Jo Beverley (3 page)

“Are you offering to guide me?”

At that moment, perhaps from some reaction of his, she recognized that she’d spoken flirtatiously. She would have said that she didn’t know how to flirt, but she was doing so, and it shook her.

If she were going to flirt, it should never be with this man. If she’d asked her trustees to draw up a list of the
least
suitable men she might meet in polite society, Octavius Fitzroger would have been near the top of it.

Octavius was the name given to an eighth child, so he came from a large and probably impoverished family. He was without employment, seemed to enjoy idleness, and she’d heard rumors at Rothgar Abbey about some dark scandal in his past. She’d been too intent on pursuing Ashart to find out more, but she knew some of the guests were surprised, even shocked, that he’d been allowed in the house.

All the same, when he took her hand and raised it to his lips, when he murmured, “I could be your guide in many things…” Damaris’s grasp on common sense faltered.

He’s kissing your hand, nothing more,
she told her misty mind, but it didn’t help. Her heart pounded, and moisture gathered in her mouth, forcing her to swallow or drool. When he leaned closer she recovered enough to put a hand on his chest. “No, sir!”

“Are you sure?”

No.
His body felt like fire beneath her palm, for only his shirt covered his hard chest. If she slid her hand higher, her fingers would touch naked skin at the base of his throat….

“Practice,” he murmured, “leads to perfection.”

“Practice?” she squeaked. “At what?”

“Flirtation.” He raised a hand and brushed his knuckles down her slack jaw. “If you’re happily flirting with me, no one will be able to believe that you’re still pining for Ashart, will they?”

“Why would I ever choose you over him?” The question was rude, but the desperate truth.

His eyes danced with wickedness. “For Christmastide amusement. You’re a wealthy young woman who is soon going to London to marry well, but for the moment you amuse yourself with me.”

They were fixed in place, he stroking her jaw, she holding him off. It created a strange illusion of being within a magical circle, one she didn’t want to break.

“Very well,” she said, but clung to reason. She pushed at his chest and said, “There’s no need to embrace here.”

Her push achieved nothing but to press her hand harder against his heat and make breathing more difficult.

“No kiss as a reward, fair lady?” His fingers brushed between the fur lining of her hood and the skin of her neck. “Chinchilla,” he murmured, making the word sound like a whisper of sin.

Oh, he was wicked, and she should push harder, even scream for help, but she wanted his kiss. Her mouth tingled for it.

“Just a kiss,” he said softly. “Nothing more, I promise.”

He dislodged her hand that was still feebly trying to hold him off and took her into his arms. She couldn’t remember ever being touched like this before, with such tender power.

Resist, resist!

He caught any protest in a kiss.

She was helpless, but his embrace felt not at all forceful, except as a force of nature. Thought evaporated, and Damaris let him tilt her head so he could deepen the kiss, then let him crush her to his strong, hard body, enfold her, protect her.

His lips freed hers. Damaris opened stunned eyes to look into his. Silver blue around endless dark. But he looked insufferably pleased with himself.

She gripped his hair. His eyes widened.
Good.
Before he could resist, she pushed him back against the side of the coach and kissed him as thoroughly as he’d kissed her. She’d never done such a thing before, but let instinct rule as she whirled with him back into the storm.

When she broke the kiss to pant for breath, she realized she was straddling him. Her breasts ached, and she pressed them against him, returning stinging lips to his again and again and again—

He twisted away. “Damaris, we have to stop!”

“No.”

“Yes.”

Then she heard what he’d heard.

Gravel. They were nearing the stables!

She was back at Rothgar Abbey, and tangled in disaster again.

What had she been thinking?

She’d not been thinking at all. She’d been overtaken by a force as fierce as the panic that had driven her into flight. Heaven alone knew what would have happened if they’d not had to stop. As the coach rattled into the stable yard of Rothgar Abbey she stole one quick glance at him.

Her look clashed with his. She instantly looked away again, trying to interpret his dark, blank expression.

Lord Henry Malloren wrenched open the carriage door. “Pox on you, you plaguey chit! What in the name of the devil are you up to now to shame us all?”

F
itz stared at the sinewy, red-faced man, trying to think what to do for the best. When Lord Henry grabbed his ward’s arm, however, instinct took over. He chopped at the man’s hand as he’d chopped at Damaris’s, but a great deal harder. Lord Henry cursed and backed away, but he flailed the riding crop in his other hand. The crop he’d intended to use on his ward?

“Devil take you, sir! I’ll have you in court for abduction and assault!”

Fitz swung around Damaris and out of the coach, putting himself between her and danger. “Be quiet and have some sense, Lord Henry. Do you want to provide a show for the stable yard?”

Lord Henry was old, scrawny, and a head shorter, but he leaned forward. “She’s already made herself a laughingstock. What’s one more folly?”

Damaris appeared by Fitz’s side, hissing, “Stop it!” but Fitz didn’t take his eyes off his opponent.

“We can discuss this in the house—”

“We will discuss this nowhere, cockerel!” Though Lord Henry didn’t take his eyes off Fitz, he addressed his ward. “Get back in the coach and stay there, girl. We’re leaving within the hour now that you’ve embarrassed us so badly.”

