Again, My Lord: A Twist Series Novel (29 page)

“Here you are, ma’am,” Corinna said and offered the reticule. The woman clutched it with gnarled fingers and smiled.

“Thank you, dear girl.” Her eyes glistened. “And thank you, my lord. I enjoyed hearing about your mother’s projects.”

He made an elegant bow. “And I about your grandchildren.” He took her arm and drew her up from the bench. “May I escort you to your friends now?” he asked.

“Oh, no. I am here with my son, but he’s somewhere about the place nearby, I suspect, and shall find me soon.”

“Then to your carriage?”

She chuckled. “What a fine gentleman you are.” She patted his sleeve again, then turned to Corinna. “You keep this one close, dear. Men like him don’t grow on trees.”

Corinna resisted choking on her tongue as the woman tottered away into the crowd, reticule clasped tightly to her bony breast.

The earl moved beside her. “A lady of great taste, obviously,” he said, laughter in his voice again.

Corinna’s bemusement scattered. “More likely blind, and certainly deaf,” she replied, then looked up at him.

She should not have. Where quiet pleasure had shaped his handsome features in the presence of the stranger, now cold aversion shone.

“You would know about an existence deprived of the senses, wouldn’t you?” he said. Without awaiting her riposte, he turned and disappeared into the crowd.

~o0o~

Damn and blast his mother.

No. That wasn’t just. Ian had enormous admiration for his mother. She had a fine character and a formidable mind, both of which she’d been obliged to hide for years because of her husband’s ignorant, intolerant cruelties.

But since the death of his father nine years earlier, his mother had finally made her life what she wished, filled with projects and people the late earl would never have allowed in his home. Though she never asked more from him than her widow’s jointure, Ian always supported her projects. He cared for her deeply.

But that run-in with Corinna Mowbray at the museum was enough to have a man damning Saint Mary if he thought she was even partially to blame for it.

Corinna Mowbray. The burr in his memories of childhood. The bane of his youth. Even Christmas held a blot because of that female and her ceaseless superiority, the same nose-in-the-air, better-than-thou attitude she still cultivated.

He couldn’t have been more than twelve, she a few years younger. The house overflowed with guests for the holidays. He’d been in the stable brushing down his horse after a ride. Even as a child he’d liked several hours alone each day with the horses. The muted sounds of snuffling and chewing, and the scents of straw and animals comforted him. The morning was clear and cold, the stable warm, and he was content.

Then she appeared at the door and his happiness evaporated.

He’d told her to go away. She responded by informing him that he was an imbecile—as usual—and he was doing it all wrong.

At that age he already knew considerably more about the care of horses than any other boy around. But something about Corinna Mowbray always dug at his belly like a sharpened stick. The way she peered at him with her mossy eyes and spoke in short, chopped sentences as though addressing a simpleton never failed to crowd his chest with anger. For Ian, mild-tempered and amusement loving, that sensation felt like death.

She’d stood there in her little white frock with pink roses sprinkled across the sleeves and skirt, her golden-brown hair bound by thick white ribbons, so tight-laced, starched, and prim … and Ian simply left all reason behind.

He taunted her, teasing that she knew nothing of horses or anything worthwhile, only about baby things. The day before she’d showed off her insect collection in the drawing room like no girl he’d ever met. Privately he had been impressed. But faced with her alone in the stable he told her it was nothing but a jumble of dead bugs, most of them wingless and without the correct number of legs. She’d probably ripped them off when she killed them. As his pièce de resistance he said that a person couldn’t ride a dead beetle anyway.

She turned every shade of red until finally she boasted that she might not be able to ride a beetle, but she could ride any horse in his father’s stables.

He mounted her on Storm.

Even now, so many years later, Ian cringed at the image wedged in his memory of the little girl’s twin braids flailing out behind her as the half-broken colt took off across the yard. He’d known then that he shouldn’t have done it. But no one had ever been able to goad him like Corinna Mowbray. Guilt prickling at his insides, nearly as awful as the anger she roused in his young breast, he’d grabbed up his horse and followed.

He discovered her in a ditch beneath a hedge a half-mile from the stables. Storm had disappeared.

