by Shirl Henke
He lifted one eyebrow sardonically. "We haven't had an affair ... yet."
"And whose fault is that? You seduce and promise paradise ... and then something always intervenes," she said, pouting. "I'm tired of excuses."
"Half the thrill is in the chase, rather like foxhunting. Which reminds me, we're supposed to ride in a quarter hour and you're not dressed."
Cybill licked her lips with a small pink tongue and whispered, "We could ride right now ... and I need not dress at all."
"Tempting," Alex replied, extracting her hand from his clothes and pressing a kiss on the soft palm. "But we'd be missed, I fear. The old marquess is a stickler for having everyone participate in the hunt."
Her violet eyes glowed with pure lust. "Very well. I shall leave you to eat my dust... until tonight when you may feast on something else ... I shall slip into your rooms. The marchioness always gives the largest beds to her gentlemen guests."
He chuckled, giving her well-padded rump a swat as she turned to walk away. Once she vanished up the circular staircase to the second floor, his expression turned sour. Tonight he would have to bed her. She was beautiful, experienced and lusty, precisely the sort of female he preferred. Why then did the thought of tonight's assignation hold so little appeal?
Cybill was right. He had invented continuous excuses for not consummating their relationship. To date he had learned only bits and pieces of information to pass along to the charge d'affaires. Chamberlain was indeed somewhere out of the country, although she did not specify where, and he found no subtle way to press her for more details. He had learned the reason Chamberlain's injury had not cost him his commission. The colonel had taught himself to use his left hand with as great a proficiency as he had previously used his right. Cybill could not resist taunting him with the threat of another challenge from her still deadly husband.
Alex was not certain what her motives really were. Did she desire him because he was the only man ever to best Chamberlain? Was it simple lust because her husband was absent? Or did she play a deeper game? No matter what her reasons, tonight she would get her wish. He would bed her. Silently damning life in general and Jonathan Russell in particular, Alex headed toward the sound of baying hounds and laughing houseguests.
* * * *
Everything around her was a fuzzy blur, as if she were underwater, trying to see shifting distorted shapes through the murky haze. Drat, where were those accursed spectacles? She always felt so helpless without them. In early childhood she had been plagued with this disorientation, feeling utterly at the mercy of her surroundings, until her father had had her fitted with her first pair of eyeglasses. Even now the terrifying memories still frightened her.
Joss rummaged through the pockets of her dress searching for her spare pair, which she was never without—until now. How had she become so forgetful of late?
Poc gave a startled yelp when she accidentally stepped on his tail. "Sorry, fellow, but I can't see a thing unless I
get down on my hands and knees and crawl about like a charwoman cleaning floors."
Sighing, she knew there was no help for it. She would have to do just that. Her spectacles had fallen from her face to the carpet while she was roughhousing with the dog. Somehow they must have bounced, because they were nowhere nearby. She lowered herself to the floor, groping very carefully so as not to step on them and break the lenses inadvertently.
Poc followed her every move now, brushing against her shoulder and planting a series of cold, wet kisses on her face to cheer her on. "Pray, don't you step on them," she scolded, trying to shove him back as she made a circuit around her bed.
Just as she reached the edge of the Tabriz rug, her hand came in contact with a wire earpiece. "Thank heaven," she cried, reaching out her hand to seize them while starting to get to her feet. When she stood up, Joss forgot the end table situated at the foot of the bed. Her shoulder struck it and she flinched, feeling the delicate narrow top teeter on its high spindly legs, setting off a fearful clatter of china vases, brass statuary and candlesticks.
Candlesticks! The lighted branch of candles tumbled off the table directly onto the thick cushion of the bed, setting fire to the sheer bed curtains. Joss clamped her glasses on her nose and glanced frantically around for something with which to smother the flames.
A blanket lay folded at the opposite end of the bed. In her haste to reach it, she forgot about Poc, who stood beside her sniffing at the smoke. When she turned she tripped over him and sprawled headlong across the carpet, landing in an ignominious heap across the floor while the fire blazed on.
