Linda Needham (11 page)

“That a man’s home is his castle?”

“No,” she said, glancing back over her shoulder with those wide, bright eyes, as she trailed him along the hallway toward some unknown destination. “I had assumed that if you and I had come home together after our wedding, we would have shared a chamber and a bed.”

He stopped midstride, startled by her frankness. “You’re damn right, we would have. Will. Share a bed.”

“Ah, then wouldn’t that have made the master suite mine as well as yours?”

The woman was a Gordian knot of logic. “So where did you store my clothes? In the attic? Out in the barn? What about the trunk I sent ahead? Or have you given everything of mine to the children to play with in the garden?”

“Your trunk is downstairs, unmolested. Everything from your chamber is right in here. Safe and sound.” With that she unlocked the large linen closet on the opposite wall and opened the door wide to a neat array of shelves and baskets and the pungent aroma of camphor.

“Much obliged.” He felt thoroughly shelved.

“I’ve one request, though,” she said, the brashness gone from her voice and her eyes.

He laughed at her sudden humility. “Only one?”

“Please don’t move back into your room until to
morrow afternoon. I don’t want to have to move Margaret tonight. As you saw for yourself, she needs all the rest she can get.”

Jared slammed his palm against the door frame and leaned into her face. “Bloody hell, woman, I’m not going to evict a sick child from her cot.”

She pressed her lips together, in disbelief or in gratitude, he wasn’t sure. “Thank you for the reprieve. I promise that we’ll be packed and gone from here by tomorrow noon at the latest. A good evening to you.” She lifted his hand and put the key to the closet in his palm with such tender care that she was halfway to the back stairs before Jared knew she was leaving.

“Just a damn minute.”

“Ah, there you be, Lady Hawkesly.” One of the Miss Darbys poked her head around the corner, smiling fondly. “Elden’s looking for you.”

“Oh! Excellent, Rosemary. I’ll see him right now.” Kate shot him a worried glance, then disappeared down the stairs like a wisp of smoke, leaving him with Miss Darby bustling toward him, a tray clattering with a small pitcher, a cup and a saucer.

“Evenin’ to ya, Lord Hawkesly,” the woman whispered, shyly padding toward him. “Just going to look in on little Margaret. C’n I get you anything?”

She waited, unmoving, until he asked, “Who is Elden?”

“Ah, Elden Carmichael. A dear man. My lady’s estate manager. Anything else?”

“No. Thank you.” Except what the devil had happened to old Hopwood, his own estate manager?

“Good then, just give a call and your wish is ours.” The wiry woman hurried down the corridor and into the sickroom.

The very chamber that he still planned to share with his bride as soon as he could close down her orphanage. Surely the parish church could find room for them, or the relief commission in Preston. The sooner they were dispatched from his property and from his wife’s care the better. A clean break was best. Because he damn well wasn’t going to let her just up and leave in the morning. He’d lock her in the cellar first.

He had come home to a madhouse, run by a mad-woman who happened to be his wife.

His beautiful, wild-eyed wife, who had packed him away as though he’d died, his personal effects stored away in a room no larger than a closet.

He rifled through eight baskets before he found his razor and shaving kit. If he was going to spend another night at that damned Badger’s Run, he was going to have a fine Wilkinson blade and razor to shave with come morning.

And then what?

Where were peace and contemplation?

And what about the marital bliss he’d expected to find here in the bosom of his home?

Let the woman tend to her noisy little projects, he had work to do. A new assignment from the Home Office that put him in charge of investigating suspicious activity around the English ports. He was expecting a crate of papers from Lord Grey that would keep him busy during the day.

Now that he’d come home from the high seas, he had a land-bound lifestyle to sustain, in an elegant house with liveried servants and a wife, and he certainly couldn’t accomplish it all with his wife in open rebellion and the place overrun with orphans.

He grabbed a few of his handkerchiefs out of a basket, shut the closet door and as he stuffed the kerchiefs into his coat pocket he ran into Ross’s message.

In all the confusion, he’d never read the bloody thing! He yanked out the envelope and scanned Ross’s neat hand, wondering how the man had learned anything new about the gun runners so quickly.

If anyone could expose a misplaced sack of grain, it would be Claybourne.

“Thanks, Ross, and may God rot your socks.”

Granted that a breach of more than eighteen months was a bit too long between the “I do” and the wedding night. But he hadn’t been able to help it at the time. And he planned to explain it all to her in private sometime
tonight
.

If he could find the woman after he penned a reply to Ross.

