by The Rogue
The branch let out a threatening cracking sound at her burst of activity. Jane froze. Her moment of inattention allowed the layers of muslin to cover her once more.
The thick limb had seemed sturdy enough when she’d clambered up onto it. If her formal dancing slippers had not been so slick and useless that she’d been unable to keep her footing, she would have been fine.
She was still fine at the moment, since her legs were strong from country living and her head wasn’t pounding too severely yet, but if she didn’t find a solution to her problem soon, she was going to have to face a fate that currently ranked somewhat worse than death.
She was going to have to call for help.
Ethan Damont left Lord Maywell’s lovely ballroom with his pockets full of Lord Maywell’s lovely money. Since he’d been assured by reliable sources that Lord Maywell was a very bad sort of man, Ethan had even enjoyed the evening’s card game.
The refreshing thrill from a pastime that had mostly left him cold for the last year put an additional spring to his step as he crossed Maywell’s expansive grounds.
Sauntering down the gravel walk leading to a rear wall that hopefully wouldn’t be too high to manage, Ethan heard a sound that made him freeze in place.
Somewhere, not a dozen yards away, a woman was cursing softly and creatively.
A woman? Out in the dark alone? Ethan’s lips twitched. Who said she was alone?
He began moving again. Far be it from him to interfere in someone else’s mischief. He certainly wouldn’t want to be disturbed at such a moment. At least, not as he recalled such moments, dimly though that was.
Female companionship was something else that had lost its previous glow this past year—at least as far as the sort of women Ethan had once fancied.
There had been a time he’d liked his entertainment enthusiastically shameless, the more so the better. Wine, women, and song. When money ran thick like honey through his fingers, he’d had no trouble finding playmates aplenty. And when times were lean, his charm had been enough for at least an occasional tumble.
Then one day the wine turned to vinegar, the women became loud and blowsy, and the song began a discordant resonance deep within him. It suddenly felt as though he could see far, far into his future—and all it held was more of the same.
He’d kept up the pretense for a while, but then lost interest even in that. It wasn’t until he’d been dragged from his house a few weeks ago by a dark-haired beauty on a mission that he had felt his own heart beating in excitement once again.
Of course, who could blame him? She was a fine and revitalizing creature, was Rose Lacey—that is, Rose Tremayne, for she was now married to quite possibly the last friend Ethan had left in the world.
Which was probably for the best. Ethan had little to recommend himself to a woman so principled. Ethan could honestly claim that his own life was devoted to the redistribution of wealth—into his own pockets.
He wondered without much interest if it was going to be a very long life.
Then he heard it. Sniffle.
“Oh, no,” he groaned to himself. “Not that.” His spine weakened. He tried to stiffen it by sheer will.
Sniffle.
“Bloody hell,” he whispered, slumping in resignation. Turning around, he retraced his silent steps until he was opposite where he believed the woman to be. The hedge was old growth and sparse between the thick gnarled trunks. Ethan wriggled through with commendable lack of noise.
The grounds here were dark, but Ethan could see the black trunks of trees silhouetted against the better lit area nearer the house. The earth was soft under his feet, so he was able to approach the ladylike sniffling unheard.
Finally, Ethan was treated to such a sight that he simply had to pause. With a deep breath, he took a moment to appreciate it fully. Long, bestockinged, truly superior legs were wrapped firmly around a jutting tree branch. It was damned erotic, that’s what it was. Ethan felt like letting go a bestial growl of his own.
He stepped closer. In the light from the house he could see the milky gleam of thigh skin peeking over the tops of the pair of rather battered stockings. The calves that were crooked over the limb looked plump and fully strong enough to hang on to him—er, the tree branch—all night long.
There was nothing else to see but yards of muslin swathing the rest of her. No difficulty there.
Ethan had ever been a leg man.
Just then, the branch Ethan had been envying gave out a loud, groaning crack!
Ethan lunged forward, grasped the muslin bundle by what he judged to be a waist and tugged the whole lot, legs and all, into his arms. His damsel in distress let out a yelp of surprise and sent an elbow deep into his stomach.
