Lady Disdain

by Michelle Morrison

  Sarah admired her cousin’s ability even as she recognized she could never emulate it. She was a private person by nature and her experiences with Peter Greene as a girl had only tightened the protective bubble she kept around herself. She knew she was well liked and respected by the residents of The Mint, but she also knew they respected her distance. She wondered what it would be like to be more like Eleanor, but quickly dismissed the notion. The thought of opening herself up like that made her palms go clammy It was simply how she was and nothing in her life would change that.

  Until Samuel James had barreled into her life. She glanced across the room and found him watching her. He kept up an animated conversation with the crowd around him and glanced at them from time to time, but always his gaze came back to her.

  Yes, she was a different person when she was with him. She was more talkative, more animated. In short, she felt more alive. And yet—

  “Ridiculous,” she muttered under her breath.

  “What is?” Eleanor asked, causing Sarah to start in surprise. “Your attraction to Mr. James or the fact that you’ve pledged yourself to a life devoid of pleasures?”

  Sarah stared at her cousin. “I quite enjoyed the lemon cream earlier and I shall relish the down mattress of the guest bedroom later. I wouldn’t say my life is devoid of pleasure.”

  Eleanor gave her a skeptical look, her lips pressed flat as she waited Sarah out.

  “Oh very, well. If you must know, both are ridiculous,” Sarah said finally.

  “I don’t see why your attraction to Mr. James is ridiculous. He’s handsome, clever, and successful. Not to mention his personality is as strong as yours. You could never enjoy a man who couldn’t stand up to you, you know.”

  Sarah frowned but realized her cousin was right.

  “So if your attraction is actually perfectly rational, and you’ve just admitted you have nothing against pleasure, what is the problem?”

  “There is no future for us. He is returning to America soon and I need to focus on my work.”

  “He’s not in America yet, is he? And his sister moved here. Perhaps he will as well.”

  Sarah felt her heart race at Eleanor’s words and she grew irrationally angry at herself.

  “He is a distraction I cannot afford,” she said tersely. “I have plans for our charity now that you’ve secured our funding and it is going to take all of my time and attention.” Sarah tried to ignore how officious she sounded.

  Eleanor raised her eyebrows and said, “As to that, I have some ideas as well and they involve bringing more people into the day to day running of our services.”

  “What? There is no way we could pay for that—“

  “I have induced a few additional wealthy patrons to sponsor my ideas,” Eleanor replied archly.

  Sarah felt poleaxed. She couldn’t tell which emotion was stronger, her admiration for her cousin’s inspiration or her resentment that she was initiating things without consulting Sarah. When she opened her mouth to speak, she realized which unfortunate emotion held sway. “You have no right to make such decisions without me!” Hot tears stung her eyes and she fought to keep her voice low.

  Lord Reading glanced at her, then Eleanor, and with a small nod, moved to intercept the small group who were making their way over.

  “That organization has been my life. My life for the past five years. I have devoted everything I have to building it and helping people.” She swallowed hard, trying not to cry. The night had been filled with too many emotions. She was unaccustomed to feeling anything other than exhaustion and occasionally satisfaction at a job well done. This—Samuel James, and kisses, and lemon creams, and an Eleanor who was suddenly exerting authority—was too much.

  She felt her cousin’s arm slide along her back and turn her away from the crowded room. Eleanor led her to a settee where they sat. With everyone else standing, they were afforded a bit of privacy.

  “Sarah, you know I would never do anything without your approval, don’t you?”

  Sarah sniffed and blinked rapidly, trying to keep the tears from falling. “Yes,” she said.

  “Our work—your work—is vitally important. Imagine the lives of the people you’ve helped over the last five years if you had not been there, helping them, feeding them, providing medical care, finding clothing, jobs, decent places to live.

  “But life is so much more than work, regardless of how valuable that work is. You are entitled to more than grueling days of service, Sarah. You are allowed to be happy and enjoy life as well.”

