“Yes, my dear. Come along now. The intermission is over and Douglas is getting testy.”
Alex bided her time, but it was difficult. The moment they arrived back at the Sherbrooke town house, she kissed Sinjun good night and grabbed her husband’s hand, dragging him into their bedchamber.
“You want me that badly?” Douglas asked, staring at her with some amusement.
“Sinjun met Colin Kinross. I saw her speaking to him. I fear she’s been rather forward, Douglas.”
Douglas looked down at his hands. He then lifted a branch of candles and carried it to the table beside their bed. He studied it for a while, in meditative silence, then shrugged. “We will leave it be until tomorrow. Sinjun isn’t stupid, nor is she a silly twit. Ryder and I raised her properly. She would never ever jump her fences too quickly.”
At ten o’clock the following morning, Sinjun was ready to jump. She was waiting on the front steps of the Sherbrooke town house, dressed in a dark blue riding habit, looking as fine as a pence, so Doris had told her firmly, and she was lightly slapping her riding crop against her boot.
Where was he? Hadn’t he believed her? Had he just realized that she wasn’t to his taste and didn’t intend to come?
Just before she was on the edge of incoherence, she saw him cantering up, astride a magnificent black barb. He pulled up when he saw her, leaned down just a bit, and gave her a lazy smile.
“Aren’t I to be allowed in your house?”
“I don’t think so. It’s too soon.”
All right, he thought, he would accept that for the moment. “Where is your horse?”
“Follow me.” She walked around the back of the house to the stables. Her mare, Fanny, was standing placidly, calmly accepting the caresses bestowed on her neck by a doting Henry, one of the stable lads. She waved him away and mounted by herself. She arranged her skirts, knew in her heart that she wasn’t physically capable of presenting a finer picture, and prayed. She gave him a tentative smile. “It’s early. Shall we go to the park?”
He nodded and pulled alongside her. She didn’t say a word. He frowned as he neatly guided his stallion around a dray filled with kegs of beer and three clerks dressed in funereal black. The streets were crowded with hawkers, shopkeepers, wagons of all sorts, ragged children from the back streets. He stayed close, saying nothing, keeping a lookout for any danger. There was danger everywhere, naturally, but he realized that she could deal with most anything that could happen. If she couldn’t, why then, he was a man, and he could. Whatever else she was, she was an excellent rider.
When they reached the park, he said as they turned into the north gate, “Let’s gallop for a bit. I know a lady shouldn’t so indulge herself, but it is early, as you said.”
They raced to the end of the long outward trail and his stallion, strong as Douglas’s horse, beat Fanny soundly. She was laughing when she pulled her mare.
“You ride well,” Colin said.
“As do you.”
Colin patted his stallion’s neck. “I asked Lord Brassley who you were. Unfortunately he didn’t see you speaking to me. I described you, but to be frank, ma’am, he couldn’t imagine any lady, particularly Lady Joan Sherbrooke, speaking to me as you did.”
She rubbed the soft leather of her York riding gloves. “How did you describe me?”
She’d gotten to him again, but he refused to let her see it. He shrugged and said, “Well, I said you were reasonably toothsome in a blond sort of way, that you were tall and had quite lovely blue eyes, and your teeth were white and very straight. I had to tell him that you were brazen to your toenails.”
She was silent for a moment, looking over his left shoulder. “I suppose that’s fair enough. But he didn’t recognize me? How very odd. He’s a friend of my brother’s. He is also a rake but good-hearted, so Ryder says. I fear he still tends to see me as a ten-year-old who was always begging a present off him. He had to escort me once to Almack’s last Season, and Douglas told me in no uncertain terms that Brass wasn’t blessed with an adaptable intellect. I was to remain quiet and soft-spoken and on no account to speak of anything that lay between the covers of books to him. Douglas said it would make him bolt.”
