Marlowe was certain that they were already too late for that.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IN WHICH A GREEK GOD SWEEPS MISS JONES OFF HER FEET
THE VISCOUNT WAS right. Trouble had indeed been found . . . then played with, tied to a trident, and flung aloft by the time Minerva located her charges and their companions. The unnecessarily grandiose marble fountain of Poseidon, set in the center of the garden, had become a castle, the basin of water a moat. Both of the Honeywell girls were chanting something about vanquishing Norman invaders while dancing around the perimeter, faces painted with what Minerva feared was the sludge from the bottom of the fountain.
Other than a difference in height—one was a slightly taller, auburn-haired demon, compared to the other—it was even harder to distinguish between the two Honeywell girls than it was between the twins. But she didn’t need to tell them apart to know she was doomed. The Honeywells, with their war paint and battle cries, made her charges seem almost tame.
Or maybe they were merely the lit fuse on an already unstable powder keg. She came to this conclusion when she glanced up at Beatrice’s shout of “Die, you Saxon filth!” to find the girl clinging to one of Poseidon’s muscular alabaster thighs and flinging a bucket of water in the Honeywells’ direction.
Somehow, most of the brackish water landed on Minerva’s bodice.
She tilted her head heavenward to gather her fraying nerves . . .
And spotted her missing pantaloons billowing in the wind off the spikes of Poseidon’s trident.
When she recovered enough to tear her attention away from that particular beacon of humiliation, she found four pairs of wide eyes fixed on her. She couldn’t fathom why they’d gone so suspiciously still and quiet so quickly until she realized she’d just shrieked like a banshee.
The water had been extremely cold, after all.
She decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth, thankful she didn’t have to resort to more physical means of subduing the siege in progress.
She stabbed her finger in the direction of her pantaloons. “What is that?” she demanded.
Beatrice, feet planted on the pedestal rising out of the center of the fountain, had the good grace to look sheepish. Laura just looked defiant, as usual. Minerva didn’t even bother gauging the Honeywells’ level of contrition, since it would doubtless be nonexistent anyway.
“It’s our pennant,” Bea said.
“Are you sure? Because your pennant looks just like my new pantaloons,” she said flatly.
The Honeywells snickered at the edge of the moat, and Minerva began to reconsider her stance on corporal punishment. She settled for a stern glare—to little effect.
Bea glanced up at the unmentionables, then at her sister, and then the pair of them gave Minerva a synchronized shrug. “I don’t see it,” Bea said.
Minerva set her hands on her hips and gave Bea The Look that was successful at least half of the time.
Bea looked for a moment as if she might set her heels in, but she finally sighed, her tiny shoulders slumping. “Fine,” she said, as if Minerva were being a huge imposition. “If you want them back so badly you’d interrupt the Siege of Exeter, I suppose you can have them.”
Well, at least Bea paid attention to her history lessons. But if she thought she was going to guilt Minerva into letting them continue their ridiculous behavior, she was wrong.
Bea started scaling up one of Poseidon’s overly developed calves, and Minerva’s stomach dropped. She didn’t want to even imagine how the twins had managed to plant their flag in the first place, but Bea was certainly not going to attempt the climb to the top of Poseidon’s trident again in her presence. The twins may have been half-feral, but that did not make their tiny skulls any more immune to being cracked open from a fall.
Minerva rushed forward, climbed into the fountain, and gritted her teeth at the frigid water soaking her up to midthigh. She splashed through the water, wincing all the way, and pulled Bea from Poseidon’s pedestal without preamble. Bea looked shocked at the manhandling but remained surprisingly quiescent all the way back across the basin.
“Don’t you dare climb up there again, Beatrice Leighton,” she scolded, hoisting the girl over the edge of the fountain and depositing her next to her sister. “I’ll not have either of you cracking your heads open.”
“I’ll go,” one of the Honeywell chits said, bounding toward the fountain with a much too gleeful expression.
