Miss Wonderful

  Crewe had paused in the act of trimming a candle.

  Papa was rising from his chair.

  Mr. Carsington lifted his head from the hand it had been leaning on and, after a moment, smiled a small, secretive smile.

  The back of her neck tingled.

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought you were sleeping.”

  His smile widened. Mirabel abruptly recalled what she’d done in the early hours of morning—and her sarcastic remark about leaping upon gentlemen in their sleep.

  Her face grew very hot.

  “Never mind,” she said. She started to turn away.

  “Please don’t go, Miss Oldridge,” Mr. Carsington said. “Your father and I were talking about Egyptian date palms. I should like to hear your views.”

  Perhaps his smile hadn’t meant what she thought it did. Perhaps it had been a smile of relief at her interrupting a deadly boring botanical lecture.

  Her father gestured at the chair he’d vacated, and Mirabel took it. She could not run away, no matter how embarrassed she was.

  While botany was less likely to prove fatal than an opiate overdose, it was not without its dangers. From date palms, Papa might proceed to Sumatran camphor trees, in which case Mr. Carsington was sure to throw himself out of the window.

  “We were speaking of young men sowing wild oats,” her parent said, “and I remarked that this may well be a law of nature. In ancient Egypt, I was telling Mr. Carsington, only female date palms were cultivated. Wild males were brought from the desert to fertilize them.”

  “I could not understand why the Egyptians should go to so much bother,” Mr. Carsington said. “Why not use cultivated males as well as females? But you are better versed than I in agriculture. What is your opinion?”

  “I can think of three reasons,” she said. “Tradition, superstition, or—and this, I fear, is not always the rule in agricultural practices—the wild males had been proven to produce fruit either in greater quantity or of superior quality.”

  “The Babylonians suspended male clusters from wild dates over the females,” Papa said. “Many nations of Asia and Africa used this combination.”

  “Then it would appear to be a widespread practice,” Mirabel said. “Yet I don’t see what it has to do with the human species sowing wild oats. To my knowledge, date palms do not possess intellectual powers, let alone principles. They cannot decide how to act. They are governed entirely by natural laws.”

  “But the young are governed more by nature—by natural feelings, in other words—than by intellect and moral principle,” her father said. “For example, would either of you claim to be the same person you were, say, a decade or so ago? At that time, as I recollect, Mirabel, you were in London, breaking hearts left and right—”

  “I was what?” Mirabel stared at her father. He could not have said what she thought he did.

  “Were you really?” said Mr. Carsington. “Well, that is interesting. You grow more complicated by the minute, Miss Oldridge.”

  ALISTAIR wished he had a way of capturing the moment, for the look Miss Oldridge gave her father was priceless. If the botanist had suddenly sprouted palm fronds and date clusters, she could not have appeared more dumbfounded.

  She quickly composed herself, however, and directed a level gaze at Alistair. “This is absurd,” she said.

  “You never told me you’d been to London,” he said.

  “It was ages ago,” she said. “You weren’t even born yet.”

  He laughed. “No doubt my father wished I hadn’t been. Some ten or so years ago I incited a riot near Kensington Gate.”

  “A riot?” she said. “You started a riot?”

  “Did you not read of it? The tale was in all the papers.”

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  “You had too much on your mind, I daresay. All those hearts you had to break.”

  Alistair thought she was well on her way to breaking his.

  This day had dragged on so slowly, grey and dismal. He hadn’t realized how low his spirits had sunk until now. He’d hardly noticed his state of mind, it was so familiar, this melancholy.

  Then she’d burst into the room and he’d thought his heart, in pure joy, would burst from his chest.

  Numskull heart. She would break it, and forget about it as quickly and easily as she’d forgotten all the others. It would serve him right. He should guard it better, lock it away and keep his mind on business. Should, should, should. But he couldn’t summon the will to resist her, to stifle the happiness he felt when she came into the room.

