The Way The Wallflower Wed

by Devon, Eva

  She nodded, quite pleased he was so protective of such remarkable items. He was no fool to be letting anyone touch the artifacts. He did not show them off in arrogant pomp.

  Savoring her simple dinner, she returned to the bread and cheese. The flavors burst upon her tongue in the most magnificent array of tastes. It was such a pleasure to finally be eating, and with someone who was so interesting.

  Meals with her family were incredibly dull affairs.

  The food was particularly terrible, for their cook had no imagination, and her parents had little to no conversation, except for speaking of pheasants and the state of the Season.

  Pippa had no interest in the Season, and she certainly had no interest in her family’s attempts to raise themselves back up into the echelons of society.

  They’d never been part of the best set, but they had been close for a golden moment. But her father’s poor decisions had seen them decline. Her father was nigh obsessed with returning to what he saw as his rightful place.

  She could not have cared less.

  No, she cared for the books in the library her grandfather had built so long ago, filled with things he thought were great treasures.

  Leather-bound, first editions.

  For her grandfather had not been able to read until he was nearly an old man and that. . . That had instilled in him a love of books so voracious it was almost an obsession.

  She liked the fact that she had become such a studious person when he was barely able to read himself for most of his life.

  She liked to think he would have admired her for it.

  Yet, it was impossible to know what he truly would have thought of her and her commitment to her own education.

  Perhaps, he would have hated the fact that a woman was reading so much, but she refused to even consider it.

  She rather liked to think she had her grandfather’s entrepreneurial spirit.

  It certainly explained why she had been willing to show up upon the Earl of Roxley’s doorstep and why she was so happily eating his bread, cheese, pear, and wine, standing opposite him now, completely alone, without any concern for a chaperone.

  Roxley narrowed his gaze, his emerald eyes captivating as he assessed her. “You have the strangest look upon your face,” he said.

  “Do I?” she asked, her body quite alight at his study. She’d never felt thus before, and it was both compelling and alarming. Did he make all ladies feel this way?

  “Indeed,” he said. He waggled his dark brows at her. “Contemplating a bit of lace?”

  “You are simply trying to get a rise out of me.” She shook her finger playfully at him. “It shall not work.”

  “How disappointing,” he teased, his gaze warm. “I’d rather like to see you in a rise again. Your cheeks become the most interesting shade of pink.”

  “They do not,” she denied firmly, heat lacing up her neck and into her face.

  “You see?” he challenged, a soft laugh rumbling in his chest. But it was not a laugh of superiority but of approval. “I am able to get a rise out of you.”

  She gave him a mock look of scorn. “Why do you wish to do so?”

  That seemed to give him pause, and he hesitated for a long moment before he replied, “Because it is most interesting to see how humans react.”

  “Do you not ever react?” she asked. It did not surprise her that he studied the nature of humans. It was, no doubt, why he preferred to spend so much time with the past.

  “You know that I do,” he said simply, finishing his bread and cheese. “You’ve seen it. You’ve seen I have no tolerance for fools.”

  “You mean men like the Earl of Westmore?” she asked.

  “That idiot,” he all but snarled. “Yes. But there are a great many more like him and worse.”

  A look of supreme displeasure darkened Roxley’s face. “Right now, in Egypt, many ruthless men are causing an absolute disaster. And I must get back there as soon as I have finished cataloging my own affairs.”

  “You’re going to leave soon?” she asked, placing her nearly finished bread down upon her plate, dread pooling in her belly. She had only just met him. She loathed the idea of saying goodbye soon.

  “I must,” he said forcefully. “I have a great deal to do there. It is imperative I take as many notes and make as many drawings as I can before more fools destroy everything they touch.”

  A ferocious growl of disgust rippled from his throat. “Napoleon has made a muck of everything. The Continent and now Egypt. You mark my words. And it won’t be over any time soon.”

  She drew in a long breath, trying to take in the full breadth of everything he had just declared. “You, sir, are most intriguing.”

  “Most people don’t think so.” He plunged a hand through his dark hair, leaving it positively wild about his handsome face. “Most people think I’m absolutely impossible.”

  “I didn’t say you weren’t impossible,” she corrected. “But I did say you were most intriguing.”

  “I see,” he said tersely. “Well, you have a great deal of work to do. You should go now.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, sensing the discussion was done. He had revealed perhaps more than he had intended to her. And she appreciated his frankness. “You are correct.”

  She took a last, long drink of the rich wine, put it down, and looked back to the corridor. She picked up her candles and readied herself to bid him a good night.

  “You won’t be able to find your way, will you?” he said abruptly.

  She wrinkled her nose at his disdainful supposition. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Back to your chambers,” he clarified. “You won’t be able to find your way.”

  Her spine straightened. Admire him though she did, he really was quite a troublesome fellow, who underestimated her at every turn. “Of course, I shall.”

  “Ha,” he said, leveling her with his charged gaze. “My house is a rabbit warren.”