Even though she had lost all feeling in her legs in the frigid water, Minerva felt her heart sink to her toes at the very idea. The only thing worse than the twins’ skulls cracked open were the Honeywells’ skulls cracked open—and the Duke of Montford out for blood. Her blood. Though he’d probably faint at the sight of it.
She leveled her best glare at the girl, channeling her father at his most autocratic. It seemed to work, for the girl’s cocksure expression faltered, and she stepped back in line.
Minerva transferred her glare to her billowing pantaloons and considered her next move, shivering when the April winds picked up and bit through her drenched skirts. The thought of leaving her unmentionables flying high for the new footmen to find—or God forbid, the viscount or Mrs. Chips—made her want to punch someone in the face. There was nothing for it but to retrieve them herself, though how she’d arrived at such an impasse in her life boggled the mind.
She gathered up the weighted bulk of her wet skirts and slogged up to the marble pedestal where Poseidon was half kneeling in his altogether, looking on the verge of smiting his foe with his trident. She grasped a marble shin and heaved onto the ledge, slowly dragging herself up the line of Poseidon’s body until she was hugging him around the waist, her face smashed against the cold, damp marble of his breastbone.
Something poked her in the stomach, and she glanced down to find Poseidon’s . . . attributes . . . staring back at her from far too intimate a distance.
“Oh, for the love of . . .” she muttered. She could feel her face heat at the ridiculousness of her position. The Honeywell chits must have realized her predicament, for she could hear them giggling below her.
The only bright spot in what was quickly becoming a terrible day was that the twins were still too young to understand what the older girls found so amusing. They took her long pause for a case of nerves. Thank heavens, for the only thing that could make this day worse was having to explain male reproductive organs to them instead of reading their usual bedtime fairy tale.
“Do be careful, Miss Jones!” Bea called, almost sounding concerned for her safety. “It’s a bit wobbly up there.”
“Nonsense,” she began briskly with all the false confidence she could muster through her chattering teeth.
Then she placed her wet boot on Poseidon’s bent knee and felt the entire statue list ever so slightly forward.
She threw her weight against the god’s torso, and the statue shifted back into place with a creak and groan. The sinking sensation in her stomach stopped, and she rested her head against Poseidon’s throat, wondering how her life had come to this utter abandonment of decorum.
A saner person—one who’d not spent five years tending to Lady Blundersmith’s imaginary agues, a year in a remote girls’ reform school with Fräulein Schmidt as the closest thing to a friend, and then two months governessing for Viscount Marlowe—would have at that moment abandoned the venture altogether. And since she was not quite ready for Bedlam, she did actually consider climbing back down to earth, swallowing her mortification, and fetching the one lone footman the twins had yet to scare off to retrieve her unmentionables.
But then she heard the deep baritone growl of the viscount’s voice drifting from the entrance to the garden and the light, teasing tones of what she assumed were the duchess and countess, and she froze. The voices were growing perilously close to the fountain. She could even see the flash of the duchess’s infamous Honeywell Swirl chignon and the matching siren-red of the viscount’s favorite red silk banyan through
the rosebushes.
The thought of the viscount discovering her pantaloons flying high on Poseidon’s trident—the thought of the look on his face, that same smug amusement he’d worn the entire journey from West Barming to London—was enough to overrule the last of her common sense. She hoisted herself onto Poseidon’s knee once more, ignoring the gentle sway of marble beneath her, and strained upward toward the leg of her pantaloons, billowing just out of her reach.
“You have to prop yourself up on his shoulder, Miss Jones!” Bea called.
“Shhh!” She motioned at the girls to keep their voices down—or at least she tried to. The movement seemed to make the statue wobble even more. She clutched at Poseidon’s head until his wobbling slowed down, then took Bea’s dubious advice and lifted her left foot onto the god’s shoulder, trying to arrange her wet skirts so she too wasn’t revealing all of her attributes to the world. She wound up having to drape most of her skirts over Poseidon’s head, her splayed legs stretching the fabric.
For some reason, this seemed to set off the Honeywell girls again—perhaps because of the position of the Greek god’s head.
