How To Bed A Baron

by English, Christy

  “Perhaps I should have said, I need you to pose as my betrothed, if only for a few days. My mother thinks I’m engaged, and I want to tell her gently that I am not.”

  Serena pursed her full lips in thought, too polite to tell him that he was being a fool. There was a time when she would have laughed out loud at that bit of nonsense. After ten years apart, she had perhaps grown a bit more pensive, or at least a touch more controlled, for she did not speak right away, but sipped her beer.

  “May I ask what has happened to your actual fiancée?”

  “She deserted me on the road to Gretna Green.”

  Serena raised one elegant brow but as he knew it would not, her elegance did not last long. She set the tankard down on the wooden table with a resounding thwack that made a woman at a nearby table jump. Serene stared at him, heedless of the good English beer that had sloshed out over her hand.

  “The trollop.” His old friend did not soften her words or her glance as she glared at him, as if he, and not Miss Catherine Middlebrook, had somehow offended. “Was she possessed by madness?”

  Arthur tried to repress a smile, but failed. Suddenly, the humiliating incident that had sent him to this public house in the first place took on a sheen of comedy. “No. The lady was carried off by a mad Scotsman.”

  Serena almost rose to her feet when she heard that, pushing back from the bench. “God’s teeth! A mad Scot, in Oxford? We must call the magistrate at once, and see what can be done. How far do you think they have gone? And why in the name of God are you sitting here, listening to me, when your future wife has been absconded with?”

  Serena was about to leave him flat and call for the innkeeper to send for the militia, no doubt, when Arthur caught her hand in his. At his touch, she stopped cold, her torrent of words drying up.

  “She was in love with the man, Serena. She left me because she loved another.”

  She sat down again, and blinked, looking for all the world as if he had struck her between the eyes with a mallet. “Some woman left you for a blinking Scotsman?”

  Arthur could not repress his smile, for she sounded so shocked, as if she could not fathom how any woman, anywhere on Earth, might prefer another to him. “She did.”

  Serena settled back on her bench, still blinking. “She was a trollop and a madwoman then.”

  “She is a lady,” Arthur said. “I fear I cannot have you name her as anything else in my presence.”

  “The devil with that!” Serena blazed anew, this time at him. “I’ll call her anything I please, and to her face, if she has the mischance ever to meet me in the street. I will call her out, and run her through for you.”

  Arthur found himself laughing then, feeling for the first time that perhaps he had been saved by that mad Scot from a mistake he would have regretted for the rest of his life.

  “Calm yourself, Serena. Please do not call her out on my account. She has no affinity for swords or pistols and would simply cry. Then her Scot would meet you in her stead, and then I would have to kill him, if I could, and we would all come to ruin.”

  Serena listened to the Gothic tale he spun as if he was talking the plainest of sense. She nodded, and drank her beer down in one long draught, in an attempt to cool her temper, he supposed. She finished it, but did not call for another. She looked at him and took his hand in hers. For some reason, he felt shored up by her touch, as if he were not alone in the world, as he had always been. As he had always been alone, since she went away.

  “Did you love her, Arthur?”

  He thought for a long moment, listening to the leanings of his heart. He never did such a thing, not since his father had died, for the heart seldom led where one might follow. He did so now, only because she asked it of him. For once, for blessed once, his heart did not show him pain.

  “No,” he answered. “I did not love her. She needed rescuing, and I wanted to save her.”

  “You are a white knight still.” Serena looked at him, unwavering, her frank green gaze taking him in as it had when they were small, and discussing important things, like where to cast their fishing lines in the river. She did not smile. “She was a fool to leave you, whatever her reason.”

  “The heart wants what it wants, or so I have read.”

  Serena’s generous lips quirked in a half smile, and he found himself staring at the plush line of them, wanting to lean close and taste her.

  She did not seem to feel the same bolt of heat as he did, coming out of the clear blue sky to couple with his hopeless love for her. She treated him like a friend, just as she had always done, and patted his hand. “Tell me you have not been reading Byron.”

