Barbarous

by Minerva Spencer

  Still, collapsing into a quivering heap would not help anyone, least of all her sons. Daphne glanced from Lucien and Richard’s expectant expressions to Ramsay’s interested one. Food? At a time like this? When a man had returned from the dead? When—

  “What happened to the hamper, Mama?” Lucien’s brown and gold eyes, so like his father’s, flickered over the rumpled blanket and scattered contents.

  Ramsay looked every bit as curious as her son, but, she suspected, for entirely different reasons.

  Daphne forced her mouth into a smile. “Eating our luncheon sounds like an excellent idea, Lucien.” Why shouldn’t they eat? Indeed, what else should she do? Blurt out the truth to Ramsay in front of her sons and servant? Yes, food first. Explanations and confessions later—much later.

  And about Ramsay . . .

  “You must join us, Lord Ramsay.”

  He inclined his head, clearly willing to play his part in the farce. “It would be my pleasure.” He gestured to the trampled food and crockery. “May I be of assistance?”

  Before Daphne could answer, Lucien made a noise of shocked delight and pointed to Ramsay’s gloved left hand—a hand missing its third finger.

  “I say! What happened to your finger?” Lucien had to tilt his head so far back to meet the giant’s gaze he was in danger of tipping over backwards. “And your eye?” he added for good measure.

  Heat flooded Daphne’s face. “Lucien!”

  His head whipped around. “Yes, Mama?” he asked, all wide-eyed innocence.

  “Any more questions like that and you will ride back to Lessing Hall inside that empty hamper.”

  Lucien shot a worried glance at the picnic basket, his shoulders sagging with relief when he realized his mother’s threat was a physical impossibility. He gave the towering lord a sheepish look. “I’m sorry I was rude, sir.”

  Ramsay smiled. “I’m sure there will be ample time later to regale you with tales of all my missing parts. But for now, perhaps we might give your mama a few moments while Pasha demonstrates some of his other tricks?” He turned his back to give Daphne some much-needed privacy and she almost wept at the small show of kindness.

  She turned to Caswell—who’d been watching and cataloguing the incident, no doubt to regale the servants’ hall with the story over dinner. “Please see what can be salvaged, Caswell.”

  “Very good, my lady.”

  Daphne located her flattened hat beneath a large earthenware flagon of tea and used a hat pin to fasten her jacket closed. Her spectacles were not far from her hat, their lenses intact but the delicate nosepiece twisted. She carefully unbent the soft gold until the glasses rested on her nose, albeit unevenly. Next she went to work on her hair, which had come unmoored during the struggle and now spiraled in all directions. She finger-combed the waist-length wheat-colored tangle, twisted it into a knot, and secured it with her few remaining hairpins. Once she had done all she could, she went to assist Caswell.

  Cook had included enough bread, fruit, roast fowl, Scotch eggs, cured ham, biscuits, tarts, and cream cakes to feed a dozen hungry men, and only a few items had been ruined during the struggle.

  Daphne took a plate, piled it high with food and handed it to her groom, who hesitated.

  “Don’t be foolish, Caswell, there is plenty of food for all of us.”

  His face reddened but he took the plate and bobbed his head. “Thank you, my lady.”

  Daphne knew her egalitarian behavior—a relic of being raised by her coal-heiress mother—still shocked the Lessing Hall servants, even after a decade. But really, why should the man stand around while food spoiled?

  She prepared four more plates and within a short time they were all settled on the blanket with food.

  * * *

  Daphne had no appetite.

  Instead, she crumbled a piece of Cook’s excellent bread into increasingly tiny pieces while her sons peppered Ramsay with endless questions about his horse.

  She had questions of her own and they pushed their way into her mind like hungry weasels invading a henhouse. The most pressing question of all was how much Ramsay had heard before he’d interrupted her undignified fracas with Malcolm.

  Had he heard Malcolm’s threats? The blackmailing? The accusations about the twins?

  For years she’d been haunted by nightmares that someone would eventually learn of her lies and expose her to public shame and ridicule. But never had she expected to face the man her deception had wronged the most.

