The kitchen had been so huge that all four kitchen staff and two housemaids slept in their own large room near the twenty-foot tall roasting pit. The beds had been plush, the linens downy. The aromas from the kitchen, headed by Jess’s mother, had wafted around the rooms at all hours. Unlike other Englishmen, the Rockingham residents never complained that their house was fragrant with herbs, roasted meats and fowl, or onions and squashes. If servants (and owners, too!) had any complaints it was that the kitchen was too far from the main house’s dining room. Charlie’s grandfather, Jess remembered, had said that in rain, snow and hail, one’s health might be at risk. He declared he wanted his roast duck served hot not chilled and had ordered an enclosed corridor built to solve the problem. The memory warmed her.
So did the fact that Charlie’s London townhouse was smaller, more compact. And more manageable, or so she thought.
The comfort of the thin stuffed bedding in the kitchen nook Jess had definitely misjudged. That first night, she slept like the dead, but when she arose before dawn, her bones did creak. She’d forgotten that kitchen fires could warm nooks like the one in this Dudley Crescent townhouse only for so many hours. It was July, but still, the damp of the night crept into the cellar like a slick chill.
As the lowliest servant in the house, she was up before all others. She’d assembled her work box last night before retiring and placed it beside her. Inside the shallow wooden box, she had a carpet broom, rags, polish, dry duster, dust pan and scouring paper. Up before the sun, she visited the privy in the central yard, got water from the central well and soap from the larder to wash standing up in the room off the scullery. Then she pinned up her hair and donned her old cotton gown and apron. Her first job was to light the kitchen fire, clean up the dressing boards, sort away any dirty glasses or dishes left from last night and sweep the floor. Finally, she filled the teakettle and set it to boil for the cook and her first maid to start breakfast.
Then she grabbed her work box with her tools and climbed the stairs to the first bedroom fireplace she must clean. The viscount’s.
Stealthy as a little cat, she twisted the knob of the door to his sitting room and tiptoed inside. She paused midway on the carpet and didn’t hear him about. But she didn’t expect him to be up at first light either. Pulling his bedroom door just to, she knelt down and set to work.
“Sleep well, Jess?”
“Oh!” She dropped her dustpan. The coal dust and bits of dead embers sprayed over the hearth. “You shocked me!”
“My apologies.” He came around her, his feet bare, his toes tapping the wooden floor in impatience.
Her gaze climbed from his ankles to his calves and…ahem…they were bare too. She didn’t dare look higher. She wanted to laugh and should have been outraged. “Are you naked?”
“I sleep without clothes. Always in July.”
“Good to know.” She shook her head but set herself a stern warning that thinking of him in his nude glory would not be wise. Visions flashed through her mind of how muscular he’d been even as a youth. His ribs as taut as a washboard. His arms like a bull’s haunch. She wiggled, uncomfortable with her body’s arousal at his appeal. If he’d been virile as a boy, as a grown man, in his bare skin, he would be irresistible.
Right.
She picked up her brush and dustpan and set back to work clearing the hearth.
“You didn’t answer me,” he prodded and crouched down. His dreamy blue eyes met hers and the warm fragrance of his body drifted toward her. Furthermore, his pose…and the dark gap in the folds of his banyan were not conducive to a regular heartbeat.
She seized a quick glance at his face. His eyelids, droopy with sleep. His black hair, tousled. She licked her lower lip. “Didn’t I?”
She’d seen him wearing not a stitch when they were children and they’d swum together in the pond near his estate’s Roman folly. Three years older than she, he’d always seemed long of limb. As he’d grown taller and broader, he’d swum with his small clothes covering his essentials. Just as she’d worn her chemise. But water had clung to him and defined all she wished to see. No wonder she’d used the memory of his body as her model for her heroic ices. She’d touched him then as she carved, his shoulders, ribs and arms, his lean hips and strong thighs, the heavy masculine parts of him only his lover would ever caress. Her clients had ouued and ahhed over his perfection. She’d always grinned that they paid her handsomely for accosting him in this perfectly acceptable and professional fashion.
