Last Night's Scandal

  Well, then, all was going according to plan, except for the unforeseen to-do at the Falcon Inn. Which she’d quite enjoyed. The look on the bully’s face when she’d slapped him with her glove was priceless.

  But then Lisle had come and dragged her away and—

  The carriage door opened.

  There he stood, looking up at her, a rainbow of colors ringing one silver-grey eye.

  “You’d better come in and eat breakfast now,” he said. “We won’t stop to eat again until midday.”

  “We?” she said. “You weren’t coming. You would rather live like a pauper in Egypt or die of starvation than yield to your parents. You have decided that journeying to Scotland is a fate worse than death.”

  “Traveling with you, it’s going to be even more fateful, I daresay,” he said. “Do you want to eat or not? It’ll be hours before you get another chance.”

  “You are not in charge of this journey,” she said.

  “Now I am,” he said. “You were determined to make me do this. Now you’ll have to do it my way. Eat or starve, it’s your choice. I’m going to look at the famous bed.”

  Leaving the carriage door open, he turned away and sauntered back into the inn.

  Olivia burst into the bedchamber ten minutes later.

  “You,” she began. But even in one of her blind rages, she could hardly miss the bed, and it stopped her dead. “Good grief!” she said. “It’s enormous.”

  Lisle casually looked up from his examination of one of the bedposts at the head.

  Her bonnet was askew and her hair was coming loose, red curls tumbling against her pearly skin. Her clothes were rumpled from traveling. Anger still sparked in the impossibly blue eyes, though they’d widened at the sight of the bed that had been famous in Shakespeare’s time.

  She looked wild, and though he ought to be used to that shatteringly beautiful face by now, the wildness threw him off balance again, and his heartbeat was sharp and painful.

  “That’s why it’s called the Great Bed of Ware,” he said calmly. “You’ve never seen it before?”

  She shook her head, and the curls danced madly.

  “Quite old—by English standards, at any rate,” he said. “Shakespeare refers to it in Twelfth Night.”

  “I’ve seen this style of thing,” she said. “Tons of oak, carved within an inch of its life. But nothing nearly as large.”

  It was, indeed, carved with dizzying exuberance. Flowers and fruits and animals and people and mythological beings covered every inch of the black oak.

  “Twelve feet square and nine feet tall,” he said. Facts were always safe and soothing. “It’s a room, really, enclosed by curtains. Look at the panels.”

  She stepped nearer.

  He caught her scent and remembered the feel of her body under his hands, when he’d pulled her out of the inn.

  Facts. He focused on the physical features of the bed. Inside carved arches, two panels portrayed scenes of the town, including its famous swans. He lightly ran his index finger over their inlaid wood.

  It lacked the grace of Egyptian art. To his surprise, though, he found it enchanting.

  “They’re like windows, you see,” he said. “It was meant to entertain. It must have been even more eye-catching when it was new. Here and there you can see bits of paint. In its early days, it would have been quite colorful—like the temples and tombs of Egypt. And the same as in Egypt, visitors have left their marks.” He traced a set of initials. “Seals, too.”

  He let his gaze return to her face. Wonder filled it now. The rage was gone, the storm blown over, because she was enchanted as well. She was sophisticated and cunning and had never been naïve. Yet her imagination was boundless, and she could be captivated, like a child.

  “How odd that you’ve never seen it before,” he said.

  She examined a lion’s head with a red seal on its nose. “Not at all odd,” she said. “Since we’re usually traveling to Derbyshire or Cheshire, we don’t take this road. And when I leave London, it’s because I’m in disgrace, which means getting me out and far away as quickly as possible. No time for sightseeing.”

  He looked away from her face. Too much of that and he’d grow addlepated. He studied one of the satyrs adorning a bedpost. “Slapping that drunkard with your glove and calling him a coward wasn’t the cleverest thing you’ve ever done.”

  “But it was immensely satisfying.”

  “You lost your temper,” he said. When she lost her temper, he couldn’t trust her brain or her instincts. He couldn’t trust her to take care of herself.

  He came away from the bedpost and folded his hands behind his back. ”What did your mother tell you about losing your temper?” he said, in the same patient tone he’d heard her mother employ on the day he’d met Olivia.

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “I must count to twenty.”

  “I think you didn’t count to twenty,” he said.

  “I wasn’t in the mood,” she said.

  “I’m amazed you didn’t treat him to one of your apologies.” Putting a hand to his heart, he said in falsetto, “ ‘Oh, sir, I do most humbly and abjectly beg your pardon.’ Then you could flutter your eyelashes at him, and fall to your knees.”

  She’d done this the first time they’d met, and the performance had left him dumbstruck.

