Soon Flynn was deposited on the bank side and their rescuer returned for Kate. By then the water almost reached over his tall boots and the horses were nervous, snorting and flinging their heads about.
"My lady? I'm ready for you, if you're ready for me. I'd say we're just in time." As he held his arms up to her, his eyes twinkled in a very disturbing way. It felt as if he'd tickled her.
Although she usually equated the color blue with tranquility and innocence, today Kate had cause to rethink that idea.
"Ma, your face is all red again," her son bellowed unhelpfully from the riverbank.
"I might weigh too much for you," she muttered.
The man looked askance. "I can carry two newborn dairy calves on these shoulders and I've never dropped any."
Since she had no idea what a calf weighed, this meant nothing to her. Kate had a vague inkling that she ought to be insulted by the comparison, but she was too anxious to bother confirming it.
"Leave the whip, Duchess," he suggested pleasantly. "You won't need it for me. I'm fairly tame. Sometimes even obedient. But only in gloomy weather like today. In fact, you're lucky the sun's not out, because then I'd be in a less helpful mood and more lively. Feeling my oats, you might say."
She exhaled a quick huff, set her whip on the floor of the cart, and shifted to the edge of the seat, which— being wet— was slippery. He grabbed her as she slid off and in the next moment she was in his arms, being carried with ease across the raging river.
His chest was warm and solid. She could feel his heart thumping away under her shoulder, steady and reassuring. So far. But what if he fell while carrying her? He might slip. Was she heavier than he thought? He smelled of the wet earth and some less pleasing odors.
"Where are you headed?" he asked. "There's not much out this way. Or did the stars align in my favor for once and send you for me?"
Kate stiffened. "We are on our way to the Reverend Coles," she replied warily. "He offered to find employment for me."
"Coles?" He stopped walking and looked at her. A more tentative smile curved one side of his mouth. It reminded her of the expression on Flynn's face when he was given a birthday gift to open— when he didn't know yet if it would be something fun like a spinning top, or dull but useful, like a knitted cap. "Then you are mine."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Reverend Coles was sending me a new housekeeper today. You're early. Damn and blast! I meant to change my shirt before you came."
She stared at his profile as he resumed his stride through the water.
A shirt? A shirt was all he thought to change before she came?
Well, this wasn't what she'd expected at all.
"Poor Coles," her rescuer added. "His passing is a great loss to the community."
"Passing?"
"Aye."
"Reverend Coles is dead?"
He looked askance. "Well he'd better be, since we buried him yesterday. Didn't you know?"
Know? Of course she didn't know. How could she? For the last eight days she'd been on the road and it was a month at least since she'd had a letter from him. The Reverend had only mentioned a little sore-throat, perhaps not wanting to worry her.
Kate's heart sank.
Two years ago, just before Reverend Coles left the East End of London, he gave a stirring sermon from her local pulpit, inspiring her imagination when he spoke of Cornwall's fresh air, away from the filthy, Cholera-stricken streets of London. His words had given her hope and something to aim for. The Reverend took an interest in Kate's attempts to better herself and encouraged her to practice her letters by writing to him in his new parish. When she finally had the means to escape Bert Soames, the Reverend suggested she head this way herself and he kindly offered to help her settle there.
"You'd best apologize for threatening me with a whip, Duchess. I don't know many housekeepers allowed to get away with such insubordination to their master, and we ought to begin as we mean to carry on. I'll be in charge here. Needn't think to flutter your lashes and rule the roost."
"Yes, of course." She sighed, her mind preoccupied. "I suppose so."
"Be warned, I'm a hard task master."
"No doubt."
"And don't think I'll always have time to get you out of trouble whenever you get yourself into it. I haven't heard you thank me yet for saving your behind today."
Now she paid attention. He seemed to be walking slower, taking longer to get her to the riverbank. Looking into his eyes and finding a distinctly mischievous gleam there, she suspected the slow pace was deliberate. He had let her think the situation was urgent and now, suddenly, it was not.
"I'm not saved yet, sir," she said warily. "Once I'm on dry land again I'll thank you then."
He looked surprised and then laughed. "Steady on now! I'm the bashful, self-effacing sort and such an excess of gratitude might cause me to drop you."
Bashful? As a fox in a chicken coop, she suspected.
When he looked at her again, Kate felt the melting influence of his smile. Before her lips were inclined to soften and curl in the warm rays of his sunny regard, she turned her head away.
Apparently her angry frowns and sharp comments bounced off him like rubber balls. It was most disconcerting for a woman who had learned the efficacy of insults and scowls when dealing with over-eager gentlemen.
Finally he set her down on the wet grass and asked, "What's the heaviest thing in the cart, Duchess?"
"There's a chest with my... linens. That probably weighs the most."
He waded back to the cart, heaved the large chest onto one shoulder and brought it safely across the water to set it down beside her.
"Linens?" he grumbled. "Sure it's not a few dead bodies?"
"It's very superior bed linen. The best quality."
He sniffed. "I'll bet it is."
Not knowing quite what to make of that remark, Kate closed her lips in a firm line and watched him wade back to the cart yet again.