He sorted through the closet and finally found the basket that held the contents of his desk: paper and envelope, pen, ink, his seal and a stick of wax. By the time he found a writing surface, he was downstairs in the dining room straddling one of the tiny benches. His oil lamp brought one of the children to him like a little moth.

“Hello! I know how to write my name! D-o-r-i!” The little girl who was missing all four of her front teeth managed to shove herself against his arm, dropping a glob of ink in the center of the page.

“I’m glad of that…Dori. But I’d be just as glad of a moment to write in silence.”

It wasn’t to be. The room filled with children who rummaged paper and pencils from somewhere and were now crowding around his lamplight, taking turns drawing and writing.

“Let’s play school!”

“I’ll be Lady Hawkesly!” shouted Glenna, poking a pencil into the air. “Now, children, you must hold your pencils just this way.”

Starving orphans? Hell, they didn’t know what starving meant. These were robust young limbs, shiny, clean hair, white teeth.

Suddenly two of the Darby women appeared like shepherds and shooed them all up the stairs, offering their apologies and displaying an impossible amount of patience.

He tried to finish his message to Ross in the overwhelming quiet, but he found it far more oppressive than the children’s simple chaos. Because he could so easily conjure the image of his misdirected wife gallivanting around the countryside with her orphans in tow.

Because he knew that she would do just that, if he allowed her.

Because, of all the things he’d learn about his wife, he was sure she wasn’t the sort of woman who made idle threats.

His only choice was to extend the “truce” a few days while he made a few inquiries.

More important than that, he needed to launch this marriage before the woman found an excuse to scuttle it.

To finish what he’d stupidly left incomplete.

To make her his before the sun rose tomorrow.

“W
e should have plenty of grain for the soup kitchen this month, Elden,” Kate said, dragging the oil lamp closer to the ledger on Elden’s desk, carefully tallying the column of numbers one more time. “If Hopwood’s accounting is correct—and heaven knows the man is minutely accurate—then we still have a hundred twenty tons of barley in the warehouse at Southampton…”

“And something near to two hundred tons of wheat and…” Elden had perched himself on the edge of the desk and now squinted down at the ledger. “What’s that last column?”

“A hundred tons of Indian cornmeal.” Kate leaned back in the chair and breathed a long sigh, the prospect of getting caught at her intrigue keeping her from feeling any sort of relief. “We’re holding steady at the
warehouses in Bristol and Liverpool, and Hopwood is going to make another acquisition in Plymouth.”

Great heavens, the enormous risks they were all willing to take.

“M’lady, if the government ran the Relief Commission as well as you run the Ladies’ Charitable League, there’d be no famine at all.” Elden popped the last of a meat pie into his mouth then went to the office door.

“If I thought I could change things, Elden, I’d storm Whitehall and stage a coup.”

“God help us all.” Elden laughed and jammed on his cap. “Just one more trip to the wharf, one more wagon, and the barn will be empty. Ready for the
Katie Claire
.”

“Do take care, Elden. It’s dark out there on the road.” He gave her a wink then disappeared into the shadows on his way toward the barn.

So many people giving so much of themselves.

And far too many who gave nothing at all. Men like Jared Westbrooke, earl of Hawkesly.

She slipped back into Elden’s little office, gave the account book one last tally, then tucked it behind a barrel of garden implements.

Another secret she could never share with her husband.

She had kept an eye out for him during her meeting with Elden, expecting him to burst through the door at any moment. But he’d never come looking for her, though she been gone from the house for more than a half hour.

Tansy and Myrtle were scrubbing up in the kitchen when Kate finally returned to the house, humming together in their slightly imperfect harmony.

“His lordship’s gone, my lady, if you’re looking for him,” Myrtle said, her eyes glinting at Kate.

The woman never missed a thing. “How long?”

“Not ten minutes ago. Said he had a message that needed to be sent.”

“Then he’s probably gone back to Badger’s Run. And I should too. I need to stop by the tackle barn and pick up the prize for this evening’s award.” And Lord knows what kind of trouble Hawkesly might bring down on them all. Like tossing all the paying guests out on their backsides.

Tansy giggled. “A right lovely man to be following after, my lady. If you know what I mean.”

“Handsome doesn’t make up for bad timing, Tansy.” Kate grabbed one of her cloaks off the peg at the back door. “I don’t know why Hawkesly chose to make his grand entrance at this particular moment.”

Myrtle smiled fondly as she patted Kate’s cheek. “And aren’t all husbands just like that, my dear? No sense of when to come and when to go.”

The perfect description of Hawkesly.

“Don’t listen to her, my lady,” Tansy said, “Myrtle’s never been married.”

