Wicked Wyckerly (2 page)

2

Abigail Merriweather drove the sharp blade of her hoe into the weed that was daring to invade her rhubarb patch. The thick green leaves and red stalks of the rhubarb grew with a lushness that made a mockery of her arid existence since her half-siblings had been taken away.

“The house is so quiet!” She cried her despair to the tailless squirrel perched on the fence.

The squirrel chattered his agreement, reaching with his little paw to grab the nutty reward she offered for his company. The tickle of his nails against her palm might be the only small hand that touched hers this day. She almost burst into tears.

“I cannot go on like this,” she told her sympathetic friend. “I’ve written to the marquess asking for help and waited and waited, but he does not answer my pleas.”

She didn’t whine to the servants. That would be undignified. And her friends in the village thought she ought to be
relieved
to be rid of four rowdy young children. Certainly, she’d already sacrificed enough on their behalf. She had been twenty-three before she finally found a suitor in the local vicar, and twenty-four when he ran away rather than adopt the rambunctious half-siblings whose responsibility she’d assumed upon her father’s unexpected death. Her minuscule dowry hardly covered the expense of such a ready-made family. For a vicar hoping to advance his position, she had become a liability rather than an asset overnight.

She understood why Frederick had left, but she’d been crushed all the same. Losing both her papa and her fiancé in a single year had been devastating. But she loved the children and had given up marriage to keep them. Except now they were gone, too, shipped away by Mr. Greyson, her father’s executor, to the safekeeping of a guardian
who could provide more effectual male guidance
. Tears welled at the still-fresh sting of the insult. A veritable stranger was more suitable because he wore trousers!

“They’re all the family I have left,” she told the squirrel, who would have switched his tail in approval had Miss Kitty not deprived him of it when he was just a nestling.

Brushing her short curls from her forehead, Abigail leaned on the hoe handle and surveyed the rhubarb bed with a sharp eye for nefarious dandelions and wild garlic. Soon, both rhubarb and strawberries would be plentiful, and Cook would prepare the tarts the twins so dearly loved.

But Cissy and Jeremy wouldn’t be here to eat them.

“I need a man,” she declared so decisively that the squirrel leaped from the fence and hid under the hedge. “I need to marry a rich solicitor,” she amended. “A gentleman who loves children and would take my case to the highest courts. An upright, respectable man with enough money not to worry about the expense!”

Rather than cry more useless tears, she was stubbornly contemplating the solicitors of her acquaintance—which amounted to exactly none—when the mail coach rattled to a halt on the treelined road. The mail wasn’t delivered personally to Abbey Lane, but Abigail couldn’t prevent her heartbeat from skipping in hope. Perhaps a letter of response from a marquess required hand delivery. She wouldn’t know. Her father’s distant, titled cousin had never sent one.

Please, let him say he would help her fetch the children back. Jennie and Tommy were older than the twins, but they were still too young to be away from home. If she couldn’t find a rich solicitor to marry, she needed a respectable, wealthy London gentleman, like the marquess, who would be willing to fight for her cause.

The coach lingered, and she hurried toward the gate, hoe still in hand. Perhaps their guardian had relented and sent the children home for a visit. The mail might stop out here for young children—

“Keep the demon bratling off my coach until you’ve tamed or caged her!” a cranky male voice bellowed.

“I hate you, you bloody damned cawker!” a child screamed.

Despite the appalling curse, Abigail hurried faster. She did not recognize the voice, but she knew hopeless desperation when she heard it. She would not let harm come to any child under her notice.

“Your generosity will not be forgotten,” a wry, plummy baritone called over the thump of baggage hitting the ground.

Sophisticated aristocrats with rounded vowels and haughty accents were not a common commodity in these rural environs. Abigail’s innate social insecurity kicked in, rendering her immobile while she tried to decide upon a course of action.

A small figure darted through the hedgerow, dragging a ragged doll and shouting, “Beetle-brained catch-farts can’t catch me!”

“Penelope!” the gentleman shouted. “Penelope, come back here this instant.”

