Scandalous Brides

by Annette Blair

  “You needn’t concern yourself I’m-I’m disappointed,” she continued, barely able to contain her mirth. “We-we can always take the long way home some-some other time, when you’re feeling more up to it.”

  “Disappointed?” Salt growled. “Up to it? You little wretch!” he added in an altogether different voice and grabbed her to him. “Don’t ever think I’ll be taken in by your tricks again! Two can play at your game! On the terrace, I did a splendid job of bamboozling you, if I do say so myself. Admit it, you thought I was truly angry with you.”

  Jane snuggled into his embrace. “I admit to nothing, my lord.”

  “What? Must needs I spank an admittance out of you?”

  Jane kissed his cheek. “If that is your whim, my lord.”

  Salt shook his head with mock displeasure then took her breath away by crushing her mouth under his.

  With the steps gone and the carriage door finally closed it only remained for the Earl to give his driver the appropriate signal. Still kissing his wife, he lifted his arm to rap twice on the wall behind his head which separated the occupants from the driver up on his box, then made two more raps in rapid succession.

  The horses were given their heads and the carriage lurched forward.

  Jane came up for air and asked curiously, “What signal was that?”

  “Too tired indeed,” Salt murmured and kissed her again, fingers tugging at the lacings of her silk corset, his other hand outstretched to draw the heavy curtain on the window and the world.

  FOURTEEN

  WHEN THE EARL’S carriage finally pulled up outside his Grosvenor Square mansion, it was mud spattered, the horses were spent and his driver John was in need of a well-earned jug of ale beside the kitchen fire. The under-butler, the porter and two drowsy footmen came out of the house to welcome the Earl and Countess home. Willis waited under the portico with the porter, who held up a flambeau, while the footmen stepped forward, one to set the steps in place while the other went to open the carriage door.

  A short, sharp sentence and a solemn shake of the head from the driver and the two footmen stepped away to stand beside the porter to await the Earl’s pleasure. Willis took one look at the driver, who dared to wink and grin lewdly at him, and he frowningly turned on a heel and disappeared back indoors out of the cold to have words with the butler.

  In Willis’ opinion, it was beyond everything decent that the Earl should bring a whore he had pleasured in his carriage to the front door of the house he now shared with his young Countess. It stretched Willis’ patience and moral fiber to breaking. If it wasn’t for his deep regard and respect for Lady Salt, so he told Mr. Jenkins, who stood sleepy-eyed but listening in the marble-floored entrance vestibule, he would give notice forthwith.

  And what, pray tell was Mr. Jenkins’ opinion, given his lordship’s younger sister the Lady Caroline Sinclair had arrived from Wiltshire not five hours ago and was now resident in this house? And if the unexpected arrival of the Earl’s sister wasn’t enough to try the patience of a martyr how did Mr. Jenkins intend to handle the delicate matter of Lady St. John’s urgent missive that her son was on his death bed, and that the Earl present himself in South Audley Street at once.

  The butler shrugged his narrow shoulders and kept his thoughts to himself.

  When the porter opened wide the front door and in stepped the Earl, Rufus Willis had to swallow his words.

  OUTSIDE IN THE CARRIAGE, the carnage of various articles of clothing strewn about the padded velvet interior, from discarded panniers to a gentleman’s silver waistcoat pinned with decorations of the highest order flung in a corner, suggested a frenzied urgency to the occupants’ lovemaking. Nothing was further from the truth. Everything had occurred with a deliberate slowness, as if the cogs of a clock moved at half-speed. From undressing each other in the darkness, to making love, each action and reaction was savored. Every exquisite sensation—sight, touch, smell and taste—was enjoyed for its own sake, while the carriage bumped and rattled across the uneven cobblestones of the deserted city then out along the muddied roads of the newer squares and streets of the wealthier occupants of the parish of Westminster.

  Stripped of his finery, gloriously naked and deep inside her, there was so much tenderness in his hands and in his mouth as he caressed and pleasured her, and in his words when he confessed his overwhelming need of her, that Jane was able to delude herself that he would be forever hers and hers alone. And when she finally tumbled off into oblivion with him, somewhere in the fog of satiated desire she heard her name, and the one tiny, but oh so precious, sentence he had not uttered to her since he had asked her to marry him all those years ago.