  “I am happy,” Sarah said petulantly, but she glanced at her cousin, whose beautiful face was filled with compassion and love and said, “Alright. Yes, I understand.” She had been a trifle too fixated on the seriousness of life, she supposed. When she first arrived in Southwark, she’d had to eschew any distractions to simply survive and establish the charity. And then as word got out and more people sought her aid, she’d been so busy that there simply hadn’t been time or energy for the enjoyable aspects of life. And then it had become habit, the constant working. It became second nature to her and she forgot what it was to sit with friends and simply chat. She forgot what it was to laugh at the silliness of life. She certainly forgot the pleasure of music and dancing. In short, she forgot that surviving and living were two very different things.

  A tingling awareness lit across her skin and she glanced across the room. The ebb and flow of the guests had allowed a clear path to form between their settee and Mr. James who stared at her with a concerned frown.

  Sarah dashed a gloved finger beneath her eye to make sure no tears had escaped and Mr. James immediately started toward her. She gave her head a tiny shake and he stopped, though the concern in his face said he did not wish to. Then the crowd shifted and he was lost to sight.

  When Sarah crawled in bed that night, she tried to force herself to review the list of things she needed to do the next day, but her brain would not cooperate. It would have been easier for her to return to Southwark tonight, but Lady Chalcroft would not hear of it, so Sarah was ensconced in a huge comfortable bed with crisply pressed, lavender-scented sheets. But it was not the luxury of her current surroundings that distracted her from her mental recitation of the next day’s duties. Try though she might to focus, her brain kept returning to those delicious stolen moments in the garden. Her skin prickled in memory of the almost preternatural awareness she seemed to have of Mr. James—Samuel she thought with a sleepy smile. As she began to drift into sleep, she replayed the moment he had seen her upset and had moved to come to her. For a careless, brash American—and a man no less—he’d proven remarkably sensitive to her emotions, she thought with a small smile. He really was not at all what she had first thought he would be. When consciousness faded into dreams, she was again in the ballroom, only this time, he crossed the room heedless of the people around him and gathered her in his arms to comfort her.

  Chapter Six

  Sam awoke the next morning feeling like a pubescent boy. He gingerly felt about the sheets, relieved he was not that far gone. Still, his dreams had been some of the most erotic he could remember. They had all started with that passionate kiss in the garden. He rubbed his mouth as if he might better remember Sarah’s lips against his. She had felt so damn perfect in his arms, a little taller than most women so that he hadn’t had to hunch over to kiss her properly. The way her body had molded to his had been exceptional as well. She had worn no stays beneath the rose-colored, high-waisted silk gown. He paused in his reflections to curse the weeks of accompanying his sister on her shopping trips for imbuing the awareness of the color referred to as “rose,” as well as the knowledge that gown’s waistlines were currently nowhere near a woman’s natural waist, cinching in just below the breasts.

  That notion brought him back to thoughts of Sarah in his arms. The thinness of her gown had allowed him to feel the lush fullness of her curves pressed against his shirtfront. He’d caressed her trim waist and back and had just grazed t
he side of one perfect breast when they’d been interrupted.

  Sam punched his pillows into a more comfortable shape and lay back, his hands propped behind his head.

  Yes, they’d been interrupted, though at least it had been by Lady Eleanor and Alex Fitzhugh—Lord Reading. (Things might have soured if some old gossipy biddy had caught them.) But in last night’s dreams, he had tugged the small puffed sleeves from her shoulders until her perfect breasts had popped free. At this point, the dreams seemed to vary. He recalled one in which they’d ended up in the grass with her skirts bunched at her waist. In another, the garden morphed into a hotel room. He glanced around. Not this hotel room, but surely one he’d stayed in before. Other dreams he could only grasp an image of, or even just a feeling, an ambiance. He shook his head, unable to make the images coalesce. One thing was certain however. In all of his dreams, Sarah Draper had been the most perfect experience of his life. He wondered if she were as perfect in real life as she had been in his dreams.