“Oof!” That had hurt! Just for that, Ethan put her down far more slowly than he otherwise would have. After all, one didn’t happen onto this sort of view every day. With his arms wrapped around her, the act of turning her over caused a few “unavoidable” liberties to be taken.
“So sorry. Do forgive me,” Ethan said without much urgency. He let the luscious legs down first and watched wistfully as the muslin shifted allegiance and tumbled down to hide them. He was left with a struggling, protesting bundle of fallen hair and slapping hands.
“Get—off! Oh! Oh!” The woman gave him a last hearty shove and Ethan released her.
“You’re welcome,” he drawled, and dipped a low ironic bow, then turned to walk away. Heroism never paid. “I do hope the branch doesn’t fall on your head,” he called to her, his tone not terribly concerned.
Red-faced and gasping, Lady Jane Pennington, well-known Society heiress and recent rescuee, straightened and brushed her hair partially out of her eyes. The light of the house was behind her, shining on a broad back that was swiftly disappearing into the darkness.
Oh, thank heaven he was leaving! If one could catch fire from embarrassment and humiliation, she would certainly be a living torch right now. The fact that someone had seen—oh, she could die!
Still, a lifetime of taking pride in her good manners forced the words from her throat. “Thank you, sir,” she said. The words choked a bit, but fair was fair.
He turned to look at her, then slowly stalked back toward her. Jane abruptly doubled her embarrassment as the light fell onto his face. He was not only tall and strong, but manly and handsome as well. All in all the worst possible candidate for rescuer she could imagine.
He came close, then closer still. Jane backed up a step in alarm. Her hair still hung over her eyes and her face was in shadow, but it wouldn’t do to be recognized.
The fellow came so near that she had to tilt her head back to look into his face. Her breath caught at the impact of his fine face and form. So near . . .
Only then did a shiver of alarm pass through her. She was alone, in the deserted garden at night with a man who had seen her drawers.
Even the most gallant of rescuers might gain the wrong impression.
His gaze was narrowed as he cast it down on her. “I’d rather an honest ‘get-thee-gone’ than that grudging thanks, gazelle,” he said, his voice low.
Jane twitched. She’d had a long night and was in no mood for this man’s opinion. “And I would rather you be on your way than coming back to mock me.”
“Ouch.” He smiled slowly. “You have teeth. Perhaps you aren’t a gazelle after all.” He dipped his head near hers, until if she turned her neck she could brush his cheek with her lips.
“Are you a predator?” His voice feathered warm and soft in her ear. “Is that why you were in the tree, waiting to pounce on some unsuspecting male?” His tone made it clear that he was more than willing to be that male.
Oh, bother. He was one of those men. Jane snorted. “Does that load of horse apples actually work on women? Or am I the first one you’ve practiced it on?” She folded her arms. “Because I must inform you that it will never succeed.”
He pulled his head back to look at her. His eyes were in shadow. Jane could not tell his
reaction. Was he offended? Did she care?
“Of course not.” His tone was flat, almost bored. “What was I thinking? I’m awaited at home, in any case.”
Then he plucked a leaf from her hair and tucked it into his weskit pocket. “My token, fair maiden,” he said mockingly.
He turned his back on her and strode away. Just as he stepped into the deeper darkness of the rear garden, the stranger sent her a flashing, wicked grin over his shoulder and pointed up to “her” tree.
“Nice limbs,” he called. “A fellow could lie among them all night.” With an insouciant salute, he turned away again and was gone.
Jane clapped one hand to her mouth at his shocking jest—then snorted with laughter despite herself. He was a wicked, wicked fellow.
She picked up her skirts and ran for the house. She hoped she could make it to her room before anyone saw the condition she was in. As she scurried through the dimness, she wondered about her handsome, wicked rescuer . . .
Perhaps she wouldn’t tell Mother about this one.