  He laughed out loud at that. “Indeed. I have not.”

  “Well, thank God for that,” she said. “Death improved him, if you ask me.”

  “You met him then?”

  “Only the once, when he passed through Parma on his way to Rome. My father was invited to a dinner held in his honor, and I was forced to attend.”

  Something dark in her eyes made Arthur want to reach for a sword, though, of course, he did not wear one. “What did the bastard do?”

  “Nothing he hasn’t tried with a thousand other women, and succeeded with most of them, if his own tales can be believed.”

  “I would kill him twice,” Arthur said, pressing his hand down onto the wood of the table until a splinter wedged sharp in his palm. The pain did not make him see reason, however, only her voice did that.

  “There is no need. I sorted him out,” Serena said, suddenly looking away, as if she might find something more interesting to discuss from her perusal of the tap room.

  Arthur would not let her avoid him but tugged on the sleeve of her gown. Fury had stolen the power of speech from him, it seemed, at least temporarily, but she must have felt his urgency along her arm, for she faced him again.

  Arthur finally found his voice. “How did you sort him?” He wondered if she had perhaps pushed the offending gentleman into a convenient fountain, as Italy was said to be full of such. But then she smiled.

  “I pushed my knee with great industry into a certain part of his anatomy that he valued.”

  Arthur laughed out loud at that, surprised to find himself given over to mirth twice in the space of ten minutes, with a bout of fury tucked in between. His heart warmed in her presence, as his skin turned pink in sunlight. Arthur could not remember when he had experienced such piercing emotions, and so many, all in one day. He was usually a calm man, a measured man who found amusements aplenty, but never passion.

  He looked into the deep green of her eyes, caught in her smile, and knew that his heart was in for a great deal more pain before Serena left him again. He did not shrink from her, though, or from the future he knew was coming. Instead, he caught her hand, and kissed it, surprising her into silence just when she had opened her mouth to speak again.

  “Come, Serena. I will take you where you need to go. Which is…?”

  “Magdalen College,” she repeated, sounding a bit breathless. He held her hand tighter, and wondered if he saw the hint of a blush rise along her cheeks. He could not be sure, and he reminded himself that gentlemen did not stare, nor did they discommode ladies. But Arthur heeded neither stricture, but watched her close.

  She was blushing, and the sudden color in her cheeks only made her more beautiful.

  “And after we have your needs seen to, and your father’s legacy sorted, you’ll come home with me.”

  Chapter 4

  Serena could not quite believe that it was her old friend Arthur staring at her across the table as if she were a tasty treat he could not wait to devour. She wondered why on Earth he did not simply tell his mother his girl had bolted, and start looking for a new wife. Why she needed to be dragged into his shenanigans, and into the radius of Lady Sara, a woman not easily fooled, Serena could not say.

  Unless the heat in his eyes was the reason.

  For a moment, Serena found herself wondering where that heat might lead, i
f she and Arthur spent the night in his mother’s house.

  Serena fought with the desire rising in her own blood, a strange bit of madness that she had never before experienced. She had never been tempted to stay with a man even for an evening, all those years she spent in Italy with only her elderly father standing as guard over her virtue.

  She was no green girl. She had lost her innocence to an Italian in Siena who had claimed to be a displaced prince, but who thankfully traveled on to parts unknown the next morning. It had been a moment of weakness, a foolish indulgence of curiosity, which fortunately had borne no fruit and caused her no shame, save for her private shame at being a fool.

  Serena had learned at a very young age not to allow a man to stare at her with desire in his eyes. Always in the past, save with the self-proclaimed prince, she had nipped the nonsense in the bud with a strong set down. But now, with Arthur, she did nothing of the sort. She let the unwelcome, unavoidable swell of her own desire cloud her reason, the heat of his hand on hers.