  He rolled out of bed and crossed the room to splash cold water on his face. Given the way she had affected him with a few kisses, he would stake his life on it.

  An hour later, bathed, groomed, and in the midst of reviewing a contract with a new ink supplier he had found here in London, he found his attention wandering back to Sarah, wondering what she was doing. He hoped she wasn’t having to talk another abusive husband into drinking her laudanum tea. He frowned as he remembered her stories of being robbed at knife point. For all that she was tall, she was not a big woman. If one of those ruffians had decided to take more than her coin, there would have been very little she could do to stop him.

  With a shake of his head, he forced his mind back to his work. She had survived five years in Southwark. Surely she knew what she was about better than he did.

  Not thirty minutes passed, during which time he was outlining his travel log about London (he grinned at his note not to include The Mint in his favorite places he’d visited) and he suddenly realized that the buildings in which Miss Draper worked—and no doubt lived—were dangerous. From what he’d seen, most were a stiff breeze away from toppling over, no doubt with Miss Draper in the middle of them.

  He stood and began pacing. He wondered if he could convince her to operate her—what had she called it? —soup kitchen out of doors while he hired a structural architect to make sure the place was completely safe. Realizing the length of his receiving room was not long enough to properly stretch the worry out of his legs he grabbed a hat and left the hotel, determined to walk off his sudden obsession with Miss Drapers’ safety beneath the leaden London sky.

  He made his way down Piccadilly street, navigating his way around casual strollers and dodging running delivery boys.

  Perhaps, he considered, his recollection of the few kisses he’d shared with Miss Draper were colored by the fact that he’d been without feminine companionship for nearly six months. Oh, he’d been in constant company with his sister, of course, but she certainly didn’t signify.

  It was entirely possible that in the six months since his last…flirtation, he’d forgotten how delightful the feminine form felt in his arms. It was conceivable he simply didn’t remember how a pair of velvety lips and a silken tongue could set his very blood on fire and fuel his dreams with vividly erotic images.

  But the worry over a woman—the gut-wrenching, heart-pounding fear at the thought of harm coming to her—that was new. He paused on the corner of St. James’ street and waited for a break in the traffic. He thought of his sister and tried to recall if he had ever worried for her safety as much. True, Caroline had never lived in as dangerous a place as Southwark, but she’d also been a bit of a hellion growing up, climbing trees, sneaking out at night, and breaking an arm in an incident involving a ladder and a sheep that had never been completely explained.

  He’d viewed such activities with an indulgent protectiveness. He loved his sister deeply but had never been terrified of the thought of something terrible happening to her. It occurred to him that if something were to happen to Sarah Draper, it would be as if he’d lost a limb. And this after only a handful of hours spent in her company!

  “Oi! Look out, guv!” yelled a man carrying a huge barrel on his back. Sam realized he’d stopped in the middle of the street, blocking traffic. He hurried along, wiping his hand over a face that was suddenly clammy: not from his near-miss, but from the idea of a life without Miss Draper.

  How on earth could she have come to mean so much to him in such a short amount of time?

  He quickened his pace, his strides eating up the length of block after block. Perhaps, his logical mind rationalized, his desire for her was so great that the thought of something preventing him from seeing it through to its culmination was the real issue. No, he thought with a snort. A portly gentleman in possession of an enviable set of silver whiskers frowned his disapproval of such an uncouth noise.

  Clearing his throat to disguise what had been an unattractive sound, Sam shook his head. No. No amount of unfulfilled desire could explain his reaction at the thought of Miss Draper beneath the rubble of a collapsed tenement building or at the hands of an armed attacker. He shook that visualization out of his head and looked around to get his bearings.

  Well, hell, he was practically in Mayfair, he realized. He may as well go and see his sister. He knew she and her new husband were preparing for a several month’s long honeymoon, but he also knew Caroline would always make time for him.

