‘Do you still have the headache, my lord?’
‘Not unless I roll about on the lump on the back of my head.’
‘Then do you think you could endure a little light if I open the shutters slightly?’ she asked to try and gauge how sensitive to light he was and if she ought to worry about him more than she already was. If there was a lingering chance of concussion it should have shown by now, but she was determined to keep him in bed for another day just in case she was wrong.
‘Gladly. I would like to see even a hint of today since I seem to be sleeping so much of it away it feels like a waste of a fine summer day.’
‘You are injured, Lord Stratford. You must take care until we are sure your head injury is less serious than the doctor feared. I knew you were going to be a difficult patient the moment you started to feel a little better,’ she said with her back to him as she let in a small shaft of curious sunlight now it had moved up the sky and would not shine directly into his eyes.
She tried hard to pretend he was only a man in need of a little compassion and not in any way special as she drifted about his bedchamber, tidying little details of the room Darius had no time to worry about. If she tried hard enough, she could forget Lord Stratford possessed strength and character as well as too much money for his own good—oh, and that wretched title as well. Mother Nature had been generous with her gifts when he was born and Marianne wondered if the lady was hell-bent on mischief when she gave him energy and presence as well as an unforgettable face, even if she had withheld classically handsome features. The man was too definite for such smooth good looks, but by the time you realised that it was too late—he had already remade handsome and the rest into also-rans.
‘Who, me?’ he answered as if he would never dream of being awkward or lordly and she almost laughed.
She added charm, when he chose to use it, to that list of unfair ways Lord Stratford was unforgettable and frowned to make it clear that tactic would not get round her any better than a brusque series of orders. ‘Yes, you. It is in your best interest to rest until your head is better and trying to charm your way downstairs before you are ready to leave this room will not get you anywhere.’
‘I shall have to confound you and endure it like a gentleman then, or is that your plan, Mrs Turner? You point out how awkward I am likely to be so I will play the perfect invalid to show you how wrong you are. Is that how you keep ugly customers like me in order?’
‘I don’t know, I have never had to deal with one quite as ugly as you before, Lord Stratford,’ she lied smoothly, but this time he grinned at her as if he knew it was untrue. He thought he had her measure and that felt far too dangerous. The last thing she wanted was him knowing what she really thought of him. If he knew she had tried to sleep earlier, after far too many wearisome days and nights of worrying over Juno and then him, and failed because of him, he would know he had the advantage and play on it to get his own way. Even closing her eyes and trying to nap had been a mistake, she reminded herself.
She turned away from him again and frowned down at the short stretch of garden where the house backed on to the road to the farm and stables through the sliver of a gap in the shutters. She had thought it was prudent to allow him this so he would not get out of bed and fling them wide as soon as her back was turned. Yet as soon as she tried to relax she was haunted by silly images of him awake and aware under her searching hands, instead of unconscious and worryingly still as he was yesterday when she frantically explored his body for injuries. He had such a honed and muscular body under his once-splendid clothes as well.
She did not usually care how a man would look naked, not since she lost Daniel and thought she would never want to be intimate with a man ever again. Yet even now her fingers twitched involuntarily as if they were longing for the feel of him under them again, so she eyed them as if they had turned traitor. They still yearned to explore his firm satin skin over honed muscles and a flat belly she had been certain no aristocrat would possess, until she searched almost every inch of him for hurts she winced at finding, although she kept telling herself he was nothing to her.
‘If that does not work, I shall just have to find another way to stop you doing yourself permanent damage by doing too much too soon,’ she said and from the hot dare in his mesmerising blue eyes he had heard the mistake in that sentence just as she did as soon as it was out of her mouth. No, she would not be joining him in that bed to keep him there until he was well enough to get up and start ordering the world again. ‘A sleeping draught, perhaps, or maybe I could get Darius to knock you out with a cudgel,’ she added.
A fiery blush still stung her cheeks at the image of them in bed together with her doing all sorts of wrong and inventive things to keep him there. She cursed herself for that giveaway flush of hot colour and he could hardly miss it when there was not much else to look at in this bare bedchamber. She had only just got it clean and had had a new mattress brought in when he needed it so urgently. All the extra comforts she was planning to add hadn’t seemed important. She would have another chair or two brought up so the others could sit with him and keep him amused. And she needed to consult Fliss about adding a rug and some furniture. If Lord Stratford felt more comfortable, he might be less restless and less inclined to run before he could walk on that damaged ankle. There, she had almost forgotten to be conscious of him as a man while she did her best to reduce his stay here to a domestic detail.
‘I can think of better reasons to be a good patient,’ he told her with a mock leer and an altogether too-disarming grin.
There was still a hot promise in his gaze so she avoided it and frowned at a fresh cobweb instead. There could never be anything between a lord and a humble widow they would not be ashamed of afterwards. ‘I doubt you know how to be patient in any sense of the word, my lord,’ she forced herself to say lightly.
‘And I am trying so hard to be humble,’ he told her half-seriously and she nearly laughed. She could not imagine a less humble man if she ran through a list of the hot-headed and entitled officers she had met from the Duke of Wellington downwards.