Chapter Two
Ethan was not awaited at home. That had been a lie. There was no one to greet him but his silver-haired butler and his looming sour-faced male cook. Ethan Damont descended from the hired carriage to the front steps of his prized Mayfair house. Despite the lateness of the hour, his ground-floor windows blazed with light, as did the rectangle of open door that waited him.
If he wasn’t mistaken, his new butler had somehow known to open the door before Ethan had even been driven into his own square. Such punctilious attention to duty was a bit alarming. Ethan certainly hoped he wasn’t expected to reward it with timely pay and Christmas bonuses. Gambling was a chancy career, at best.
Things were fine now, of course. It would take even a devoted hedonist like Ethan a long while to run through the generous reward he’d received for helping to rescue Collis Tremayne’s stout old uncle . . .
It occurred to Ethan for the first time that he’d never caught that uncle’s name. Then he shrugged the thought out of his fogged mind. He wasn’t drunk, of course. One couldn’t cheat well if one was drunk.
Well, that wasn’t necessarily true. Ethan could and had, more than once, but it was very bad form. The marks didn’t like it when they couldn’t blame their losses on their own relative inebriation. It caused suspicion, which was very bad for business.
But he wasn’t drunk tonight. Merely tired, tired of the whole bloody game.
He let out a breath and climbed his own steps with much less enthusiasm than the lovely house deserved. He’d won it in his salad days, from a man so rich he’d simply shrugged and bought another, finer one the next day.
Ethan loved his house, loved every scrap of gilded molding, every square of marble on the floor, every mouse in the cellar, and every damned bat in the attic.
He might not be a gentleman, and he might not be a worthy—or even a vaguely good—man, but he had a bloody fine house.
In the front hall of said house, Ethan’s butler stood at the ready in dignified if nauseating splendor, all tricked out in the hideous new official pink and violet livery of Diamond House. Ethan had picked it out rather facetiously when pressed past his patience by the man’s insistence on proper uniform—well, he hadn’t dreamed the bloke would take him seriously!—and now it seemed he would be staring at it forever.
Oh, well, what was one more mistake in a life that held so many? The butler wore it with imperturbable dignity all the same.
He gave the butler his gloves and hat. “How did you know it was me? It was a hired carriage.”
The butler didn’t shrug like another man might have. He merely nodded respectfully. “I simply knew, sir.”
“Yes, but how?”
The butler blinked slowly, his gaze never faltering in its level, mystic calm. “I knew because it was you, sir.”
“That’s frightening, do you know that?”
“Yes, sir.”
Ethan shrugged out of the greatcoat he’d worn against the September fog outside. “Well, stop it. You’ll give me nightmares.”
“Indeed, sir.”
Ethan shot the man a sharp glance, but the cool reserve remained in place. That had not been humor. With a barely concealed shudder, Ethan took himself off to his study.
Although it was nearly morning, he didn’t even attempt to go to bed. Sleep never came until he was so bloody tired his eyes wouldn’t stay open. He might as well stare at the fire and sip brandy until that happened.
The brandy decanter was nowhere in sight.
“Jeeves!”
The butler appeared miraculously at his study door, making Ethan jump. “Sir, my name is P—”
“Jeeves, do I pay you well?”
“Obscenely so, sir.”
“Too right.” For the moment, anyway. “So, if I want to call you Jeeves, and you have no objection to Jeeves other than it isn’t really your name—you didn’t have a dog named Jeeves, or an enemy, or any such thing, did you?”
“No, sir, indeed I did not.”
“Well, then. I like calling you Jeeves. It’s easy to remember when I’m tired or drunk, or tired and drunk, and I like it. I feel most lordly when I say it. Say it with me, Jeeves.”
The butler—damned if Ethan hadn’t forgotten his real name already—serenely repeated it with him. “Jeeves.”
“So, Jeeves, the reason I called you in here is that my brandy is missing.”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
Ethan took a sigh. It seemed he was going to pay for the Jeeves thing. “Did you put my brandy somewhere else?”
“Yes, sir, I did.”
“And this somewhere else is . . . ?”
“In your sitting room, sir, just off your bedchamber.”
