The Rambunctious Lady Royston (5 page)

She could see her thrust had hit home as her husband visibly flinched at her idea of a proper nickname for Zachary.

"Furthermore," she continued, buoyed by her initial victory, "the face I made at the altar was meant to convey a message obviously too far removed from both the gutter and your most consuming interest, your own doubtful consequence, to penetrate your limited understanding. I was merely," she explained carelessly, examining the neatly-rounded fingernails of her right hand, "giving my first performance as official Royston court jester, trying to dispel some of the suffocating pomposity I was sure was as painful to you as it was to me."

Samantha allowed a slight smile to curl the corners of her mouth. "If I am not mistaken, I succeeded fairly well."

The Earl smiled back at his wife. "That you did, you mischievous brat. My mood lightened considerably at the sight, and once I spied out the gape-mouthed astonishment of the worthy minister and tried to visualize his swooning dead away if you had dared to embellish your monkeyshines by plugging up your ears with your thumbs and waving your fingers at him, I was hard pressed not to plunk myself down on the altar steps and howl."

The last of Samantha's anger had all but disappeared. "The thought had occurred to me, but I refrained in deference to my Aunt Loretta's prediction that I will be a dismal disappointment as a Countess."

The newlyweds chatted on in complete charity with each other for a few more minutes. Then Aunt Loretta's
"pssst"
called Samantha to her side, and that unnaturally animated woman dragged her niece off to a small room and endeavored to explain the responsibilities of the marriage bed. Considering the woman was a spinster, she could speak only from hearsay rather than experience, and that—plus an abhorrence of the murkier details—kept her instruction on a largely vague and uninformative level.

Samantha remembered her husband's earlier reference to the coming night and ingenuously asked her aunt to explain exactly what use a tongue might be put during this mysterious ritual between men and women. This merely prompted her flustered aunt to suddenly recall pressing business elsewhere—supervising a display of wedding gifts or some such thing.

I'll bet Lady Foxx could tell me what I need to know, Samantha thought grudgingly. Ah, well, the bargain was entertainment and heirs. The first part of the bargain seemed easy enough to keep, as she appeared to amuse Zachary even when she wasn't applying herself to the project.

But the second part might prove a bit more difficult.

When Isabella entered the room in search of her sister—who should even now be upstairs changing into traveling clothes—she found her leaning over a table, peering into the glass hung above it and scrutinizing her stuck-out tongue.

"Sammy, whatever are you about?" Isabella exclaimed, almost startling her sister into biting off that same tongue.

"Izzy," Samantha ventured, once she had recovered her composure, "Do you know anything more to the point about the begetting of heirs than Aunt Loretta's mumblings about squeezing your eyes shut and thinking of England?"

Isabella blushed hotly. "Perhaps if you asked questions on, er, specific areas of doubt, I could attempt to help you," she offered weakly.

Striking a belligerent attitude of hands on hips and tapping one satin clad foot in agitation, Samantha demanded, "Very well, I will. What does my tongue have to do with it?"

The elder, unmarried sister tottered weakly to a nearby chair and sank into it in an attitude of complete bafflement. "Your tongue?" Isabella repeated rather numbly.

Samantha perched herself gingerly on the edge of a facing chair and nodded vigorously. "Yes, you ninny, my tongue. Zachary was most particular about it."

"I was always under the impression the center of interest was considerably lower on the anatomy," Isabella mused almost to herself, silently vowing to pump her maid, Maude, as soon as the opportunity presented itself. "Perhaps it would be best if your husband explained, Sammy, as he is the one who brought it up in the first place," she suggested at last.

Samantha considered this idea for a moment, nodded her head in the affirmative, and abruptly charged her sister with lollygagging. Time was a-wasting; the groom was being forced to cool his heels until his bride was dressed to travel.

As Isabella led the way up the back staircase to the room already containing Samantha's newly purchased wardrobe—a chamber adjoining the Earl's—Samantha's mind was humming along at a frantic pace. Soon the time for questions would be over and the moment of reckoning at hand. Ah, well, at Zachary's advanced age he most probably would content himself with only one or two heirs (meaning, to her naive mind, just one or two trips to her bedchamber), and spend the remainder of his nighttime hours engaged in that restorative agent so necessary to the elderly—sleep.