  She shook her head, unbothered. “Oh, no, I will be able to find my way quite easily. I have a good sense of direction, you know.”

  And then. . . She did not know what drove her to it, but she winked at him. Yes! Winked. “Quite a good traveler, you know?”

  “A good traveler, you say?” he growled softly.

  “Oh, yes,” she affirmed, licking her lips at the sound of his delicious voice.

  “Trying to finagle yourself into a passage to Egypt?” he asked.

  “Honestly,” she said, clutching the candles tightly to her person. “It never even crossed my mind. But if you would like to take me, I shall happily go.”

  “We shall discuss it another time,” he said. “Now, I shall escort you back to your chambers.”

  “It really is not necessary,” she said firmly, determined to make him understand she did not need his assistance. “I am most capable, and it is time you stop insinuating I am not.”

  “Well, then,” he gestured towards the door, far too smugly. “Off, you go.”

  And she did.

  It was the most triumphant she’d felt in a long time, possibly years! Especially when she took a single glance back over her shoulder and spotted his absolutely shocked face.

  She headed through the kitchen doors, back into the corridor they’d taken, and headed easily to her chambers.

  She’d been born with a remarkable sense of direction, and she had a marvelous feeling it was going to pay dividends.

  Chapter 7

  Roxley prowled his sparse chambers. Chambers he kept free of distractions so he might direct his energies where he most wished them to be focused upon. Antiquities.

  But this night, he was not thinking of antiquities.

  Devil take it. He was thinking of the young woman just down the hall, who had shown up upon his doorstep like a zephyr. A welcome whirlwind that had shaken up his stuffy halls in but a few hours.

  He liked Pippa Post a great deal.

  And not just as an intellectual equal.

  It was most cha
llenging, for he had a strange suspicion she was actually going to prove a most sensible assistant.

  She had not balked at the books he had brought her, as many had done before. She had made no sort of stammering protestations of horror at the task he had set her in translation. She had easily eaten and enjoyed the simple meal he had given her, and she had found her way easily back through his house with no silly qualms.

  After making certain that she had indeed found her way back to her rooms, he’d tried to read, but the words had blurred before his eyes.

  He kept seeing the tendrils of her red hair coiled against her pale neck and the flash of her blue eyes as they twinkled indignantly at his suggestion that she mightn’t be able to find her way back to her room.

  Not only had she headed off with more confidence than half the young men he’d interviewed, she’d done it easily and with little aplomb.

  Marcus had had fourteen potential assistants lose their way on the way back to their chamber when they had stayed overnight for their interviews.

  Most of them had been so lost that they’d started hollering for help. Much to their horror and Marcus’ resignation, the earl would inevitably find them and lead them back to their rooms, tails between their legs.

  But not the indomitable Miss Post.

  She was a woman to be reckoned with. She was a person to be reckoned with.

  And, oh, how he admired that.

  He wasn’t accustomed to finding such people as her, and he wasn’t going to let her go, not if she proved to be as capable an assistant as he thought she was going to be.

  Which was quite odd because, this morning, when she’d pounded upon his door, as sopping wet as a someone shipwrecked, he was certain she was just another fool’s errand.

  But now? Now he knew his biggest difficulty was going to be in the fact that he wished to bed her.

  And one could not bed one’s assistant.

  Or at least, one should not, certainly.

  Wouldn’t it make things far too complicated? Surely, such an action on his part would make him a bastard.

  He scowled. He had never been in this predicament. . . Desiring someone who was to be in his employ?

  At first glance, he never would have thought he would want Miss Post.

  But want her, he did, damnation.

  There was something in her practical voice, in her sharp manner, in the way she simply accepted any challenge with zest, that made her. . . Well, irresistible.

  He felt fairly certain he could ask her to mount a camel and travel the desert with him to Damascus and she would cheerfully oblige, reveling in the new experience.

  Most of the men he knew shuddered at the idea of camels and a sun that did not relent. They managed for prestige and treasure.

  Miss Post? She looked as if she was so eager for knowledge that she would happily tackle sand ants to discover the name of a pharaoh.

  In short, Miss Post was most certainly his sort. She was the sort he’d never known he wanted. . . For, he’d never met anyone like her before.

  And there was the fact that her lips were most inviting. . . She had the most charming habit of flashing him with indulgent smiles when he roared at her.

  And roar, he had.

  Bloody hell. . . How was he going to stay away from her and work with her at once?

  Perhaps. . . Perhaps they could find pleasure of mind and body?

  No. It was an absurd idea. Surely, she would become emotional and fall in love with him, and it would become incredibly difficult.

  Or was she as independent-minded in the pursuit of lust as she was in the pursuit of history?

  A vision of her, her gown sliding down her strong, slender body appeared to him, and he swallowed like a man witnessing a mirage when parched in a vast desert.

  Did he dare ask her? It seemed a really quite dangerous proposition.

  He wasn’t a man who enjoyed having affairs.

  They took too much time, and he was far too busy to keep a mistress pleased outside of bed.

