Temptation

  He was good. Temperance could see that now. He was good enough that he could purposefully throw himself off balance yet never lose control. As a kid, no one had ever been able to keep up with Temperance, but she could see that if she’d met an eleven-year-old James McCairn, he would have given her a run for the money.

  Now they were at opposite ends of the ballroom, and around them the children were watching in wide-eyed silence. She could feel that they were afraid. Was this a real argument? Or were these two adults pretending again?

  When Temperance looked up at James, she saw him move his chin downward in a quick gesture. It took only a second to know what he had in mind.

  “I’m going to murder you,” she yelled, then gave a couple of powerful strokes and went flying toward him. Could she pull it off? she wondered as she neared him. Had she understood his gesture correctly? Would he catch her, or would she go flying through the windows at the end of the room?

  But she trusted him.

  Seconds before she was about to run into him full force, she crouched down, tucked her head into her chest, stuck one leg out, then put her arms straight up in the air, and she was moving fast between his legs. James caught her by the wrists, and in one lightning-fast powerful movement, he then turned quickly, and instantly, they were both facing in the opposite direction and James was skating backwards, holding Temperance’s uplifted hands, her compressed body balanced on her one skate, between his legs.

  When James finally stopped against the opposite wall, Temperance didn’t move. Her head was down, her leg was still up, and her thigh muscles were screaming with pain. But she didn’t hear a sound from the children.

  “Are they still there?” she whispered up to James.

  “Scared,” he whispered back.

  But in the next second Temperance heard the sound of a single pair of hands clapping, and in the next, the room erupted in laughter and applause.

  After several minutes, when the sounds began to die down, hands grabbed her under the arms and she was pulled out from between James’s legs. When she tried to stand, she was stiff, both from the unaccustomed exertion and from her fear that the trick wasn’t going to work.

  It was Ramsey who’d helped her up, and Grace was beside him. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” she breathed, looking at Temperance with eyes full of astonishment. “Did you two practice that?”

  “No,” Temperance said, her hand to her back. “We just—” Breaking off, she looked up at James. He was surrounded by children, each with a pair of skates in hand and wanting him to help put them on. Grace was still waiting for an answer. “We just—” What? Have a natural rapport so we can communicate with just tiny gestures given between us?

  Temperance was saved from answering by the door opening and Eppie and her younger sister bringing in the first of four trays full of food. With a collective squeal, the children ran toward the food, Grace behind them, so Temperance and James were alone at the far end of the ballroom.

  Temperance didn’t know what to say to him. In a way, what they had just done had been very intimate.

  “And what are you planning to teach next Sunday?” he asked; then they both laughed and the awkward moment was gone.

  “You have any horse liniment?” she asked, putting her hand on her hip where she was sure she was bruised.

  “Never need it myself,” James said. “Since I climb mountains and herd sheep and—”

  At that moment one of the older children lost control of his skates and slammed into the back of James. This time he went down in earnest, grabbing Temperance as he fell, so that she landed on top of him.

  Of course all the children thought this was more of the show, and with their mouths full, they laughed at the two of them.

  Temperance pulled herself off James, then looked at him as he stayed where he was, in a crumpled heap on the floor.

  “So?” she said, looking down at him, her eyes full of laughter.

  “In the tack room, third shelf down, on the right. But, first, get these things off of me.”

  Smiling, Temperance bent down, and using the key that was on a string about her neck, she removed his skates; then he sat there while she took hers off as well. By now the floor was full of children, all wearing skates and pulling each other about the room. Frequent thuds of children falling were followed by screams of laughter.

  Standing, James put his arm around Temperance’s shoulders. “Think anyone will miss us?” he asked, standing on one foot.

  She looked at the activity around them, with kids screaming, laughing, some eating, some scooting about on the skates. “Somehow, I don’t think so,” she said, then she caught Grace’s eye and Grace nodded, meaning that Temperance had done well.

  “Come on,” James said. “I know where there’s a bottle of wine and some cheese and something soft for our backsides.”

  “All right,” Temperance said, smiling up at him. His arm was about her shoulders, and one of hers was around his waist. Her other hand was on his hard, flat stomach muscles. Usually when a man offered her wine and “a soft place,” she ran the other way, and if he followed, she’d been known to use the steel point of her umbrella as a means to stop him. “Sounds wonderful,” she said, then helped him limp out the door.

  The “something soft” was a pile of straw that wasn’t too clean, and the wine and cheese was just that: a bottle of wine and a chunk of cheese. No glasses, no pretty porcelain plates, no candles; just sustenance.

  However, as soon as they were in the dirty tack room that smelled of horses and old leather, James sat down on a bale of straw and pulled his shirt off over his head. “Right there,” he said as he held out a bottle of wine to her, then pointed to the back of his left shoulder.

  It took Temperance a moment to realize that he wanted her to rub liniment into that area.

  All her life, she’d prided herself on being a “free spirit,” an enlightened person. So what was she to do now? Say to him that her sense of propriety didn’t allow her to pass a bottle of wine back and forth with a man? That she couldn’t be alone with a half-dressed man? And, besides, wouldn’t that sound absurd when, just ten minutes before, she’d been rolling between his legs?