  “By the time you were done,” he went on, “everyone would be weeping—or reeling. Including him. And you could slip out quietly.”

  “I’m sorry now I didn’t,” she said. “It would have prevented my being manhandled out of the inn.”

  It would have prevented his feeling her supple body under his arm.

  “I don’t see why you didn’t drag him out—to the courtyard—and put his head under the pump,” she said. “That’s what someone ought to have done when the trouble started. But everyone was afraid of him. Not you, I’d think—but you had to get all manly and overbearing with me.”

  “It was more fun dragging you out,” he said.

  She drew nearer and examined his eye.

  Her scent swarmed about him and his heart was racing.

  “That Belder,” she said, shaking her head. “Why didn’t he hit you harder?”

  She swept out of the room.

  The day was cool and grey, and the rain had laid the dust. The ladies wanted fresh air, they said. Riding in a gloomy, stuffy carriage wasn’t their idea of agreeable travel.

  Olivia suspected that the reason they wanted the louvered window panels open was to admire the masculine scenery nearby.

  It was fine scenery, and she couldn’t help enjoying it, too, though Lisle had turned out to be a Tragic Disappointment.

  He rode alongside, practically at her shoulder, keeping pace with the carriage, instead of riding on ahead as she’d expected him to do. Their carriage’s speed, in consideration of the ladies’ old bones, was slower than Lisle could like. It was slower than Olivia liked, certainly. She wished she were riding as well, but she hadn’t thought she would, and hadn’t arranged for it.

  Her saddle was packed away in one of the carriages with their other belongings, and packed deep. She hadn’t believed she’d need it until they reached their destination. While one could hire horses at the posting inns, and she could ride virtually any sort of horse without difficulty, a saddle was an altogether different article. A lady’s saddle was as personal an item as her corset, and made to fit her precisely.

  Not that she needed a saddle. She was Jack Wingate’s daughter, after all, and as easy on a horse’s back as any gypsy.

  But no one was to know she still did that sort of thing. No one was to know about the men’s clothes that Bailey had adapted to fit her, which lay neatly folded in a box among her other belongings.

  She recalled how shocked Lisle had been the
first time he’d seen her in boy’s clothes. She was remembering that moment—How could she forget the comical look on his face?—when the coach stopped.

  The carriage bounced slightly as the footmen jumped down from their perch at the back. She saw one hurry ahead to hold the horses.

  “What is it?” said Lady Cooper.

  “Lisle noticed something wrong with one of the wheels, I daresay,” said Lady Withcote.

  The door opened and a footman put down the step. Lisle waited behind him. “No need to disturb yourselves, ladies,” Lisle said. “I only want Olivia.”

  The ladies smiled at her.

  “He only wants you,” said Lady Cooper.

  “He said he’d leave me by the side of the road,” Olivia said.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Lady Withcote. “He’ll do nothing of the kind.”

  He’d do worse, Olivia thought. He’d had time to brood over the grievous injury she’d done his pride. By now he’d probably composed a very boring and irritating lecture.

  “We’re not scheduled to stop,” she told him. “Not until—” She glanced down at her Paterson’s. “Not until Buntingford.”

  “I want to show you something,” he said.

  She leaned forward and looked out of the door to her right, then to her left. “There’s nothing to see,” she said.

  Except an excessively handsome man sitting as easily upon a hired horse as if it had been part of him.

  “Don’t be tiresome,” he said.

  “Lud, don’t be tiresome, child,” said Lady Cooper. “Let the boy show you his what’s-it.”

  “I could do with a pause,” said Lady Withcote. “I should like a moment to close my eyes, without being jounced and jostled. Such a head I have. Must have been something I ate.”

  Olivia turned away from the door to look at them.

  “Don’t you want to see what it is he wants to show you?” Lady Cooper said.

  Olivia disembarked.

  The ladies leaned forward to watch the proceedings through the open door.

  Olivia walked up to him. She stroked his horse’s muzzle, while aware, out of the corner of her eye, of the muscled leg nearby.

  “You said you never get to see the sights,” he said. “There’s one down that turning on the left.”

  A little surprised, she looked at the signpost he indicated. Then she looked up at him.

  “I’m not going to take you to a desolate place and murder you,” he said. “Not here and now, at any rate. Were I to take you away and return without you, the ladies might notice. Bailey would, certainly. We’re going only a short distance. We could easily walk, but these country lanes will be knee deep in mud. You can ride Nichols’s horse.”

  She held up her hand before Nichols could dismount. “No, stay as you are. I can ride behind his lordship.”

  “No, you can’t,” Lisle said.