After several tense moments— and a great deal of grunting— the trapped wheel finally moved and the horses pulled the cart up through the rustling reeds and onto the grassy bank.
With a deep sigh she looked at the sorry collection of damp possessions they'd brought along to this place she'd optimistically thought of as Hope. A place which turned out to be the middle of nowhere, and inhabited by a giant, blue-eyed man called "Storm". A man with a smile that ran truant across his face like a naughty child with no fear of being caught.
The Devil too, so they said, was a charmer.
She sincerely hoped Reverend Coles knew what he was doing to leave her in this man's hands. His very large, grimy, work-roughened hands.
Chapter Three
"You're not what I expected," he muttered, scratching his chin.
"And vice versa," she replied, her gaze flicking disdainfully over his attire.
"Well, beggars can't be choosers, I suppose."
Her eyes flared and then narrowed quickly. "Quite."
She was a haughty piece of work, full of spit and fire, and— by the look of things—fallen on hard times and forced to earn a living.
When she'd finally allowed him to carry her from the cart, Storm guessed this must be a considerable concession she made, a privilege few would enjoy. He could only equate the sensation of achievement with one he'd felt when successfully earning the friendship of a stray kitten— a tiny, bedraggled creature he'd fed from a distance for weeks last winter, before it trusted him enough to venture over his doorstep. The night that kitten crept inside and curled up by his fire was one of the most contented evenings of Storm Deverell's thirty years. Not that he'd ever tell that to a living soul.
Like the kitten, this woman preferred the world to see her as a tigress. It was all about survival of course, a natural instinct to appear larger than one really was and keep predators at bay.
She stood with one hand on her cub's shoulder, keeping him close to her side, watching their rescuer with wary curiosity.
The woman seemed to wrestle with her decision for a moment, but eventually, as if each word cost her a blood-letting, she agreed. "Very well, sir. I suppose we have no other choice. If this is what Reverend Coles planned."
Her features were pretty and refined, but there was no ladylike frailty apparent. Even when she'd thought he was about to commit some crime against her, the woman was ready to fight. Although Storm had little experience of fine ladies, he'd always imagined her sort to go through their day ever on the cusp of swooning. But he sincerely doubted this woman had cause to carry smelling salts.
"What happened to your husband?" he asked.
As soon as the words were out, he felt the sharp kick of a ghostly foot—probably his mother's— warning him that it was indelicate to ask. But clearly this woman didn't have one around anymore or she wouldn't be there, hiring herself out as a housekeeper. Why should he dance around the matter? She was going to work for him, wasn't she? Therefore he had a right to question her.
Her eyelashes lowered gracefully, shading her cheeks, but before she could speak the boy shouted proudly, "My Pa's asleep forever. He was a war hero."
Instantly she forgot to look demure and shouted at the child to get up into the cart.
"What shall I call you then? Or will Duchess be sufficient?"
"She's Katherine Kelly, but everybody calls her Kate," her son answered. "An' don't you mind her mean face. It always looks that way."
She frowned hard at the boy, and he quickly rewrapped his own expression in the woolen scarves that circled his head several times.
"Oh, it's not such a mean face," Storm replied solemnly. "I've seen worse. On the Bumble Trout."
The woman turned her stern appraisal upon him, but before she could utter a word, he said, "Well then... Kate...shall we?" He held out his bare hand and she looked at it doubtfully. Her lips pursed again in a frustrated puff, and then she stepped up into the cart. But she didn't take the assistance of his hand. She managed by herself.
He caught the teasing sight of a slender ankle clad in what appeared to be a silk stocking, embroidered with a tantalizing, upward twisting vine of ...hmmm...tiny red roses.
"I would rather you call me Mrs. Kelly," she muttered, the hem of her skirt hastily adjusted to cover the intriguing sight again as she sat. "We are not well enough acquainted for first names."
Not yet perhaps, he mused, suddenly feeling very warm under his wet clothes.
"And it wouldn't be proper between a man and his housekeeper," she added, her face flushed.
"If you say so. I think I prefer Duchess in any case." It suited her, he thought.
With one gloved hand she hurriedly swept a dark, damp curl from her cheek, thrusting it back under the limp straw brim of her bonnet. "Is that your house?" she demanded, pointing with her whip toward a small stone building down in the valley.
"No. That's old Putnam's place. He died recently and his widow moved to St. Austell to stay with her sister, so it's empty at present, but won't be for long." Storm had plans for that small holding himself.
"I thought you said everything within three miles is yours."
"Everything but that little farm," he replied. "That'll change soon, though. My house is in the next valley. Not far."
"Lead on then," she exclaimed impatiently.
Those were her last words for quite a while.
His dog ran on ahead, and Storm walked with the horses to guide them. "Been long on the road?" he yelled over his shoulder.
"Eight hundred years," her son shouted back. Unlike his mother, the child was not shy. "Where did you come from, mister?"
"Lived here all my life. Born near Truro. Never wanted to live anywhere else but here."