  He watched her summon her wits, saw her baffled blue gaze clear, and waited for her answer.

  She leaned toward him and whispered, “I beg you will not place too much credence in what Papa says about my time in London. I cannot think where he comes by the notion that I am a femme fatale. Perhaps he has confused me with my Aunt Clothilde. She was a famous beauty. She is still, actually. Men are always falling in love with her.”

  Alistair leaned toward her. “Perhaps it runs in the family,” he whispered back.

  She gave him a quick, uncomprehending look, then coloring, drew back. “Oh,” she said. “You are flirting with me.”

  If only it were so simple and innocent. But it was not. The game he played at present was more dangerous than mere flirtation. He knew this, but he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—help himself.

  “Do you mind?” he said.

  “No.” Her brow wrinkled. “Doubtless you find it more amusing than date palms. But I am out of practice, and—” She broke off and looked about the room. “Where is Papa? Where is Crewe?”

  Alistair gave the room a quick survey. Their chaperons were nowhere in sight. “They seem to have abandoned us,” he said softly. “I wish you would take advantage.”

  “Of what?”

  “Me,” he said. “I am helpless, confined to this chair. I am not to put any weight on my left foot. I am completely at your mercy. Break my heart. Please. Get it over with.”

  “You are delirious,” she said. “Papa was talking about camphor trees, wasn’t he? I must tell Mrs. Entwhistle not to let—”

  “Very well. If you will make me leave my chair…” Alistair started to get up.

  She sprang up from her chair, thrust her hand against his chest, and pushed him back down.

  He looked up at her. Her hand stayed on his chest. She didn’t move, didn’t speak, only watched him, her gaze scanning his face.

  Finally, she lifted her hand. He waited for the slap he so richly deserved.

  She laid the palm of her hand against his cheek.

  It was nothing, really, the merest touch, but it was everything, too, to him, and he might as well have been struck by lightning, for it blasted to pieces what remained of his judgment and all those noble principles regarding the lines a gentleman may and may not cross.

  He turned his head and pressed his lips against the soft flesh of her hand, and heard her quick intake of breath.

  His own breathing grew hurried. He’d done nothing but miss her and indulge in hopeless fantasies since she’d left this room in the dark hours of morning.

  He couldn’t banish the memory of her scent and the supple curves of her body.

  Now he drank in that scent while tracing the soft curves of her palm with his lips. Her hand trembled, but she didn’t draw it away, and when he kissed her wrist, he found her pulse beating as frantically as his heart did.

  Her fingers curled into a fist against his cheek. He kissed her knuckles.

  She pulled her hand away.

  He looked up.

  Her countenance was wiped clean of expression.

  From behind him came a small, disapproving cough.

  Alistair suppressed the oath rising to his lips, turned toward his valet, and said, “Oh there you are, Crewe. I wondered where you’d got to.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” the valet said. “Thinking Mr. Oldridge had remained, I assumed my presence was not required, and stepped
into the next room to attend to a few tasks.”

  “I collect it was the date palms,” said Miss Oldridge coolly. “They have driven me to distant parts of the house often enough. When that subject comes up, the wisest course is flight. I applaud your good sense, Crewe.”

  She turned an unreadable gaze upon Alistair. “Perhaps I had better warn you about the camphor tree of Sumatra. Papa has recently read an Asiatic Journal article devoted to the topic.”

  “I am not sure I know what a camphor tree is,” Alistair said.

  “I strongly recommend that you do not ask him to enlighten you,” she said.

  “I certainly shan’t ask Mr. Oldridge to read the article to me,” Alistair said. “Your father has a soothing voice, and botanical prose is terrifically boring. I’ll only fall asleep without learning a thing. Look at what he brought this time. Can you wonder at my preferring to discuss date palms with him?”

  Miss Oldridge glanced at the table, where a copy of De Candolle’s Elementary Principles of Botany lay.