Her ankle protruded at a peculiar angle beneath her dirtied skirt and she wept, great heaving sobs, tears staining her pale face, her nose running. But even through her pain and wailing, she managed to tell him in no uncertain terms that he was a cretin, unfit for human company, and she hated him. She refused to allow him to place her on his horse and carry her home. Ian had scowled, mounted, and rode like the devil to fetch the head groom.

He spent the next week standing up at the dinner table, the caning his father gave him left such welts. But he vowed to never again allow Corinna Mowbray to get beneath his skin.

He had, unfortunately, failed at that many times in the succeeding years. He didn’t see her often, and when he did he had every intention of behaving well. But he simply couldn’t seem to hold his tongue with that female. Today’s spitting match was no exception.

Disgust with himself cloyed at his skin. He never treated women with less than the honesty and respect they deserved. Now Corinna Mowbray had him squabbling in public and insulting her as though he were the worst sort of lowbred scoundrel. As though he were his father.

“What’s the trouble, Chance?” Stoopie clapped him on the shoulder. “You look like your five favorite horses just lost at Newmarket one right after the other.”

Ian looked up from his scowl. He’d ridden all the way from the exhibition to Brooks’s already. He supposed he’d left his horse in the care of the club’s groom outside from sheer habit.

He shrugged out of his friend’s grasp. “Must’ve been in a brown study, but it’s passed now,” he said and gave his greatcoat and hat to a footman.

“You wouldn’t know what studying was if it bit you in the arse,” Stoopie chortled. “But I wouldn’t either, so I don’t blame you for it, old chap.”

Ian’s stomach clenched. She’d always told him he had porridge for brains, that he would amount to nothing. Once, when they were older, she’d said he was so lacking in intelligence he would even have to resort to cheating to win at cards, just like his father.

The clench turned to burning.

He’d done well for himself, of course. He enjoyed good friends, the ample proceeds of a smoothly running estate and a superb breeding stable, and the company of the most beautiful unmarried women in England. And he had never cheated at the tables. Not once. He worked hard to make certain he would never be tempted to do so.

“Care for a bite to eat?” the marquess asked, patting his rotund stomach. Ian nodded, casting his eye about for Jag and unreasonably glad he didn’t find the baron amongst the club’s patrons tonight. Jag was far too sharp, and Ian was in no humor for deflecting more questions.

They settled at a table and Stoopie ordered beefsteak and onions. Ian took the same, and a bottle of brandy. Those consumed, he ordered whiskey. Its pungent aroma curled into his nostrils like twin pincers, and the recollection of Corinna Mowbray’s furious face faded slowly from his mind’s eye.

After that, he was too far aloft to recall much of anything.

~o0o~

Ian awoke in unusual discomfort. The bedclothes twisted about his legs and arms, immobilizing him. He tried to stretch but cloth cinched up beneath his armpits. After the club he must have returned home more disguised than he’d realized. He preferred to wear nothing to bed, but his valet, Andrews, liked him to wear a nightshirt—damn his meddling. The wretched thing seemed heavier than usual, though.

He lifted a hand to rub his face awake.

Ruffles?
Since when had he purchased a nightshirt with ruffled sleeves? Or satin ribbon wound about the cuff? Since when had he allowed any garment even vaguely resembling this into his house? Andrews had gone too far this time.

His palm smoothed across his cheek, and arrested. Andrews couldn’t have possibly shaved him when he’d come home near four o’clock, could he? His manservant needed a stern dressing down just as soon as he brought his miraculous morning-after tonic: one part coffee, one part blue ruin, and one part secret ingredient. Andrews refused to tell him the mix, probably because he knew it was the sole reason Ian put up with his mother hen routine year after year.

The door opened. Ian slewed his sleep-fogged eyes toward it. A maid entered bearing a silver tray with a teapot and a sprig of flowers in a small vase. The tray was wrong; Ian took breakfast in his dining room, no matter what hour he rose, and he never drank tea before the evening. But the maid, apparently a new girl, was a pretty thing, so he didn’t chastise her.