  “What are you waiting for?” he asked impatiently.

  “For my mother to come storming in and tell me I’m doomed,” Temperance said.

  The look he gave her over his bare shoulder told her that he knew exactly her dilemma. His eyes turned soft and seductive. “You’re not going to turn coward on me now, are you?”

  Ignoring the bottle of wine, as she needed her senses to remain clear, she took the bottle of liniment down from a shelf, poured it on her hands, then began to massage his shoulder. His big, thick, muscular shoulder. On his warm, smooth, dark skin.

  Well, she thought as she tried to override her senses with her brain, she was once again experiencing lust and, as before, she was going to be able to say that she had overcome it. She had not given in to her baser needs and—

  “Care for a tumble in the hay?” James said with a lowered-lashes look up at her.

  That broke the spell by making her laugh. “So tell me about your late wife. If you never liked her, why did you marry her?”

  He grimaced, the invitation gone from his eyes. “For a housekeeper, you certainly are interested in things that aren’t any of your business.”

  “It’s none of my business to entertain the children of your village, either, but I did it, didn’t I?”

  “Oh? When I got there, it didn’t look as though you were being very entertaining. It looked to me like you wanted to run away and hide. Oh! Watch those nails of yours.”

  “Sorry,” Temperance said with no sincerity in her voice. “If you want to rub this on by yourself, just tell me.”

  “No, that’s all right. Lower, yes, yes, that’s the right place.”

  When she saw him close his eyes in what appeared to be ecstasy caused by her touch, she knew she had to either leave or talk
very fast.

  “Wife, remember? You were telling me about your wife.”

  “No, you were snooping into my business again, but I wasn’t telling you anything.”

  At that Temperance took her hands off his bare back.

  James started talking immediately, and Temperance went back to rubbing. “I was in love with a village girl, but my father took me to London and dangled beautiful women in front of me, so I gave in and married one of them. The one he chose. Then I brought her back here to McCairn to live. There’s nothing else to tell except that she cried for the whole two years we were married.”

  “What happened to her?”

  James was quiet for a moment; then he looked at the row of horse harnesses hanging on the wall. “One moonless night she tried to run away. She jumped on one of my nervous racehorses, and I guess she meant to go to Midleigh, but she must have become disoriented.” His voice lowered. “She rode the horse over the cliff, and they both went into the sea.”

  Temperance didn’t want to ask, but she couldn’t help herself. “Do you think it was suicide?”

  “No!” James said sharply. “I don’t want another suicide in the family. With what my grandmother did, we have enough sins on us.”

  “But your grandmother didn’t commit suicide,” Temperance said, then put her liniment-coated hand over her mouth in horror at what she’d said. She’d just betrayed a confidence!

  For a moment James just looked straight ahead, saying nothing. “All right, out with it,” he said softly. “What has that nosy nature of yours snooped out now?”

  “If you’re going to talk to me like that, I don’t think I’ll tell you anything,” she said as she popped the cork back into the liniment.

  This time when he spoke, his voice held command. It was soft, but she knew that he wasn’t joking. “You will tell me what you know about my grandmother.”

  But Temperance refused to be intimidated by him. “I thought you didn’t like her. Didn’t you call her The Great Spender?”

  Standing, James picked up his shirt. “Because the woman had faults didn’t stop me from loving her. She was a good woman to me. Now tell me what you know.”

  Temperance didn’t want to tell him anything and wished with all her might that she’d kept her mouth shut. But she could see from his face that he wasn’t going to let her get away with saying nothing.

  “Sit,” he said, nodding toward the bale of straw he’d just risen from.

  Temperance obeyed him, then sat in silence as he untied the laces from one of her walking boots.

  “You might have the opinion that this was not a happy house,” he said as he pulled off her boot.

  At that Temperance could only make a sound of disbelief. Gambling. Murder. Revenge. No, not exactly a happy household.

  “I know that the villagers love to talk about my family and Grace is a big talker.”

  “You would know that,” Temperance said, then opened her eyes wide, for her voice sounded quite bitter. Why had she said that? But when he’d mentioned Grace, she’d instantly thought of the very intimate relationship that he’d once had with the woman. And now Grace was living in the same house with him. Were they still . . . sharing?

  “You want to . . .” He nodded his head toward her stockinged foot.

  “Oh,” she said, then hesitated before pulling up her skirt and unfastening her garter in front of him. Should she tell him to look away? There was a wicked part of her that wanted to stretch out her leg and—

  But James solved the problem by turning away long enough for her to quickly unfasten both stockings and roll them off her feet. She tucked them into her pockets. When she was finished, he knelt and his big hands held her small foot.

  James didn’t seem to have heard the tone of her voice. “I know that you’ve heard of gambling and feuds that lasted for generations, but—”

  “No one told me of a feud,” she said with interest.

  At that James clamped down on her ankle with his big hand. “Are you going to listen or try to get even more information from me?”

