The Rambunctious Lady Royston (8 page)

St. John—once again outfitted for a casual evening in a tobacco brown banian (a friend had sent it from India) and leather slippers (vanity may have prompted the change in his appearance, but weighing more heavily was the strong smell of smoke that still clung to his other garments) —sized up the situation as soon as he came into the main cabin. He rang for someone to remove the tub, now a miniature sea complete with white-tipped waves Samantha was regarding with a fixed stare, and poured out a glass of burgundy for himself and some ratafia for his bride.

A wave rocked the yacht just as Samantha took the glass, and some of the liquid spilled onto her hand. She looked about for a napkin and, finding none, proceeded to daintily lick the moisture from her fingers. Before she was half done Zachary, his wife's naive sensuality stirring him into action, took up those same fingers and—looking intently into Samantha's oddly saucer-wide eyes—completed the job with the tip of his own tongue, licking slowly down the sides of her fingers and tracing a pattern in her palm.

So that is what the tongue is used for, Samantha concluded silently: first her neck and ear, now her fingers. She could imagine the sensation could be quite pleasant if the technique was employed in any number of ways, in a variety of places, none of which she could imagine at the moment. I should be dissolving into strong hysterics, she recollected mistily as she watched Zachary's mouth blaze a trail of kisses from her palm to the sensitive pulse in her wrist.

A proper lady would at least put up a show of reluctance when presented with such a situation, she scolded herself, as St. John showed all signs of repeating his ministrations on her other, ratafia-free hand. My family is right, Samantha decided with an indistinct nod of her head. I am a truly shameless creature, allowing Zachary to kiss my fingers, my wrist, and oh! I never knew men enjoyed nuzzling the crook of a woman's elbow. How utterly delicious!

Samantha closed her eyes just as another wave tipped the floor of the cabin sufficiently to propel her into the Earl's arms. She allowed her head to droop against his muscular chest and decided her strange feeling of lightheadedness came from the butterfly kisses Zachary was now bestowing on her neck and one exposed shoulder. She opened her eyes and the room tilted precariously, then refused to come clearly into focus. This phenomenon also seemed to have an unfortunate effect on her stomach, so she squeezed her eyes tightly shut—a dizzying maneuver that caused her to lose her balance completely.

St. John thought his bride was perhaps a bit tipsy from the wine. But, being a good seaman himself, he ignored the effect the heavy seas might be having on someone unaccustomed to close acquaintance with either liquid, scooped Samantha up, and deposited her gently on the turned- down sheets of the immense bed.

Samantha was nothing if not honest. She looked up at her romantically eager husband and said, "I think I may be a bit drunk."

"Just a trifle up in the world, my pet. That's all," his lordship assured her, then smiled a very intimate smile as he removed his robe and lowered himself beside her. "It might even lend a bit of cachet to the proceedings."

The object of this assurance would dearly have liked to believe it, but her stomach had already taken control of the situation from her hands. All at once Samantha's eyes widened, their deep green showing darkly against her suddenly ashen cheeks, and she sprang clumsily from the bed to run to the basin set on its stand in the corner. There she cast up her accounts, over and over again, while St. John held a cool wet cloth to her perspiring brow.

"It—it's the boat, Zachary. It will keep moving," she wailed piteously.

At long last the Earl escorted his wan bride back to the bed, tucked her in up to her chin, and left her to rest. Some three hours and several trips to the basin later his lordship allowed reluctantly that the seas were a bit rough if one was unused to spring storms in the Channel, but assured Samantha that there was no danger of the Sea Devil going to the bottom.

Samantha was many things, but she was not a good patient. Like many usually robust people, she considered illness to be a personal insult. When really under the weather—as she was now—she was easily convinced that her malady was sure to prove fatal.

She opened one bleary eye and glared at her husband balefully. "In that case, my hopes are quite cut up. I had been comforting myself with the thought of a quick and painless death by drowning to rid me of this misery."

"Tch, tch, Sam. Such a craven, cowardly way for my little spitfire to talk. I thought you were made of sterner stuff."