  Daphne studied that man from beneath lowered lashes.

  She’d been a girl when Hugh Redvers disappeared, but—like every other female between eight and eighty—she’d been bewitched by the Earl of Davenport’s wild, handsome heir. The young lord had not only looked like a Greek god, he had always had a kind word and ready smile, even for a gangly, shy, and bespectacled neighbor girl ten years his junior.

  He laughed at something one of the boys said and the sound pulled Daphne from her trance, making her realize she’d been leaning toward him, like a moth hovering too close to a flame.

  Daphne shook her head at the fanciful thought and resumed her examination. She had to admit that time—some of it harsh if his missing pieces were anything to go by—had made him even more attractive. She wrenched her eyes away from his face and catalogued the rest of him.

  He was dressed in the manner of an English country gentleman, but there was a subtle foreignness to the cut of his garments. His forest-green riding coat was sculpted to his broad back and shoulders and his waistcoat was a pale green that matched his remaining eye far too closely to be an accident. As for the supple buckskins which encased several leagues of leg? Well, the less said on that subject the better. Daphne was still contemplating that skintight garment when Lucien’s insistent voice interrupted her ill-mannered ogling.

  “Is that not correct, Mama?” Lucien’s tone let her know this wasn’t the first time he’d asked the question.

  “Hmmm?” Daphne looked from her son’s dogged expression to Hugh Redvers’s grinning one, and her face heated like a schoolgirl’s, an unfortunate habit that showed no sign of abating with age. The dreadful man knew she had just subjected him to a ruthless, thorough, and intimate physical inspection; and he’d enjoyed it.

  Daphne ignored his smirk and addressed her son. “Is what not correct, Lucien?”

  “Papa promised that Richard and I could have our hunters when we turned ten. And that is only in a few months,” he reminded her, as if Daphne might have forgotten the day she gave birth to her only children. Lucien nudged his silent sibling and Richard nodded in support of his elder twin. Daphne sighed; the vexatious subject of hunters came up at least once a day.

  “We can speak about this later, Lucien.” Oh, and they would, they would; her son was relentless.

  She looked from Lucien’s stubborn face to the baron’s smiling one and decided it was past time she took control of the conversation.

  “Have you only recently returned to England, my lord?” It was an asinine question, but, really, what question wouldn’t be at this point?

  Ramsay’s smile grew, as if he could hear her thoughts. “Come, we are family—you must call me Hugh.”

  “Family?” Lucien repeated, forgetting—at least for the moment—the matter of hunters. “Are you a cousin, like our cousin John Redvers?” Lucien frowned, “Although he is dead, now.”

  Ramsay laughed. “I certainly hope I am nothing like Cousin John Redvers—dead or alive.”

  Daphne hoped so, too. John Redvers had been a weasel-faced drunkard whose only achievement in life was the remarkable speed with which he had dissipated his inheritance.

  When Hugh Redvers had been declared dead all those years ago, it had been John—his feckless younger cousin—who’d become the Earl of Davenport’s next heir. John had been one of the reasons—if not the reason—the earl had remarried in his seventies.

  Another reason had been that the orphaned daughter of the earl’s closest friend had been
seventeen, two months’ pregnant, and desperately in need of a husband.

  “Mama?”

  Daphne realized Lucien was still waiting for her to explain his kinship with the magnificent newcomer.

  “Baron Ramsay is your papa’s eldest nephew. The one we’d all believed lost at sea so long ago.” Daphne cut him an accusatory look, but Ramsay appeared not to notice—or care—if his smile was anything to go by. Indeed, his handsome face wore the same expression of lazy amusement it had since the moment he’d entered the clearing. The only time he had not appeared pleased had been when he looked at, or spoke to, Malcolm.

  “Papa told us about you, my lord,” Richard, her usually quiet and reserved son, said. “He said you were a better hand with a sword than anyone he’d ever seen.” Richard’s reverent tone implied that praise from his beloved papa was high praise indeed.

