“You’re falling asleep.”
Hannah opened her eyes slowly. “I’m enjoying the story, thank you. If you’d like to leave, I’m sure a maid will be along shortly.”
“Of course.” He put the book aside and tugged on the bellpull. “Now a maid will be along shortly. Let’s get you to bed, shall we?”
Before Hannah could protest, he’d scooped her up against his chest. Without winter clothes between them, the embrace was more intimate than it had been earlier in the day.
“Arms around my neck, Boston. We can’t court further mishap with you already injured.”
She complied, feeling the heat of him and that wonderfully spicy scent wrapping around her.
“I can’t believe you agreed to my request without making some tart protest,” he said as he crossed the room with her. “I’m heartened is what I am. Cheered even.”
“Cheeky is what you are, isn’t that the English word?” she said as they moved into the bedroom.
“For God’s sake, why wasn’t the fire lit?”
He lowered her to the bed and saw to the oversight, pumping the daylights out of a set of bellows to get a roaring blaze going.
“Here.” He lifted her up and sat her in a rocking chair near the fire.
“I am not a piece of masonry, to be hoisted about without my permission.”
“I’m running the warmer over your sheets, Boston. Perhaps you’d rather get into a cold bed in a cold room and try to manage on your own?”
Must he sound so amused? Must he be so thoughtful? “The maid can see to my sheets.”
“Now that somebody has considerately rung for a maid.”
He disappeared into the other room and came back with the afghan. The afghan he’d warmed and wrapped around her foot with such care and comfort Hannah had been hard put not to melt. It almost, not quite but almost, had served as consolation for the loss of his warm hands wrapped around that same foot.
“Up you go.” He lifted her again, and she participated to the extent her arms were around his neck. He set her down on the bed and delivered another magnificent scowl.
“You do that so well, sir.”
“Hoist you about?”
That too. “Frown, express displeasure, disapproval.” She shifted on the mattress, because it was cold. Blasted cold.
“I don’t want to leave you until the maid comes along,” he said, hands on hips. “And I don’t think for a minute a nibble of cheese toast was an adequate meal.”
“So I should have supper in bed?”
She was hungry, but God was in charity with her, for her stomach didn’t rumble very loudly.
“You should be spanked soundly,” he said on a sigh.
Step-papa would certainly have agreed.
The maid appeared in the doorway, a hefty young woman with a clean, full-length apron to her credit and her cap neatly tied.
“You’ll get Miss Hannah tucked in, please,” the earl said. “And mind her foot is injured, and her sheets cold. In future, her bedroom fire is to be lit when we get up from table, the same as every other bedroom.”
The maid bobbed a curtsy. “Of course, milord.”
He left on that grouchy little scold, and Hannah felt abruptly both the fatigue of a long day and a mild throbbing in her right os whatever.
He’d been right about that too: she’d barely twisted her ankle, but the wrench to her hip and back had been as significant as the injury to her dignity.
“I can stand beside the bed while you use the warmer,” Hannah said. “The room really is a little chilly.”
“It is,” the maid said, “and I do apologize, mum, but your aunt is still in the dining room, enjoying an aperitif, and we typically don’t see to the bedrooms until the ladies have arisen from the table. Saves on coin that way. Shall I braid your hair?”
As the room gradually became more comfortable, they managed Hannah’s hair. The maid was running the warmer over the sheets again when another maid appeared, tray in hand.
“His lordship says you missed supper,” the second maid explained. “He said you wasn’t to get cranky and peckish.”
Hot chocolate sprinkled with cinnamon sat near a pair of rum buns.
If reading Dickens to her hadn’t won a bit of her heart, the offerings on the tray surely did.
Hannah propped up her pillows and lay back on her warmed sheets. She took a nibble of delicious rum bun, wrapped her hands around the mug of hot chocolate, and wondered if all the titled, handsome gentlemen she’d meet here would be possessed of such good manners.
And such warm hands.
Three
“A bloody damned bit of snow isn’t going to keep me from leaving the house.”
Asher directed his foul language at no one in particular, for at this time of the morning the study was empty of living creatures save himself and a large black-and-orange house cat curled up on a hassock near the fire.
The specter of Uncle Fen’s disapproving presence hung close by though, as close as Asher’s elbow, where the baron’s latest epistle sat on the massive desk, its meek appearance belying its vituperative content.
“You will make all haste for London, the ladies being your responsibility to see suitably housed, attired, and introduced.”
The last word was the stinging tail of the lash: introduced… As if Asher himself had more than nominal and begrudging entrée among the baron’s titled peers and cronies. Asher and the Cooper women would be the socially blind leading the blind.
Or the lame. After two days in bed, Miss Hannah Cooper was much recovered from her injury, recovered enough he need not haul her about in his arms.
Asher was not recovered. Not from the sight of her helpless and in pain, not from the sense of having failed in so simple a task as escorting a lady, and not—God help him—from the realization that holding a woman’s foot could be intensely erotic when it wasn’t supposed to be.