  His declaration, which should have made her supremely happy, only served to stir her doubts because he had declared himself not in the coolness of daylight but in the darkness of a moving carriage in the heat of passionate climax, his mind and body in turmoil. Although she had no experience of other men, she instinctively knew that what was said in the intense heat of lust could not be believed until repeated in the stillness of a clear head and restful body.

  Staring unseeing at the ceiling as the carriage turned into Grosvenor Square, Jane was oblivious to the fact that while she mentally ruminated in the darkness, Salt was propped on an elbow watching her intently. He wondered for the umpteenth time why he could make this utterly beautiful and thoroughly beguiling creature respond to his every intimate caress, yet she continued to keep him locked out of her thoughts. It was no surprise then that when the carriage finally came to a halt under the portico and he lightly touched the locket about her throat, she gave a start and brought her blue-eyed gaze down from the carriage’s padded ceiling to his face, her smile enigmatic.

  “Home,” he said with a smile, pulling on his drawers.

  He buttoned up his breeches and helped Jane to sit up, before struggling into his crumpled shirt. But he did not bother with his stockings or his shoes, and ignored his waistcoat and frock coat. He found Jane’s chemise flung over a cushion and helped her wriggle into it, but when she put out a hand for her bodice he tossed it aside and instead placed the fur-lined cloak about her shoulders.

  She gave a start, appalled.

  “You are in jest! I cannot leave here in nothing more than my chemise and stockings!”

  “That’s why I gave you the cloak,” he responded cheerfully and opened the carriage door, letting in a great rush of chilled early morning air. “Besides, what’s important is around your neck. The rest can be replaced.”

  Jane remained seated, hugging the cloak tightly about her slender frame, despite Salt having descended the steps to stand barefoot on the cobbles. She put up her brows.

  “And what of your most noble order of the garter, my lord? Shouldn’t his lordship throw that around his neck? After all, it’s just as important and can’t be replaced.”

  “No,” he stated simply and grabbed her wrist. “I have what’s important here.”

  He yanked her through the doorway. The cloak slipped off one shoulder and Jane squealed and grabbed at the fur as if her life depended upon it. But Salt would not be deterred and in one swift and easy movement her threw her, startled and protesting, over his shoulder, an arm across the back of her bare thighs to keep her squirming legs still, a hand pressed to the cloak to ensure it slipped no further.

  “If you keep wiggling about,” he said with a laugh as he turned and strode past the two gaping footmen and a red-faced porter who silently opened the door, “I give no guarantees that we will make it upstairs with our dignity intact.”

  “Dignity?” Jane tried to rise up to stop the blood rushing into her ears, only to flop forward in defeat. “Magnus! Stop this at once!” she demanded in a strident whisper, thumping his lower back with her balled fists. “Be reasonable! Think of the example to the servants! What will they think of us? Magnus?”

  “I do so like to hear you call me by my Christian name,” he said conversationally, ignoring Jane’s ineffectual thumps.

>   He stood in the wide expanse of the marbled entrance hall as if it was the most natural thing in the world for the 5th Earl of Salt Hendon to arrive home at three o’clock in the morning in nothing more than a crumpled white shirt hanging out of his breeches, bare legged and barefoot, with his protesting Countess slung over one shoulder, her shapely stockinged ankles and feet on display.

  The dumbstruck butler, under-butler, and porter all exchanged a swift, eyebrow-raising glance that confirmed what they all privately thought: Not only was the Earl in his cups, but his Countess was tantalizing naked under her cloak. It made them stay back, the butler holding Lady St. John’s unsealed note at his side and waiting the appropriate moment to interrupt the couple.

  “No one calls me Magnus,” the Earl was saying, finally sliding Jane off his shoulder and down the length of his hard frame to allow her to stand on her own two feet.