His lordship was teasing, of course, and very commendable it was of him, too, considering how drastically his plans for the evening had been altered yet again. But Samantha was in no mood for friendly raillery.

"Why not be a good little demon and run along outside and amuse yourself? Maybe you can find a crewman, on his hands and knees working on the decks, and give him a kick in the pants. Better yet, you jolly ghoul, why not tie a length of rope, one end to your waist and the other to a large rock, and jump overboard for a swim?" She rolled back onto her side, drew her legs up in a fetal position as if to guard her tender stomach and slurred sleepily, "Off you go now, mate. Give my regards to all the little fishies."

St. John did leave, chuckling beneath his breath, but he returned off and on during the remainder of the night to check on his wife, who was not once aware of his presence.

The next morning, when Samantha finally awoke clear-eyed and even a little hungry, the Earl learned that Samantha was unaware of more than just the passage of the night. Ah, the resiliency of youth! he thought, watching her as she alternately munched on dry toast and sipped sweet tea. She recalled aloud how everything about the previous evening after the observation of that miniature tempest in her hip bath was a total blank. In all seriousness she asked Zachary if she had been much of a bother.

The smile left the Earl's face. It was unbelievable! Lord Royston had employed some of his most proven-effective techniques on this unfledged girl, with what he thought were remarkably encouraging results. Now here was that selfsame female, baldly proclaiming that what he thought had been a highly successful prelude to complete intimacy had in reality impressed her so little that a few glasses of wine and some slight seasickness could erase the entire episode from her mind.

From her vantage pointy sitting crosslegged in the middle of the bed looking across at St. John as he lounged elegantly in a leather-stuffed chair near the first porthole, Samantha could see that the man was not best pleased about something.

"Then I was a nuisance," she wailed. "Oh, Zachary, I know I'm an absolute pig when I'm sick. Aunt Loretta and Izzy say they'd rather nurse a bear with a sore paw than me, but I promise you I hardly ever get sick, honestly." With a touch of her usual spirit she added, "Besides, you were the one with the brilliant idea of having our honeymoon on this bloody boat. How was I to know I've not the makings of a sailor? I've never been on the water before—unless you count Smithdon's Fish Pond, in a rowboat, which I certainly don't because that water is clear as glass and only three feet deep most of the time."

St. John, his chin and mouth nearly buried in his cravat as he sat slumped in his chair, told her ruefully, "You weren't seasick, sweetings, or at least you probably wouldn't have been except for my stumbling stupidity. What you were, infant, was drunk."

Wrinkling her brow, Samantha pondered this information for a few moments before clapping her hands together in glee. "How utterly famous! I've always wanted to be drunk," she cried happily. "Thank you, Zachary. If you allow me to become bosky it must mean you consider me an adult, for everyone knows how freely the spirits flow in Society."

St. John mumbled something nasty into his neckcloth.

"So, anyway, Zachary, what did happen last night? Is there anything I should know?" she questioned seriously.

How was he to answer a question like that? Did he tell her nothing happened and take time to regroup his forces before planning another, less alcoholic, assault on her senses? Or did he tell her they had graduated from compliments and hand-kissing to pleasurable cuddling and neck nibbling—procedures that appeared to have been mutually edifying—and had even progressed to the point of actually sharing the same bed for some few fleeting moments before Fate interrupted in the form of a sick belly? Would she believe him? Who would? Even he had trouble recognizing the so-willing girl in his arms last night as the same young miss whose greatest pleasure in life was slashing him to ribbons with her sharp tongue.

Ah, well. It was early days yet. There was time and enough for everything to come round once they were back in London.

"I assure you, my dear invalid," the Earl said at last, "nothing occurred last night that is of any lasting importance to either of us. Let us just say we had been spending a reasonably civil hour together when suddenly you took ill. And as there is bound to be another evening later today after the sun goes down—and another tomorrow, and another the day after that, and so on—I doubt the loss of one insignificant night shall weigh too heavily in the long run."

With those words Royston rose and quit the cabin, going out into the air to pace the deck and rough out the next moves in his assault plan, while back in the cabin a thoroughly miffed Samantha was wrinkling up her nose and doing a creditable imitation of St. John's tone as she parroted, "And another the day after that, and so on and so on.
Bah!
Fusty old crow, condescending to me like I'm still in leading-strings."