By now thick, black smoke was beginning to fill the room. Joss's coughs were punctuated by the dog's alarmed barking. She scrambled to her feet, calling loudly for help as she fought her way to where the blanket lay, miraculously still untouched by the flames. Seizing it she rushed over to dunk it in the basin of water on the dry sink, then threw it over the curtains, which had burned free of the brass frame suspending them around the bed. As the flaming material fluttered onto the satin spread, the heavy wet blanket followed it down, snuffing out the conflagration.
Unfortunately by this time the fire had already jumped to the lace doilies on the bedstand and the linen scarf on the table across from it. Shrieking "Fire, fire!" at the top of her scorched lungs, Joss grabbed up the blanket and attacked the spreading blaze.
By this time her cries and the dog's frantic barking had brought two footmen, the cook and her helper all scrambling to help put out the fire. Within a few moments, which seemed like hours to Joss, they had the flames subdued to a smoldering mess of foul-smelling bed linens and charred wood.
Joss surveyed the once beautiful room's soot-stained walls and paint-bubbled furniture. "What will Alex say?" she wailed. "How could I have been so clumsy?"
"It weren't yer fault, mistress," Bonnie the cook replied, patting Joss's arm with a beefy red hand. "That silly chit of a maid set that brace of candles where they wasn't supposed to be."
"Yes, they belong on the pier table against the wall," Archie the footman said. The servants rallied around their sobbing mistress, whom they all loved dearly for her kindness, attempting to cheer her.
"Don't fret. The master is a good 'un. He'll not have a care about refitting the room. No real damage done that a coat of paint, some refinishing and a few new linens won't fix," Bonnie said, ushering Joss from the wreckage of her bedroom. "I'll have Mary fix up the bed in the next room for you to sleep on tonight."
* * * *
Sleep eluded her. Her nose was stuffy and her throat raw in spite of the posset the cook had insisted she drink at bedtime. She coughed, then sneezed. Utterly wretched, Joss sat up and blinked owlishly in the darkness. As usual, she could see nothing but fuzzy outlines blurring into the inky blackness.
The pungent odor of smoke still hung heavy on the night air in spite of the window she had flung wide open before retiring. Unfortunately, the window was in the fire-damaged bedroom. The small one in this room had been so thoroughly painted shut that she could not budge it.
"A—a—achoo!" There was no help for it, she thought crossly. She had been deathly allergic to smoke ever since she was a small child. Her father had been forced to keep her away from the common room at the Fin and Feather because the men's pipes had caused her nose to stuff up and run.
She would get no rest until she got away from the smoky air. Vowing to get Archie to pry open the window in this room first thing in the morning, she sat up in bed and groped for her glasses. Once she had them safely settled on her nose, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and reached for her robe, shivering because she had been forced to sleep in her thin cotton chemise. The long flannel night rails she usually wore were casualties of the fire.
"Thank goodness Alex is out of town for the weekend," she murmured to herself as she made her way down the back stairs, holding a lone candle in one hand to guide her way. Although she had never been in his private quarters, she knew there was a second small bedr
oom similar to the one in her apartment. She would just have to sleep in it for tonight.
No need to trouble any of the servants, who were all asleep above the carriage house. Joss walked slowly down the long dark hall, peering through the first doorway. The room was large, filled with heavy masculine furniture.
Alex's room. Something drew her to step inside. A huge four-poster bed sat uncurtained in the center of the room, dominating it.
How would it feel to sleep in Alex's bed?
"No!" Joss whispered aloud, appalled at the very thought of invading his privacy.
But he's not home, the insidious voice wheedled.
She took another step closer. Her palms felt damp and her heart raced. She took a deep breath, relieved to find her head had cleared up in the fresh air. But it was not really clear, else she would not be contemplating such a wicked thing.
Where is the harm in it? He'll never know.
"But I will," she agonized. How bittersweet to lie there and imagine that her husband was coming to lie beside her. Or, worse yet, to imagine all the other women he would make love to in that bed. Visions of Cybill Chamberlain's plump, pale body entwined with Alex's made her squeeze her eyes closed in misery.