“Haven’t been to the moon either, sister dear, but I know for a fact that it’s made of cheese.”

“Then you know as much as I do on the subject of marriage, Myrtle.” Kate laughed and gave both women a hug. “Still, I’ll keep your advice in mind.”

Kate saddled her little mare and rode off toward the tackle shed, certain that she’d catch up with Hawkesly along the way.

Unless the blackguard decided to send his message from the village, which would put him right on the main road, sure to encounter Elden and his wagon.

But as she reached the tackle shed and let herself inside, she realized that the man must have ridden like the wind because she should have caught up with him by now. Even in the darkness, along an unfamiliar track…

No, not unfamiliar. Hawkesly must be quite familiar with the shortcut to the lodge.

And the road to the village.

And the wharf.

To the Hawkesly warehouse.

“Good evening, wife.”

Kate whirled toward the voice in the doorway, already knowing its source, the sound of it in her ears, the way it rattled her heart and angered her.

Hawkesly! Like the near mythical creature he seemed to be, her husband was standing in the doorway, taking up its height with his shoulders.

There seemed to be something almost feral about him, as though he’d been stalking her through the woods. As though he’d been riding ahead of her on the trail, had heard her and decided to slip into the shadows, and trail her once she passed his cover.

Which could only mean trouble.

“Good evening,” she said as lightly as she could manage, fumbling to light the oil lamp on the workbench. “Is there something I can get for you? More olive blue flies? A larger creel?”

She heard his leagues-long footfalls against the plank
floor as he entered the room and the stark finality of his shutting the door.

“What I want is to understand why a wagon just left my barn under cover of darkness, loaded down with I don’t know what.”

So he’d seen Elden after all. No matter. This little secret paled in comparison to the others she would keep from him forever.

“Cabbage. And carrots. And other crops. Heading for market. We’ve worked hard all summer. Now that the harvest has come, it’s time to sell.”

“To market where?”

“Preston this week. Our green goods have done very well there.”

Hawkesly didn’t look satisfied in the least with her explanation; he looked…hungry, voraciously determined as he continued his inexorable stalking toward her, tall and darkly encompassing.

“Elden,” he said, slowly mulling the name, one eyebrow cocked devilishly. “I don’t recall having an Elden on my payroll.”

“You do now.” Kate stood her ground, ignoring the weakening in her knees and the clattering in her heart as the man approached in his beastly way. “His name is Elden Carmichael. I hired him well over a year ago.”

“As what? A cabbage broker?” He peered down at her, making her back up a step and then two.

“Elden is my estate manager.” She bumped her backside into the workbench, making the bamboo poles clatter.

“You’re wrong there.” He reached behind her, glid
ing his hand between her elbow and her waist until he was leaning his palm against the bench top, smelling spicy, oddly sweet, of Tansy’s cinnamon apples. “Martin Hopwood is the estate manager at Hawkesly Hall.”

“
Was
the estate manager.”

“Was?” His frown deepened. “What happened? Is Hopwood dead?”

“Of course not.” But she could hardly explain that he’s become her grain procurer for the Ladies’ Charitable League. “Martin Hopwood is nearly seventy years old. He’s not as strong as he used to be.”

“Hopwood is as hardy as an ox.”

“Which shows just how long you’ve been away.” Kate slipped out from under his prison and carried the lamp toward the office. Hawkesly followed like a thunderstorm. “Master Hopwood was growing frail, his eyes dim, his bones achey like the autumn wood, as he used to say. I couldn’t bear to see him suffer any longer so I pensioned him off to live with his daughter and her family in Devonshire.”

“Without my leave?”

“You weren’t here. But you’ll be glad to know that I hear from the dear old man quite often and he’s very happy in his new situation.” Says he loves the life of an intrepid scallywag.

Hawkesly glared at her in silence, then took the oil lamp from her hand and stalked to the center of the room, hooking the handle to a rafter peg. He looked even more devilish with the lamp still swinging, making the shadows dance and deepen across the planes of his face as he stalked toward her. “So if Hopwood
wasn’t here, then all those letters I sent to him about the estate accounts—”

“Answered by me, Hawkesly.” Kate turned away from him and went to the shelves of baskets. “I not only wrote those reports to you, but also everything that went to your banker and your broker in London.”

“You?” He laughed deeply, as though he thought her efforts a great jest.

“The work needed doing and there was no one here to do it but me. I’m not the sort of woman who sits back and waits for someone else to take care of my problems.”

“Not until now. From this moment on,
I
will take care of your problems for you.”

She nearly laughed: the impossible man
was
her problem. A stone in her shoe.

