Leslie Lafoy (20 page)

“Uncle Barrett!” they exclaimed as they and the dogs galloped en masse toward him.

Belle remained where she was, watching and enjoying the bubbling enthusiasm.

“Well, hello,” Barrett said, gently shoving the dogs aside with his knee so that he could hug each of the girls in turn. When they’d both stepped back and he’d given each of the dogs a quick ear rubbing, he straightened and began the formalities. “I’d like you to meet my friend Mrs. Dandaneau. Belle, these delightful young ladies are Carden’s nieces, Miss Beatrice,” he said, indicating the older one, “and Miss Camille.”

The girls nodded and smiled at her and she nodded and smiled at them, noting the mischievous sparkle in their eyes, their barely contained excitement. Wondering what they were about, she scratched the necks of both dogs and said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you. And who are your friends here?”

“Lucy and Belize,” the younger one happily supplied. “We brought them along today because baby Elise keeps pulling their whiskers out and Aunt Sera says that they deserve to escape the torture for a while.”

“Poor things,” Barrett said, rubbing their ears again as he looked past them to the doorway. “Where’s Amanda? Downstairs yet?”

“She’s at home,” Camille answered, her grin going from ear to ear. “She’s under house arrest.”

Barrett tilted his head to the side and cocked a brow. “What?”

“She’s calling it unjust imprisonment,” Beatrice added, her approach seeming far more controlled but no less designing. “And behaving very badly about it all.”

And just as Belle knew the sisters hoped, Barrett asked, “What did she do?”

It was Beatrice who answered. “She had her nipples pierced.”

“Oh,” he half breathed, half gurgled, his eyes wide and his stance suddenly faltering. “Oh.”

Isabella held her breath and resisted the urge to intervene, to declare the conversation unseemly. Theirs was a relationship that had existed long before her arrival in Barrett’s life; it wasn’t her place to attempt to shape it in any way. That Barrett was being deliberately shocked to his toes was somewhat bothersome—until she realized that his discomfort stemmed from nothing more than the thought of a female assuming the prerogatives normally reserved for rakes.

“She did it without permission,” Camille contributed before Barrett could regain his sense of equanimity.

Beatrice took her turn, adding, “Which no one would have given her and why she did it on the sly. And no one would have known she had it done if one of them hadn’t festered.”

The color drained from his face and he made a strangling sound. Afraid that he might actually faint, Belle took him by the hand and gently but firmly drew him back and down. He landed on the seat beside her, managing to groan, “This is truly far more information than I require.”

“It’s the fashion rage, you know, Uncle Barrett,” Beatrice went on. “All the girls are doing it.”

He gulped and then gasped a ragged breath, looking at them in stunned horror.

Camille didn’t give him any further chance to gather his wits. “She has pretty rings for them.”

Beatrice grinned and added, “I saw them in her jewelry chest. They’re ruby dangles. Three golden chains with a stone on each end.”

“Oh.” He closed his eyes and then quickly opened them again, shaking his head. “Jesus.”

“Uncle Carden’s furious,” Camille mercilessly supplied. “He said she wasn’t coming out of her room until hell froze over. Aunt Sera’s not having much luck in getting him to be understanding about it all.”

Scrubbing his hand roughly over the stubble of his beard, he seemed to rally a bit. “Well…” he said strongly enough. And then ran out of steam.

“Would you be angry if one of your nieces did that, Uncle Barrett?” Camille asked, the perfect picture of innocent curiosity. “Would you consider it something really horrible and worth being locked away for?”

The inquiry was apparently sufficiently pointed to nudge his sensibilities back into place. His brows came together and there was actually a slight edge of outrage in his voice when he declared, “One of my nieces has done it.”

Beatrice immediately fired another salvo. “Do you think piercing one’s nipples is such a horrible thing?”

“I … uh…” He paused to swallow and take a breath before weakly continuing, “I have to wonder what the point of it is. I mean … Who’s going to see them other than Amanda?”

“The doctor who came to the house to treat the infection,” Camille offered brightly.

“And her beaus,” Beatrice tossed out blithely, innocently.

Barrett started, blinked, and then fairly growled, “Only if Amanda doesn’t mind them being drawn and quartered for the privilege.”