Colin chewed this over. He simply didn’t know what to think. She looked like a lady, and Brass had said that Lady Joan Sherbrooke was a cute little chit, adored by her brothers, perhaps a bit out of the ordinary from some stories he’d heard, but he’d never noticed anything pert about her himself. He’d then lowered his voice, whispering that she knew too much about things in books, at least he’d heard that from some matrons who were gossiping about her, their tones utterly disapproving, and she was indeed tall. But then again, she’d been waiting on the front steps of the town house for him to arrive, certainly not what the young lady of the house would do, would she? Wouldn’t an English young lady be waiting in the drawing room, a cup of tea in her hand? Brass had also insisted that Joan Sherbrooke’s hair was a plain regular brown, nothing out of the ordinary, but it wasn’t. In the early sunlight it was at least a dozen colors, from the palest blond to a dark ash.
Oh, to hell with it. He didn’t understand, and he wasn’t at all certain he believed her. More likely, she was looking for a protector. Perhaps she was the lady’s maid to this Lady Joan Sherbrooke, or a cousin. He should just tell her that he had no money and all she could expect from him would be a fun roll in the hay, no more, no less.
“I have taken you by surprise,” Sinjun said, watching the myriad expressions flit over his face. On the heels of her calmly reasoned understatement, she said in a rush, “You’re the most beautiful man I have ever seen in my life, but it’s not that, not really. I wanted you to know that it wasn’t only your face that drew me to you, it was . . . well, just . . . oh goodness, I don’t know.”
“Me, beautiful?” Colin could only stare at her. “A man isn’t beautiful, that is nonsense. Please, just tell me what you want and I shall do my best to see that you get it. I can’t be your protector, I’m sorry. Even if I were the randiest goat in all of London, it would do me no good. I have no money.”
“I don’t want a protector, if by that you mean you would take me on as a mistress.”
“Yes,” he said slowly, fascinated now. “That is what I meant.”
“I can’t be a mistress. Even if I wanted to be, it wouldn’t help you. Surely my brother wouldn’t release my dowry if you didn’t wed me. I suspect he wouldn’t be pleased if I did become your mistress. He is very old-fashioned about some things.”
“Then why are you doing this? Pray, tell me. Did one of my benighted friends put you up to this? Are you the mistress of Lord Brassley? Or Henry Tompkins? Or Lord Clinton?”
“Oh no, no one put me up to anything.”
“Not everyone likes the fact that I’m a Scot. Even though I went to school with a good many of the men here in London, they think it just fine to drink with me and sport with me, but not for me to wed their sisters.”
“I think you could be a Moroccan and I would still feel as I do.”
He could but stare at her. The soft blue feather of her riding hat—a ridiculously small confection of nonsense—curled about her face, framing it charmingly. Her riding habit, a darker blue, darker than her eyes, he saw, fit her to perfection, and it wasn’t flirtatious, that habit, no, it was stylish and showed off her high breasts and narrow waist and . . . He cursed, fluently and low.
“You sound just like my brothers, but usually they’re laughing before they get to the end of their curses.”
He started to say something but realized that she was staring at his mouth. No, she couldn’t be a lady. She was a damned jest, paid for by one of his friends. “Enough!” he bellowed. “This is all an act, it has to be. You can’t want to marry me, just like that, and proceed to announce it in the most brazen way imaginable!” He turned suddenly in his saddle and jerked her against him. He pulled her out of her sidesaddle and over his thighs. He held her still until both horses quieted, not
that he had to do anything, because she didn’t fight him, not at all. She immediately pressed her breasts against him. No, she couldn’t be a lady, no way in hell.
He forced her against his left arm and lifted her chin with his gloved fingertips. He kissed her hard, his tongue probing against her closed lips. He raised his head, anger in his voice. “Damn you, open your mouth like you’re supposed to.”
“All right,” she said, and opened her mouth.
At the sight of her open mouth, Colin couldn’t help himself. He laughed. “Bloody hell, you look like you’re about to sing an opera like that vile soprano from Milan. Oh, damnation!” He set her again onto Fanny’s back. Fanny, displeased, pranced to the side, but Sinjun, even a Sinjun who was nearly incoherent with pleasure and excitement and amusement, managed to bring her easily under control.
“All right. I will accept that you are a lady. I will . . . no, I cannot accept that you saw me at the Portmaines’ ball and decided you wanted to marry me.”