  Ramsay’s smile faded and his full lips parted; for a change, nothing came out. It was as if the possibility of a compliment from Daphne’s late husband—a man with whom Hugh Redvers’s disagreements had been legendary—had robbed him of speech.

  This breach in his confident façade made Daphne feel considerably less flustered, which was what she’d been feeling from the moment he’d entered the clearing and caught her crawling around in the grass with her coat gaping open. She had looked a bloody, ragged mess while he’d sat on his fairy-tale horse with his good-looking face and big, gorgeous body and . . . Well, suffice it to say, she could not help enjoying his discomposure, no matter how petty that might be.

  “I am gratified to hear your papa had at least a few fond memories of me.” Ramsay’s tone was light, but Daphne heard the tension beneath it. He looked from one twin to the other and smiled. “I must admit I’m pleased to discover two such fine cousins.”

  The boys flushed with pleasure.

  Ramsay’s green eye slid from the boys to Daphne. “Two fine cousins and an aunt.”

  While Daphne might have no experience with handsome, virile men below the age of seventy, even she could see the sort of man he was: a dangerous one. At least to women like her—serious, unsophisticated matrons; women who could be of no possible interest to him.

  Whatever he saw on her face brought back his piratical smile and twenty years disappeared in an instant. Daphne was once again an awkward little girl afflicted with an enormous case of hero worship. It was beyond maddening; it was humiliating.

  She pulled her gaze from his mesmerizing person, her face so hot that steam was probably rising from her head, and noticed everyone’s plate except hers was empty; she latched on to that excuse like a sailor clutching his last pint.

  “We must be getting back,” she said, getting to her feet. She ignored the disappointed noises both boys made, brushing crumbs from the crumpled, grass-stained skirt of her habit, looking anywhere but at Hugh Redvers. She needed to put some distance between herself and the man—even if it was only a few feet.

  While Daphne repacked the hamper, Caswell and Ramsay helped the twins re-saddle their ponies. When they’d finished their respective tasks and were ready to mount, Ramsay tossed Lucien into the saddle with an ease that left the boy breathless with laughter. Richard had already led his mount toward a tree stump, so Ramsay turned to Daphne.

  “Auntie?” His single green eye contained enough wickedness for six eyes and she scowled up at him, hating that being called auntie made her blush. After all, Daphne was his aunt, although she was over a decade younger and there was no blood relationship. So why—

  Two huge hands slid around her waist and lifted her into the saddle, expending as much effort as an average man might use to hang a picture. Daphne was just as breathless as Lucien—but mercifully did not giggle—when Ramsay handed her the reins. And then winked at her.

  Heat bloomed in her chest and she opened her mouth. He smiled up at her, his eyebrows raised, and she realized he was expecting—indeed, anticipating—some scandalized response from her. She closed her mouth.

  He chuckled and turned to his horse. He grasped the pommel of his saddle with his left hand and then swung his six-and-a-half-foot body onto the massive shire in a motion so easy and graceful, Daphne couldn’t be sure she had actually witnessed it.

  Her sons cooed and murmured in awe. “Can you show us how to do that, Cousin Hugh?”

  Ramsay had to look down at least two feet to meet Lucien’s eyes. “Of course. But you’d need to keep your pony a bit longer—I couldn’t teach you to mount a hunter, at least not yet.”

  Both boys appeared to absorb that information, their identical faces serious and thoughtful—and more than halfway convinced.

  The baron didn’t smile when he looked at her, but Daphne could feel his smug amusement at having quashed the tedious subject of hunters so easily.

  She ignored him. “Lead on, Caswell.”

  The groom put Richard in front of him and Lucien behind before heading out of the clearing.

  “After you, Lady Davenport,” Ramsay said when Daphne tried to maneuver her horse into the rear. His voice was a sensual purr even though his words sounded innocent enough.

  Daphne shook her head but didn’t bother to argue. The winking, the sly looks, what did they mean? Was he flirting with her?

  Surely not.