With her hands on her hips, Camille looked at him with eyes widened in obviously feigned surprise and disappointment. “You don’t approve any more than Uncle Carden does, do you?”

“I completely understand why he’s locked her in her room.”

Isabella looked between the two girls, knowing that they weren’t done with him quite yet. He’d gotten his equilibrium back to a certain degree and that wasn’t part of their plan. Which of them would take the point next? she wondered. So far, Camille seemed to be the one who made the first, slightly stunning jab and Beatrice the one who followed to quickly deliver the roundhouse on their dazed victim.

True to form and expectation, it was Camille who said, “Amanda says that that sort of thinking is old fogy.”

“Really,” Barrett replied dryly, his calm seeming to deepen with every heartbeat.

The girls shifted slightly on their feet. Beatrice softly cleared her throat and Camille obeyed the command.

“She says she’s going to find herself a modern-thinking man.”

A dark brow shot up. “And she believes that a modern-thinking man would approve of such … such…?”

“Adornment, Uncle Barrett,” Beatrice supplied with a well-practiced sigh of strained patience. “The word’s ‘adornment.’”

“Hardly,” he snorted.

“Uh-huh,” Camille shot back, nodding so emphatically that a strand of blond hair slipped loose from her ribbon headband. She shoved it away from her eyes. “I’ve seen the rings, too, Uncle Barrett. They’re beautiful.”

He was about to offer another retort when Beatrice sweetly announced, “I’ve ordered myself a set just like them. Well, except not in rubies. I prefer emeralds. But most definitely the dangle style.”

They’d succeeded yet again; his jaw went slack and the color faded from his face. For a second he stared at Beatrice, stammered and sputtered, and then he turned to Isabella. “Help me,” he choked out. “Please.”

The hopeful desperation on his face … The wary hopefulness on the girls’ … Part of her enjoyed seeing the rake being set back so neatly on his heels. Another part winced at the deliberate manipulation. Torn, Belle quickly weighed her choices. The easy way out would be to claim the entire conversation unseemly and beneath her participation. But it was way too late for that ploy; propriety had been blown to bits from almost the start. Lord, was there a middle ground?

“I never would have guessed, Barrett,” she ventured carefully, “that you’re so traditional in your thinking.”

Beatrice and Camille recognized the ploy for what it was and maintained their wary assessment. Barrett, however, rocked back with widened eyes. “Would you consider … such … such…?”

“Adornment,” Beatrice supplied with exaggerated weariness.

“Belle, you can’t seriously…”

Definitely not, she had to admit. But the ability to rattle a rogue to his core was a delightful temptation. “Beautiful rings are beautiful rings,” she admitted, shrugging her shoulders, knowing that she was going to have to eventually set matters straight and then spend the rest of the day making it up to him. “Personally, I’ve always had a weakness for sapphires.”

The girls grinned and Barrett … He blinked, struggled to swallow, and sounded as though he were using his last breath to say, “I’m going downstairs.”

All three of them watched as he managed a swift but fairly decorous retreat. When he disappeared down the stairs, Isabella looked back at the girls and grinned. “Did your sister really have her nipples pierced?”

Beatrice arched a brow and nodded. “And Uncle Carden threatened us with imprisonment if we told anyone about it. But watching Uncle Barrett squirm was worth the price we’re going to pay.”

“Thank you for playing along,” Camille offered, her smile wide. “You’re very good.”

That assessment depended, she knew, on which side of the game a person was standing. When Barrett stopped long enough to think about what had happened, he wasn’t going to be pleased with her having fallen in with Carden’s nieces. “You two are a very bad influence.”

“If you think we’re bad,” Beatrice remarked, “wait until you see what Aunt Alex sent over. Aunt Sera sent us to the Blue Elephant to help her pack it.”

Apparently Miss Beatrice and Miss Camille had learned their lessons at the knees of experts. “Do I get any hints?” Isabella asked, finding some comfort in the fact that Barrett had undoubtedly been through this sort of ordeal before.

Camille shook her head and again shoved aside her tumbling hair. “It would ruin the fun of watching Uncle Barrett unpack.”

“Which we should see to,” Beatrice said, casting a look at the stairs, “before he has a chance to let Uncle Carden in on what we’ve done.”

