But oh, now…now Colin was alive.
And even now, as the Eversea women discussed the wedding they all presumed would take place in a week…Forgive me, Marcus, she thought.
Louisa was no longer certain it would.
It occurred to Colin that the only thing Countess Malmsey and the woman sitting across from him in the carriage had in common was that they were both, to some degree, enigmas.
Madeleine Greenway was watching the streets roll by through the carriage window. She hadn’t said a word in some time. Colin wondered how she’d spent the evening in the storeroom. Watching him twitch in his sleep? Mulling his recitation of innocence? Guessing at the number of potatoes in the bins? Reviewing the story of her life, whatever that might be? He glanced down at her hands, linked loosely in her lap; she was wearing gloves now. He recalled those hands on his skin last night, devastatingly gentle, devastatingly feminine, matter-of-factly competent. Her fingers—he’d felt it—had trembled a little when they touched him, and God help him, he had almost reached down to touch her, because his body had its own instincts, which so often overrode whatever judgment he possessed when it came to women.
But what had moved her?
“Do you have a plan?” Madeleine Greenway’s voice was still husky from lack of sleep, but managed to sound ironic anyway. He wished she would do something he could interpret as flirting. He found flirting soothing.
“I do, rather. I think a calculated risk is in order,” he said firmly. “If I know Eleanor—the countess—she’ll be spending a good portion of the day sleeping off the effects of drinking away her boredom the night before, because God only knows drinking is the only way to endure Lord Crump’s monthly do’s, and there was one last night, as today is Sunday. I think we need to go straight to the countess to ask about that footman.”
“And I assume you…know…Eleanor.” Admirably dry sentence, that one. Very nice strategic pause, too.
“Oh, I know Eleanor.” Colin tried for an enigmatic smile, but the smile became crooked and real as he thought about the countess. He genuinely liked Countess Malmsey. She was lovely, which helped with the liking—she had English-rose skin and dark blue eyes, a tipped-up nose and a pink little mouth and a wonderful bosom, which he’d admired any number of times during a waltz—but her wit occasionally cut and surprised, hinting she might be hiding a more interesting brain than the blue eyes and bosom implied. Because she was young, the wit was considered more charming than dangerous, like claws on a kitten, so it was indulged.
But perhaps the most interesting thing about Eleanor was that she had managed to marry an earl who, it had long been rumored, could not be caught, as he had been married once, begat a full complement of heirs, and settled into what had been to all appearances a long, comfortable widowhood in his middle years. But then he’d married Eleanor.
Colin knew very little about the somber Earl of Malmsey other than that he was invariably pleasant when they met and that he possessed quite a handsome collection of muskets and pistols that he brought to Manton’s on occasion, fired off straight into the hearts of the targets there while awed young bloods looked on, then wordlessly went right back home again.
No one was entirely certain where he’d found Eleanor, which is what made her something of an enigma.
“More importantly, do you know how to get into the countess’s house without being seen?” Madeleine Greenway asked. Oddly, she didn’t sound daunted by the prospect, which reminded Colin that she’d no doubt gotten into far worse places than a Grosvenor Square town house.
“Oh, yes. I know how to get in. And I know precisely where to find the countess, as she once dared me to sneak into her bedchamber.” He glanced up at her for a reaction; alas, she remained unsurprised. “But then the deuced woman threw me right back out.”
Ah, that inspired a glint in those dark eyes. “I imagine that doesn’t happen very often.”
Colin went still. Was Mrs. Greenway flirting? It was hard to know, really.
Just in case, he urged softly, “Do feel free to imagine anything at all about me.”
This just won a slight smile and a shake of her head, which she then turned back toward the carriage window.
The hackney delivered them to the earl’s home on Grosvenor Square, and Madeleine paid the driver with her dwindling reserve of money. While she was busy with that, Colin eased himself surreptitiously out of the carriage, hat down, coat on, to regard the house he’d been welcome in on any number of occasions and was about to breach by stealth.