  When a woman was tall, well-endowed and bore hair as red as a fiery blaze, she either embraced the life of a courtesan or spent her life fighting off unwanted advances. If she was clever and quick, she avoided situations in which she might be accosted, in which strong set downs, say with the edge of one’s knee, must be given. She wore plain, ugly, serviceable gowns of gray and brown, and kept to digging in the dirt, and to maintaining the camp her father had set up for the gathering his bits of the past. Archeology was a dirty business, and not just because men like M. Galliard skulked about, always looking for something to loot. It was not a glamorous occupation, and it did not attract the romantic sort. She reminded herself that she was not in the least romantic. But still, she let Arthur hold her hand.

  She realized that they had been sitting there for several minutes at that point, with only heat and silence between them. She cleared her throat, and tried to draw her mind back to the problem of getting her father’s legacy into safe hands before the sun had set. She would sort out the rest of her life after that.

  She realized that she wanted nothing so much as to accept Arthur’s offer, at least for the night. She had nowhere else to go. And she was desperately tired of being alone.

  Arthur Farleigh waited patiently for her to come to the conclusion he had already reached. When she did, he must have read her answer in her eyes. He did not speak but smiled at her, and drew a ring out of his pocket. It was a silver ring, holding three small, delicate pearls. Serena had never seen anything so lovely in her life.

  Her old friend, his passion tamped down for the moment, slipped it onto her finger without ceremony. “Thank you for helping me.”

  Serena knew she was lost when she did not argue with him. She did not take the ring off, nor did she point out the obvious fact that it was he who was helping her.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Arthur stared at his mother’s ring on Serena’s hand. The daughter of a baronet, she once would have been a suitable match for him. Long before her father dragged her off to Italy in the middle of a war to dig for buried treasure. He looked into her face and wondered if his mother would accept her now, if he found the nerve to marry her in earnest.

  He pushed all such thoughts from his mind as soon as they entered in. He was not a green boy, to follow after fancies. He was a man of thirty, who needed an heir. He could no more marry Serena, a twenty-eight year old woman of little fortune and antiquated connections, than he might fly to the moon on a cloud. Even if such a goddess might have accepted him. Which this one decidedly would not.

  Even in her ugly gray gown, Serena Davenport gleamed like a gem on velvet. An emerald set in rose gold, perhaps. Her skin was as soft as the day they had parted, her cheeks no longer rounded with girlhood but high. Her green eyes were the same slanted cat’s eyes they had always been, but now they seemed to take him in and measure him with thoughts he no longer knew. This woman had been his best friend once, and now she was a stranger.

  A beautiful stranger, one he wished he knew a good deal better.

  Arthur chastised himself for his ungentlemanly thoughts, even as he stood, the picture of decorum, and offered her his arm. “May I see you to my carriage, Serena? We must be off to Oxford before the hour grows much later.”

  She stared up at him, and placed her hand in his without drawing on her gloves first. He could feel the supple softness of her fingers in his own, and as she stood, wrapping her cape around her, he took in the scent of cinnamon.

  “Serena,” he said, after he had nodded to his man to pay the tab. “You can’t possibly have been baking.”

  She laughed aloud at that. “I never bake. Anything I touch in the kitchen burns to ash.”

  “You smell of cinnamon,” he said bluntly, wondering if his manners had wandered off with his wits in tow. She did not take offense, but smiled as he escorted her out of the tap room.

  “It is a special unction I acquired in Italy,” she said. “It is a combination of orange oil and cinnamon that is said to have once warded off the plague.”

  “Has there been a new outbreak of the Black Death in Tuscany of which I am unaware?” Arthur asked, handing her into the carriage. She had put her gloves back on between the table and the door, but he could still feel the heat of her palm when she touched him. It made him want to strip her gloves off, and run his hand up her arm, beneath the tight sleeve of her gown.

  She laughed again, a dark, vibrant sound that made him want to kiss her. Instead, he adjusted the line of his cuffs, and did his level best to make himself attend to what she was saying.