Oh, that would turn the imp right around. With a sniff of disdain at such incompetence, Abigail intercepted the foulmouthed termagant’s path. Crouching down to the child’s level, she placed a hand on her arm. “If you run around behind the house,” she murmured, “he won’t find you, and Cook will give you shortbread.”

Tearstained cheeks belied the fury in huge, long-lashed green eyes as the child gazed warily upon her. With her heart-shaped face framed by golden brown hair that was caught loosely in a long braid, she could have been a miniature princess, were it not for her threadbare and too-short gown. And the outrageous expletives that had polluted her rosy lips.

“Hurry along now. I will talk to the rather perturbed gentleman who is opening the gate.”

The child glanced behind her and, setting her jaw in mulish determination, raced across the lawn toward the three-story brick cottage that Abigail called home.

“Penelope!” The fashionably garbed Corinthian caught sight of the child and strode briskly up the drive after her.

Abigail gaped at the intruder’s manly physique, accentuated by an impeccably tailored, long-tailed cutaway, knit pantaloons, and Hessians polished to a fare-thee-well. She thought her heart actually stumbled in awe—until alarm startled her mind into ticking again.

She might be inclined to be generous and reserve judgment for a man who made a child cry. Children cried for many reasons, not necessarily rational ones. She did not know a man alive who could deal successfully with tearful children, including her late, lamented father. But the gentleman’s expensive frock coat and Hessians in the face of the child’s pitiful attire raised distressing questions.

Abigail was even less inclined to be forgiving when he seemed prepared to race right past her as if she did not exist. She was painfully aware that she was small and unprepossessing, and she supposed her gardening bonnet and hoe added to her invisibility in the eyes of an arrogant aristocrat. But she wasn’t of a mind to be treated like a garden gnome.

She stepped into the drive and wielded the hoe so it would knock the elegant stranger’s knees if he didn’t acknowledge her. He might be large and formidable, but no man would intimidate her into abandoning a hurt child. He halted with the quick reflexes of an athlete and gazed at her in startlement.

She scarcely had time to admire his disheveled whiskey-colored hair and impressive square chin before he ripped the hoe handle from her grip and flung it into the boxwoods. For a brief moment, she stared into long-lashed, troubled green eyes, and she suffered the insane urge to brush the hair from his forehead to reassure him. Except he was so formidably masculine from his whiskered jaw to his muscled calves, and smelled so deliciously of rich, male musk, that she trembled at the audacity of her impulse. Reverend Frederick had always smelled of lavender sachet.

“The little heathen first, introductions later.” The Corinthian broke into a ground-eating gallop that would have done a Thoroughbred proud.

Discarding her disquiet, Abigail hastened up the drive in the intruder’s wake. Dignity and her corset prevented her from galloping. As did her short legs.

She arrived at the kitchen door to behold a scene of chaos.

Plump and perplexed, Cook stood with a tray of shortbread in her hand while the threadbare princess darted under the ancient trestle table, shoving a sweet in her mouth.

Miss Kitty yowled and leaped from her napping place on the sill, knocking over a geranium in her haste to achieve the top of the pie safe. The scullery maid cried out in surprise and dashed into the pantry, whether to hide or to secure a weapon was not easily discerned.

And the gentleman—

Abigail thought her eyes might be bulging as she regarded the captivating view of a gentleman’s posterior upended under her kitchen table. She had never particularly noticed that part of a man’s anatomy, but garbed in knit pantaloons, his was extraordinarily . . . muscled. And neither her insight nor his action was pertinent to the task at hand.

She sighed in exasperation and yanked the green coattail as the gentleman attempted to squeeze his broad shoulders between the table and Cook’s favorite chair in an effort to retrieve the child. “Honestly, one would think you’d never seen a child have a tantrum before. Leave her be. She won’t die of temper.”

Unprepared for a rear attack, the intruder stumbled sideways, caught Cook’s chair to steady himself, and knocked over a steaming teapot. He gracefully managed to catch the pottery before it crashed to the brick floor, but not before scalding his hand with the contents.

Abigail winced and waited for the flow of colorful, inappropriate invectives that the child had to have learned somewhere.

