded them like an auburn curtain.

  He drew her down onto her purgatorial settee, but she did not care that its short arm was pressing into the base of her skull. Her body came alive under his hands in a way it had not in many months. Victor had been a decent lover, but nothing like this man.

  She forgot Victor, too, in the next moment, as James’s calloused hands slid over her bodice, cupping first one breast, and then the other, as if he would sample both of them at once. His lips moved down her throat, but they did not stay there.

  His hands smoothed over the skin along the scalloped neckline of her gown, then drew her bodice down. Both her breasts rose from the lace cups that held them until James pushed that lace down, too. Angelique arched her back in invitation, and then his mouth was on her, drawing one nipple between his teeth. He suckled, then bit down gently, so that she moaned beneath him, and writhed, reaching for the waistband of his trousers.

  “Where is your bed?”

  James Montgomery’s brogue was in full throttle, and the sound of it made her shiver. She pressed herself to him, trying to assuage some of the ache at her core against his hard body. He pressed back, so that she felt the hard heat of him nestle in the cleft of her thighs. She writhed against him, hoping he would reach down and draw her skirts up. He kissed her again, hard, but instead of loosening his trousers or raising her gown, he spoke again.

  “I don’t know if I can hold on much longer, mo ghaoil. Where is your bedroom?”

  Angelique heard the word bed and almost didn’t understand it any better than the Gaelic endearment he had murmured against her skin. She did not want to think, she did not want to move. She only wanted to have him enter her there, on that purgatorial sofa.

  “No,” she said. “Here. Now.”

  He laughed a little, his breath hot on her breast. He blew gently on her nipple, and it puckered for him. He laved it with his tongue then did the same to the other. She began to realize that he was more in control of himself than she was. His next words were like a wash of cold seawater at Brighton.

  “You deserve a bed, Angelique. Where is it?”

  She felt sanity returning. She sighed, her body still aching, her breasts still heavy with need, still rosy pink from his touch. She reached for her self-control, and found it, and pulled it on, the way she pulled on her stays every morning. She was not a fan of stays just as, at the moment, she was not a fan of calm reason. But both served to keep her from making a fool of herself.

  No man had entered her bedroom since Anthony, and no man ever would. Anthony was the last man she would allow past her defenses. She had almost not recovered from letting him inside. Her bedroom was her sanctuary. She never brought men into it anymore. She slept with them in theirs.

  But she knew that she would not take herself off to whatever place James Montgomery laid his head. The lust had come upon her like a fever, but it was passing, even as she caught her breath. Indeed, her skin was still fevered with desire. But she knew herself. She would not be making love to him that night. She could not afford the luxury of making love to him, ever.

  As amusing as he was, James Montgomery seemed very good at enticing her to forget herself, where she was, and who she was. Walking any further down the path of seduction with him was just not worth the risk.

  “I don’t take men into my bedroom,” she said.

  “You’ll take me.”

  His brogue was just as strong, but now she could tell that it was anger, not lust that drove it. She pushed him away and sat up, raising the bodice of her gown. The silk was wrinkled but repairable. Lisette would be annoyed, but would understand that when lustful Scots came to tea, these things happened.

  “This is the third time you’ve left me unsatisfied.”

  She laughed but stopped when she saw the muscle leap in his jaw. “You’re counting, are you?”

  He rose to his feet, looming over her. For a moment, she almost relented. She almost drew him down to her again and set about persuading him to forget about her bedroom there on her hearthrug. But his anger was real. She had insulted him, though she had not meant to. It seemed they were destined to offend each other. It was best that he was leaving.

  “It won’t happen again,” he said.


  “That, we can agree on.”

  His dark auburn hair fell around his shoulders like an old Highland warrior. She knew he was from Aberdeen, and that the Scots had been relatively civilized for decades. Still, the thrill she felt as she stood to face him was real.

  His brogue was gone now, replaced with the clipped accent that the British Navy no doubt had beaten into him. “This isn’t over,” James said.

  “This conversation is.”

  She thought he would storm out then, and that she would not see him again. She did not know a lot about James Montgomery, but she knew men. She had insulted him too badly, passing through the realm of challenging into offensive. He would not be back.

  He did not storm out.

  Instead, he stepped toward her and took her in his arms. He did not ask for permission, and he did not hesitate, but kissed her once, hard, as if to seal a bargain between them.

  “I’ll be back,” he said.

  “I’ll be gone.”

  He smiled, as if he thought she was simply toying with him, and picked up the leather thong that had held his hair in place before she freed it. He did not bother to tie his hair back but slipped the thong in his coat pocket and walked out of the room without looking back.

  James Montgomery left, just as Hawthorne had, as Anthony had. The front door closed behind him. She stood in silence for a moment, the quiet of her house for the first time sounding like emptiness.

  She always had valued her privacy, and she always had cherished her time alone. But that evening, with James gone, the room seemed too still, the corridors and rooms above her head too quiet.

  She drank the last of her wine, but her favorite Burgundy tasted like bitter dregs on her tongue. She set her wineglass down and rang for Anton.

  She would call for her carriage. Angelique desperately needed the distraction. Though she was leaving for Shropshire in the morning, though she had not finished choosing which gowns she would take, she knew she could not stay in that house with only Lisette for company.

  She would go to see Arabella, locked away at Hawthorne House. She needed to warn her about the duke and his rumormongering. She told herself that this was the real reason she donned her light cloak and left the silence of her sitting room behind.