Through the mews, then through the garden gate, into the back door of the kitchen, up the servants’ stairs, down the main hall, four doors down, et voilà! A fragrant white rose and silver chamber inhabited by a countess.
This was how he’d done it when she dared him to sneak in, anyhow.
“Follow me,” was all he said to Madeleine.
The mews were unoccupied, and as it was still early yet for Grosvenor Square, they lay their feet down softly so their footsteps wouldn’t echo through the courtyard. Colin leaped the low garden gate easily enough, avoiding the spikes, but weeks in prison had robbed his muscles of strength: he was all too aware that he wasn’t nearly as limber as he’d once been. He pushed the thought aside, because it would simply make way for resentment, which he didn’t have time to entertain. He lifted the gate latch and opened it so Madeleine wouldn’t have to leap it, too.
Through the small but abundantly green and fragrant garden was the back door of the kitchen, and this was their next hurdle. Colin opened the kitchen door slowly, just a crack; Madeleine peered in, looked back at him and shook her head, meaning: empty of servants. For now. Though he thought he heard distant voices.
They darted through the kitchen and straight through another door that led to the servant’s steep stairwell, which lead to a marbled hallway.
A pause to look left and right before they entered, and then they did, walking as quietly over the marble as their boots would allow them, Colin counting doors and sconces. He stopped and listened briefly at the fourth door they encountered…and heard nothing.
So he turned the knob and entered the countess’s plush, fragrant chambers.
Colin took in the familiar room with a glance: the mirrored dressing table in gilt and polished dark wood, plump chairs, the vast bed covered in tasseled silk, the enormous wardrobe in pride of place. No maid was in evidence. But neither was the countess mounded beneath her blankets sleeping off too much champagne.
How very unlike Eleanor.
Colin knew a grave disappointment. He’d been so certain of finding her here. He went still, feeling foolish for a moment, and considered what to say to Madeleine Greenway, who had looked about the chamber wordlessly before returning her eyes to his.
The idea of searching through the house for the countess was daunting.
He was so absorbed in the noise of his thoughts that he nearly missed the click of slippers out in the marble hall.
Madeleine didn’t. She touched his arm. They both froze.
Colin’s heart stuttered; he glanced wildly about the room. He saw the wardrobe and made a decision: looped an arm around Madeleine’s waist and swept her backward up into it before she could gasp a protest. He couldn’t risk the click of sound the door might make if he pulled it all the way closed, and besides, they needed to breathe. It would have to remain open a few harrowing, incriminating inches.
He held Madeleine fast, his arm snug beneath her breasts, and the two of them sank back in the darkness, cool silky dresses brushing and sighing against them just as Countess Malmsey came singing into her room, her voice gently off-tune and a little wistful.
“Oh, if you thought you’d never see
The last of Colin Eversea…”
Colin couldn’t help but grin. Ah, so she misses me.
With his arm wrapped around the narrow waist of one beautiful woman in a dark closet hung with sensually rustling fabrics, Colin watched another settle herself at her dressing ta
ble, turn her head this way and that, remove a pin from her hair, make a moue with her mouth, and put the pin back in.
Despite the absence of a maid, a vivid blue day dress was laid out across the bed, this one more sophisticated in cut. Perhaps an opinionated maid’s suggestion of what the countess ought to be wearing, instead of what she was wearing, which was white, cut very low, and had lace fluttering at all the important edges: sleeves, bosom, hem. She looked like a delicate, provocative little moth.
The top of Madeleine’s head fit easily beneath Colin’s chin, and he knew she, like he, could see the countess at her dressing table through the crack in the wardrobe door. He was sorely tempted to rest his head upon the top of Madeleine’s head, partly out of whimsy, partly to know—because suddenly he was dying to know—the texture of her hair.
Though he doubted she’d enjoy being used as a chin rest.