  “No, indeed,” she answered, as the coach and four left the inn yard. “We are fortunate that no such thing has happened. Though God knows there are plenty of modern plagues to scourge us. I wear the oil in the hopes of warding off disease. My father’s man in Parma swore by it.”

  Arthur nodded sagely, as if he actually gave such superstition credence. “Indeed. An Italian servant is always a man to be heeded.”

  Serena swatted his forearm. “I follow the strictures of the locals wherever I go. Honey and garlic are good for healing as well.”

  “I had no idea you were such a fountain of peasant knowledge.”

  “Peasants know a great deal, Arthur.”

  He was not certain he agreed, but he would not argue the point. The warmth of her body was tucked close beside him in the carriage, as she had not bothered to sit in the forward-facing seat across from him. She always did the unconventional, most unexpected thing. Arthur knew that he should rise and sit across from her himself, but with the scent of cinnamon claiming his senses and the soft wool of her cloak brushing his hand, he simply could not do it.

  The ride to Magdalen College was not a long one, for which he was thankful. He schooled himself to impassive calm, reminding himself that, as a gentleman, he could not take advantage of a lady in distress. With her father dead and strange Frenchmen dodging her steps, Serena qualified as a woman in need. He would keep his own nascent desires to himself, even if it killed him.

  Which it very well might.

  ***

  Serena was very happy when the coach finally stopped.

  Unlike most of the mind numbing, body breaking journey she had endured getting home to England after ten years away, the last leg of the odyssey to Oxford University was warm, comfortable, ensconced in the velvet and polished oak of Arthur’s traveling chaise. And beside her, sitting too close for her peace was Arthur himself, larger than she remembered, and unfortunately, just as honorable.

  She thought of all the bastards whose company she had been forced to endure as her father struggled to keep the dig going when his own money had been cut off from him behind the enemy lines of the ongoing war. She remembered the gropes she had just barely managed to dodge, the smug smiles, the assumption that for a fee, the pleasures of her body came along with the pleasure of working with her father.

  Serena had sworn to herself that once she was home, back among the civilized
men of Oxfordshire, she would live in her father’s house, or rent it out and find a small cottage of her own, where she might live out her days in quiet, called on only by the local spinsters, the occasional widow and perhaps the vicar’s wife. She promised herself that she would never have to endure the unwanted touch of a man again.

  And now, safe in Oxfordshire, safe beside the one man on Earth who would rather die than offer her insult, the one man alive who would kill any man who did so, Serena wanted nothing more than to feel the touch of his hand on her arm.

  And elsewhere.

  Serena cursed herself, and as the carriage rolled to a smooth stop outside the antiquities library of Magdalen College, she told herself not to be a fool.

  She gathered what was left of her wits and her pride and leaned down to take up the bag she had carried all the way from Parma, only to find it in Arthur’s grip.

  He smiled at her and climbed out of the carriage, handing her down to the paving stones as if she were made of spun glass, as if she were a precious thing. Serena’s hand itched for the worn strap of the bag that held her father’s legacy, but it was heavy, and Arthur lifted it easily. If she could trust him with her virtue, she could trust him with this.

  “Thank you, Arthur.”

  He quirked a brow at her as he had when they were children, looking bemused if not outright amused. “No need to thank me, Serena. I would carry you much farther, and at much greater trouble to myself and my people, than Magdalen College on a sunny day in June.”

  Serena took his arm then, and watched as he dealt deftly with each man they met. Gatekeeper after gatekeeper fell away, as they never would have for her, until she found herself at long last in the center of a book filled room, the kind of room in which she would have lived out her life, had she been born a man. Her father’s old friend, Professor Gillingham, stared with bemusement at the broken down satchel set on the oak table between them. She remembered then that bemusement was how Gillingham looked at the world.

  “Professor,” Serena began. But she did not finish, for the old man came around the polished oak table to take her in his arms.