“Well, I wasn’t precisely certain I wanted to marry you then, at that moment, just that I thought I could look at you for the rest of my life.”
He was disarmed immediately. “Before I see you again—if I see you again—I would that you cloak yourself in a bit of guile. Not a tremendous amount, mind you, but enough so that you don’t leave me slack-jawed, with nothing to say when you announce something utterly outrageous.”
“I’ll try,” Sinjun said. She looked away from him for a moment, across the wide expanse of thick green grass, to the riding trails that intersected the park. “Do you think perhaps I could be maybe pretty enough for you? Oh, I know all the other about toothsomeness was just a jest. I wouldn’t want you to be ashamed of me, to be embarrassed if I did become your wife.”
She met his eyes as she spoke. He just shook his head. “Stop it, do you hear me? For God’s sake, you’re quite lovely, as you must certainly know.”
“People will tell any number of lies, offer more Spanish coin than would fill a cask if they believed one an heiress. I’m not stupid.”
He dismounted his stallion, hooked the reins about his hand, and strode to beneath a full-leafed oak tree. “Come here. We must talk before I willingly incarcerate myself in Bedlam.”
Ah, to stand close to him, Sinjun thought, as she obeyed him with alacrity.
She looked up at that cleft in his chin, and without thought, she raised her hand, stripped off the glove, and her fingertip traced the cleft. He stood completely motionless.
“I will make you an excellent wife. Do you promise you don’t have a troll’s character?”
“I like animals and I don’t shoot them for sport. I have five cats, excellent ratters, all of them, and at night they have the hearth all to themselves. If ever it is really cold in the dead of winter, they sleep with me, but not often, because I tend to thrash about and crush them. If you mean, would I beat you, the answer is no.”
“You’re obviously very strong. I’m pleased you don’t hurt those who are weaker. Do you also care about people? Are you kind? Do you feel responsible for those people who are your dependents?”
He couldn’t look away from her. It was very distressing, but he said, “Yes, I suppose so.”
He thought of his huge castle, only half of it really a castle, and that one not medieval by any means but built by a Kinross earl in the late seventeenth century. He loved the castle with its towers and its crenellated battlements and its parapets and deep embrasures. Ah, but it was so drafty in some parts, so dilapidated, that one could catch an inflammation of the lung just standing in one spot for ten minutes. So much had to be done to bring the entire castle back up to snuff. And all the outbuildings and the stables, the crofts and the drainage system. And the depleted herds of sheep and cattle, and his crofters, so many of them, poor and dispirited because they had nothing, not even enough seeds to plant for crops to feed themselves, and the bloody future was so grim and hopeless if he didn’t do something . . . .
He looked away from her, toward the line of immense town houses that lined the far side of Hyde Park. “My inheritance was sorely depleted by my father and polished off by my brother, the sixth earl, before he died. I need a lot of money or my family will be reduced to genteel poverty, and many of my dependents will be forced to emigrate, that or starve. I live in a huge old castle set at the eastern side of Loch Leven, beautiful really, not far to the northwest of Edinburgh, on the Fife Peninsula. But still, you would see it as a savage land, despite all its arable land and gentle rolling hills. You’re English and you’d see only the barren heights and crevices, and savage, rocky crags and hidden glens with torrents of rushing water bursting through them, water so cold your lips turn blue just to drink it. It’s usually not all that cold in the winter months, but the days are short and the winds occasionally heavy. In the spring the heather covers the hills with purple, and the rhododendron spreads over every crofter’s hut and even climbs the walls of my drafty castle, in all shades of pink and red and magenta.”
He shook himself. He was prosing on like an idiot poet about Scotland and his part of it, as if he were parading his credentials for her inspection, and she was looking up at him, her expression rapt, taking in every word and watching his mouth. It was absurd. He wouldn’t, couldn’t, accept it. He said abruptly, “Listen, it’s true. My lands have the possibility of wealth because of all the arable acres, and I have ideas how to help my crofters improve their lot and thus improve my own in the process. No, we’re not like the Highlands that must even now import sheep to survive. It’s called enclosing, and it’s a pernicious practice, for all the men and women who have lived on their plots of land for generations are being systematically disinherited. They’re leaving Scotland or coming to England to work in the new factories. So I must have money, Joan, and there is no other way for me to save my inheritance except by marrying it.”
