Fool for Love

Darby was remarkably swift for someone who appeared to be lazily contemplating her vehicle. He wrenched the horse down in a second, earning an approving smile from Jem.

  “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times,” Jem scolded Henrietta, with the familiarity of a longtime servant. “These here horses are too tetchy to be stroked like barnyard cats.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” she said apologetically. “I’m afraid that I was so taken by showing off Parsnip that I forgot his temperament.” She walked around the horse toward the small perch of the curricle. Darby noticed with surprise that she had a slight but distinct limp. Had her gait been uneven when they first met? He couldn’t remember seeing her walk before this moment.

  “May I help you into your vehicle?” he asked.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “Jem and I have been driving together since the days of my first pony cart, and he is quite used to assisting me.”

  Jem picked up his small mistress and placed her in the driver’s seat, handing her a long whip once she had her skirts in order.

  “These horses are on the fast side, Mr. Darby. I trust that you are not distressed by speed?”

  Darby clambered into the curricle. “Not at all.”

  A moment later he felt a little less confident. The horses were either extraordinarily fresh or they were friends with Old Scratch himself. They tore off down the drive from Shantill House with a matched toss of their heads.

  No wonder Henrietta had a limp. It was a miracle she hadn’t been killed rather than just lamed. She seemed un-bothered by the fact her horses were out of control, slipping them around the corner into the high road as if she were driving a pony cart.

  It was only when they were tearing along the high road that Darby realized that he was grinning like a fool. His hat was threatening to blow off, so he removed it. His hair had whipped out of the ribbon that held it at his neck, and he was braced for what he considered a likely spill in the ditch, but he was grinning. And Lady Henrietta Maclellan? Well, she was sitting bolt upright in that prim manner of hers, but as he watched she cracked her whip and caught the tip, as adroit as any Corinthian with a stolen mail coach and a bet on the books at White’s.

  “Where the devil did you learn to drive like this?” he shouted over the wind.

  Lady Henrietta turned her head and smiled at him as she adroitly feathered the curricle around the very edge of a curve in the road. “My father was a member of the Four-in-Hand Club. Since he had no son, he taught me to drive.”

  “Most unusual,” Darby commented.

  She slowed down just a trifle to give a plodding landau an inch or two on the left. The driver waved, clearly used to seeing Lady Henrietta driving herself. “My father was one of those who bribed public coach drivers to let them careen madly down the road, terrifying all the passengers, I have no doubt. He had a great love of speed.” She smiled apologetically at Darby. “I’m afraid that I inherited it. My family considers me to be dangerously prone to taking risks.”

  Darby laughed again. She was such a prim bundle of womanhood, a petite little female with her bonnet and gloves.

  Henrietta pulled the horses to a walk. “We’re nearing Limpley Stoke,” she explained, “and I do try not to put anyone out of consequence in the village. Some of the villagers are so limited in their thinking about what a woman should and shouldn’t do. I generally leave Jem outside the village with my equipment.”

  “I thought you said that you were not good at physical sports, Lady Henrietta,” Darby observed, wishing she would look at him.

  They had reached the outskirts of the village, where the road narrowed and turned to cobblestones. Henrietta pulled the curricle to a halt as a traveling carriage lumbered down the middle of the road. “I am not good at games, I assure you.”

  “Have you ever tried archery?”

  She nodded, smiling. “I can’t shoot straight. You’d fear for your life if you were near me.”

  “That suggests that I’m not in fear of my life now,” he said with a crooked grin.

  The curricle was at a stop, as the traveling carriage was followed by a succession of vehicles loaded down with trunks and boxes. Darby glanced back at Henrietta’s groom, Jem, and jerked his head.

  Jem blinked at him, and said, “Shall I get the horses’ heads, miss?”

  At her nod, Darby jumped out and walked around to Henrietta’s side of the curricle. He reached up his arms. “May I?”