  Still, never having engaged in such frivolity herself, Daphne was hardly adept at recognizing flirtation. Not that she had ever wanted to flirt. Even if she’d had the inclination to indulge in such a vapid activity, she had never had the opportunity. She’d been seventeen when she married the Earl of Davenport. And before that? Her hand tightened on the reins. Well, before her marriage there had only been Malcolm.

  Her mare’s ears twitched at the tension in her body and Daphne forced herself to relax. She would think about Malcolm and his demands later. Right now she had her hands full with the man behind her.

  It didn’t matter if he was flirting with her or not. Daphne might be woefully inexperienced when it came to the opposite sex, but even she knew better than to engage in flirtatious banter with a man who’d been a hardened rake at the tender age of twenty. Flirtation was probably as natural as breathing to the odiously attractive man.

  Daphne would just have to ignore any lures he cast toward her—and he’d lose his charming smile and friendly twinkle when she eventually confessed the truth to him.

  She shuddered at the thought of that particular conversation. Just how could she return what was legally his without destroying her sons’ lives in the process? How?

  She was still brooding on the calamitous subject when her horse crested the rise and a fantastical scene drove all other thoughts from her mind.

  Chapter Two

  “Good Lord,” Daphne murmured, not sure where to look first. It was like a scene from The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.

  The entire front lawn and at least half of the tree-lined drive that curved in front of Lessing Hall were obscured by people, animals, and possessions. There were mountains of trunks and luggage, heavy brass-strapped chests portending treasure, massive oaken casks, roll upon roll of colorful carpets, elegant furniture, exotic animals, and equally exotic men of every size and nationality and description.

  It was a blinding visual cacophony.

  Daphne rode to the edge of the mayhem and stopped beside Caswell, who was staring in openmouthed amazement. The groom was holding the reins of her sons’ ponies and Lucien and Richard were nowhere to be seen.

  Daphne was surveying the colorful mélange for signs of her children when a remarkable-looking man with honey-colored skin and eyes like molten gold sauntered up to them. He was not just breathtakingly handsome, he was also half-dressed. He wore only obscenely tight buckskin breeches, glossy polished boots, and a worn leather vest that exposed arms rippling with muscles and acres of golden skin. He was leading two dogs that looked as if they’d been packed in a box and then hastily taken out full of wrinkles. A huge red parrot with a beak larger than Daphne’s fist rode on one shoulder. The man’s unnerving gold
gaze brazenly roamed the length of her body and then flickered away and over her shoulder.

  Daphne couldn’t decide if she was insulted or amused by his obvious dismissal of her person.

  Ramsay reined in beside her and heaved a gusty sigh. “Martín, would you please find a shirt and coat and then put them on.” It was not a question.

  The younger man’s sinfully lush lips pulled into a mocking smile, exposing white, even teeth that added to his perfection. “Oui, Capitain.” He did not move.

  “Now, Martín.”

  He chuckled and rejoined the circus behind him, not moving with any particular haste.

  Ramsay dismounted and came to help her down. “I apologize for Martín; he’s rather a force of nature. He and the others will not be here long. I’ve taken rooms at the Pig and Whistle, but I’m afraid they do not have space to accommodate all my possessions. I recalled my uncle kept several large barns for storing his tenant farmers’ harvest and hoped I could impose upon you just until I determine my plans.”

  His request jarred Daphne out of her speechless contemplation of the spectacular sight before her. The irony of the real Earl of Davenport taking rooms at an inn and asking if he could store his belongings on his own property sent a hot wave of shame surging through her body.

  “You must stay at Lessing Hall, Lord Ramsay.” She was pleased with her cool, level tone. “As you pointed out, we are family. It would be ridiculous for you to lodge at the Pig and Whistle.” He raised his eyebrows and Daphne hurried on. “There is ample room at Lessing Hall for dozens more servants, and the stables are nearly empty since the earl’s death. This was your home before, Lord Ramsay, and so it should be now.” Her heart thudded in her ears as she waited for his response.

  It was a long moment before he nodded, his piercing gaze and warm, caressing smile once again reducing her to the status of awkward adolescent. “I am grateful for your hospitality, my lady. If you are not—”