So much for being willing to gladly accept the consequences of their game, Belle thought. She deliberately took her time to gain her feet and then took several long moments to make an utterly futile effort to smooth her skirts and tuck her hair back under its pins. When she’d given Barrett all the time she reasonably could, she smiled and said, “Then we should be about it, don’t you think?”

*   *   *

Carden was standing amid a maze of wooden crates in the parlor when Barrett reached the bottom of the stairs. “You have my deepest, most abiding sympathies,” he offered, striding into the room.

He looked puzzled and asked, “Why would…?” And then the puzzlement was gone, replaced in rapid succession by realization, horror, and outrage. “They told you!” Glaring past Barrett’s shoulder at the stairs, he growled, “They’ll be thirty before they set foot out of the house again.”

Barrett leaned his forearms on the top of a crate and shook his head in bewilderment. “What was Amanda thinking?”

“I haven’t the foggiest notion,” the other railed. “You’d think that with all the females in my household, I’d have some idea of how their minds work. But every time I think I’ve got some inkling of the process, one of them goes off into the realm of outrageousness and leaves me standing there gaping and gasping and flopping around like a fish on the bank.”

He paused just long enough to suck in a hard breath and then went on, “Take my hard-earned advice, Bare … Do
not
get married. Don’t do this to yourself. Run. Run far and run fast.”

The high-pitched creaking of the stairs made any sort of response unnecessary. At the first sound, Carden started forward, quickly threading his way through the crates.

“You!” he called from the doorway as their hems came into sight and the dogs bounded past and toward the rear of the house. “Both of you! Out to the carriage!”

“But we have to help unpack,” Camille asserted as she danced down the remaining stairs.

Bea came on her heels, jauntily adding, “It wouldn’t be fair to bring all this and then let Uncle Barrett and Mrs. Dandaneau deal with it all by themselves.”

Belle joined them at the foot of the stairs, a knowing smile flirting at the corners of her mouth.

Carden didn’t so much as glance her way. Instead, he looked between his nieces, pointed toward the rear of the house and practically bellowed, “You should have thought of that before you sang like birds. Out!”

They went, Bea saying as they passed, “Uncle Carden, you’re positively stodgy.”

“I’m positively furious!” he clarified to their backs. Watching them, he lowered his voice to add, “The maps you wanted are in the tube on the window seat.”

“O’Brien?”

“He’s on the task and said to tell you that he’ll come by here as soon as he has a report. He’s guessing that it will take maybe a day. Two at the most. He has everyone working on it.”

“Thank you. And Aiden? Will he be here shortly?”

“I wouldn’t look for him,” Carden admitted, finally bringing his gaze back to the room. “The girls said that he was called down to the docks this afternoon. Some problem with the repairs being done on the
Rana
that he had to address.” He glanced at the crates and said, “I hate to leave you with all of this, but…”

“Understood,” Barrett assured him. “Good luck.”

“Remember what I said,” Carden instructed as he left. “Don’t do it! Save yourself!”

“What aren’t you supposed to do?” Belle asked quietly as the back door slammed.

“Get married,” he replied, smiling and turning to lean back against the crate. “Although I don’t think marriage is as much his frustration as having children is. He inherited his nieces with the title. And then he and Sera have three little ones of their own. Six girls in total. Some days he’s a tad overwhelmed by it all.”

She came to stand beside him. Looking at the crates, she softly asked, “How old is Amanda?”

“Seventeen.” The same age, he realized, that Belle had been when she’d been marched to the altar.

“Ah,” she said, nodding slowly. “A particularly dangerous point in life. Old enough to get yourself into serious trouble and too young to know how to get yourself out of it.”

And, he knew, some women never got any better at making decisions. Women like Mignon Richard. Others, though … Women like Belle learned the hard lessons quickly and never made the mistake again. “So, tell me,” he drawled. “What do you really think of Amanda having herself pierced?”

“I know that her behavior’s appalling by the standards of genteel society, but young women have always been prone to pushing the limits of tolerance. It’s how we learn what’s truly important and what’s not.”

“That’s not the kind of answer I was looking for.”

“No,” she countered, smiling up at him, her eyes sparkling. “What you want to know is whether I’d really consider doing it myself.”