  That was a devilish smile he had, to Henrietta’s mind. He stood in a patch of sunlight, golden brown hair tumbling around his face, and the look in his eyes!

  But there was nothing for it; she certainly couldn’t scramble down from the high perch herself. Jem or some other man must lift her down.

  She leaned forward and put her hands lightly on his shoulders. “This is very kind of you, sir,” she said.

  His face was just before hers now. He put his large hands on her waist and Henrietta shivered. There was something intoxicating about the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he grinned at her.

  “What do you mean by it?” she asked involuntarily. The second she said it, she longed to have the question back, but a lifetime’s practice saying precisely what she was thinking had tripped her up.

  He let her down to the ground rather slowly, but his hands didn’t move. They lingered in an appallingly brash fashion. Even through her pelisse she could feel his fingers shaping the curve of her waist.

  “Mean by what?” he asked.

  “Mean by the way you look at me.”

  “I suppose,” he said, and his voice was husky and dark, that I am considering your prowess at physical sports, Lady Henrietta.”

  “Oh,” Henrietta gasped. His remark was well out of her usual conversational bounds. And moreover, she’d figured out exactly how he was looking at her.

  As if he were hungry.

  Starving, in fact.

  She saw his head coming toward hers, and by all rights she should have moved away. But she simply stood there, still as a stone, and let his lips touch hers again.

  This time it was a little harder to think clearly. His hands were still on her waist for one thing. They seemed to have settled at the curve where her hip flared, as if she were his possession.

  And his mouth was harder than it had been earlier, less gentle, less respectful. And his tongue! She was definitely thinking about protesting, just as soon as her head cleared a little.

  Darby never bothered to formulate thoughts or words when he was in the grip of desire, and so he suffered no such confusion. God knows why he was compelled to kiss a rackety female who drove like a fiend down the country roads and uttered whatever unsuitable comment jumped into her head.

  But there you are. The compulsion was damn near unconquerable.

  She was small, confused, and smelled like meadow flowers. And innocence. He pressed his hard mouth to her soft one as if he could plunder that innocence and replace it with his cynicism.

  Her lower lip was plump and sweetly curved. He licked it, and she shuddered. Darby felt the tiny ripple move through her body. So he pulled her closer and licked that lip again, pulled her so close that he could feel her breasts pressing against his chest.

  The thought drifted into his head that Lady Henrietta Maclellan had a body that was made for sport. The hell she wasn’t good at physical games.

  It was true that she was an impressively bad kisser. Her lips were clamped together like a steel gate. He ran his tongue along her lips again, tempting her—nay, begging her—to open up. He tried teasing. He tried caressing. He tried slanting his lips across hers in a hard caress that had made previous companions melt at the knees and sag into his arms.

  The only person his techniques seemed to affect was he himself. His heart was pounding and his groin—well, that would scandalize Henrietta, were she to glance down.

  “Henrietta,” he said, chagrined to find that his voice was a husky whisper.

  “Yes, Mr. Darby?”
>
  He opened his eyes to find her looking cheerfully into his face, seemingly not a whit affected.

  The only thing that gave him a glimmer of hope was the wild rose blush high on her cheeks. That, and the fact he had felt a tremor move through her slender body.

  “Did you enjoy your second kiss?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said readily, “I certainly did because—”

  That was just what he was waiting for. Simon Darby wasn’t above using nefarious tactics to get what he wanted.

  He bent his head, captured her words, and drank the innocence from her mouth. He forgot that Jem was standing twenty yards away holding Parsnip and Parsley, forgot the fact that he was making an exhibition of the two of them on the side of the public road.

  He forgot everything. She gasped as he plundered her mouth and wonder of wonders, her rigid body relaxed a trifle. A few moments later, one slender arm crept around his neck.

  As it turned out, Henrietta Maclellan took to kissing like a duck to water. Far from holding her mouth closed as if to protect the crown jewels, her tongue began tangling with his in a slow dance that made the blood burn through Darby’s veins. The surprise he could almost taste in her mouth disappeared, replaced by an eager little pant, a sense of breath coming from a chest tight with desire.