"No! I won't think of that," she whispered resolutely in the silent room, then backed out and walked farther down the hall to the second door. The small cubicle had been refitted into a dressing room with a large brass bathtub in one corner, a valet's pressing board and various irons in another. The rest of the space was taken up by a huge armoire and clothes chests. There was no bed.
She had two choices—return to the smoky upstairs and snuffle away the night or sleep in Alex's bed. Well, he was not using it.... To bolster her courage Joss retraced her steps into Alex's sitting room, where she knew he kept spirits. Over the weeks of their marriage he'd attempted unsuccessfully to convince her of the restorative benefits of sherry for a lady. Well, tonight she needed all the restorative benefits she could get.
Pouring a snifter full of the sweet, tangy liquid, she swallowed it down like medicine. Perhaps one more for good measure. Downing a second snifter as quickly as she had the first, Joss felt a languid euphoria settling over her as she made her way to the big bed. "Now I shall get a good night's sleep.
* * * *
Alex lay staring at the ceiling where shadows danced, reflected from the lone candle flickering on the candlestand. What a bloody tangle his life had become. A month ago he was the happiest, most carefree man in London. Now ... No, best to concentrate on the task at hand. Odd that bedding a beautiful woman had somehow become a matter of duty rather than pleasure. It left a sour taste in his mouth.
His troubling reverie was interrupted by the soft hiss of the bedroom door swinging open as Lady Cybill glided in. She was dressed in a sheer, voluminous robe of pale raspberry silk that did less to conceal the lush full curves of her milky flesh than did her long ebony hair, artfully arranged to fall in a shiny curtain over her breasts. She carried a candle in one hand, which she set on a table by the door, deliberately silhouetting her body in its light as she made her way slowly across the room to where he lay on the bed.
She's performing for me, he thought with grim amusement as he watched her slowly shed the whispery silk robe to reveal a low-cut sleeping gown in a deeper shade of magenta. The rich satin molded itself to her heavy breasts and rounded hips.
"Do you always stalk your men, Cybill?" he asked, swinging his long legs over the side of the bed and sitting up.
"Do you always wait for your lovers still clad?" she replied. Although barefooted and shirtless, he still wore his doeskin breeches.
"I'm scarcely dressed." He was not aroused either, in spite of her display of feminine pulchritude.
"What is it, Alex ... hmmm? Are you afraid of Rupert? You bested him once. Surely his having regained his skill left-handed should not worry you ... or does it?"
An opening ... of sorts. He strolled over to the piecrust table and filled two cut-crystal glasses with some of Brownlea's fine aged port, handing her one, then raising his in a mocking salute. "Let us just say this situation is different from our last contretemps. I don't relish having an irate husband charge in here to challenge me for bedding his wife."
"You, worried about scandal?" she scoffed, sipping the port as an amused smile bowed her pouty mouth.
"I did not relish maiming a man, no matter what you believe, Cybill. The next time I'd have to kill him ... and then the British peerage would raise a hue and cry to hang me. I do relish my neck."
She polished off the port and set the glass aside, then pressed her hands into the curly hair of his chest, kneading the muscles like a contented cat. As she wound her arms around his neck and rubbed her lush breasts against his chest, she purred, "No reason to worry about my husband for now."
Alex reached between them to tweak her swollen nipples through the smooth satin gown. "How can you be so sure of that?" he asked, moving his mouth closer to hers.
Blind hunger glazed her eyes as she tried to pull his head down for a kiss. "Because Rupert is half a world away, in the American gulf at some godforsaken outpost in Spanish Florida."
As he nibbled her earlobe he said, "I thought Wellington had all the experienced English military officers in Spain."
Cybill shivered, nuzzling a flat male nipple with her raspy tongue. "All this lovely bronze skin. Perhaps I should have sailed with Rupert so I could have sampled others of your kind," she said with a husky air of excitement thickening her voice.
"My kind?" he echoed ominously.
Lust turned her eyes as black as ink in her white face. "Mixed bloods, red Indians. The ones they call by that name—red...somethings."
"Red Sticks?"