  “In any case, I like conversing with your father,” Alistair said quite truthfully. Despite what he’d learned about Oldridge as well as what Alistair observed and what he’d surmised, he couldn’t dislike the gentleman.

  “No one converses with my father,” the daughter said. “Not as normal human beings understand conversation. It is all detours and tangents and non sequiturs.”

  “You have too many responsibilities pressing upon you,” Alistair said. “You haven’t time to follow the meanderings of his mind, let alone sort them out. I, however, am completely at leisure at present. I can listen and puzzle over the connections between one idea and the next. It is fascinating.”

  Her expression sharpened, and her blue gaze fixed upon him with an intensity he could only wish were amorous.

  But he knew better. He had said something wrong. He didn’t know what it was, but he had no doubt he was about to suffer the consequences.

  “Fascinating,” she said quietly. “Of course you would say so. You are such a good listener. You let him ramble on about botany the way you let the other gentlemen hold forth about their hounds and poachers and mole catchers.”

  Something was springing out at Alistair from the darkness of her mind, but he could not yet make out what it was.

  “Mole catchers?” he said lightly while he braced himself to be torn to pieces.

  “I listened all day to ladies’ remedies for ailments ranging from warts to consumption,” she said. “It was tedious and annoying. But the exercise resulted in my neighbors thinking more kindly of me.”

  Alistair caught on. “Miss Oldridge, it is not—”

  “When you first came here, you told me why you’d contacted Papa first,” she said. “Since he’s the largest landowner hereabouts, you assumed his opinion of the canal would carry great weight with his neighbors. I thought that by now you would have realized my father takes no notice of practical concerns, such as the prospect of coal barges or passenger boats filled with drunken aristocrats cruising through his meadows.”

  “Miss Oldridge—”

  “You are wasting your time cultivating my father,” she said. “In the first place, he dotes upon you already. In the second, he hasn’t the remotest interest in your canal.” She lifted her chin. “In your place I should stick to seducing his daughter, since she, as anyone can tell you, is your most dangerous—and determined—opposition.”

  “Miss—”

  But she, knowing a good exit line when she’d uttered one, swept out of the room before he could utter another syllable.

  He listened to her footsteps fade.

  From another corner of the room came a pitying cough.

  LATE the following afternoon, Mirabel was in her father’s study, answering his correspondence.

  She had found the perfect way of keeping Mr. Carsington at the very back of her mind, instead of occupying every cubic inch of that organ: property law. She was locked in a desperate battle with the legal jargon of a letter from her father’s solicitor when she became aware of a series of faint thumps from the hall.

  She assumed a servant had dropped something. If the problem was serious, she’d soon learn of it.

  She returned to the solicitor’s letter.

  “I must speak to you,” a voice rumbled from near at hand—and nearly catapulted her from her chair.

  But composure was reflexive. Mirabel kept her seat, dropping only the pen with which she’d been making notes. Replevins, mesnes, distreins, and writs of cessavit, however, all flew out of her head.

  Mr. Carsington stood in the doorway, leaning on a cane. He was fully dressed. His linen was immaculately white and crisply starched. His sleek brown coat hugged his broad shoulders as though it were a second—and costly—skin. She was not sufficiently versed in men’s fashion to identify his inexpressibles as pantaloons, breeches, or trousers. All she knew was that they fit snugly, outlining the long, muscular legs she’d seen in their natural state.

  That recollection brought a host of others, and a rush of longing swept in with them, and in that moment she saw the truth, so stark there was no disregarding it.

  She’d crossed a boundary.

  She was infatuated.

  She’d done it without realizing, and now that she understood, it was too late. She had no way back to safety.

  She must simply endure it, and hide it, pretending she felt nothing, that, for instance, the room had not grown too small, suddenly, and too warm.

  “This is most unwise,” she told him. “Your ankle is not strong enough for traipsing about the house.”

  “Today Dr. Woodfrey told me I might take some mild exercise, as long as I used a cane, and put as little weight upon my foot as possible,” he said, advancing into the room, which seemed to shrink further. “My leg has given me a good deal of practice with the method.”