‘It could take a lifetime,’ she argued and he smiled as if he knew he was naturally arrogant and impatient, but he was less lordly and very human in private.
‘I will need a lot of help, then,’ he said huskily and all the images in her head earlier were hot in his piercingly blue eyes as he gazed back at her.
Even his mouth looked firm and inviting as the notion of what that help might involve sang between them. He was an invalid, for goodness’ sake. And even when he was well he would still be a viscount. Before she went away again she ought to check the bandages on his wrist and ankle were tight enough, but not cutting into him, except being so close to him right now seemed a bad idea. She almost wished he would go back to being the arrogant and objectionable nobleman she met yesterday. It would be so much easier to treat him with cool and impersonal efficiency, then go back to getting the house ready for a wedding.
With any luck he would be well enough to be very gently driven to Broadley and the best inn in town very soon. He could live there in comfort until he was ready to be driven home in his own beautifully sprung carriage. And if she kept on putting his money, rank and privilege between them maybe she would stop finding him so attractive and powerfully male, even when he was lying there in Darius’s nightshirt and should look less than his usual overconfident self.
She heard a stir down in the yard and thank goodness for a distraction. Now she could be taken up with whoever was out there instead of him and she would not have to get that close to the man without Darius here to take away the intimacy of it.
‘I wonder who that can be?’ she said, with a tut-tut to tell him she did not have time or inclination for visitors. Really, she would be glad to see anyone who would drag her away from his side and break this ridiculous spell he seemed to have cast over her at first sight. She still loved D
aniel and she always would, so of course she did not want another man and she really did not want to want a lord like this one.
‘I have no idea,’ he said, ‘but at least you can walk over to the window and see for yourself.’
‘Hmm, well, I cannot see why anyone would be... Oh, my word,’ she gasped as a team of dray horses came properly into view, then the dray itself appeared, loaded with boxes and all sorts of odd items as if half a house full of furniture and trappings were on the move, but what on earth were they doing here?
‘For goodness’ sake, woman, will you stop peering at whoever is out there and tell me what is going on?’ His Lordship snapped from the bed in angry frustration and there he was again, Alaric the Pirate; barking orders from his sickbed. Good, he should make her temper flare and stop her having silly and overheated ideas about Alaric the man.
‘If I knew that I might tell you,’ she said and turned back from the window with a frown and a stern dare not to even lift his head off his pillow, let alone attempt to get out of bed and see for himself. ‘There is a dray loaded with boxes and bags and furniture drawing up outside, Lord Stratford, and I have to suppose that the driver and his mate have been directed to the wrong place to deliver it since I did not order a single stick of it. I had better go downstairs and send them to wherever they are supposed to be going with it all.’
‘Ah, apparently your friend Miss Donne is even more efficient than I thought.’
‘What on earth can all that stuff have to do with her?’
‘The lady obviously has the good sense to worry about your reputation even if you do not, Mrs Turner. If you continue to stay here without a duenna of some sort now I am in the house, your good name will be in shreds.’
‘I do not have a good name for the gossips to destroy, so it does not matter what they think of me,’ she said. The bitterness in her own voice shocked her. The snide remarks about ladies who wilfully married below their station she had had to pretend not to hear in Bath must have hurt her more than she realised at the time, numbed as she still thought she was by Daniel’s death.
The sound of it made Lord Stratford frown, then look lordly and impatient. ‘It matters to me,’ he said so mildly she felt the sting of his temper more than if he had shouted at her.
A little bit of warmth and caring about her well-being was in there as well as impatience and that might have disarmed her, if she was not already furious about the silly conventions he was worrying about a lot more than she wanted him to. If such empty notions of propriety had made a friend rush here, she would far rather she stayed away. And she did not have time for any more distractions right now, or enough cleared bedrooms to receive them if they intended to stay as that wagonload of furniture and luggage made it look as if they might. ‘It does not matter as much as a snap of my fingers to me,’ she told him defiantly.
‘You were born a lady whether you like it or not, Mrs Turner, and I do not think your brother would thank me for calling him less than a gentleman now. You are still Yelverton’s sister and he has the role of lord of the manor to keep up whether you like it or not. You have to be concerned for your good name if you do not want your family suffering from your lack of one by association.’
That nagging piece of grit in her oyster made her want to blaze fury back at him and tell him he had never been more wrong in his life, but he was quite right, drat him. ‘I know,’ she admitted with a heavy sigh.
Her sister Viola might live in a respectable house several miles away from Chantry Old Hall with her charges and a stern maiden aunt of Sir Harry Marbeck’s, but she was still in Sir Harry’s employ and vulnerable to gossip about her family. For Viola’s sake and for Darius and Fliss’s she had to pay lip service to the conventions. Doubtless Fliss and Darius would soon add another generation of Yelvertons to the mix and the lid would be screwed down on Marianne’s dreams of an independent life once and for all. So she might have to care about things she had left behind with a sigh of relief when she married Daniel, but that did not mean she must like it.
