“I really don't have much of a choice, do I? You're not lying to me about the earl.”
“No, I'm sorry, but I'm not. He's famous for this sort of thing in London.”
She seemed to come to a decision. She looked up at him with a determined gaze.
“Help me get to London. Help me keep away from the men my uncle hired to bring me back. Sell the earl the horse, and you may make whatever offer you care to make for Tempest then.”
She offered her hand for a shake, but instead, James took it gently. He brought it up to his mouth and brushed his lips over her knuckle. The spark of heat that flew through him he could tell was mirrored in her, and she drew back hastily, eyes wide.
“I... that's quite enough. Do we have a deal?”
“We do.”
She rushed outside, muttering something about making sure that Tempest was comfortable, and James leaned back in the chair thoughtfully. He had been telling her nothing but the truth. The Earl of Leaford was notorious for his hatred of the fairer sex, and James itched to have Tempest for his own. However, he thought with some amusement that he was just as interested in Tempest's current owner as he was the mare. Given the fact that the mare was a descendant of the Byerley Turk, that was saying something.
* * *
4
CHAPTER
FOUR
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In the end, despite her pressing need to get back on the road, Jo had to admit there was no good reason to return to the journey that night. The sun was already below the horizon when she went out to gather herself, and even she had to admit that sleeping at the lodge was better than sleeping on the greens another night or trying to find another inn.
She and James both looked after their horses, making sure the small shelter at the far end of the paddock was stocked with fodder and sturdy in case of a spring storm, and then they retreated back to the house, where Jo looked around.
“Hm. I suppose if there is a spare blanket, I can make my bed by the hearth...”
“Poor idea. There's no good way to bank the hearth, and though it might be warm now, it will be frigid in just a few hours.”
“Well, I don't want you to sleep on the floor...”
“I've got no intention of doing so. We should both sleep in the bed.”
She stared at him in shock.
“I beg your pardon!”
James leaned back in the chair, and by the light of the dimming hearth fire, he looked frankly devilish.
Well, they did say that Lucifer was the most beautiful of all the angels before he fell, I suppose.
"Beg all you like, but it doesn't change the facts. There is a fine and comfortable bed upstairs, and the floor down here is pure stone. If you want to make good time tomorrow, if you want to make sure that you are not going to be too stiff to ride the way you need to, I think you know the answer."
Jo glared at him. "I don't know what you've heard about women in Yorkshire, my lord, but I can tell you..."
"Please, spare me the righteous indignation. If I thought you were the average Yorkshire woman, I'd have assumed that you'd as soon turn me to stone as sleep with me."
"And since I'm not, you'll condescend to share your bed with me?"
"Dear God in Heaven, you could hone swords off that tongue of yours. No. I'm not proposing anything indecent... though perhaps if you smiled a little and spoke a little more sweetly, I'd consider it."
Jo squawked, and when James laughed, she realized she'd been baited. She scowled as he continued speaking.
"No, for once in my life, I'm only trying to be practical. I've been staying here for a few weeks, and I can tell you this entire lodge gets damned cold at night. If you came up to share my bed, I am enough of a gentleman to keep my hands to myself. Unless you wish otherwise. In that case, as a gentleman, I would be compelled to give in."
Jo glared at him, wondering why there was a part of her that fluttered a little at his words. It was ridiculous. He was ridiculous.
"No thank you, my lord. We have our deal in place, and I think it would be a mistake to go beyond it any more than we had to. You will get me to London, and then we are quits. I shall stay down here. I'm not some shy London miss to quail at the first sign of cold."
James shrugged, a small smile on his lips. "If you say so. Suit yourself then."
James climbed the ladder up to the loft, and she could hear him stirring above. Jo watched the hatch through which he had climbed for a short while to make sure he didn't climb down, and then turned toward the fire. Though she stoked it as well as she could, Jo could see where James was right. It was a primitive thing, and it would go through wood at an astonishing rate. It would be as cold as Hades by dawn and probably her as well.
Still, it was burning now, and Jo glanced speculatively at the ewer set aside. There was still a large amount of water in it, enough, she reckoned, for her to get clean using a small towel.
I'll just get all muddy again tomorrow, but it would feel so good to get a scrub in now.
From the quiet above, it sounded as if James had gone to bed, and Jo decided to risk it. It only took a short amount of time to heat the remaining water in a pot, and then, gingerly stripping to the skin, Jo soaked a cloth in the blissfully hot water.
After all, who knows when I'm next going to get this chance?
She scrubbed as best she could, and even if it was not as clean as she would get in the bath at home, it was far better than nothing. The water in the pot had turned gray with grime from the road, but Jo felt far better when she had scrubbed.
Just as she was toweling her legs dry, she heard a creaking from above, and then she saw James’ bare feet on the highest rungs of the ladder.
She yelped, rushing for her clothes just as he climbed down, and when he saw her holding her men's shirt in front of her, he stopped and stared, still several rungs from the floor.