"Yes, Red Sticks. Rupert is to meet with two of their leaders, Weatherford and McQueen."
"Weatherford and McQueen?" he echoed as nonchalantly as he could.
"Do you know them? Are they as wicked as you, my darling Alex, black-eyed with skin bronzed even where the sun does not touch it?" She panted as her fingers slid beneath the waistband of his trousers. "I want to see if all of you is so deliciously dark."
He knew those men! Peter McQueen was a renegade who lived on hatred, but William Weatherford was an educated man of peace. If a wealthy planter such as Weatherford would meet with Chamberlain, the situation on the frontier must be far more volatile than even his father had imagined. How appropriate that the British war office would send a snake like Rupert Chamberlain to offer the Creek Confederacy a devil's bargain.
While his mind turned over the information Cybill had just given him, she worked on satisfying her lascivious curiosity, unbuttoning his breeches and shoving the tight doeskin lower. "You are dark all over," she squealed excitedly. "Savage, primitive beauty!"
His face was harsh with disgust as he reached down and seized her wrists, pulling her hands off his buttocks, shoving her away from him. "So that's the fascination I hold for you. You want to say you've bedded a savage—a red Indian. A far superior trophy compared to an ordinary English rake." The loathing was plain on his face as he glared down at her and refastened his breeches.
"You needn't act so petulant, darling," she snapped. "Never mind all your lovely money, your savage blood is the real reason the ton has feted you. Surely, you know that."
"Rather like Mr. Johnson's dog who walks on his hind legs, eh?" he said furiously as he yanked on his shirt and boots. " 'Tis not that my social skills are as refined as a gentleman's but merely that a red savage can tie his cravat and eat with a fork that elicits English amazement."
He seized his jacket and stormed toward the door.
"Alex! Wait," she commanded, her voice rising in anger. "Where are you going?"
"Back to London. I find I've had quite enough of the Quality for one weekend!" As he slammed the door, Alex heard her stomp a bare foot with surprising force. The sound of one of Lady Brownlea's Meissen figurines crashing against the wall followed him down the hallway.
&nbs
p; Fortunately Alex had ridden Sumac to the Brownleas'. He saddled the big roan and rode hard for the city, making good time in spite of a chill spring drizzle. In two hours he was pounding on the American charge d'affaires's door. Exceedingly disgruntled and sleepy, Russell received his report, which quickly awakened the old man. "Damn and blast, the British aren't letting any grass grow beneath their feet, are they?"
"If the Red Sticks take to the warpath with British arms, there'll be no grass—or anything else—growing from Georgia to the Mississippi River," Alex replied. He went on to detail the positions of influence McQueen and Weatherford held with the Muskogee and the history of broken treaties that the Creek Confederacy had suffered at the hands of the American government. The old diplomat was far more interested in British operations on the gulf, questioning Alex about where Chamberlain would set up his headquarters with the Spanish, concluding Fort Charlotte on Mobile Bay was most likely.
By the time his disquieting interview was over, Alex was wet, cold and utterly out of sorts. For all the good it would do his Muskogee people, he might as well never have been involved with a viper like Cybill. The thought of bedding her sickened him. But to tell the truth, he was hardly shocked at the reason for Cybill's lust. Hell, half the women he bedded were fascinated with him because of his Indian blood. That had never bothered him before. But for some reason, Cybill's open admission threw him into a rage tonight, even though he had been without a woman for weeks, an unheard-of duration of celibacy for Alex Blackthorne.
Disgruntled and weary, he repaired to Chapel Street, unwilling to seek out his usual pleasure haunts. "All I really want tonight," he convinced himself, "is to tie on a roaring drunk and get a good night's sleep."
Chapter Twelve
Mmm, what a delicious dream. If a glass of sherry before retiring brought on these wonderful sensations, Joss dreamily concluded, she should indulge more often. Utterly sensual, startlingly unfamiliar sensations rippled over her body. As a large, long-fingered hand cleverly caressed her breast, she rolled over onto her back, allowing a second hand access to the other breast. The nipples tightened into hard little buds that burned; yet it was a most agreeable sort of fire.