So thinking, Samantha began her wedding night prepared to endure with good grace the ministrations of her new husband as well as its presumed consequences: the production of a miniature St. John, probably male, however long that sort of thing took. In exchange, she would enjoy the honor and privilege (not to mention the enlarged personal freedom) that went hand-in-glove with her new rank, and believed her life just might be reasonably all round tolerable after all.

It was only when she and Zachary were alone in his great traveling coach on the way to Margate—where his private yacht, Sea Devil, was moored—that she began to have some misgivings.

He was so very big, her husband, and so very formidable. He had been honest enough to tell her he had no feelings towards her, but did that mean he would seek his "pleasure"—-or so she had heard the procedure called—without regard to her very natural apprehensions? Aunt Loretta didn't come right out and say so, but Samantha had the suspicion the next few hours of her honeymoon might just prove physically uncomfortable. She peeked at the Earl from under her long, dark lashes and tried to imagine his muscled body in relationship with her own slender figure and decided that thinking of England wouldn't help her a jot. Unconsciously, she shrank into the corner of the carriage.

"What's the problem, wife?" Zachary queried from his side of the carriage. He was very much at his ease now that all that wedding ceremony foolishness was behind him, and he was looking forward to the next few hours with considerable enthusiasm. "You aren't about to—heaven forbid—become ill from the motion of the carriage?"

"Don't alarm yourself, husband," said Samantha in a sharp, if somewhat forced, reply. "If I begin to feel unwell I promise to warn you in plenty of time for the coachman to halt, so I can hide away out of sight and sound whilst I cast up my accounts. At the moment, I am happy to say, I am enjoying the usual robust health associated with those of tender years. It is I who should be asking you—who are older and more prone to upsets of the liver and the like—if you're not ailing after the fatiguing exertions of the day and would perhaps be in want of a warm shawl about your shoulders and a restorative draught to sip on until your man can tuck you up in bed with a hot brick at your toes."

The Earl's laughter cut through the air like a pistol shot. "Just when I think you've emptied your budget of slurs and aspersions highlighting the difference in our ages—a topic that over the weeks has established itself as your major grievance among the many you hold against me—you come up with yet another insulting little barb."

Samantha thanked the darkness for hiding her shamed blush as Zachary went on in a more serious tone. "The only reason I have not been brought low by your insolence is that I've been patiently biding my time until the day I could prove once and for all how very far removed from my dotage I really am. Tonight, my dear tormentor, you will see for yourself just which of the two of us will be the first to plead exhaustion. I'll wager you a crown to a penny-piece it shan't be I that cries
enough.
"

Royston, with his steel-edged joviality, confirmed Samantha's worst fears. In his bid to prove himself the stronger, Zachary would have scant concern for his young bride's inexperience in the ways of the marriage bed. Why had she allowed Aunt Loretta's taunts to goad her into setting out to prove herself a creditable Countess? If only the dratted woman hadn't saved her "little talk" till after the ceremony, Samantha would have gladly endured the embarrassment of a last minute halt to the wedding. That way she would not be in such a pickle now. Ah, well, Samantha scolded herself: it did no good to cry over spilled milk. She was married. She might as well put a good face on it and make the best of things.

"You go on and on about your plans to humble me, Zachary, but I've found that barking dogs rarely bite," Samantha finally taunted back.

"Ah, but again I find myself forced to correct you. I most certainly do bite, Samantha," he chuckled, "as you shall yet discover."

As if it were ordained, the carriage hit a depression in the road just then and Samantha was abruptly jolted out of her corner and into her husband's quickly outstretched arms. Before she could pull away he had lowered his head to the whiteness of her slender neck and with his lips traced a moist path up to her exposed ear lobe. There he nuzzled for a moment before giving the velvety skin a gentle nip. "Ah," he whispered. "Just as I thought. Delicious."