He knew about women’s feet—phalanges and metatarsals, peroneous tertius, brevis, and longus—but he also knew about women purely in the sense a man appreciates the Creator’s more refined effort. Knew about their ears and napes and fingers and bellies, and all the luscious parts of them that could be turned to the service of their arousal and Asher’s pleasure. Yes, feet could be erotic, but they were supposed to mind their mundane business until Asher recruited them for the business of seduction.
Not even seduction, for he’d never had to seduce a woman, not since he’d turned fifteen and the ladies had started seducing him.
But here he was, haunted by the feel of a lady’s foot, soft and cool against the callused palms of his hands. He’d long since accepted that grief did not permanently inoculate a man against arousal, but this, this fascination for a woman who wanted no part of England, Scotland, and the fellows to be found there—
“Bah!”
The cat opened unblinking green eyes.
“I’m to haul them to London, weather be damned, and believe me, cat, the weather will be evil. Every God’s blessed aspect of this misadventure will bend to the baron’s need to see his heir suffering and miserable.”
The cat squeezed her eyes closed in a display of feline indifference.
“Maybe I should make you come with us.”
More indifference, reminding Asher of the elders among whom he’d been raised. They weren’t indifferent, though, so much as stoic. Anybody who could withstand sixty Canadian winters with nothing but a longhouse and a meager fire between them and the elements had stoicism running in their veins.
And those were his people too.
Asher leafed through the rest of the mail delivered that morning. One thin missive had crossed the Atlantic mere days after its intended recipient: Hannah Cooper had a letter from home, something bound to raise her spirits. Asher hooked his spectacles back around his ears and peered at the letter.
Many people still didn’t bother with the expense of an envelope, but Hannah came from money, from people with pretensions to class in
so far as the United States boasted of same. Still, the man penning this letter hadn’t bothered to limit his sentiments to the inside of the folded paper, but rather, had scratched his message so the last of it could be read on the outside.
“You have disgraced your family, and the only solution remaining is to situate you where you might never again bring shame down upon my house, where you are firmly established as some other man’s problem. This is your last chance, Stepdaughter. I suggest you make the most of it.”
What had Hannah Cooper done to invite such an admonition? Smiled at some beamish farm boy? Leaned a little too closely on a widower’s arm? Cheered too loudly at a race meet? He could not see the woman now contentedly reading one floor above him disgracing herself in any meaningful sense.
Even if she did have the most erotically appealing feet it had ever been Asher’s torment to hold.
He stuffed that thought back into the dark closet from whence it had escaped, and took the little epistle to Miss Cooper’s sitting room.
She looked up at him, setting Copperfield face down in her lap. “To what do I owe the pleasure, sir?”
She had her feet up on a hassock, and an afghan swaddling both legs. Asher had the sense she’d taken to the comfort like the feline in his study, instinctively seeking warmth and ease to save against the times when there would be none.
“I bring you an epistle from home,” he said, making no move to pass her the letter. “Have you enough light to read it?”
“If it’s from Grandmother, she doesn’t write cursive, so yes, I have adequate light.”
He settled on the hearth, blocking some of that light.
“I gather it isn’t from your grandmother.” He passed her the letter and watched the eager light in her eyes wink out like a snuffed candle.
“Step-papa, then.” She took the letter and slit it open, glancing at the contents. “A little sermon, lest I forget his many attempts to guide me into the arms of the suitors of his choice.”
“You’re finicky. Somehow, one might guess this about you.” And she was bitterly disappointed not to hear from this old granny of hers.
“I’m female. We’re given to odd notions.” She set the letter aside unread—Asher suspected the missive would shortly end up in the fire—and made as if to resume disporting with Master Copperfield.
“Odd notions such as?”
She returned the book to her lap and gazed past him, into the fire. “I would like to be held in affection by my spouse, not merely tolerated for my fortune, for one thing.”
“Affection doesn’t strike me as too odd a notion.” Though affection for her? A fellow would have to scale the battlements of her disappointment and self-sufficiency, bare his soul, and place his heart entirely in her hands.
But what a lucky fellow he’d be, if she surrendered her heart in return.
“I would like my spouse to take me to wife whether I’ve a great fortune or only a modest dowry.”
“Many men marry women with modest dowries.” Many men with modest expectations, or personal fortunes of their own. Perhaps those were in short supply in Boston.
“Men generally only marry women of modest means when the fellow’s heart is engaged.”
“Affection and means of his own, then,” Asher said, and he wanted to add some deprecating little aside, except Boston wasn’t being unreasonable at all. Affection in a marriage would be… wonderful.
It had been wonderful.
“Does that smile suggest you are laughing at me, sir?”
“Was I smiling? I thought I was agreeing with you. Is your stepfather so easily disappointed that your modest requirements foiled his ambitions for you?”
“He presented me several choices, all of them beholden to him or deeply indebted to him or even in his employ. I considered each man and declined them one by one. He presented more, and more, until I realized he wasn’t going to stop.”
“What did you do?” Because clearly, she’d taken control of the situation somehow.
She used her peacock-feather bookmark to stroke her chin, the gesture distracting as hell. “I rejected those too.”