  When he pulled his mouth away, thinking to taste her cheek, her eyes didn’t fly open. There was no cheery little comment. Instead she made a little sound that spoke of disappointment, and so he swooped back to the sweetness she offered, to the delicious plump curves of her mouth.

  It was Darby who looked…looked at the long lashes against Henrietta’s cheek, as delicate as a fringe of finest silk. At the clear shape of her forehead, the cream of her skin, the one dimple in her right cheek. In the shadow of the curricle, his hand drifted onto a sweetly rounded bottom, and even though he immediately moved his hand back to her waist, she sighed into his mouth, and he felt another shiver move through her body.

  Some distant part of his brain had heard a coach rumble by, the occupants of which were undoubtedly intrigued by the spectacle they were presenting. A native thread of caution wandered into his brain, reminding him that he was kissing a gently born maiden—the daughter of an earl—on the side of the high road.

  As if she could sense that wisp of chilly weather, Henrietta let her arm slip from the back of his neck and opened her eyes. She had eyes the color of a summer night, a beautiful dark blue. She looked at him silently for a moment. Her lips were swollen from his kisses. But it was her eyes that were surprising.

  Where was the prim Lady Henrietta, the sharp-tongued spinster with untried advice about child rearing and a tendency to speak her mind?

  The woman who stood before Darby looked utterly abandoned to desire, as sultry as any round-heeled wench outside the opera house. The new Henrietta swayed toward him without words and he caught her up, caught her squarely against his body, held her as tightly as he was capable.

  It wasn’t until she started kissing him back that Darby put two and two together. What he put together was one pounding heart (his), one set of shaking limbs (his), one sweet mouth (hers).

  Those three things combined with a growing conviction—never felt by him in the thirty-some years of his life—that he had to bed the woman he was holding in his arms. Or die trying.

  Two and two added up.

  To marriage.

  This was his future wife, and if he wasn’t careful, he was going to deflower her against the side of her brand-new curricle.

  15

  Caught in the Act

  One of the first things one learns as a member of the polite world is that proposals of marriage do not take place against the side of a curricle with a groom looking on and any number of carriages passing by. Just about the second thing a man learns is that relatives of females do not like to discover their daughters in just such a situation.

  Darby had no sooner come to the realization that he was kissing his future wife than he felt a prickling in his shoulder blades and looked about to meet the blazing eyes of his future mother-in-law.

  “Lady Holkham, how splendid to see you,” he said, reluctantly stepping back from Henrietta.

  “Mr. Darby,” she snapped. “Henrietta!”

  Darby noticed with a great deal of personal satisfaction that Henrietta had a rather dazed look, quite at odds with her competent self.

  “My goodness,” she said faintly. “I didn’t know you were coming to the village, Millicent.”

  “I am aware of that fact,” her stepmother replied, rather grimly. “I am just on my way home.”

  “I would accompany you, but I have a meeting with Miss Pettigrew at the school.”

  Henrietta didn’t meet Darby’s eye. He himself had a sense of swelling joy in his chest. Alarming joy. He’d never felt anything like it in his life. All he knew was that the woman who stood before him, with her spun gold hair pushed back on her shoulders from his hands, and a wild rose flush on her cheeks from his kisses—this gorgeous bit of nature was going to be his.

  Moreover, she was going to be his, although she didn’t know or give a damn about his power in the ton. She knew nothing of his wealth, and thought he was a pauper, in fact. How could one choose a better wife? She would marry him for his kisses, and nothing else.

  He looked at her, and he was pretty certain that everything he was thinking was written there because she turned even pinker and looked adorably confused.

  “Mr. Darby,” Lady Holkham said in a piercing command, “I would request that you accompany me to my house, if you please.”

  “Of course,” he said. “And I shall meet you when—in a half hour?” His eyes were on Henrietta.