She cocked her elbows on her crossed knees, and plunking her chin down into her cupped hands stared intently into space. "Something went on in here last night, I'd bet my pearl and sapphire bracelet on it, and whatever it was it has set old Zach well up into the treetops. I wonder if, when I vomited—or shot the cat as Wally says—I missed the bowl and got... no, I'd remember that. Then again, maybe he tried to kiss me and that's when I shot the ... no, even I wouldn't do anything that awful. I hope. I guess I'll just have to forget it like wise old Solomon said I should, but if I don't know what happened last night, how am I supposed to prepare myself for tonight? Frankly, I wish he'd just do whatever it is he's bent on doing and get it over with. All this to-ing and fro-ing is becoming a strain."

She raised one hand to twirl a burnished curl idly around her index finger. "Marriage," she scoffed. "Given my druthers, I'd rather not bother with the business, thank you."

Meanwhile, leaning heavily against his forearms as he stood at the rail looking out at the approaching coastline, Zachary St. John was thinking, "Marriage, an institution created by sadists to be indulged in only by morons, masochists, and peers with entailed estates. Blast the institution to blazes! Who needs it?"

Shortly before noon, with the Sea Devil in the capable hands of a local ship's carpenter, Royston's crested coach (followed again by a second smaller coach containing Samantha's copious luggage) was on the main turnpike to London. Whatever awaited the newlywed couple in that metropolis could not possibly be so unsettling and counterproductive as what had befallen them on the Sea Devil. Fate could not be so fickle, so perverse, so mischievously disruptive as to dip its meddling fingers into the affairs of the Earl and Countess of Royston again after leading them such a merry chase, almost from the moment they met.

It couldn't.

Could it?

Carstairs, the so-proper St. John butler, stepped a foot into the room, cleared his throat, and undertook to announce in his best stentorian tones: "Miss Loretta Ardsley and Miss Isabella Ards—" That was as far as he got before the new mistress of the sedate Royston Mansion in Portman Square cut him off by pithily pointing out that marriage had not so unhinged her ladyship or distorted her eyesight as to necessitate the promptings of a third party in order for her to recognize members of her own family—now foolishly being made to cool their heels out in the draughty hallway.

Samantha then clapped her hands imperiously and made shooing motions in the direction of the insulted and valued family retainer before flinging her arms out wide and wheeling about in front of these same awestruck relations (now officially admitted to the Countess's presence), demanding their honest opinion of her new morning-at-home toilette.

"Well," she asked impishly, plucking at her rather prodigiously low neckline, "what do you think? I have at least a dozen others in my chambers you've yet to see as they've just come this morning. Confess now, can you ever in your life recall seeing such a magnificent ensemble?"

The two gape-jawed females could only wag their heads in speechless denial as their wide-eyed stares drank in the sight before them. The newest Countess of Royston had truly outdone herself.

Oh, the materials that made up her gown were not so extraordinary in themselves. But when incorporated as they were into the Circassian wrapper Samantha wore, with its rather daring palest-peach lace bodice and long, flaring sleeves, fashioned of that same lace in alternate stripes with the moss-green, soft muslin cloth that made up the slim wrap-skirt that clung from just beneath the bodice to end just above the carpet, the result was decidedly unsettling. The illusion (or carefully engineered delusion, depending on the proclivity of the observer) of Samantha's being clothed only in wisps of moss-green muslin was momentary but it served its purpose, as evidenced by Aunt Loretta's muffled gasp, Isabella's involuntary gulp, and—lastly, as well as predictably—Samantha's triumphant crow of laughter.

"I have dazzled you both, no doubt," Samantha pursued happily.

Isabella, subsiding daintily into a nearby chair, was the first to find her tongue. "Sammy, that gown is outrageous! Whatever did the Earl say? Surely he won't allow you to appear in public looking, er, looking—" Isabella struggled to search out a ladylike way to express the inexpressible and ended weakly, "looking—like thatl"