Malia Martin (8 page)

“I don’t approve of you in his room at night, Lady Pru, especially with both of you dressed for bed.” The big man dropped the tray onto the little table by James’s bed. The dainty cup rattled against its saucer, and the teapot shimmied dangerously.

Lady Farnsworth gave her butler a scathing look. “That will be all, Clifton,” she said determinedly.

“Oh, no, it will not,” the man shot back.

James put a hand against his forehead and groaned.

Lady Farnsworth was at his side in a second. He smelled her first, that tantalizing, heady scent, then felt her strong arm around his waist.

She was awfully strong. He looked down at her for a moment. She was not an overly tall woman, and she certainly wasn’t a large woman. James placed his hand carefully on Lady Farnsworth’s shoulder as she helped him to the bed. He could feel her arm beneath his fingers, and it was like touching a steel pole. The woman was very strong indeed.

Smoke was surely going to start pouring from Clifton’s ears if the man kept glaring so, but James could not have cared less. He didn’t even care that he had to let a woman help him toddle over to the bed. He knew when to accept help, and this was certainly one of those times. He had been brought low once again. This time, unfortunately, there were physical side effects.

He would have to take care of himself and get his strength back, for Captain James Ashley was not going to be humiliated by the Wolf again.

Pru helped James into bed, plumping some pillows behind his head so that he could sit up. Then she pulled the bedcovers up to his chin, shot Clifton a pointed look, and bent over the tea tray to pour. “I shall retire as soon as I have the captain settled, Clifton,” she said. “There is no need for you to stay.”

“There is no need for
you
to stay, Lady Pru.”

Pru huffed an exasperated breath and shoved the teacup into James’s hand. “I am not about to tear off my clothes and jump into bed with the man, Clifton!”

There was a choking sound from the bed, and then tea spewed out all over Pru’s nightgown. She blinked down at herself, and then over at James.

“Excuse me,” he said with as much dignity as he could obviously muster.

Pru wiped the worst of the tea away with her hands and turned a glare upon her butler.

Clifton gritted his teeth for a moment, then left without another word. A blessing, that.

Sighing deeply, Pru tilted her chin in the air and sat primly on the edge of the chair beside James’s bedside. Sometime during the last two dreadful days, the captain had become James in her thoughts. She had believed that she had killed him, and she had sat alternately praying and cursing the man to get well. When one prays at another’s bedside, not to mention the small indiscretion of a stolen kiss, formality wanes quickly.

Pru folded her hands together tightly on her lap and leaned forward toward the man in her guest bed. “How do you feel?” she asked earnestly.

James had recovered from the choking episode, it seemed. He swallowed a gulp of tea and placed the cup squarely back on its saucer. “Better,” he answered shortly.

Pru searched his face for a moment, not sure of what she looked for, but dreadfully scared the man was going to go to sleep again and never wake up. “I did think you were going to die,” she said then.

James rubbed at his temples and made a soft sound of pain. “At the moment, I have to believe death would be a rather nice thing to happen.”

“Oh dear.” She pulled her chair closer and put her own hands to James’s temples. He stiffened for a moment, but then as she pressed her fingers rhythmically against the sides of his head, James relaxed slowly. “I am so terribly sorry,” she found herself saying.

“’Tis not your fault.”

Pru bit on the edge of her tongue. It most definitely was her fault, though Josh Harker had a bit of the blame as well.

“Still, I do feel terrible for what you have gone through, Ja … Captain.” She let her fingers wander into his wavy, dark hair. He had truly lovely hair. Pru had been combing her fingers through the thick softness of it this last night wondering at its steely blackness.

He let out a low moan that made Pru jump, her hands stilling as James blinked up at her. He looked just as surprised as she felt.

“Sorry,” he said, his voice sounding a bit hoarse.

He looked very much like a schoolboy caught stealing a tart, and Pru laughed nervously as she straightened and put her entwined hands back in her lap. She glanced down at James, hoping that he had closed his eyes again, but those gray orbs were staring at her, into her.

Pru tried to look away as nonchalantly as possible. The attraction between them had become almost palpable in the last few moments. It was as if the very air between them trembled and waved like the flame of a candle. It was magnetic, hypnotic and, at the same time, thrilling and very, very hot.

“I should get a room at Harker’s Inn,” he said suddenly.

“Of course you should not. Whyever would you need to do such a thing?”

He said nothing, just stared at her, his eyes dark, nearly black, really. Pru glanced nervously at her lap, smoothing away a nonexistent wrinkle.

And then his hand was at the back of her head, pulling her toward him. Knocked off-balance, Pru fell against the hard planes of James’s chest. He locked his arms about her and kissed her.

The candle flame Pru had thought of earlier turned into a raging inferno within seconds, and with a funny-sounding moan, Pru closed her eyes and just gave in to this new experience.

It was truly lovely, and so much more exciting than the dry kiss she had pressed to his sleeping lips.

Captain James tasted of darkly steeped tea, and his mouth was incredibly soft against her own. And then his tongue swept out, tracing the seal of her lips. She opened on a shocked intake of breath, and he entered her.