Samantha, her blood on fire with an emotion she refused to recognize as anything but righteous anger, scrubbed roughly at her neck with her gloved hand and hastily scooted back to her own corner of the coach. "Perhaps you could have the coachman fetch you a soup bone to gnaw on at the next posting inn we pass, if you are so sharp-set as to be reduced to cannibalism by the rumblings of your stomach," she reproved scathingly.

St. John chuckled. "I admit to a near ravenous appetite, my sweet, but have no fear for me, please. I have every intention of satisfying my hunger—just as soon as we are aboard the Sea Devil."

"And I hope you choke!" Samantha bit out before turning her head to the window and the pitch-black countryside whizzing past as the carriage rumbled on. The remainder of the journey was passed in silence, the atmosphere inside the carriage so charged with emotion the very air fairly crackled.

It was passably pleasing, as yacht cabins went: well-appointed and designed to give every possible comfort. There was, however, an encroaching lowness of the ceiling that generated the "caught like a rat in a trap" uneasiness so prevalent among landlubbers. This was enhanced by the knowledge that the view from the minuscule portholes included the sight of white-tipped waves lapping greedily against the hull, not ten feet below those fragile glass barriers.

But when it became apparent that the single piece of furniture in those same quarters (well, at least in Samantha's opinion the only one that positively screamed out to be noticed) was an ornately carved, draped, and dauntingly huge four-poster bed absolutely smothered under burgundy and cream striped satin and a score or more artfully positioned pillows (she giddily imagined for a moment that the immense mattress had been brought aboard enceinte and then pupped), the term "claustrophobic" developed whole new worlds of meaning for the young bride.

No matter how earnestly she commanded her eyes to avoid the bizarre sight, they seemed possessed of a will of their own and persisted in straying in the direction of that ludicrously out-of-place bed. Her treacherous mind, meanwhile, taking no notice whatever of her pounding heart and damp palms, insisted upon presenting a vision of Lord Royston propped up amidst the prolific pillows and their litters (by now Samantha's fertile brain had decided the first generation pillows had themselves matured and begun to whelp).

She could even conjure up a maroon dressing gown, heavily frogged and braided, wrapped negligently about his person as St. John calmly accepted a peeled grape from one nubile young nymph while a whole covey of other supple beauties outdid each other in frenetic dances meant to capture his lordship's favor.

And wouldn't
that
teach her to never pick the lock of her papa's desk drawer and then peek at illustrated pamphlets clearly no innocent miss had ever been intended to see? Now, Lord help her, she was all but standing in the middle of one of those illustrations.

"Oh,
yeech!
" Samantha declared inelegantly, wrinkling her nose and curling her upper lip. She allowed her facial features full indulgence in hoydenism as a reward for enduring an entire day of being schooled into ladylike insipidity. "The man is depraved, totally beyond the pale. All that is lacking are barkers, a bearded lady or some other touted freak, and a juggling act. He would then have all the makings for a mediocre traveling circus. If this bed is any indication of the man's lifestyle it's no wonder polite Society bores him to flinders. He would be better served to shun all but greenheads and peep-o-day boys who get their jollies setting up coffins in front of house doors or pelting each other with oranges in Drury Lane Theatre squabbling over who's to take the newest young actress under his protective wing."

Samantha shook her red tresses in disgust, loosing what was left of her pins and sending her long locks cascading down her back in a tangled riot of liquid fire. "E-gads!" she exclaimed to the empty room. "I may have promised to do my best to keep him from being bored to death, and I may have been constrained to agree to provide him with an heir, but there's a limit to what I shall endure. And this," she told herself as she cast an evil eye at the satin- bedecked monstrosity that had so incensed her, "
this
is definitely it!"

There was the sound of a single pair of hands clapping before St. John's sarcastic "Bravo!' caused Samantha to whirl about to glare daggers at her new husband. Her long hair lagged along behind her as she turned but speedily caught up and even passed her before doubling back to wind itself around her face, turning her look of affronted dignity into a comical tangle of features glaring balefully at her tormentor from between a living—as well as a livid—haze of red.