"I was born in London, like my Ma. But we're having a Fresh Beginnin's, ain't we, Ma?"
The woman didn't answer, concentrating on the horses and whatever thoughts troubled her.
Fresh beginnings, eh? So she was leaving something unhappy behind her. He shook his head. See? Complications. Danger. He knew it the moment he saw her. Every reluctant word out of her mouth had verified it. Yet there he was, bringing her home with him to feed her, as if she was another of those lost and stray creatures he came across.
He hoped the good Reverend Coles knew what he was doing to leave this fancy, high and mighty madam in his hands.
* * * *
Flynn was soon stuffing his small face with the promised bacon, but it didn't prevent a breathless trail of questions about everything and anything, including the man's dog, whose name, they learned, was "Jack". Listening to her son, Kate silently marveled at how much energy he had— even after their long journey. Nothing silenced his wandering stream of inquiry as it darted from one subject to another and back again. Fortunately, while there was so much of new interest going on around him, the boy had more than enough to chatter about without mentioning anything regarding their previous life in London.
Their host, meanwhile, answered all the questions her son fired at him, showing he had far more patience than Kate did. As he talked, he assembled their breakfast, fed his dog and gathered laundry from where it hung like ship's sails by the fire. Although the farmhouse was large, with several different rooms and even a staircase to a second floor, everything he needed seemed to be kept within easy reach of his long arms and the glow of that hearth.
It was evident that Storm Deverell lived alone. Several old newspapers— some yellowed with age and edged with a scalloped pattern of mice teeth— sat folded up on the arm of a tattered and patched chair, which was the only cushioned seat in the house. Every shirt drying on that wooden rack had seen better days. Clearly, he had no one to sew new ones or repair those he had. And he cooked for himself with a skilled, casual ease that proved he did it often.
"I had a housekeeper once," he told her, perhaps noticing her critical gaze taking in the shambles. "But she had to split her time between me and my father, and he's always been more demanding than me. Now he's getting married again and she'll be needed there more often, so I asked Reverend Coles to find me a handy woman."
She wondered why he had no wife of his own to take care of the house for him. He looked... healthy enough to manage a wife. Of course, it was hardly a question she could ask. One of them at least ought to have manners.
He kept a clean shirt in his hand and disappeared into the scullery. She heard water splashing from a pump.
"What made you come so far from London?" he shouted.
"It was Reverend Coles' idea." She sighed, looking around at the mess again. "He made the west country sound so appealing in his letters."
"You've experience as a housekeeper?"
She could lie, of course. The state of his house suggested this man wouldn't know a good housekeeper if he met one. But she decided to be honest. After all, this was a new beginning, a new life.
"I have not," she said, anxiously gripping her teacup.
"What about references? You must have some."
"I'm afraid not."
"None at all?" Deverell exclaimed, emerging from the other room, still in the process of tugging the clean shirt over his shoulders and exposing a tanned slab of naked torso at the same time. "But you can cook?"
She averted her gaze at once, her heartbeat suddenly leaping up into her throat, making it very difficult to swallow. "Yes. No." Oh, what was she saying? "I'm an abysmal cook... but not for want of trying."
"I see. What about sewing?"
"Not a stitch." In London, Bert Soames kept a seamstress who made all 'Kitty Blue's' clothes— or altered them from second and third-hand garments, which Kate often suspected had been taken from corpses at the morgue. She'd had more than a few gowns that looked as if they were once trampled under carriage wheels and horse's hoo
ves, or dragged up out of the river. As for Flynn's shirts, their landlady had sewn those whenever he needed a new one.
"What about laundry?"
"I'm sure I can learn."
"Lighting fires? Cleaning windows?"
Still avoiding his gaze, she tucked that persistent stray curl back under her bonnet brim again. "How hard can it be?" How did she explain that when one lived a nocturnal life, clean windows were unimportant? And fires were for the wealthy who could afford coal— unless they scrambled for it in the Thames where it sometimes fell from barges.
There followed another short silence and then he said, "At least you've got a pretty face. We seldom see the like of you in these parts."
She gripped her cup of tea in both hands and took a hearty gulp.
Don't look up. Don't look...Oh, has he got the damnable shirt on yet?
Then he added, "Those lips alone might be worth the twenty-five pounds a year salary I promised."
Alas, she had to look. What else was a woman supposed to do when a man said such a thing to her? And in front of her son too. Had he no propriety?
Not that Flynn was listening. A quick glance reassured her that the boy was too busy eating bacon and playing with the man's dog.
Her new employer tipped his head to one side, hands paused in the motion of tucking the shirt into his well-worn riding breeches. "Did I speak amiss? You look all...peevish."
"Sir, it is not the sort of comment one should make to one's housekeeper."
He shrugged, only drawing her attention to his wide shoulders again. "You'll have to forgive me, if I'm too straightforward. I'm a country fellow, Duchess. I don't complicate matters. I tend to say what I think, as soon as the thought comes to me."
"I'm sure that causes you many trials and tribulations then."
"Once in a while," he admitted frankly, with a quick grin. "Mostly I manage to avoid trouble."
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