  Only the very corners of her mouth turned up. “I generally speak to Miss Pettigrew for an hour at the most, sir. It would be very kind of you to accompany me home.”

  “Not to mention brave,” he said, casting a look at the curricle.

  Her smile made heat lick through his middle section. “Brave as well,” she agreed, and turned away.

  “Mr. Darby!” He turned with a start to find Lady Holkham regarding him with all the affection of a rat-catcher eyeing his prey.

  “Lady Holkham,” he said, “I would have requested an interview with you the very moment I left Henrietta at the school.”

  Her mouth tightened at his use of her daughter’s first name. “I should like to speak to you, Mr. Darby. Meet me at Holkham House in twenty minutes, if you would be so kind.” She set off down the High Street without another word.

  He stared after her, nonplussed. Surely Lady Holkham must be happy to find that a suitor had appeared who cared nothing for Henrietta’s inability to have children? Then he realized that perhaps she thought he didn’t know that fact.

  Of course, once she knew that he didn’t want children, she would welcome his suit.

  An ironic smile curled his mouth. He had told Rees that he would find a wife in the wilds of Wiltshire, and that was precisely what he’d done.

  He walked over to the Golden Hind and obtained a piece of foolscap from Mr. Gyfford. Then he scribbled a note to Rees:

  Found a wife. Marrying her out of hand. Thought you’d be pleased to be the first to know.

  Darby stared at it for a moment and then scrawled a postscript. “She’s an heiress.” He addressed it to Rees Holland, Earl Godwin, and handed it over to Gyfford for the mail coach when it came through.

  Then he set off, whistling, for Holkham House. All he had to do was clear up this little issue with Henrietta’s stepmother and he could go back to the schoolhouse and find his future bride. Ask her to marry him, and linger to steal a kiss or two.

  Talking to the headmistress of the village school—an appointment Henrietta normally welcomed with pleasure—was proving itself difficult. For one thing, she kept smiling at the most inappropriate moments.

  Miss Pettigrew said something about little Rachel Pander, and Henrietta smiled in response, only to find Miss Pettigrew lookin
g at her perplexedly. But try as she might, Henrietta had no idea what the subject of conversation was. And when it became clear that Rachel’s hair was home to several species of lively creatures, there was no explanation for Henrietta’s grin.

  “I’m quite sorry, Miss Pettigrew,” she finally said. “I’m not entirely myself today.”

  Miss Pettigrew had clear gray eyes that effectively quelled the most rambunctious of students. “That’s quite all right, Lady Henrietta,” Miss Pettigrew announced. Henrietta shivered and said a silent prayer of thanks that she was no longer of school age.

  But she still couldn’t make herself pay attention. Darby had kissed her in just the way that her friends had described as the threshold to a proposal. In fact, she couldn’t think of a friend who had been kissed like that and not received a proposal directly afterward.

  What’s more, when Molly Maplethorpe had described kissing as melting into a bowl of pudding, she wasn’t exaggerating. In fact, Molly had diminished the experience. Just to think about Darby’s kisses made Henrietta’s knees feel dangerously puddinglike.

  Miss Pettigrew looked at her curiously, but kept going over the lesson plan for the following week. Henrietta contributed not a single comment. She simply couldn’t bring herself to care about whether the students were learning their numbers. All she could think was that Darby would meet her outside the schoolhouse in a matter of an hour, and then he would ask her to marry him.

  He meant to do it. She knew that as well as she’d known anything in her entire life. She’d bet her life he almost asked her right there next to her curricle, except that Millicent happened to come along the street.

  Perhaps he would wait until the evening. Or perhaps she ought to drive them to a romantic spot in her curricle. Except how could she suggest such a thing? And where on earth could they go that would be romantic at any rate, given the chilly weather that was brewing?

  Henrietta kept looking out the schoolroom window, and unless she was very mistaken, a snowstorm would descend on them within an hour or so. Finally, she used the storm as an excuse to escape.