“Not unless she wishes to.”

Lord Henry curled a lip. “Her wishes have nothing to do with it, cockerel. She’s under my thumb until she’s twenty-four or marries with my consent. So you’ve years to wait before she can fall into the clutches of a scandal-ridden fortune hunter like you.”

“I have no intention—” Damaris cried.

But Lord Henry cut her off with a blistering, “Do as you’re told!”

Fitz used all his strength to control himself. “Lord Henry, no one is traveling far today. It will soon snow again.”

The man glared at the gray heavens as if they were a personal affront, then turned on Damaris. “Then you’ll come with me and be locked in your room.”

He reached for her, but Fitz moved between them again. “No.”

He worried that Lord Henry would expire with rage, so deep a red he turned, but then the man snapped, “So be it. You know the consequences, girl.” He turned and marched off toward the house.

Fitz watched him go. “What did that mean?”

“If I don’t do as he says, he will withhold my money.”

He turned to look at her. She was almost as white as the snow. “All of it?”

“Every last farthing. Until, as he said, I’m twenty-four or marry with his consent.”

“’Struth. Three years isn’t a lifetime, but it’s long enough without a penny. But wouldn’t running away have had the same effect? How did you hope to survive?”

“In poverty,” she said flatly. “But I’m no stranger to that. The Worksop house is mine. That was my mother’s, so it isn’t governed by my father’s will. I have a home, and I’d sell the contents down to the pots and sheets if necessary.”

“No need for such high drama, is there? The emeralds you wore on Christmas Day would support most people for a few lifetimes.”

She turned stark eyes on him. “But they
do
come under my father’s will, you see.”

Lord above.
One of the richest women in England might be reduced to selling household items to survive. Of course, it would never come to that, because she could not be allowed to live unprotected. It would be like leaving a gold nugget in the street and expecting no one to steal it.

There had to be a way around this, but Fitz needed more information, and he needed to get to a fire. His exposed skin was burning with cold. He’d been an idiot to rush out so inadequately dressed, but when he’d looked out of the window and glimpsed the coach, some instinct had told him whom it contained and why. He’d dashed to prevent her flight without a thought.

Now, after that kiss, his urgency was warning of a problem he definitely didn’t need to add to his quota. He could not grow too close to Damaris Myddleton. At least he’d have her full cooperation in that. She intended to marry the highest title she could buy and would never consider a man like himself, as she’d made crisply clear.

He put an arm around her and urged her out of the stable yard. “We must return to the house. I’m cold, and even though you’re in furs, in my experience ladies never wear warm enough shoes.”

“You think we should wear boots?”

“Why not? A grand heiress can do anything she wants.”

“Not obviously,” she dryly pointed out.

It made him laugh. She was forthright and clever, and over the past days he’d often found himself delighted with her, even as he’d been exasperated by her unseemly pursuit of Ashart.

As they crunched through snow toward the house he laid out her situation. “Listen to me. Forget Worksop. You cannot live unprotected. Every fortune hunter in England is after you.”

“I suppose you’d know.”

“I am
not
a fortune hunter.”

She flicked him a skeptical glance. “I don’t see any problem, anyway. If I don’t have my money, there’s nothing for them to hunt.”

“That shows your ignorance. Your husband could borrow against the expectations.”

“Oh.” She frowned, and Fitz thought he’d won that point, but then she looked up at him. “So
I
could borrow against my expectations.”

He felt as if his hair must be standing on end. “No one would permit it.”

“How could they prevent it?”

“They’d find a way. In truth, I’d find a way.”

“It seems most unfair.”

“And that surprises you?”

As he’d suspected, at heart she was practical. “No unfairness perpetrated on women surprises me. But it’s a relief to know that if the worst happens, I need not beg in the streets.”

The worst? She had no idea of the worst. She was a lamb in a forest thick with ravenous wolves. A lamb who thought she had sharp teeth.

She needed a strong protector, someone to guide her through this dangerous world and teach her how to survive. He certainly could be neither protector nor guide, even though he had the knowledge. His hold on a place in the highest social circles was by the fingernails, and besides, he planned to leave England as soon as he was able.

The snow hid the paths, so they were making a beeline for the house, but his booted foot suddenly sank deep. He held her back, found more stable footing, and helped her to it.

“Why is Lord Henry your guardian?” he asked as they went on, part of his mind trying to remember the layout of the grounds here. They were safely away from the ha-ha, at least, the deep trench that kept the deer from the gardens. “You have no connection to the Mallorens, have you?”

“None at all. It seems my father persuaded him.”

“How?”

Her eyes smiled with a touch of real humor. They were slightly slanted—cat’s eyes—and they fascinated him.

“With money,” she said. “Lord Henry’s a wealthy man, but he’s the sort who always wants more. As I understand it, he became interested in an investment in one of my father’s ships—or one was dangled before him. My father suggested that instead of laying out money, he simply promise to be my guardian if I were left an orphan. It must have seemed a safe gamble to Lord Henry. I was fourteen at the time. In ten years I’d be independent, and my parents were healthy people in their prime. Certainly my father lived a dangerous life, but my mother’s was the epitome of safety. It was Lord Henry’s misfortune that she died at forty-eight. If my father hadn’t already died four years earlier, I’d suspect him of engineering it so that I might invade the highest levels of society as he failed to. Lord Henry would hate to admit it, but he was captured, by a pirate—lock, stock, and aristocratic connections.”