Ethan waited, but Jeeves won. With his knees weak with surrender, Ethan folded. “Why did you put it in my sitting room as opposed to my study, Jeeves?”
“Why, so when you drink yourself into a useless stupor, I may only have to carry you the distance of one room, as opposed to two flights of stairs, sir.” Jeeves gazed at him with no sign of unease or distress at such flagrant insubordination. “If you refuse to allow me to hire the staff that this house requires, I must find other ways to do my duties to your expectation.”
Ethan gazed back at him in shock. Then a short laugh burst from him without his consent. “Jeeves, you’re a man of good sense. I’ll take my brandy in my sitting room from now on. Point for point, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Indeed, sir. It will interest me who wins the day, sir.” Ethan laughed again and turned toward the stairs and the sitting room where his brandy awaited. Then he stopped. “If you could hire one person, who would it be?”
“A cook, sir,” Jeeves said promptly.
“I have a cook.”
“You have a tattooed sailor who spits in your soup, sir. You rarely eat at home, sir, but I do.”
The man had a point. “Very well, then. You may choose a new cook.”
Ethan continued up the stairs, then stopped again. “Jeeves, what sort of tattoo?”
“Twins, sir. Voluptuous ones, in the altogether. Apparently, it was a memory worth preserving forever.”
Ethan whistled. “I’ll say. I’d like to see that.”
“He’s very proud of it. He would be more than willing to show it to you on request, sir, but I’d advise against it.”
“Why is that?”
Jeeves looked up at him with ancient eyes. “The young ladies in question reside on each of Cook’s buttocks, sir. Your food will never taste the same, I promise you.”
Ethan was still laughing as he poured himself a drink. Sitting by the fire with his brandy, he had to admit that Jeeves was the first sign of life his house had seen in a very long while.
The glints of firelight in the brandy reminded Ethan of the faint light glinting from the tangled hair of the girl in the garden. He absently rubbed the ribs where she had sent her elbow into them. She had an admirable swing, he had to give her th
at.
As he tipped back his glass, he wondered how she had explained her state of dishevelment to her companions. He took out the leaf that still lay tucked into his weskit pocket and slid the cool red and orange slickness between his fingers.
He hadn’t asked her for her name, which was probably for the best. He hadn’t behaved very well. Of course, neither had she.
Who was she and what in the world had she been doing up a tree? The questions so possessed him that he quite forgot to pour himself another brandy.
He wondered if she had a beau.
“Eeny meeny miney mo, which of these will be my beau?”
The many and varied daughters of Lord Maywell shrieked with laughter at the saucy rhyme and crowded forward to see which sketch of the current crop of bachelors that Augusta, the eldest, had landed her finger upon.
Lady Jane Pennington flopped back on the counterpane of the bed she shared with her youngest cousin, Serena, and tried mightily to suppress her boredom. She’d not returned to the festivities after her mishap, for there was no chance that she could remove all the damage from her dress and person in order to prevent comment. She’d been quite prepared to plead headache or some such when the rest of the girls came upstairs.
It turned out that no one had missed her.
Well, the girls had been entirely overstimulated by the evening, and her aunt had had all she could bear keeping an eye on them. It was a statement of faith and high esteem that her relations hadn’t had to monitor her every move this evening.
As it turned out, it had been a blessing as well, considering the events in the garden. Jane put that from her mind. It was too embarrassing and . . . well, somewhat stirring.
The giggles swelled to scandalized shrieks. Jane winced.
The Maywell Mob, as they were known in less reverent circles, were generally rather dear girls but exhaustively focused on one single group goal. Marriage, for all five of them, as soon as possible.
Of course, if Jane had grown up sharing beds and hair-brushes and a single harried ladies’ maid with five sisters, she might be in a bit more hurry to leave home. As it was, however, Jane had no home to speak of. Her father’s estate had gone to his brother Christoph, who had become the new Marquis of Wyndham. Fourteen-year-old Jane and her mother had been whisked off to Northumbria to the “Dowager House” on the lesser estate.