  Her arms remained up around his neck and her barely covered breasts were deliciously pressed to his chest. He continued to hold her tightly against him, a hand in the small of her back so the cloak, which had now slid to her waist, exposing her narrow back through the thin linen chemise, did not reveal more tantalizingly bare flesh.

  “Not even my mother called me Magnus, not when I was in short skirts and leading strings, not ever. I was Lacey while my father was alive, Viscount Lacey. Always Lord Lacey.”

  “How very sad. A child deserves to be called by his Christian name, especially by his parents,” Jane responded, looking up into his brown eyes. “That’s what makes him him. Not some cold and distant title that has belonged to his forebears for generations.”

  He bent to kiss her gently. “Somehow I knew you’d say that,” and in a more rallying tone, “Not a very manly name Lacey. Magnus has more presence and is much more manly, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, much more manly!” she mocked. “Just as manly as Salt. Though I prefer Magnus.”

  “Do you know,” he added with a huff of laughter, surprising himself, “I do believe my family have quite forgotten I have a Christian name.”

  “You are being absurd again!” Jane announced with a giggle. “Of course they know your Christian name, it’s just that they choose not to use it because they prefer you to remain atop your noble pedestal; it adds to their self-consequence.”

  “Pedestal?”

  “The pedestal you inhabit as the most noble Earl of Salt Hendon; where you and your noble nostrils live most of the day.”

  “Noble nostrils? Good God, do I have noble nostrils?”

  “Only when you’re being pompous and when you’re angry. Then they quiver.”

  He laughed out loud at that, as if told a good joke, displaying a perfect white smile. “Thank you. I must remember that when next I show my displeasure.” He dipped his head and brushed the tip of his nose against hers and said seriously, “And when I’m not living atop my pedestal, where am I?”

  Jane blushed and lowered her lashes. “In bed with me.” And just as quickly added with a smile, because she felt she had gone too far with her candid observations, “Besides, your family must approve of the name Magnus because you have a beautiful little goddaughter by the name of Magna.”

  “Poor Merry! To be saddled with such a name.” He effortlessly lifted her into his arms. “I hope you will go on calling me Magnus—in and out of the bedchamber,” he murmured.

  She leaned her cheek against his shoulder and snuggled up to his neck, where traces of his spicy masculine fragrance remained, her disheveled hair a mass of tumbled curls and loose pins, and closed her eyes. “Only if it’s mine to own,” she responded, feeling very sleepy cradled in his arms. “No one else… to have it.”

  “No one else,” he muttered and kissed her tangle of hair.

  He had a large bare foot on the first step of the curved stair when, from the first landing, there came a squeal of undisguised delight that had Jane instantly wide-awake and struggling out of Salt’s arms to stand half-concealed behind him. The owner of the squeal came sailing down the stairs, one hand to the polished balustrade, an elaborately embroidered pink silk dressing gown over her night shift and a lace night cap over her bright copper curls that was tied lopsidedly under her pointed chin.

  Jane blinked and wondered if she was witness to an apparition. The girl was not that much younger than her and although she possessed the Sinclair coloring her pretty features had more in common with an Allenby than a Sinclair.

  “What the devil are you doing in London?” Salt growled and suffered the girl to throw her arms around his neck. “I hope you dragged the long-suffering Dawson with you and half my laborers as outriders?”

  “Of course!” she announced cheerfully and released him. “Dawson refused at first to accompany me but I told her I’d come up to town without her anyway and now she’s quaking in my rooms convinced you mean to dismiss her. Of course I told her that’s rot.” She stepped back and ran her wide-eyed gaze over the Earl, from bare feet to dressed hair and cocked her head in mock disapproval. “You went to the Richmond Ball with your hair powdered but without your stockings and shoes?”

  “Don’t be vile, Caroline!” Salt snapped in embarrassment.

  Jane muffled a giggle into the Earl’s shoulder, instantly warming her to the girl, and clutched the fur-lined cloak more tightly about her naked body.