“You’ll have a whole crop of dandies to choose from when we reach London,” he said. Miss Hannah Cooper wasn’t being honest with him, not about her romantic past, in any case. “You will consider them too, I hope, and find at least one worthy of your hand.”
“What of you? Will you be considering the crop of ladies available to become Mrs. Lord Balfour?”
“Lady Balfour,” he corrected her, though he knew she was being Colonial on purpose, as he had often been Scottish on purpose, or even Mohawk. “And yes, I am specifically charged with that happy task.”
“You’re laughing at me again.” She picked up her book and ran her finger halfway down the page. “Not well done of you.”
He had to smile. Her choice of expression was British, the rebuke all the more effective for her crisp accent.
“Perhaps I’m laughing at myself. If you could spare me a few more minutes of your busy day?”
She did not put her book down but turned to gaze out the window. “It’s pouring snow out there, and you have a wonderful library. Forgive me for appreciating it—at your invitation.”
“Despite the snow, I am also charged with getting you and your aunt safely to London posthaste. My uncle the baron has suggested we depart several days hence.”
This time she batted her nose with the peacock feather, and Archer had to study the frigid weather lest he snatch the feather from her. “Aunt is not one to put up with discomforts silently.”
Unlike Miss Hannah Cooper, who had not once complained about her disability, nor had she complained about her stepfather, exactly. She’d answer Asher’s questions, albeit only up to a point.
“If we can’t take an express train, we’ll go in easy stages. The inns along the main routes boast decent accommodations, so your aunt should have no cause for complaint.”
“She will complain, though. Aunt has prodigious ability when it comes to manufacturing complaints.”
She studied her infernal feather, while Asher caught the ghost of a smile tilting her lips up.
A smile?
“You want us delayed,” he said. “You’re enjoying this storm, looking forward to the lousy roads, the delayed trains, hoping they mean you miss the start of the Season.”
“They can’t possibly,” she said. “It’s barely March. The Season won’t start until the second week of April this year.”
“But you’ll need a wardrobe.” He rose from the hearth to pace. “You’ll need mounts for riding in the park and driving at the fashionable hour. You’ll need calling cards printed up, and stationery for accepting or declining invitations. You’ll need to hire ladies’ maids for you and your aunt.”
And every one of those needs, Asher would have to see to.
He stopped and speared her with a look. “You plan on fighting me every step of the way, don’t you? You won’t like the clothing made to order for you. You won’t choose a maid until the very last minute. Your schedule won’t allow you to try out the horses I select for you, and it will all be in aid of thwarting a stepfather who has tried hard to see you well situated.”
And while Asher might commend the lady’s fighting spirit—he did commend her fighting spirit—he did not at all appreciate that she’d be making a hash of his efforts to endure a Season of Polite Society at the same time.
His brothers Ian, Connor, and Gilgallon, and his sister Mary Fran had all acquired English connections, and to the extent that Asher owed his family, good impressions in London were devoutly to be wished.
Miss Cooper rose as well, shedding her blankets to face him as he glared down at her.
“Were I to engage in such antics, sir, it would be in aid of maintaining my freedom. My stepfather didn’t try hard to see me situated, he tried hard to see my fortune situated under his fat, greedy thumb. I read the proposed settlements, and my prospective husbands were not to have
control of my money. He controls me now, and he wants to control my money when I marry. He went to great lengths in the attempt. I’m prepared to go to greater lengths to see him thwarted.”
She believed what she was saying; Asher concluded that much from the fire in her eyes. “Is he wasting your fortune?”
“He can’t.” She turned away and went to the window, her limp barely noticeable. “Papa, my real papa, set it up so there are trustees, but they lose authority when I marry or turn six-and-twenty. Papa intended my husband to take over management of my funds, but the marriage settlements simply turn the husband’s authority over to Step-papa. He’s greedy, not stupid.”
“Or he’s prudent.”
“If he’s so prudent, why doesn’t he find me a fellow who isn’t beholden to anyone? A man who’s made his own fortune and will understand how to make the best use of mine? A man who will put that money in trust for our children, for our daughters especially?”
They were good questions, questions the lady’s mother should have been asking the stepfather at least. One of Asher’s first tasks upon returning to Scotland had been to read Mary Fran’s settlement with her English baron. Fortunately, Ian, who’d held the earldom at the time, was a canny negotiator, and Mary Fran and little Fiona were well set up.
“Your stepfather is an ocean away,” Asher said. “Nobody can make you marry a man against your will.”
“No, they can’t. It has already been attempted.” Her spine was ramrod straight at this disclosure.
“Did you cry off?”
She nodded once, back still turned.
Oh, Miss Cooper. “You left him literally at the altar?”
“Not alone.” She turned to face Asher, arms crossed over her chest. “When the minister asked if I took that man, I answered as loudly as I could in the negative, before the entire congregation. I said he was my stepfather’s choice, not mine, and if Step-papa was so in love with the man, then Step-papa could marry him, for I wanted no part of him. None.”
She was in utter, jaw-clenched earnest, and she’d humiliated both her stepfather and her intended as publicly as she possibly could.
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