  Cautiously she stood. She braced her hands on the desk. “I strongly doubt that Dr. Woodfrey’s idea of ‘mild exercise’ is a hike from the guest wing, down a long staircase, and several hundred feet to the coldest part of the house,” she said.

  “I don’t care what his idea is,” Mr. Carsington said. His voice dropped to a throbbing undercurrent. “I must speak to you. About yesterday. You accused me of seducing you.”

  “You need not announce it to the household.” Mirabel hastily skirted the desk, and him, and closed the door. She stood in front of the door, in case she needed to make a speedy exit…before she added a blatant outrage to her rapidly mounting heap of indiscretions, something she couldn’t cover up with sarcasm or by taking the offensive, as she’d done previously.

  He remained where he was, but a pace or two away.

  “You announced it in front of my valet,” he said.

  “I forgot he was there,” she said. “Crewe is discreet to the point of invisibility.”

  “His master is not,” said Mr. Carsington. “I am indiscreet, and very stupid at times, but I am not duplicitous. I do not go about seducing women in order to further business aims.”

  “I see,” she said. “You do it merely for amusement.”

  He regarded her with half-closed eyes, yet she detected the glitter in them. “I am not the one who left London strewn with broken hearts,” he said.

  Was he mocking her? “I told you that was nonsense,” she said tightly.

  “You made a start at breaking mine,” he said.

  “I what?” She could not believe her ears. “Are you delirious?”

  “You accused me of seducing you,” he said. “You seem to have forgotten who made the first move.”

  It had been she, and she couldn’t pretend otherwise. Heat washed over her, not all of it from shame.

  She remembered the feel of his mouth against her hand, and the way the world had gone away. She experienced again the spill of sensations she had no name for, and the sense of toppling off balance. She did not know how to come right, and wasn’t sure she wanted to.

  She looked up and saw hi
s mouth curve a very little. It seemed like a taunt, daring her to contradict him. She didn’t want to. All she wanted to do was lay her fingers over his mouth and feel those sensations again. She didn’t want to talk or listen or think. She didn’t want to be sensible. She was always sensible and thinking ahead. She was one and thirty years old. Why could she not be a fool this once?

  “Well, if you must split hairs so fine,” she said unsteadily.

  “I certainly must,” he said. “Furthermore, I am not cultivating your father. He has been kind and amiable to me, and altogether impossible to dislike, even for your sake. If anyone is being won over, it is I. This is why—”

  He broke off with a gasp as she grabbed his lapels. “Miss Oldridge.”

  She looked up at him.

  He looked down at her hands. “You’re wrinkling my coat,” he said in horrified tones.

  Mirabel smiled, though her heart banged as loudly as a cannon volley.

  His gaze went from her hands to her mouth, and the horrified look faded. His eyes darkened.

  Her breath came and went too fast, and her knees wanted to buckle. She tipped her head back.

  He bent toward her—then drew back. “No. There is too much at stake. I cannot be—”

  Mirabel tugged on the lapels, pulling him to her, and kissed him, full on the lips.

  It was like kissing a block of wood.

  Her spirits, a moment ago so agitated, plunged into a black abyss.

  She started to draw away.

  “Oh, don’t look like that,” he said. “I am only—It isn’t that I don’t want…Oh, what’s the use?”

  He let go of the cane, and it toppled to the floor.

  He caught her face in his hands and gazed at her for a long moment. She brought her hands up to cover his. They were warm, and his touch was gentle, as though she were fragile. She wasn’t, and for a moment, nothing at all made sense, and butterflies fluttered in the pit of her stomach.

  Then he lowered his mouth to hers, and with the first gentle pressure of his lips, the world changed.

  Mirabel had been kissed before, and passionately, too, and she’d responded passionately because she’d been in love.

  But this was different, as different as another universe, and she didn’t care about passion or love, only that it was sweet and made her limbs weak.