“Jess?” He lifted her chin. He sat in a rare ray of light in the dark room. His blue eyes, ever so sparkly, twinkled at her. The rascal, he knew he was a tormentor. “Did you?”
Had her wits scattered with the dust? What precisely had he asked? Sleep? Um. Had she? “I did, yes. I did sleep well.”
“Where?”
Still half awake herself, she searched for her answer. Then she narrowed her gaze on him. If he intended to undo her, he would fail. “The kitchen nook.”
“Were you warm?”
Not as much as I will be if your robe opens any wider. She wiggled her brows. “Of course. Always in July.”
He gave her a look that said touché. “How did you awaken so early?”
Was this an interrogation? At five in the morning? With him as God made him? Trying to be funny? She tipped her head. “I was the Cook’s daughter. Then a chef. Always up near dawn. And what is your excuse?”
He tossed her one of his boyish smiles that brought out his dimples. “I knew you’d come here to do this and I woke up periodically to listen for you.”
“Ah. Then no cock rose at dawn for you.”
He laughed. Crowed, actually.
She blushed, fast and furious, to the roots of her hair. Baring her teeth, she bent and swept up the debris that had gone flying. She struggled to stand.
He put a hand under her upper arm to help her up. “You still look tired.”
“I am.”
“What else do you do after this?”
“Mrs. Moseley has a list for me.”
“Long?”
“Very.”
“Damn. Sorry. I wanted to talk.”
“Talk? A housemaid is expected to do her duty, not talk with her lord and master.”
He pushed an escaping tendril of hair behind her ear, skimming her tender skin with his fingertips. His touch was deft as an angel’s kiss, as hot as the devil’s seduction. But when he spoke, his voice was not. “I’m not that.”
“You are to me.” He cupped her cheek and she fought to keep her tone cool. “You always were.”
She yanked away.
He pulled her back. This embrace as flush as yesterday’s was also made of fire. This was not her back to his front, but face-to-face. Thin brocade to threadbare cotton. Her aroused breasts to his granite chest and the vee of her thighs flush to the long girth of his straining cock. “I want you here. Whatever your reason. But you will be honest with me about us.”
“Us?” she blurted, straining backward. “There is no ‘us’.”
“Once there was,” he declared, his arms iron bands about her.
“The prerogative of youth.” She had to consign her infatuation with him to naïveté.
“Is that why,” he said in a whisper of sorrow, “when I went to war, you forgot me?”
“Forgot?” His words nailed her to the floor. Did she know him? Had she ever really known him? How could she forget the searing brand of his lips and the sweet promise to return to her, to marry her and defy his parents who did not want the cook’s daughter in their family? “I never did.”
“No? I distinctly remember you—”
“We said a lot.” She wished to blot out that forlorn period of her life after he’d gone to war. “We were young and silly.”
His blue eyes turned ice cold. “I never thought we were foolish. I thought we were in l—”
“That,” she said to cut off his declaration of a lie, “was a long time ago, Charlie.”
&nb
sp; “There. So I am at least ‘Charlie’ to you. A small victory.”
She tried to step around him. “This conversation is not useful.”
“It is to me.” His fingers tightened on her wrist. “I want to know why you never wrote to me.”
The shock of that had her rearing back, her eyes fluttering in confusion. “What?”
“When I left for Spain, why were you so ready to forget me?”
“Ready to—”
“Was there another? That footman who liked you? Timothy?”
“Who? No. No! I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why would you think I never wrote to you?”
He took her by the points of her shoulders and bent down to peer at her. “Are you telling me you did?”
“Of course I did. I gave my letters to Jennings to post. I wrote every day for…for months.” She recalled how she poured out her heart to him. On paper, she’d been more open, more frank about how she adored him and wished him home soon, whole and well of mind and body. She’d written every day and then given her letters to the family butler.