  “I’d like to see all the pieces of the puzzle.”

  At that James shook his head. “Damn it, woman! My grandmother is buried in unconsecrated ground, and it plagues me. If you know something about her death, I want to hear it.”

  “Your grandfather killed her,” she said, then held her breath as she waited for the coming explosion.

  But there was none. Instead, James opened the bottle of liniment and began to massage it into her sore ankle. “Yes, I can see that,” he said after a while. “The old man had a ferocious temper.”

  “And how many girls did he throw out the window?” Temperance said, trying to lighten the mood. After all, this had happened many years ago.

  James looked up at her with a one-sided grin. “A few. So now, tell me everything that you know and where you heard it.”

  Temperance started to say that she was under a bond of secrecy, but it was too late for that now, so she told him how Grace’s husband had seen the accidental shooting, then later James’s grandfather had claimed that his wife had committed suicide.

  “Bastard!” James said under his breath as he picked up Temperance’s other foot.

  “It was an arranged marriage,” he said as he rubbed her ankle. “And they hated each other.”

  “Like you and your wife,” Temperance said softly.

  “Yes,” he said flatly. “Like my wife and me. But theirs was a loveless marriage from the start, and my grandparents wanted nothing in the world but to hurt each other. He gambled and she spent.”

  At that Temperance leaned toward him, her face eager. “But where is what she bought?”

  When James looked up at her, there was amusement on his face. “Don’t tell me you’ve believed that old legend? That somewhere in that house is Aladdin’s treasure trove?”

  “Oh,” Temperance said, deflated, as she leaned back and he began to rub her ankle with liniment. “I thought maybe . . .”

  He looked up at her with one eyebrow raised. “You thought what? That you and I could start tearing down walls and looking? You don’t think that my grandfather did that, as well as my father? Or that my brother and I didn’t spend every moment we were in that house looking for the treasure?”

  Negativity had never made Temperance give up anything. “But Grace said that her husband found receipts for things that your grandmother bought, things made of silver, and even gold statues by Cellini.”

  For a moment James was silent as he massaged her ankle, and as his silence lengthened, her heart began to beat faster. As a child she’d loved the book Treasure Island.

  “What receipts?” James asked quietly.

  Temperance wanted to whoop with triumph. But she took a deep breath and calmed herself. “I have no idea. What do they matter, anyway, since there is no treasure to be had? Just because your grandmother spent the family fortune to keep it out of the hands of your gambling grandfather but she died without telling anyone where she’d stored the—

  She broke off because James had grabbed her shoulders and planted a kiss on her mouth. It was a hard kiss that soon turned soft and sweet, and she never wanted it to end.

  After too short a time, he moved away and looked at her. There was amusement on his handsome face. “Whatever you’ve been doing all your life, it’s not been kissing,” he said.

  At that Temperance lost her good mood and pushed his hands away. “That’s because I don’t want to kiss you.”

  “Sure about that?” he said as he bent forward again.

  But there was nothing that could kill ardor more effectively than being told one was no good at something. Her mother would say that Temperance wasn’t supposed to be good at kissing because Temperance wasn’t married. Whatever, all Temperance’s good feelings were gone.

  James put his hand under her chin and lifted her to look at him. “I hurt your feelings?”

  “Of course not!” she said with an insolence that she didn??
?t feel. “But are you interested in anything at all besides sex?”

  At that he blinked at her. Obviously he wasn’t used to hearing women say that word. “No, it’s all I think about. I can’t get any work done for thinking about what I’d like to do to women in bed. I think about—”

  She knew that he was teasing her, but she also knew that she didn’t like the way this conversation was going. “Receipts, remember? This all started when I— Hey!”

  James had grabbed her by the wrist and was pulling her out of the tack room toward the house. He didn’t seem to notice that her shoes had been left behind, but as Temperance stepped on stones and something squishy, she was well aware of her bare feet. Please don’t let it be horse manure, she said as he half dragged her into the house.

  Temperance tucked her bare feet under her skirt and yawned. Last night she’d stayed up till early morning helping Grace make hats. She’d spent today in a rigorous bout of roller-skating, and now here it was late at night and she was going over account books with a man who had told her she didn’t know how to kiss.

  “Nothing,” James said for at least the seventeenth time.

  Around them were account books dating back to 1762. “If these books were in America, they’d be in a museum,” Temperance said, yawning again.

  “If you want to go to bed, do so,” James said, but his tone let her know that he’d forever after consider her a wimp if she did.

  She stretched out her feet in front of her and wiggled her bare toes. There were half a dozen candles lit in the room, but the old library was still so dark that they might as well have been in a cave. “What I want to know is why your grandmother didn’t tell someone what she was doing. If she did buy and hide all these things, why didn’t she tell someone?”

  “She didn’t expect to die when she did.”

  “No one expects to die ever, but we still make out wills. Accidents can take anyone at a moment’s notice. And if your grandfather’s temper was such that you weren’t surprised to hear that he’d murdered her in a struggle, why didn’t she prepare for that possibility?”