  It took him a bit of doubling back and wrong turns to find the right house. He’d only ever arrived by a coach driven by a man who knew London’s streets much better than he did, apparently. By the time he arrived at the impressive grey stone manor with white marble colonnades, his stomach was growling. He hoped Caroline had her usual afternoon plates of finger sandwiches and biscuits. She had not yet acclimated to the English ton custom of eating supper at nine o’clock at night, though she had wholeheartedly embraced the English penchant for pot after pot of tea.

  Ah well, perhaps he could induce her to have some coffee sent up, he thought as he waited for the butler to answer his knock. Or better yet, whiskey. The thought of whiskey awoke the memory of that potent distillation, shared in a noisy, smoky public house in Southwark. With Sarah. Right before he’d kissed her.

  “You are a damned fool,” he exclaimed, just as the door swung open.

  The butler who was, rather fortunately, possessed of a rather wry sense of humor, bowed briefly.

  “For which I apologize, Mr. James.”

  Sam grinned as he entered. “Not you, Chester. I’m referring to myself.”

  “Of course,” Chester replied in a tone that said he quite concurred.

  “There now,” Sam said, handing over his hat and gloves. “Be a good, er, chap, and inform my sister I’ve come calling.”

  “Of course,” the butler said again. “Might I inquire, sir…”

  “Oh! I’m practicing my English lord dialect. What do you think?”

  Chester merely raised his eyebrows and said, “Do you return to America soon, sir?”

  Sam burst out laughing. “I do indeed. A good thing, I take it?”

  “I only wish to bid you a bon voyage before you depart.”

  “I shall make sure to call for your blessings. Unless you’d like to go to America with me? It’s a land full of adventures just waiting to happen, Chester.”

  Sam wondered at the glint in the butler’s eyes. “Perhaps one day, sir,” he said, turning to show Sam into a drawing room.

  “I look forward to it,” Sam replied and then noticing Caroline wasn’t in the room said, “Oh Chester, can’t you just show me straight up?”

  “I must inquire if my lady is in, sir.”

  “She’s always in to me!” he called to the departing butler’s back. “I’m her brother!”

  A few minutes later as Chester was showing him into the Trowbridge family’s cozy upstairs parlor, Sam couldn’t help but give Chester an “I told you so”
look, which the butler blithely ignored.

  “Sam!” Caroline exclaimed, coming to embrace him. “It’s so good to see you.”

  He looked at her with a sideways grin. “It’s not even been a fortnight since your wedding.”

  “Yes but as I’m accustomed to seeing you on a daily basis, two weeks is a long time. Besides,” she said with a delighted smile. “This is the first time I’ve received you as Lady Trowbridge.”

  “Well I hope Lady Trowbridge keeps up the afternoon tradition of sandwiches. I’m about to perish from hunger.”

  A knock at the door behind him heralded the arrival of a maid bearing a tray laden with food.

  “You say you’re perishing from hunger if you’ve not eaten in two hours,” Caroline said, fixing him a plate.

  “Yes, well, it’s occurred to me that I haven’t eaten all day,” Sam said wonderingly. He truly was a voracious eater. It was odd that he’d not realized he’d missed both breakfast and luncheon.

  “Good heavens! What caused such an occurrence?”

  “I was busy this morning. I’ve found a new ink supplier, by the way. And then I went for a walk and, well, I ended up here.”

  “What time did you start your walk?”

  He shrugged as he ate an entire finger sandwich in one bite and reached for another. “Perhaps eleven o’clock this morning.”

  “Good heavens!”

  “You need another English-sounding expression. That one is growing hackneyed. Ask your butler for assistance. He’s quite impertinent.”

  “What are you talking about?” Caroline said with a frown. She looked as if she wished to check his temperature.

  He waved his hand in dismissal and kept eating.

  “Why did you walk so long? I take it something was on your mind?”

  He was about to nod but stopped himself. He wanted Caroline’s advice, but as her older brother, did not want to ask for it.

  He poured himself a glass of lemonade and took a large gulp.

  “Ack! That’s sour!”