Her dearest husband had never kissed her thus. Even the small kiss he had pressed to her mouth after lovemaking had always seemed rather chaste. Everything from those moments with her husband had always left Pru feeling like she had missed out on something important.

But now, suddenly, with this man, kissing had become Pru’s favorite activity in the world. Tentatively, Prudence touched her own tongue to James’s as she placed one of her hands against his thinly covered chest. She allowed herself to seek out that small tuft of hair at his neck and twine her fingers in it.

“Mmm,” she heard herself moan.

Prudence pressed her upper body against James, enjoying the feeling of her softness against his strong chest. Pru had a sudden consuming need to strip away James’s nightshirt and see him. She moved back slightly, and his arms unlocked from around her. She felt him grip her shoulders and knew that he was going to push her away.

Oh, she did not want to be pushed away.

She sighed as their mouths parted and looked ruefully into James’s beautiful eyes. “That was so very nice,” she said on a sigh.

James just groaned. “No it was not, Lady Farnsworth. That was carnal and wrong. And that is why I must go stay at Harker’s Inn.”

She ignored the last part of his statement, curling her fingers into his nightshirt. “Carnal, yes, but wrong?” she asked. “How can something so wonderful be wrong?”

“You are too truthful for your own good, Lady Farnsworth.”

She pushed away from the delectable Captain James Ashley and laughed deeply.

When she stopped, James was looking at her darkly. “How can a widow be so innocent?”

“Oh, Captain Ashley, I am far from innocent.”

“But you cannot see attraction for what it is. You cannot see what folly it would be to allow ourselves to continue on in such proximity.”

Pru’s amusement fled. Oh yes, she could see. More than James would ever understand, she could see. “We are adults, Captain Ashley. Surely we can control ourselves.” Even as she said the words, Pru could not stop from staring at James’s wet lips.

“Or perhaps,” she said, feeling like someone had put her in a trance, “we should just act on the attraction? Put it behind us, so to speak?” She looked up into his eyes, to see that he stared at her as if at a changeling.

“Truly, Lady Farnsworth, you speak your mind.” He closed his eyes, shook his head, then winced. “But your idea just shows your innocence more completely. Acting would not put anything behind us, but rather make it ever so much a part of our present.”

Pru was listening, barely. With his eyes closed, James was at her mercy. She could look at him all she wanted, and she definitely looked. At the moment she was marveling at the space between his collarbones. It pulsed with each beat of his heart, and she wanted to place her lips there. She wanted that with an intensity that stunned her.

He opened his eyes, and their gazes locked. James Ashley had the longest, darkest lashes of any man she had ever seen. And the way he looked at her with his storm gray eyes made her very sure that taking him as a lover would never leave her feeling as if she were missing something important.

“James,” she began, but he stopped her with a small shake of his head.

“You call me James and sit beside my bed nearly naked.”

Pru frowned and glanced down at the nightgown she wore. It covered every inch of her skin, more than any gown she owned.

“This is never going to work, Lady Farnsworth. I have a job to do here, and I must concentrate on that task. I must insist that I leave your home in the morning.”

Prudence sighed. “Captain, you have been through quite a harrowing experience, and
I
must insist that you stay under my care until I am sure you are well again.”

They stared at each other in stubborn silence.

Pru chewed at her bottom lip for a moment, then licked at it when she realized that she could taste the captain on her mouth.

James closed his eyes on a groan.

“Does your head still pound, Captain?” she asked worriedly.

“Among other things,” James muttered.

She pressed her hand against his forehead, but he stiffened. “You must leave,” he said through his teeth.

Prudence let her fingers linger in the captain’s hair for just a moment of pure bliss before returning her hands to her lap. “Do you wish for anything else before I leave, Captain? More tea, perhaps? Another compress?”

“No.” He still did not open his eyes.

Prudence stood with a sigh. “There is really no reason you must go to Harker’s, Captain. We are both adults, we …”

“Good night, Lady Farnsworth.”

She did not want to go. She would rather sit all night in the hard-backed chair watching Captain Ashley sleep than crawl back into her empty bed. “Good night, Captain,” she said finally, and snuffed out the candle.

“N
ew plan,” Pru announced quietly the next morning, as Clifton sat in the kitchen cradling his coffee.

He glanced up at her and frowned. “New plan? But this one is working very well, indeed.” The butler chuckled. “I think we should just keep the man drugged for a while until he gets spooked and leaves.”

Pru shivered. “No. I shall never use another potion on another human. I have just spent two days very sure that I had killed him.”

“So what is your new plan?”

“Since he is convinced that he must remove himself to Harker’s Inn, we shall allow the captain to go there. We’ll have to keep him here for another night at least while we move the wool from Harker’s cellar to our barn, but as soon as that is done, we can let the good captain go and stay at the inn.”

“Excellent plan,” Clifton said, and took a long drink of coffee.

“And I shall take him as my lover.”

Coffee spewed out in all directions as Clifton coughed and sputtered.

“I thought this all over very carefully last night,” Pru said quickly before Clifton could begin thundering. “It is a lovely plan.”

“It is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!” Clifton thundered.

“There is an obvious attraction between the captain and me. You have commented on it yourself, Clifton. And Leslie has noticed it as well …”

“So this is all
that
woman’s idea. I should have known!”