Well. At least Poseidon was the only one seeing up her skirts, however awkward.
After a bit of contortion, she was finally able to grab the leg of her pantaloons, but the fabric snagged on the trident and refused to budge. She tugged on it again, to no avail.
“Oh lud, what have we here?” came the duchess’s amused voice from much too close.
She cursed inwardly. Too late. She was too late.
Minerva chanced a glance downward and saw the duchess’s flame-colored hair, freckled face and startlingly mismatched eyes beaming up at her, looking as if Minerva had done something miraculous rather than scale Greek statuary in a wet dress. Next to her was an extremely pregnant woman with the Leighton coloring—Lady Brinderley, she presumed—who was laughing outright.
The viscount stood just behind his older sister, but the smirk Minerva had been dreading was not there. Instead, his jaw hung slack, and his big brown eyes were popped so wide they seemed incapable of blinking anymore. He looked as if he’d run into a wall, and when she finally looked down and caught sight of her legs, bared to midthigh with nothing but her sagging stockings to cover them (she really could have used those pantaloons right about now), she understood why.
Cheeks burning, she jerked at her unmentionables—now the least of her worries—one final time, and the force she used was so great the statue creaked forward, causing her boot to slip from Poseidon’s shoulder. The front of her skirts was still thrown over Poseidon’s head, and so as she slipped down his torso, her skirts rode up even higher.
Below her, the viscount cleared his throat, his face the same color as his banyan, and attempted to look anywhere but at her. The duchess seemed to be caught between glee and concern. “My dear, are you all right?” she called.
“Quite,” she bit out, jerking her skirts from around Poseidon’s head and pushing them down her legs with one hand. But just when she’d nearly restored her dignity enough to clamber down the pedestal, something cracked—Poseidon’s thigh underneath her foot—and the wobbling became a relentless tilt forward.
She scrambled to remove herself from the god’s path of destruction. Somehow she managed to jump into the fountain and make it over the edge with her pantaloons in one hand before the statue could fall down completely. But once again she was too slow to completely avoid catastrophe.
She saw the viscount’s panicked expression as he rushed toward her . . .
But he was too late to save her from Poseidon’s clutches. She spun around and shrieked as she saw the god of the sea bearing down on her from above. She had just enough time to slow the statue’s creaking descent with her hands to Poseidon’s sculpted breast before the statue’s weight had pinned her to the ground, but she wasn’t quick enough to save her head from banging against the flagstones.
The last thing she could think before everything went blank was at least she’d managed to salvage the pantaloons.
SHE CAME TO a moment later and found the god of the sea between her legs, her skirts rucked up scandalously high once more, and the viscount hovering over her, looking as if he didn’t know whether to push the statue off her or keep it there to protect her dignity.
Her dignity, however, had long since abandoned her.
The duchess and Lady Brinderley loomed into her line of vision, both trying to look appropriately serious, but failing miserably. Somewhere behind her, all four of the little imps who had begun this whole debacle were cackling with hilarity.
The duchess turned to Marlowe. “This is your governess?”
“It would appear so,” he murmured, trying and failing not to ogle her naked legs. The wretch.
The only upside to the situation that she could see was the heated blush she could feel spreading through her blood as she noticed the viscount’s gaze. At least she wasn’t cold anymore.
“If you wouldn’t mind,” she bit out.
The viscount startled, looked puzzled for a moment, but then finally snapped into action. “Yes, of course,” he said gruffly, still blushing like a schoolgirl, and lifted the statue away from her. There were advantages to being a giant, after all, for he showed little strain in hoisting Poseidon into his arms and carrying it away from the scene of the crime.
She just managed to tuck her skirts back over her legs by the time he turned back to her. Her attempt to climb to her feet ended in disaster, however, her head spinning and her eyes crossing. She fell backward once more—though she would categorically, positively deny it was a swoon—and was caught in warm, strong arms.