  But if, perhaps, they both shared a mutual love of history and passion for it, they could perhaps enjoy time together in bed and enjoy time together working over his artifacts.

  No, no, he thought to himself, shaking his head woefully, desperate to rid himself of the delicious image of her nude body from his mind.

  He would not even entertain the thought, even as he considered her pink lips, the soft curve of her small breasts, the slight round of her hip.

  Bloody hell, he loved the look of her lips as she spoke of lessons and learning and education and history and asked remarkably sensible questions.

  Marcus sucked in a deep breath meant to calm his heated body. It did not work.

  He could not allow himself to think on her, could he?

  The way her gown had skimmed her body, there had been no siren’s temptation in it.

  It was a gown as good as one might expect on a governess.

  Nothing enticing, nothing exciting.

  And yet, damnation, he found himself admiring her, and he knew it wasn’t because she was beautiful in any particularly usual sense of the word.

  It was her boldness, her lust for life, her hunger to learn, just as he did, that attracted him to her.

  She was irresistible in her hunger for life.

  He had met so few people who truly wished to know about the past that he suddenly found himself feeling an affinity to her that he had not experienced with another person in a great many years.

  His family had dismissed him as impossible and a disappointment years ago. His mother and father had died years ago, both of them fairly certain he would prove completely ineffectual as an earl.

  They’d been mistaken in one part. He ran his estates most carefully, but he loathed the ton. So, in that, they had been correct. Perpetuating the Roxley line meant little to him.

  And as far as he could tell, most people only cared for the gilded things of this life.

  Most of the young men who had come to interview for the position of his assistant only cared about the artifacts as treasures, as jewels, as items they could prop up on their mantle and show off to the world.

  Not Miss Post.

  She was clearly interested in the history of it, and that, that was perhaps going to be his undoing, but it was also what was going to make her invaluable. . . If he could resist his own hunger for her, her mind. . . And a body that looked strong enough to make merry in his bed and climb the pyramids of Giza.

  Chapter 8

  Marcus awoke after some quite disturbing dreams. . . Not disturbing in the sense of upsetting, but in the graphic nature of them.

  Miss Post had been the center of his fantasies, in positions that had certainly not been what one might expect of an assistant.

  They had been, in fact, the most erotic dreams of his adult life.

  Marcus donned his breeches quickly, trying to direct his thoughts to where they belonged, and that was to the cold basin of water he prepared every night so that it was ready for him upon waking.

  Vigorously, he thrust his hands into the icy water and splashed his face and chest with it, delighting in the invigorating feel of frigid water meeting his skin.

  He toweled himself down, then quickly pulled on his linen shirt.

  Shoving his feet into his stockings and boots, he headed straight out in the hall, desperate for coffee. He would have a quick drink and then head out for his daily five-mile walk. Once completed, he would return as the sun rose and begin his work.

  It was the only way he could begin his days. Cold water and walking.

  If he did not undertake these two tasks, his days devolved into a melancholy disaster.

  No, his days always had to begin the same, with an invigorating splash, a good walk, and quite a good bit of coffee, all of which allowed his thoughts to roam and to put pieces of different ideas together.

  Yes, his walk would also allow him to collect his thoughts about his assistant. He needed that time to formul
ate a plan before he saw her.

  Fortunately, he highly doubted Miss Post would be up for some time or daring to show her face until she had gotten her translations done. So, he wouldn’t have to worry about her at present.

  No, he wouldn’t worry about her at all.

  Nor the fact she might have strained her eyes in the night or that she might’ve been cold in her room or that. . .

  “No,” he grumbled to himself.

  He refused to allow her to be the center of his thoughts.

  As he bounded down the stairs towards the foyer, he was quite surprised to hear footsteps.

  “There you are, Roxley!” Miss Post exclaimed. “I was wondering when you might get up. I suddenly wondered if you were one of those fellows I’ve read about. They do say a proper London rake spends a good deal of his day in bed.”

  “Ha,” he returned, knowing she was teasing him. “You know I’m neither a Londoner nor a rake.”

  “No,” she agreed, her face beaming with pleasure and self-satisfaction. “But now, I suppose, I’m trying to get a rise out of you.”

  He ground his teeth together.

  He never should have told her he enjoyed the color of her pinkened cheeks when he teased her, because now he had a terrible feeling she was going to try to get a rise out of him whenever the chance presented itself.

  She cocked her head to the side and pursed her lips. “You have a most interesting shade to your cheeks as well. Though it’s a much ruddier shade than I’m sure mine was.”

  Miss Post clapped her hands then gestured towards his study. “Now come, if you would like to inspect my work.”

  “Your work?” he queried.

  “Yes.” She narrowed her gaze, perplexed, before she rushed enthusiastically, “The translations you asked for. They’re finished and upon your desk. But I don’t know why you would ask me to translate Marcus Aurelius. It’s been done to death, Roxley. I love his works, of course. His musings about life are very, very interesting and a good life lived. I quite like the Stoics myself. Epictetus is a particular favorite.”