  “He calls me Caro-line in that pompous way when he’s uncomfortable,” Lady Caroline confided with a smile, then had the temerity to wrinkle up her little nose with its dusting of freckles to brazenly appraise the half-concealed Jane from tumble of dark hair to small bare feet. “You’re much shorter than I remember, possibly because I’ve grown, but you’re still utterly lovely,” she remarked, as if they were known to one another. “You’re quite the loveliest garden sprite to have lived at the bottom of our garden, isn’t she, Salt? When I say our garden of course I mean Salt’s vast seat in Wiltshire; but you know that. Did you ever see us, on the hill overlooking your quaint little cottage? We were on horseback under the stand of old oaks. We’d rest our mounts there. But that was just an excuse so Salt could catch a glimpse of his garden fairy—that’s you, by the way—tending your garden—”

  “Caroline! For pity’s sake!”

  Lady Caroline rolled her eyes, not at all abashed at making the Earl’s ears go very red. She made her curtsey to Jane and said matter-of-factly, “I’m Caroline Sinclair. Salt’s long-suffering sister. You can call me Caro. Even Salt calls me that when he’s being pleasant. Which isn’t often enough, let me tell you!”

  “Call you impossible, insufferable, and intolerable!” he retorted, face ablaze with color at the public revelation of details he’d rather leave unsaid. He quickly introduced Jane, adding wearily, “Caro, you really have chosen the most awkward time to land on my doorstep, not to mention the fact you disobeyed me in coming to London.”

  “I’m truly sorry, Salt, but my news couldn’t wait,” she said, not at all apologetic. “Besides, now you’re married it makes all the more sense—By the by,” she said, changing tack, “how did you manage to pry the Sinclair locket from Cousin Diana’s talons?”

  Jane put a hand to her throat. “This is paste.”

  Salt’s head snapped round at Jane and then almost at once looked back at his sister when she said coolly,

  “I didn’t think she’d give it up without a fight.”

  “I beg your pardon? Will someone tell me what you are talking about?”

  Both women exchanged a look. It was enough to make them firm friends.

  “I believe your sister knows more about the Sinclair locket than we do, my lord.”

  Salt frowned and waited for Caroline to explain.

  “Diana keeps the Sinclair locket under her pillow. She has done so for years. I know because once I stole it from its hiding place; if you can call taking back what is rightfully yours stealing, and got whipped for my troubles.”

  “She hit you?”

  Caroline shook her head at her brother. “No. She had h
er lady’s maid do that for her.”

  Salt was aghast. He looked at Jane and seemed to read her mind. He lifted the sapphire with one finger. “No secret compartment in this one…”

  Jane swallowed and shook her head.

  “But in the other one, the real one, you placed a note in the secret compartment for me.”

  She did not trust herself to speak. Her blue eyes filled with tears and he had his answer.

  Gently, he brushed a strand of hair from her flushed cheek. “I want to ask you… but perhaps in the morning, when we’ve both had a good night’s sleep, we will be better able to discuss the past…”

  Jane nodded.

  Intuitively, Lady Caroline knew this quiet exchange between her brother and his wife was a momentous one. Yet, she was still young and selfish enough to believe her news was so important that it could not wait. After all, she had come all the way from Wiltshire to tell her brother, and she wasn’t about to go off to bed again having been woken at three in the morning, so she just blurted out what he needed to know sooner rather than later.

  “Salt! Do you want to know why I came up to London?”

  “Do I?” the Earl responded with a tired sigh, turning to look down at her. “Could it not wait until morning?”

  Lady Caroline beamed mischievously. “I came to tell you that Captain Beresford has asked for my hand in marriage and I have accepted him.”

  Salt stared at her in utter disbelief. And if Jane hadn’t been stunned by Lady Caroline’s smile of absolute confidence, that the Earl must accept this news as a fait accompli, she would have enjoyed her husband’s hot-headed response.

  “Captain Barefaced-Cheek can ask for the whole of your damned spoiled carcass, for all I bloody well care, but he won’t get a hair on your head!” Salt exploded angrily. “And for this you disobeyed me and came up to London? I have a mind to whip some sense into you!”

  “It won’t do you any good. I’m no longer a child!” Lady Caroline pouted with her chin high in the air; adding for dramatic effect, “I am a woman.”