In his younger years he’d dallied a bit with willing servants, but categorically never his own. He appreciated a fine set of cat heads as well as the next fellow, though. The maid’s jutted out over the tray like a pair of money bags ready for Midas to fondle. Her attention was fixed on the contents of the tray, so Ian looked his fill. He generally liked slightly smaller breasts, but it was still early in the day yet, and the maid’s attributes weren’t to be dismissed out of hand.

A niggling sense that something was not quite right pricked at the back of his neck. Something missing.

“Good morning, milady. Chocolate, toast, and the post.” The maid smiled, set the tray upon a stand on the empty side of his bed, and departed.

Ian barely heard the door close.

This was not his bed.

He always slept in his bed. Always. He took his pleasures with beautiful partners wherever he wished, but never in his own bedchamber. It was the one place, the single spot that he could return to each night—or morning, as more often the case—and be at complete peace. He didn’t even allow his friends into his private chambers.

He’d spoken the truth to that blasted prim bluestocking Corinna Mowbray the day before. He slept well every night of his adult life because he kept his own bed sacrosanct, unmarked by the scent of a woman’s perfume, strands of long hair left behind, the impression of a head in the pillow beside his, and bits of feminine clothing lost within the bedclothes. It was one of the two rules he ever held to. No matter how tempting a siren’s feathered boudoir seemed at three, four, or five o’clock in the morning after a satisfying interval of mutual pleasure, no matter how exhausted or inebriated, he always returned home. Otherwise, he simply did not sleep until the next night.

But this was not his bed. His bed was solid, smoothly fashioned mahogany, its deep blue draperies lacking even a suggestion of trim. A man of simple tastes—honest play, fast horses, and beautiful women—needed no more.

This bed was far from simple. Covered in lace-edged linens and frothy pink and white pillows, draped with a striped pink, gold, and white satin canopy, gold tassels trailing the painted white bedposts—this bed was clearly a woman’s creation. A woman who enjoyed her femininity to the utmost. Ian had made love to plenty of women in beds like this, though few so opulently light of character. But he’d never slept in one.

Again, a peculiar lack tickled at his senses. Something was not right. Something was missing. Something …

Something he should have felt as he stared at the maid’s breasts. Something that should have at least suggested its existence when he recalled the last few women with whom he’d shared this sort of luxuriously feminine couch. Something that was with him every morning at waking, more faithful than the most loyal hound, more reliable than the finest Swiss watch.

He slid his arm beneath the coverlet and brought his hand to his waist.

His heart slammed against his ribs.

He pressed his fingers into his abdomen. Through the thick linen nightshirt, soft flesh sprang back. He held his breath, and his hand stole lower.

Oh, God. No. No.

No.

No.

No.

Pulse racing faster than his latest Ascot winner, he bunched the fabric beneath his hand to his waist. Sucking in air like a drowning man, he reached downward.

He yanked his arm back and bolted upright. His chest jiggled. He slammed a palm over it and cupped a supple mound. His other hand slapped up, encompassing an identical shape. Breathing fast now, he pulled at the laces of the nightshirt, barely seeing the pink satin ribbon and rich embroidery, until the fabric gaped.

His head spun. His stomach roiled. He gripped the nightshirt and tore it down the center.

Two perfect female breasts, their beautiful pink tips velvety, perched gracefully above a smooth, slender waist, a delicate navel inches above a thatch of soft brown hair. Thighs any man would pay to put his face between, creamy and round, stretched along the counterpane, the torn nightshirt falling to either side.

Ian kicked his feet free. They were small, shapely, with narrow ankles and, like his legs and chest, devoid of hair.

Dear God.
What was happening?

He lifted a trembling hand. The fingers were slender and long, the nails carefully manicured but not painted, the palms tender and uncallused. A woman’s hand. A lady’s hand. He knew the difference. He’d enjoyed the touch of plenty of both.

But not this one. He would remember a ring like the one on the third finger of this left hand if it had come anywhere near him. The sapphire was set in the gold at such a sharp angle that he would have insisted a lover remove the piece before commencing pleasing activities. Ian liked his sport lively, and occasionally outré, but bloodletting didn’t interest him—though some of his friends found that sort of thing appealing. Not Ian. When he made love to a woman, the fewer accoutrements involved the better. The female body was plaything enough.