‘I cannot undo the past even if I wanted to and I do not, Lord Stratford,’ she told him defiantly. ‘I do not regret my runaway marriage. As I was not ashamed of my husband while he was alive, I am certainly not going to be now.’
‘Why should you be?’ he said with a quieter challenge. ‘Do you expect me to think less of your late husband because he was born in a more humble bed than you or I? He must have been a brave and honourable man for you to want to marry him in the first place and I respect such men wherever I meet them.’
He sounded offended by her assumption he would not, so she supposed she ought to stop making them. She had secretly accused him of prejudice from the moment their eyes met on that doorstep and he had mistaken her for the maid and her fury with him for that misstep felt far too personal now. She shook her head at her own stupidity, but he took it as disagreement with him and impatience flashed in his eyes as he shot a challenge back at her.
‘Perhaps you ought to think harder about which of us is most inclined to rush to judgement, Mrs Turner,’ he said with a hint of disgust that made her squirm.
‘What you think of me is immaterial. I must go and find out what is going on down there and if you have any sense you will go back to sleep,’ she told him brusquely, trying to pretend his accusation did not sting. What looked like a hired gig had arrived outside now and she saw Fliss draw the horse to a neat halt, so at least her attempt to teach her friend to drive over the last few weeks had paid off.
‘Curse it, we are not done,’ Lord Stratford said as she turned away from her vantage point to leave him to his solitude with what she told herself was a sigh of relief.
‘We are as far as I am concerned,’ she told him and at least in his current state she could walk away from an argument with him. If he was his usual self, she would probably not get halfway across the room before he stood in her way to stop her going and make her listen to his opinion of her. He might even kiss her to be certain of her attention and that was an indignity she must not even think of. So she did nothing else but wonder how it would feel to be kissed by His Lordship while she ran downstairs as if the devil was on her tail.
How fortunate that Miss Donne, Fliss and all those trappings were waiting outside to distract her from impossible fantasies. The very idea of Lord Stratford kissing her until she forgot all the differences between them and sighed for him like a dizzy schoolgirl was unthinkable. It was high time she got it right out of her head and went on with real life.
Chapter Nine
‘That was well done, Defford,’ Alaric muttered disgustedly as he listened to Marianne hurry away. Now he was shut up here with his wretched body aching in every bone and sinew and his head hurt like blazes. No use trying to get up and stagger after her to apologise and explain himself better. ‘The lady must be feeling so much better about her hard lot in life now, you infernal idiot.’
Unfortunately for him the fantasy he had of her sleepy eyed and sated in his bed while he was drifting in and out of sleep yesterday was impossible. Mrs Turner was a lady, whether she wanted to be one or not, so he could not ask her to be his mistress. And the idea of her life being picked over and sniffed at by the Dowagers if he married her made him shudder. Only if they were deeply in love would there be any point risking all the gossip about her late husband and how on earth she had managed to hook his exact opposite the second time around. Marianne’s defiance of the social conventions when she ran away to wed a so-called common soldier would outrage the high sticklers and make her the target of all sorts of wrong-headed speculation. He did not particularly want to have his sanity questioned by his peers either and he was not in love with the woman, he merely admired her beauty and her spirit and her fiery determination and her lithe and lovely figure and... Hmm, that was an awful lot of ands.
Never mind—admiration was not love so they were still impossible for one another and tha
t was good. She would laugh if she knew what a sad state of longing and yearning he had got himself into when he met her sceptical blue eyes for the first time. He was very tired at the time and she was all sleepy eyed and ruffled, so of course she had looked delicious and desirable and like the embodiment of all the dreams he had refused to have as the youthful quarry of most of the husband hunters in the polite world.
As a suddenly desirable young lord instead of a younger son, at first it had taken all his energy to escape the traps laid for a single viscount in possession of all his limbs and teeth. So he had dared not dream of meeting an enchantress one night in Mayfair and falling head over heels in love lest she turn out to be a younger version of his famously beautiful mother. It was too dangerous to dream back then. Since he had acquired enough town bronze to evade the little darlings so eager to be a viscountess they would have taken him even if he had two horns and a tail, he had become too cynical to dream about anything much at all.
He could not accuse Marianne of trying to enchant him when she was obviously not at all pleased to see him that first time, but he contrarily wished she would, then he could stop thinking his way around this feral attraction and let himself just feel for once in his life. He wanted her to look at him as if she could not help tingling with sensual awareness whenever he was near.
He knew an affair was impossible and he could not ruin a woman who had risked so much for the love of a very different man even if she wanted him to. Yet he tried to define the faint scent she had left behind in this bare old room and knew if she felt anything like as itchy and tempted and frustrated about him as he did about her they would be in deep trouble. He would get over it; he knew how to lock up his emotions, but if hers were engaged he could not fight them both. Her refusal to see sense last time she had loved made her dangerous. Except the very idea of being loved so much she stopped caring who he was and did it anyway seemed magnificent and so much bigger than anything he had ever dared hope for. Just as well she did not love him, then.
Unsuitable Bride for a Viscount Page 9