Which could explain why Lord Henry was so vicious about it.

She was probably correct about her father. Fitz had seen the dossier Ash had been given on his prospective bride. Marcus Myddleton had been a black sheep of the Huntingdonshire Myddletons, who’d taken his wife’s modest dowry and traveled to the Orient to make his fortune. He’d succeeded brilliantly, but been as much pirate as merchant.

It had probably amused Myddleton to gamble on the chance that his daughter would enter such elevated circles. But had he given a thought to his pawn in this game—his only child?

Fitz also wondered—had wondered for some time—why Damaris and her mother had lived so simply in Worksop before Mrs. Myddleton’s death. He and Ash had assumed both mother and daughter preferred it that way. But her enjoyment of fashionable clothes and jewels—and her obvious desire for a brilliant marriage—suggested otherwise.

She stopped and looked up at the enormous house that now loomed over them. “Can Lord Henry forbid me entry?” she asked, a betraying quaver in her voice.

He’d not even considered that. He gently urged her toward a door. “No. It would be for Lord Rothgar to do, and I can’t believe he would be so unjust.”

“They do call him the Dark Marquess.”

“Because of his position as power behind the throne, not because of his nature.”

She stopped again. “He killed a man in a duel not long ago. Lord Henry crowed about it.”

“You are in no danger from him. And besides, I’m your Galahad, remember, proof against all forces of darkness?”

She looked at him, clearly assessing the honesty of his words. Then she inhaled, turned, and marched resolutely toward the door.

His words had been light, but she’d accepted them as a vow, God help him.

He joined her at the door and stated the obvious.

“The easiest way to escape Lord Henry is to choose a suitable man and marry quickly.” When she flashed him a suspicious look, he raised a hand and added, “Not me. I’m the most
un
suitable.”

It made her smile a little. “True. But I won’t be hurried, especially after this debacle.” She put her hand on the latch but paused again. “I don’t know whether you’ve lured me back to hell or heaven, Mr. Fitzroger, but I do thank you for good intentions.”

“The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. But let us advance to paradise, which at the moment is the warmth of the kitchens.”

He put his hand over hers and opened the door, then impelled her across the threshold. He felt her shudder. It might be relief at being inside, or fear of what lay ahead, or simply reaction to the warmth. His own hands had started to prickle as the warmth spilling from the nearby kitchen hit his icy fingers.

They were in a plain corridor lined with storage cupboards and pungent from the bundles of herbs and garlic hanging from the ceiling. Sounds and smells told of preparations for breakfast.

Ahead, Damaris’s maid was slumped weeping against a wall, being comforted by another maid. She looked up, dabbing her streaming face with a sodden handkerchief. “Oh, Miss Damaris! He’s ever so angry. He boxed my ears and has cast me off without a penny!”

Damaris ran to take her into her arms. “I’m so sorry, Maisie. But he can’t dismiss you. You’re my servant.” The other maid slipped back to her duties, and Damaris glared at Fitz. “If you hadn’t torn her from the coach, she wouldn’t have had to face Lord Henry alone.”

“True. Does he beat you?”

“No.”

The maid said, “But—”

“Once. And I’d been very foolish.”

“He slapped you that time, miss.”

Having that revealed clearly embarrassed her, but it enraged him, no matter what she’d done.

“Hush, Maisie,” she said. “Come along. We must return to my bedroom so I can prepare for…for whatever.”

“So we’re not leaving, miss? I thought it foolish to run away, but that were before. Now Lord Henry knows you tried to leave, there’ll be the devil to pay.”

“No, there won’t. He’s washed his hands of me.”

The maid’s eyes went round. “Lawks a mercy!”

Damaris turned to Fitz, and he saw the struggle before she asked for help. “What do I do?”

“I have a solution in mind, but we need to talk about it. I’ll come with you to your bedchamber.”

“What?”

“In the presence of your maid there’s no scandal.” When she hesitated, he added, “I’m not trying to compromise you, but this is not the place to talk of delicate matters.”

As if to make his point, a manservant hurried out of the kitchen and down the corridor carrying a large covered bowl.

Her dazed eyes followed the servant for a moment, then returned to look at Fitz. “Very well.”

Her maid looked as if she’d object, but with a sniff that might simply have been because of a runny nose, she turned and led them to the service stairs. After one shadowed look at him, Damaris followed.

She was wise to be suspicious, but illogically he wished she’d trust him.

They climbed the plain stairs and went through the door that was covered with green baize on one side and polished oak on the other, marking the transition from the servants’ domain to the family’s. They entered an opulent corridor lined with doors, and Fitz followed Damaris and her maid into a bedchamber.

Damaris turned to him, stripping off her gloves. “Your solution, sir?” She was trying to hide her desperation, but failing.