But the look on Charlie’s face was utter surprise. “Jennings?”
“Yes, of course. He promised to put them with all the other household correspondence. But…but are you implying…?”
“That I never received any letters from you? Yes. Yes, I am.”
She swallowed hard on pitiful memories. How she’d badger the butler for letters for her. How she’d wait until all in the house had finished with the newspapers so that she could search for news of his regiment, battles, the endless lists of wounded, missing and dead. But she’d never found his name. Not a word about him. Not a word from him.
She sought the nearest chair. A hand to her forehead, she thought long and hard. “And you? What of you?”
He knelt before her. Faint rays of sun permeated the slits between draperies and in that light, he focused stunned azure eyes on her. “I wrote to you as often as I could. When I had time, at night when there was dying light from the campfires, before a battle when I could not sleep and needed to tell you. Whenever I saw a child who begged for food or a starving dog, I remembered your generosity to the poor in Crawley. How you and your mother gave them cabbages and squash when there was more from the tenants than anyone could eat. How you made pies in the autumn and pasties in the dead of winter and gave them away to the parish poor.”
She shook her head, stunned. “He never delivered any letters to me. Not one. I—I always thought you decided not to write and follow your parents orders to avoid me.”
“The farthest thing from my mind, Jess.” Written on his handsome features was the truth. Their hopes to marry, their plan to be together forever after he returned from the Continent had been shattered by his family’s butler. “Jennings would have followed my father’s orders to hell and back. I underestimated my father. My stepmother, too. He would not have ordered Jennings to hide the mail were it not for her insistence.”
“So when my mother died a year after you went abroad and I left to go out on my own, the damage had been done.”
“All contact had been broken,” he said, holding both her hands in his.
“And I never heard of you until I read in the Brighton papers about your return from the Army.”
“And what did you learn?”
“That you had married in London after you returned from Waterloo.”
He huffed. “What the newspapers did not print was that when I arrived home from Paris, that very day I went down to Rockingham Rise to look for you. That my stepmother told me you’d resigned and went to London to work. That I came to London and searched for you here at every bakery. But no one knew of you. Now I know why. You were in Brighton all along. And my parents did not tell me. Nor did Jennings.”
“And so you married.”
“I did.” He stared into her eyes. Was he searching for words? “Duty called.”
As it always did. Jess wanted to ask about his wife. Had he loved her? Had she loved him? Was she kind and helpful to him? But that lady’s nature was truly none of her business. She was not entitled to know. Nor to ask. Yet marriage to a suitable lady of family and means was indeed part of his duty. And he’d done it. Married to carry on as he must after doing his other duty by fighting for his country. She could not—must not—should not ever question what he’d done for his duty. She could not realistically expect of a man who inherited an age-old title to flaunt convention to marry a cook’s daughter. That was truly fantasy. And yet. And yet, she had until she could no longer deny the fact that he had not come for her after his return.
“I married, Jess. Quickly. Perhaps too quickly. And after the wedding, my father and Jennings passed away within two weeks of each other. It was chaos.”
She breathed deeply to cover the shock of his revelations. These many years and she’d not imagined that he had searched for her. That he cared. Had her pride led her to the wrong conclusion about him? Had she more pride than sense? Or more pride than trust in him? Dear me. She must reflect on that sad state of her character—and correct the defect, if she could. But in the meantime, the fact that they’d both been duped cut her deeply. Charlie, she noted, looked utterly forlorn.
“And my step-mother?” He damned the woman in a seething whisper. “Never breathed a word.”
“And so their secret remained,” she murmured.
He shook his head. “We were both sorely used, Jess.”
All the years of loneliness swam in her brain like a dark cloud. A spark of her old love for him had her trying to assuage his sadness. “You must know that I believed you. When you kissed me and said we would be married. I believed you, Charlie.”
“I meant the words, Jess.”