A hole in her heart.

The sad truth was that deep inside she’d been hoping for something so much better from him.

“Taking on all my problems for yourself is a generous offer, Hawkesly, but an annulment will take care of everything.”

When the man only stared at her in a stony fury, Kate assumed he was finished with her, so she picked up the box of metals and ribbons then turned back to him with a shrug.

Jared would have followed his wife, but she’d staggered him. Bloody hell, she’d just dismissed him, tossed him out of her life!

He found his voice as he reached the woman and her mare. “There’ll be no annulment.”

She stuffed the flat wooden box into the small saddle
pack. “Better annulled than to live married and apart for the rest of our lives. We tried that already and, personally, I found it unsatisfactory.”

Certain that the woman was about to mount her horse and gallop away into the night, Jared clamped his hand over hers and turned her.

“Dammit, Kate. I came home to begin our marriage, to at last take up where I left off. And I bloody well plan to do just that. You’re not going anywhere.”

She looked at him gravely. “If I stay, Hawkesly, the children stay.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Then I’m sorry, but you’re just too late.” She sighed and turned and reached for the saddle horn, but he caught her again by the waist, with both hands this time and turned her easily, unable, unwilling, to let go of the slim, curving shape of her. Hips and rib cage and waist.

“What do you mean too late?”

“Just that if we had started our marriage immediately, like a normal newly wedded couple, I would have doubtless discovered our incompatibilities a little at a time. The fact perhaps that you snore or womanize—”

“I do neither!”

“Or have poor hygiene habits—”

“I happen to have impeccable hygiene habits, as you will find out!”

“Or, worse, that you lack compassion for those less fortunate than you; for homeless, starving children as an example. If I’d learned this in the steady course of our marriage, then I would have known this trait of yours and accepted it and I would never have taken on
the children.” She caught her lower lip with her teeth for an instant. “At least I don’t think I would have, because I wouldn’t have had the opportunity.”

You’re damn well right you wouldn’t.

“But since you left me instead to make my own way, I’ve taken a path that you could never find, let alone follow, one that I cannot possibly abandon.” She shaped an impatient hand against her hip and canted her head at him. “Now do you understand how unwise it would be to begin a marriage, when we already know how badly it will end?”

It occurred to Jared just then, with the light of the moon setting off pale fires in her eyes, making silky, silver strands of her hair, that his wife might just be lunatic enough to believe her own logic and to follow it all the way to its tragic and inevitable end.

He was equally certain that she not only intended to do just that, but that she was entirely capable of it.

So it seemed that his marriage rested at the moment on the tousled heads of nine ragamuffin children.

Hell and damnation. Formidable little foes.

“Stop right there, wife.”

She had one foot in the stirrup, her hand on the horn. She tipped her head back as though weary to the marrow and searching for strength in the treetops, spilling her hair down her back. “Please, I’ve got much to do tonight. The tournament awards, arranging for food to be packed for the children, sending word to Father Sebastian—”

“Not to mention a wedding night with your husband.”

“What?” She froze.

Time to be delicate with her. “I don’t need to remind you that we haven’t consummated our marriage.”

“Dear God.” She whirled around to face him, her eyes huge, her fingers to her mouth as though they would contain the sound of her little gasp of horror. “You actually mean to force yourself on me, to bed me in spite of all my objections.”

“I’ve never forced a woman in my life.” He took hold of her chin and made her look him directly in the eyes. “Where the devil have you gotten these outrageous notions about me?”

She shook her chin free, raised it to him, suddenly a bit overdramatic in her breathing. This fearless woman and her bold threats. “Do your worst. But you might as well know right now that bedding me will not keep me here beside you.”

He could play that game too. Couldn’t resist wrapping his fingers in the silky ends of her hair, or pulling her against his chest and whispering close to her ear, “Ah, my dear, you’ve never been bedded by
me
.”

He felt her indrawn breath against his cheek, and the wide-eyed lifting of her gaze against his heart. “No, I haven’t. But then whose fault is
that
?”

Her unmistakable, straightforward challenge whispered against his mouth zipped through him like a bolt of lightning, lodged in his groin like a roiling storm.

Drew and Ross might have been right after all. That he should tread lightly here, to carefully negotiate his way into this unfamiliar, labyrinth of a marriage.

Humility in the face of truth.

Honesty, because he owed her that.

“It’s my fault entirely, Kate.”

“Then, please…” She took a long, shuddering breath, and grabbed hold of his lapel as though to steady herself. “Please don’t compound your mistake by insisting on consummating our marriage when there’s—”