“I understand. Come home with me and speak to my brother Douglas. He’s the earl of Northcliffe, you know. We will ask him exactly what my dowry is. It’s bound to be very generous. I heard him saying to my mother once that she should stop her picking at me for being on the shelf. Since I was an heiress, he said, I could marry anyone I wanted, even if I was fifty years old and had no teeth.”
He looked at her helplessly. “Why me?”
“I haven’t the foggiest notion, but there it is.”
“I could stab you in your bed.”
Her eyes darkened and he felt a surge of lust so great it rocked him on his heels.
“I said stab, not tup.”
“What does tup mean?”
“It means . . . oh, damnation, where is that wretched guile I asked you to fetch up? Tup is a crude word, forgive me for saying it.”
“Oh, you mean lovemaking, then.”
“Yes, that is what I mean, only I was referring to it in a more basic way, what it usually is between men and women, not the high-blown romantic nonsense that females must call lovemaking.”
“You are cynical, then. I suppose I can’t expect you to be perfect in every way. My two brothers make love, they don’t tup. Perhaps I can teach you all about it. But first, of course, you will have to show me the way of such things. It wouldn’t do for you to continue to shout with laughter when I open my mouth for you to kiss me.”
Colin turned away from her. He felt marooned on a very insubstantial island, one that kept shifting beneath his boots. He hated losing control. He’d lost control over his inheritance, and that was enough to try any man. He didn’t want to lose control with a woman to boot, but she kept thrusting and parrying, being utterly outrageous and taking it for granted that it was just fine, that it was normal, almost that it was expected. No Scottish girl would ever behave like this supposedly refined English lady. It was absurd. He felt like a damned fool. “I won’t promise you love. I cannot. It will never be. I don’t believe in love, and I have very good reasons. I have years of reasons.”
“That’s what my brother Douglas said about his bride
, Alexandra. But he changed, you know. She kept after him until he converted himself, and now I do believe that he would gladly lie down in the middle of a mud puddle and let her tread across him.”
“He’s a bloody fool.”
“Perhaps. But he’s a very happy bloody fool.”
“I won’t speak of this further. You are driving me into the bloody boughs and down again. No, be quiet. I’m taking you home. I must think. And so must you. I’m just a man, do you understand me? Just a man, no more, no less. If I married you, it would be for your groats, not for your lovely eyes or your probably very nice body.”
Sinjun just nodded and asked very quietly, “Do you really think I have a nice body?”
He cursed, gave her a boot up, and climbed back into his own saddle. “No,” he said, feeling more harassed than he’d ever felt in his life. “No, just be quiet.”
Sinjun was in no hurry to return to the Sherbrooke town house, but Colin was. She paid him no heed when they arrived, merely guided Fanny to the stables at the back of the mansion. He was forced to follow.
“Henry, do see to the horses, please. This is his lordship, Lord Ashburnham.”
Henry tugged on the bright red curl that dipped onto his forehead. He looked very interested in him, Colin saw, and wondered at it. Surely this outrageous girl had dozens of men panting around her, if for nothing more than to see what she would say next. Lord, her brother must have to warn every man who came through the front door about her excessive candor.
Sinjun skipped up the front steps and opened the door. She stood aside to wave him into the entrance hall. It wasn’t the size of the Italian black-and-white marble entrance hall at Northcliffe, but it was of noble proportions nonetheless. White marble with pale blue veins stretched to the pale blue walls, most of them covered with paintings of past Sherbrookes.
Sinjun closed the door and looked around to see if Drinnen, the butler, or any of his minions were anywhere to be seen. There was no one. She turned back to Colin and gave him a brilliant smile and a very conspiratorial one, truth be told. He frowned. She took two steps and stopped, toe to toe with him.
The Heiress Bride Page 3