“For years I wanted to curse you and how you had betr—.” She blinked back hot tears. “How you had changed. And now to learn that others might have been responsible is—”
“No ‘might’ about it. Jennings was responsible for the mail. My parents paid him well to do as he was told. I should have thought of that myself. I didn’t. More fool, I.”
“And I was not there to ask, but gone.” Gone as far as I could.
“So many years. Jess—“ He reached down to take her hand in his. “I’m so sorry.”
He bent and kissed each fingertip. His humble homage made her heart swell with longing for what they’d lost. “This was not your fault.”
He raised his dark tormented eyes to hers. “But I believed that you had changed your mind.”
“Never,” she whispered—and heaven help her, she never had. Despite what she had told herself, she’d continued to long for him and compared her dashing Lord Rock to every man who’d ever tried for a relationship.
“Archer!”
Jess shot to her feet.
“Sir?” Mrs. Moseley stood at the threshold of his sitting room. “You wish to talk with the maid?”
Jess stepped forward. “Excuse me, Mrs. Moseley—”
“It’s fine, Mrs. Moseley,” Charlie announced, rising to his feet. His blue eyes turned to granite as he contemplated his housekeeper. “Miss Archer and I had a chat. The master of the house talking with his staff is, I do believe, a practice many should emulate.”
Her lips in a thin red line, the woman blinked back her fury.
“Such practice would presage a well-run house, wouldn’t you say?” he asked but answered it himself with a sharp nod. “You may leave us.”
* * *
Jess did not dare look at Charlie. He’d made his stand. She, on the other hand, could make none. She was the most insignificant of persons, the lowest ranking servant, and she’d do best not to forget it.
She gathered up her tools and ashes and hurried below stairs. All the way, she muttered to herself about her lack of foresight. In the strict hierarchy of a household, she was to be invisible and never to speak with the master of the house. She’d just committed a major sin, upsetting rules that were precise and iron-clad.
Jess, as the new
est addition, was the most vulnerable to insolence by the housekeeper and jibes from all the more senior servants. The sooner she learned who liked whom and who curried favor with others, the better off she’d be.
But she soon learned how difficult that task might be. Mrs. Moseley eyed her as if she’d caught her naked with the master. The woman announced—just to test her mettle, Jess was certain—that she was to clean the fireplaces of all ash then polish the hearths in all bedrooms upstairs. A second time. Since only Charlie’s bedroom suite was occupied, this seemed an easy job. But Moseley was showing her colors. Punishment for conversing with the master mixed with a pinch of revenge for such brass showed the housekeeper to be zealous of her power. If not also petty.
Yet Jess went to her work with nary a complaint. After all, she welcomed her lowly position here and wished to remain. She was safe in this house. Safe, at least, from anyone who hunted for her. Because who would know—who could even guess—that a pastry chef from Brighton had sought refuge in London with Lord Rockingham?
Chapter 4
At ten in the morning, Rockingham left his home and jogged down the front steps toward his town coach.
“Lady Rockingham’s,” he told his coachman. “And hurry.”
His stepmother lived in the Rockingham London townhouse on his benevolent grace, while he kept well apart in his own chosen home in Dudley Crescent. Clarice, who’d married their widowered father fourteen years ago, was a social gadabout, age thirty-four years. True, she’d wed their father when she was in her second Season and their father had been a lonely fifty-year-old looking for a tonic to relive his youth. Barely seven years older than Charlie and ten years older than Liddie, Clarice Hollister was the second daughter of an impoverished viscount. She had a small dowry, but striking blonde beauty and an effective flirtatious manner. Their father fell for her like a callow youth. Liddie never took to her, perceiving even at age ten how shallow the lady’s love for their father was. Charlie, whom Clarice attempted to sway to her support by seducing him, hated her. The fact that she could not budge him irritated her. Then she turned against him.
His Naughty Maid: Delightful Doings in Dudley Crescent, Book 3 Page 3