The gentleman’s throttled silence was more evocative. Dragon green eyes glaring, he returned the pot to the table, clenched his burned wrist and ruined shirt cuff, and, ignoring Abigail’s admonitions, again crouched down to check on the runaway.

If she had not already noted the family resemblance of matching forelocks that tumbled hair in their faces, Abigail would have known the two strangers were related by the identical mulish set of their mouths.

Bumping his head against a kitchen table while holding his scalded wrist, Fitz tried to recall why he’d thought learning to be an earl required turning over a new leaf. The moldy, crumbing old foliage he’d lived under all his life had been perfectly adequate for the lowly insect he was, although he must admit his impulsive actions in the past might occasionally give the flighty appearance of a butterfly. He snorted. In the past? If kidnapping his own daughter wasn’t flighty, it was the most ill-conceived, most absurd, and possibly stupidest thing he’d ever done, as even the child seemed to recognize.

“I want my mommy.” Beneath the table, Penelope stuck out her lower lip.

He peered in exasperation at the whining, scrawny six-year-old bit of fluff he’d accidentally begot in his brainless years, when he’d thought women would save his wicked soul.

The child had his thick brownish hair and green eyes, so he knew she was his, right down to the unruly swirl of hair falling across her forehead. The petulant lip and constant demands obviously belonged to her actress mother—may the woman be damned to perdition.

And yet, he was stupidly drawn to this imp of Satan who so resembled his neglected childhood self. He suffered an uncomfortable understanding of her rebelliousness. After all, she’d been ignored for years by a mother who had run off to marry a rich German and a father who thought good upbringing required only servants. He still preferred servants, but he obviously needed to find more competent ones.

“I will find you a better mother,” he recklessly promised, if only to coax her from beneath the table.

“I want
my
mommy!” Big round eyes glared daggers at him.

“You have a daddy now. That ought to be enough until we have time to look around and pick a pretty new mommy for you.” What in hell did she expect him to say? That her mother didn’t want her? That was one truth that wouldn’t pass his tongue, even though the damned woman hadn’t seen her child since infancy.

“Mommy says you’re a worthless toadsucker. I don’t want you for a daddy,” she declared.

Her real mother would never have lowered herself to such a common expression. Understanding dawned. “If you mean Mrs. Jones, she is a slack-brained lickspittle,” he countered, “and she is
not
your mother. Do you think I’d pick dragon dung like that for your mother?”

He ignored the choking laughter—or outrage—of his audience in his effort to solve one problem at a time. The child’s mother had chosen the nanny. He should have paid closer attention when he’d approved her choice, but at the time, Mrs. Jones had seemed affable and maternal, with all those qualities he imagined a good mother ought to have. Not that he had any experience with mothers or children, good or bad.

He couldn’t remember even
being
a child. An undisciplined hellion, yes, but never an innocent. What the devil had he been thinking? That he wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of his father? And his grandfather. They hadn’t been called Wicked Wyckerlys for naught. Berkshire was littered with his family’s bastards. Given the Danecroft debt-ridden habit of marrying for money, producing legitimate spawn had been more of a challenge.

Still, he tried another tactic, plying the silver tongue for which he was known. “But I need a daughter very much, Penelope, and I would like you to live with me now.”

No, he wouldn’t, actually. He’d always assumed the child would be better off almost anywhere except with him. Therein lay the rub. There was nowhere else for her to go.

He suspected the banty hen breathing down his neck was prepared to dump the entire pot of steaming tea on him, if her tapping toe was any indication. If he’d learned nothing else in his wastrel life, he’d learned to be wary of vindictive women, which seemed to include all pinched, spinsterish females with time on their hands.

“If you will remove yourself from my table—” Right on schedule, the hen attacked, kicking at his boots in a futile attempt to dislodge him.

“I want my mommy,” the child wailed in a higher pitch, rubbing her eyes with small, balled-up fists. “You
hate
me!”

“Of course I don’t hate you,” Fitz said, too appalled to pay attention to the hen. “Who told you that I hate you?” Gobsmacked by her accusation, he could only be blunt. “You’re all the family I have. I
can’t
hate you.”