As watching the countess primp became dull, other sensations began to make themselves known to him: Madeleine’s half-cocked pistol hard against his thigh, and the rise and fall, rise and fall, of her ribs under the band of his arm. Colin’s hand tightened ever so slightly around her waist, and for a moment he was peculiarly captivated by the sway of her breathing, and soon his own breath fell into rhythm with hers. Surrendering to an urge, he closed his eyes, promising himself it would only be briefly, and breathed in, and there it was: lavender. Lavender and darkness was how he’d first experienced Madeleine Greenway, and now the lavender and dark mingled with her warm body and a scent that was musky and rich and utterly, utterly female, utterly her own.
A rush of white heat through his veins nearly made Colin sway.
Dear God. He kept his eyes closed, struggling for equilibrium. He was stunned, nearly embarrassed, by the pure want tensing his every muscle. Simply holding a woman was something he’d always taken for granted, and something he’d thought to never know again, and now, in this dark, enclosed space, it was about to do him in. The nip of Madeleine’s waist beneath his hand was a siren call to his hand, and in his mind he dragged both his palms down around the curve of her hips, then fanned his fingers to slide down over her buttocks, between her thighs, seeking and finding all the angles and valleys of her body, stroking, savoring, expertly seducing as he had so many times with so many other women. This was the point of darkness and of women’s curves, as far as he was concerned—to coax a man’s hand into wandering, to guide him through the dark, thereby ultimately guaranteeing the perpetuation of the species.
And then there was a tap at the countess’s chamber door. Colin’s eyes flew open.
“Yes, Harry,” the countess said coolly. “Do enter, please.”
The door opened, and Colin was shaken roughly out of the divine opiate that was a woman when a footman entered the room.
The man bowed low; the line of braid traveling down his thigh glowed gold in the low lamplight. Very snug trousers, those. Good Lord.
And pale blue stockings, of course.
And then Harry the footman reached a hand behind him to close the door quietly, slowly, almost stealthily, slid the bolt, and plucked his wig from his head with the other hand. A headful of rumpled sandy hair sprung up out of it.
He strolled over and deposited the wig with a flourish on the countess’s dressing table.
“Oh, Harry, look at you. Come here.” The countess’s voice was a low laugh, and she was beckoning him with her hands to bend lower. He obeyed, and she reached up and smoothed and patted his hair into some semblance of order.
And then Harry the footman seized Eleanor’s hand and placed a lingering and very ardent kiss in her palm. Eleanor rested the hand that wasn’t being kissed against the footman’s cheek for a moment, then dropped it into her lap.
Colin’s mouth dropped open.
“I’ve had a letter from me mum, Nor,” Harry the footman confided when he was done kissing her hand. “Lizbeth is to be wed.”
“Nor,” was it? Colin mused, incredulous. The footman used the countess as his confidante? Though that kiss implied something rather more.
The woman Colin had his arm wrapped around was tense, alert, he knew. Her breathing, which he had come to know as intimately as his own in a scant few minutes, was shallower, swifter. Colin shifted his arm up from her waist, just a little, just a very, very little, until it just brushed beneath the swell of Madeleine’s breasts.
So he could feel the catch in her breathing when he did. It naturally echoed the catch in his own.
“Is she!” The countess sounded delighted. “Lizbeth will marry young Wills? He finally rallied nerve and asked for her hand? I thought ’twould never happen.”
“Three pints into it at the pub ’e begged me da fer Lizzie’s hand. But me da bought the pints to get ’im started.”
The countess and the footman laughed together. “Oh, Harry, that’s quite the best news. And how is Jenny?”
“Oh, big as a house, she is, and surly as a she-bear. Tom is right scared of ’er.”
“And worried, too, if I know Tom. The babe is due this month?”
So Eleanor—Countess Malmsey—was acquainted with Tom, whoever Tom might be? Colin’s eyes nearly watered with astonishment.
“A week from now,” Harry confirmed.
There was a little quiet. “I do like babies,” the beautiful, sophisticated little Countess Malmsey said wistfully.
Colin shifted ever so slightly, carefully eased his leg aside so Madeleine Greenway’s pistol wasn’t digging into his hip. Which of course effectively shifted her round firm arse against his groin, which was both deliberate and quite mad, but here in the dark, dreamlike world of the wardrobe, where one looked out upon a tableau comprised of countess and footman, it made perfect sense.