Minerva opened her eyes and discovered the viscount peering down at her from only a few inches away, his brow creased in concern. From so close, his thick, luxurious hair gleamed in the midmorning light, and his brown eyes glittered. She could see the bump on his nose clearly, right between his eyes, and the way his full, mobile lips were parted as he panted slightly with his exertion. His body was warm beneath his rumpled layers and fragrant with bay rum and sandalwood.
She couldn’t breathe for a long while, and it had nothing to do with the bump on her head or the chill in her bones. In fact, she wasn’t chilled at all anymore. Not in the viscount’s arms.
And that thought was worrying enough to make her push away from him entirely. She wobbled a bit but miraculously remained upright this time. She glared at Poseidon, now in a nearby flower bed, staring blankly up at the sky, his attributes also pointing the same direction.
Twice now, she had been struck down by a member of the peerage. She had not thought to guard herself against Greek statuary as well.
Minerva turned back to the viscount. He was holding his hand over his eyes while his sister and the duchess chortled behind him. She glanced down and discovered why. She may have covered her legs, but the fountain water had made her gown utterly translucent.
“Bollocks,” she muttered. She crossed her arms over her breasts.
The duchess’s eyes lit up at her crudity. “Oh, I like her.” She removed her pelisse and offered it to Minerva, who wrapped it around her shivering shoulders. “If you’re ever in need of employment, my dear, you are welcome at Montford House. I have a feeling you could keep up with my sisters quite nicely.”
“Astrid,” growled the viscount warningly, “no poaching the governess!”
Minerva side-eyed the Honeywell girls, who were standing over the fallen statue, poking it with their sticks. When their sticks reached Poseidon’s groin, she cleared her throat and thought it best to avert her eyes. She’d had quite enough of that today. “I shall keep that in mind,” she said, intending to do anything but.
“Well, the offer stands,” the duchess said briskly, then started to herd Minerva from the garden, leaving Lady Brinderley and Lord Marlowe to corral the children. “Now, let’s get you inside and out of those wet things. And you can tell me all about how you came to be climbing Poseidon,” the duchess said with su
ch enthusiasm Minerva had no choice but to follow her orders.
Minerva glanced over her shoulder at Lord Marlowe, who was hauling his two damp, squealing children up by each arm—no easy feat, for the little hellions were heavier than they looked. He made it look as effortless as he had lifting the statue, though.
Which of course it was for him, with all of that brawn at his disposal. Now that he wasn’t encumbered by the bloat of his excesses, the viscount was all raw muscle beneath those ridiculous Chinese dressing gowns of his. She knew this well, for she’d felt the strength for herself when he’d fallen on top of her at their first meeting.
She wondered if the Leightons came from Viking stock. It would certainly explain those shoulders. And the proclivity for brawling. And the easy way he’d lifted her out of that ditch in Kent, or caught her in his arms just now, as if she’d weighed no more than a feather . . .
“And,” the duchess said, watching Minerva with far too much interest as Minerva watched the viscount, “you must tell me how long this has been going on.”
Minerva jerked her attention back to the duchess, blushing—though she wasn’t sure why. “What? I have no idea what you’re talking about, Your Grace,” she said. And that was the truth. Mostly. Though she didn’t like the secret little smile that graced the duchess’s lips. Or the way her eyes gleamed as she looked from Minerva to the viscount and back again calculatingly.
The duchess merely patted her hand as if humoring a child. “Of course you don’t,” she said soothingly. “But let’s just say my task has become a thousand times easier.”
“Task?” Minerva asked, suspicious.
Her Grace didn’t bother to explain herself further and bustled them both inside.
A HALF HOUR later, the duchess had somehow managed to bully Minerva into dry clothes, charm a piping hot pot of tea and fresh scones and butter out of the uncharmable Mrs. Chips, and corral not only Lady Brinderley but also a bleary-eyed Lady Elizabeth into Minerva’s small bedroom to enjoy the refreshments. Minerva thus found herself tucked into her bed like an invalid, surrounded by titled ladies, sipping Earl Gray as if they were at a tea party, and waiting on Dr. Lucas to come and check out the bump to her head.
Regency Romp 03 - The Alabaster Hip Page 10