"Well, what is it?" Jo tried to speak as if this was something that happened every day, but her voice cracked on the final word. She had never been so exposed to a man before, and the right response was to feel shame and horror at being so very vulnerable. However, instead of shame or fear, she only felt a strange heat light up inside her, something echoed in James’ eyes. They traced over her body, from hip to shoulder, skating over her breasts, down to her bare toes on the stone and back again.
James swallowed, the click of his dry throat audible in the otherwise silent room. "I thought I would come down and give you this extra blanket. Do you want it?"
He climbed down the rest of the way, holding out a thick wool blanket.
"Yes, thank you. You can... just set it down and go to bed."
James smiled a little. "Come get it."
Jo wanted to snap her teeth at him like a fractious mare. If it had been anyone else, she would have told them to take that blanket and burn it. Instead, when he said those words, it was as if he had given her permission to do something she had wanted to do anyway.
Step by step, she came closer, the shirt the only barrier between her skin and his touch. He kept his eyes on hers, and that fire returned to her. When he had kissed her hand, she thought it was hot enough, but now she could tell that was only a spark compared to this, compared to how it could feel.
She stopped just a few feet away from him. The pull between them felt like gravity, something mysterious that drew them to each other. If she got any closer, she didn't know what he would do, what she herself would do.
As if sensing her confusion, James sighed softly.
"Maybe another night."
She frowned at his confusing words, but then he was flapping the blanket open and dropping it right over her head. As she squawked in surprise and fought her way to the edge, James laughed as he climbed the ladder back up to the loft.
"What do you have to laugh about anyway?"
The only response to her indignant question was another laugh, and with a g
rowl of frustration, she bundled the blanket close to her and stalked back to the fire.
It didn't matter at all. All he was going to do was get her and Tempest to London. As long as he did that and kept his hands to himself, it didn't matter what idiotic jokes he wanted to have.
Still, as she slipped the shirt back over her head and wrapped up in the blanket close to the hearth, a part of her wondered what might have happened if she took those last few steps toward James, giving in to that pull that seemed to anchor her heart closer and closer to him.
* * *
Jo's sleep was fitful, wandering between the very shallowest of dreams and a dreary wakefulness. She had fallen asleep quickly enough, but James had been right. The fire burned out sooner than she had thought it would, and it left her shivering on the ground, the blanket tucked around her as tightly as she could get it for warmth.
She tossed and turned on her pillow made of her bundled-up clothes. Sometimes she dreamed, and sometimes she stared at the darkness around her, willing the sun to come up.
Jo knew that she must have slept because she had no memory of anything before a warmth settled behind her.
"What?"
"Be quiet. Your damned sniffling kept waking me up."
The words themselves were harsh, but there was something almost gentle about the tone that made her smile.
The edge of her blanket was tugged up, but before she could protest the rush of cold air, a large warm presence pressed up against her back, molding to her as closely as a well-made glove to a hand. Then another heavy blanket settled on top of her, and she sighed blissfully at the warmth, snuggling back against it without another thought.
A few moments later, she was finally falling into a deeper sleep, and in her dreams, she was riding Tempest along a strip of beach that seemed to go on forever, and somewhere close, she could hear the hoof beats of another horse and rider closing in.
* * *
The first thing Jo realized when she woke up was that she was too warm to want to climb out from under the covers, and the second thing was that her mattress was passing strange and lumpy.
Then she woke up all the way and realized she was not in her room at Fairport and her mattress was no mattress at all.
She had been sleeping on James, and with a small cry of shock, she fell back on the stone floor, the blankets tangled around her.
James woke when they pulled off him, and he propped himself up on one elbow, glaring at her in the soft pre-dawn light.
"If you're going to be up, can't you stay quiet?"
"What in the world are you doing down here? Don't you have a bed up in the loft?"
"I did have a nice bed in the loft, dusty, but perfect for my needs. I was sleeping in it quite soundly when I kept hearing your whimpering in your sleep like a sad puppy."
"I was not!"
"I beg to differ."
James yawned hugely, sitting up. Jo couldn't help but notice that before he had brushed it, there was a faint crisp curl to the black strands, and she resisted the urge to reach out and smooth it down.
"No, you were stirring around and whimpering at how cold it was. I came down to tell you to leave off or go and sleep with the horses."
"Really? That's what you were going to tell me?"
"Of course. Why wouldn't I?"
Jo grinned, because suddenly and instinctively, she knew James was lying. He would never do that.
"Of course, you are right. Then what happened?"
"Then, well, you looked so damn sad on the ground, and I couldn't really carry you up the ladder without waking you, so I decided to see if I could warm you up before returning to bed. I guess I fell asleep while I was doing that."
"I suppose you must have."
Her shirt covered her well enough for modesty, and Jo sprang lightly to her feet, stretching as she did so. She was stiff from a night on the floor, and she suspected it would have been much, much worse if she hadn't gotten to spend part of the night pillowed on James.