Harry the footman apparently had nothing to say about babies. Instead, Colin watched Harry do what men the world over do when confronted with a woman’s dressing table: he picked a little glass bottle up, turned it about in his hand, clearly puzzled by it, sniffed it, wrinkled his nose, and put it down again.
“They shall be very happy. Lizzie and Wills,” the countess continued.
“They’re already happy,” said the footman pragmatically. “They’ll just be happy under the same roof after the wedding.”
Eleanor snorted with amusement at this. “You’re so very literal, Harry.”
“’Aven’t the faintest what yer mean by that, Nor,” the footman humored happily. “But I wager yer right.”
She giggled, and then stood up, whirled about, and there was a flop and a squeak and a sigh. She’d thrown herself backward onto the bed.
A moment later there was another squeak, a less impulsive-sounding one. Colin peered over the top of Madeleine’s dark head: he could see the bottom of Harry’s shoes and those pale blue stockings stretched out alongside Eleanor’s slim ankles and slippers and the foaming lace of her hem. Harry sighed gustily, too.
Beneath Colin’s hand, Madeleine Greenway’s breathing was decidedly swifter now. She made no attempt to ease away from his body, and the heat of her body made him swallow.
It was quiet for a time.
“I’ll send a gift on,” Eleanor announced at last, dreamily. “To Wills and Lizzie.”
“Now, Nor, ye mun be careful,” he warned. “Ye canna be sending expensive gifts.”
The countess said nothing for a tick.
“What good is all of this to anyone?” The words were a pout. “If I canna share it?”
Well, then, Colin thought. “Canna,” is it? Though it had seemed only a matter of time before the countess’s carefully cultivated London accent gave way to country cadences. A story was starting to come into focus here. Odd how his mind could be alert, focused on the tableau before him, when his body seemed to have another objective entirely.
“What good?” Harry sounded gently amused and pragmatic. “Money’s rather nice, ain’t it, Nor? Better than no money, I reckon.”
There was a brief silence, followed by a conciliatory snort from the countess. Sh
e sounded accustomed to Harry taking all the fun out of her melodrama, but it didn’t sound as though she minded.
“You did what ye needed to do, and what’s done is done,” Harry added gently. “And ye’ve given the job ’ere to me, and I’m well paid. And I send the money home. I’ll buy the gifts, Nor. You know ye canna risk it.”
Another sigh from the countess. “Sometimes I truly miss them all, Harry. Everyone in Marble Mile.”
“It’s been many years, Nor. They think fondly of ye, but they dinna speak of ye anymore. Ye’ve gone to London and ne’er came back, and they all like to think ye’ve done summat grand. They dinna ken of your time a’ the Sweet Apple Theater. And they nivver will, if I’ve me say in it.”
“I do know,” she conceded softly. “I’ve a fine life here. I am lucky, indeed, and Malmsey is kind to me. I’m sorry. I shan’t complain, Harry. How is the housekeeper treating you?”
And thus ensued a seeming eternity of low conversation interspersed with occasional snorts of soft laughter. The housekeeper was a tyrant, Harry confided—she’d shouted at a maid and made her cry—and the butler, of whom Harry was fond, might be nipping the brandy because his gout troubled him. As for Eleanor, she wondered whether she ought to get a new carriage, perhaps a clever little dormeuse—Harry, being a footman, had an opinion about this (no)—and she was concerned that the earl was eating too much rich food, and she worried over his health. The conversation was homely and fragmented and excruciatingly dull and excruciatingly intimate. It had the singular rhythm of any conversation between any husband and wife who had been married to each other longer than not married to each other.
Except they were not, of course, husband and wife. They were countess and footman.
Colin listened, his arms around a warm, very alive woman, utterly at a loss as to how he felt. Hilarity? Wounded pride? After all, the countess preferred a footman to him. Sympathy? Perhaps. Since time began, relatively few people had ever been free to love where they wished, and people who loved each other were often destined to live apart, for reasons of money or class.
The Perils of Pleasure Page 11