"Well, it's morning now, and we should get ready to leave."
James groaned.
"Are you serious? Do people really get up this early?"
"You keep horses, so I assume you must be joking. Of course, I am serious."
"No, I own horses. I pay people to keep them for me, mostly so that I do not have to get up at this unholy time of day."
"Sorry, you made a deal with someone who actually looks after her own horses, and I want to be on the road again before the sun's above the horizon."
James groaned and muttered a few dark things under his breath, but Jo couldn't keep a small grin from her face as she ducked up into the loft to dress appropriately. She had intended to make the entire journey by herself, but perhaps having James along wouldn't be such a bad thing at all.
* * *
5
CHAPTER
FIVE
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For the first hour or so, James was silent, mostly still in shock that he had been dragged out of bed at an utterly unimaginable hour. Whenever he had cause to see the thin gray predawn, it was because he had been up late at the tables or leaving the bed of some very lovely but very married lady.
At least he was less sore than he was afraid he was going to be, and he thought it was almost worth getting up at this early hour to see Jo on top of Tempest.
Now that he had seen her assemble her man's uniform and pin her braid under her cap, he could see how he'd thought she was a young boy. However, now that he knew who she was, and how she looked—there was still a part of him that kept going over the image of Jo with only a thin shirt between them—he could see the glimmers of beauty to her form, the brightness of her eyes and the lushness of her mouth.
She was a beauty, but that beauty was as much a part of her bright spirit as her deep auburn hair and her flashing green eyes. He wasn't sure he had ever met a woman who looked like her that he liked half so much, and then he realized he'd never met a woman he liked half so much as he already liked Jo.
Ignorant of his musings and mood, Jo rode a little ahead of him, keeping Tempest at a smart trot when they weren't walking. The cause of all of this, Tempest looked eager to run, and more than once, Jo had to coax her to calmness again, one hand firm on the rein as the other stroked along the mare's arching neck.
"Is she a racer?"
Jo looked up at his words, the first either of them had spoken in the last hour or so. "She could be. She's fast enough, isn't she? It wasn't what my father bred her for, though."
"And with that spirit, she could be a hunter, too, but I don't think she is."
"No, she's still too young for the hunt. My father thought a horse should be properly matured at four before hunting, and she's still shy of that. But she wasn't bred for hunting, either."
"What then?"
Jo shot him a suspicious look, and James blinked. He hadn't thought that a question about the breeding of her horse would be quite so fraught.
"You must not laugh."
"I won't."
"Tempest's mother was brought out of the desert, and my father bought her right away, seeing her as something wonderfully special. She was. She was strong and clever, and well-trained, and she was a cavalry horse originally."
James blinked. "You mean Tempest is bred for war?"
He remembered seeing the splendid mare half-rear before slicing through the tightly-packed men who had confronted her the day before. Yes, he could see an animal like that belonging to one of the wealthier army men, but Jo seemed like she would rather cut off her own arm than send her mount into danger.
"Not exactly. My father never had much love for sending animals we loved and reared so carefully to be blown apart by careless cavalrymen. But he wanted a horse with wit and strength that could be trained as well as an army mount. He thought that Tempest's mother, crossed with a descendant of the Byerley Turk, would produce a
foal that could... not quite do everything, but understand everything that needed to be done."
James whistled. "So, he was breeding for wit, and courage, and spirit. I can see your father was a man of ambition."
Jo grinned. "He was, and in Tempest... well, I'm not sure if she's turned out to be exactly what he wanted, but if she's not, she is surely the closest anyone has come yet."
As if aware she was being praised, the mare arched her neck and danced a little, boundless energy and endless fire.
Gunner, a little older and a little quieter, looked slightly offended by her showy display, but James only laughed, stroking him on the shoulder.
"We can't all be diamonds, old boy. The best we can do is support them sometimes."
"But yes, Tempest is the best animal that has ever come out of my father's work, and I refuse to let her go to someone who doesn't understand that. The Earl of Leaford, whatever he thinks about women, is the only man my father trusted, so to London I go."
"And the other horses of the stud farm?"
Jo's face crumpled like paper for a moment before she took on a sterner expression.
"A handful are already gone, and several of the grooms are dismissed. They have enough to keep the stud farm going for a little while, but it is clear that my uncle intends to dismantle it out. It is not entailed to the title or to Fairport itself, and so it is fair game for his depredations, damn him."
James frowned at the picture that was becoming clear, and for a few moments, they rode in silence, as he turned things over in his mind.
"So, what does your inheritance look like?"
Jo shot him a sharp look.
"And what kind of question is that?"
"The kind that would get me shunted out of polite Society without a single person deigning to speak to me if anyone heard me ask it. However, we spent the night on the floor together, and the only witnesses are the starlings and larks in the hedgerow, so I'll risk it."
Tales of a Viscount_Heirs of High Society Page 24