  “We’re going a short distance, you said,” she said. “It makes no sense to spend time making a dozen adjustments, to get me properly seated on Nichols’s horse—adjustments he’ll have to go to all the bother of readjusting later. I can be up behind you in a minute.”

  He looked at her. He looked at Nichols.

  Despite having been caught in a downpour, the valet remained elegant and unflappable. Though he wouldn’t show it, he’d die a thousand deaths on the inside, rearranging his saddle for her. She saw no reason to torture him. He hadn’t insulted and hurt her.

  “What worries you?” she said to Lisle. “Are you afraid I’ll knock you off your horse?”

  “I’m a little afraid you’ll stick a knife in my back,” he said. “Swear to me that you’re not armed.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” she said. “I would never stab you in the back. That would be dishonorable. I would stab you in the neck or in the heart.”

  “Very well, then.” He kicked his left foot free of the stirrup. Olivia put her left foot into the stirrup, took hold of his arm, gave a hop, and sprang up behind him.

  “Deuce take the girl!” Lady Withcote cried. “I never could do that!”

  “You were agile in other ways, Millicent,” said her friend.

  Meanwhile, Olivia realized she’d made a grave error of judgment.

  Chapter 6

  She’d acted unthinkingly, and why not?

  Olivia was as much at ease on a horse as any gypsy.

  She’d ridden behind her father time without number.

  But that was her father, and that was when she was a little girl.

  Lisle wasn’t her father. She’d ridden behind him once or twice, but that was ages ago, before he’d become so excessively masculine.

  It hadn’t dawned on her to cling to his coat. She’d simply wrapped her arms about his waist, because that was the natural thing to do.

  Now she was hotly aware of the taut waist under her arms and the straight back against her breasts. She was aware of thigh touching thigh and leg touching leg and the rhythmic movement of their bodies as the horse walked along the muddy, rutted road.

  She could actually feel her moral fiber—such as it was—disintegrating.

  Ah, well, it was only a short ride, and she could expect a long, boring lecture at the end of it. That would stifle inconvenient and pointless urges.

  She let her cheek rest against Lisle’s neck and inhaled the earthy scent of male and horse and country air and recent rain, and somewhere in this mix, tantalizingly faint, a hint of shaving soap.

  After a moment he said, “In what ways was Millicent agile, I wonder?”

  “Nothing nearly as exotic as you imagine,” she said. “Nothing like your harem dancers, I daresay. Not nearly so acrobatic.”

  “In the first place, I don’t imagine,” he said. “In the second, if you’re referring to the dancing girls, they’re not, technically, harem dancers.”

  Oh, good, a language lecture. That would take her mind off the rampant virility and the male scent, which ought to be bottled and marked with a skull and crossbones.

  “The word harem, you see, commonly refers to the women of a household,” he said, “though this is not the precise meaning of the word, which denotes a sacred or forbidden place. The dancing girls, on the other hand—”

  “I thought we were to take the left turning,” she said.

  “Oh. Yes.” He turned back to the lane.

  Not a moment too soon. It might have been the way he smelled or the heat of his body or all that virility or, more likely, the devastating combination, but she’d found herself growing genuinely interested in the correct meaning of harem.

  Moments later they entered a meadow and proceeded to a small railed area guarding what appeared to be a block of stone.

  “There it is,” he said.

  As they neared, she saw the metal plaque set into the stone.

  “A rock,” she said. “You’ve stopped the carriage and taken me to see a rock.”

  “It’s the Balloon Stone,” he said. “The first balloon ascent in England landed here.”

  “Did it, really?”

  “There’s a prior claim, but—”

  “Oh, I must see.”

  Eager to get down and away from him and get her head clear again, she didn’t hesitate. She set one hand on the back of the saddle and one on his thigh, preparatory to dismount. She felt it instantly, the shock of that intimate touch, but it was too late to stop—and absurd to do so. This was the quickest and easiest way to get down.

  She swung her leg over the horse’s rump, aware of the pressure of Lisle’s hand over hers . . . on his thigh . . . holding her steady. Heart racing, she slid down to the ground.

  She didn’t wait for him to dismount but moved quickly to the railing, hiked up her skirts, and climbed over it into the small enclosure.
br />   She knew she’d given him a prime view of her petticoats and stockings. She knew what such a sight did to a man. But he’d got her agitated in that way. Turnabout was fair play.

  “ ‘Let Posterity Know,’ ” she read aloud in the declamatory tone usually employed on state occasions, “ ‘And Knowing be Astonished That On the 15 Day of September 1784 Vincent Lunardi of Lucca in Tuscany The first Aerial Traveller in Britain Mounting from the Artillery Ground in London and Traversing the Regions of the Air For Two Hours and Fifteen Minutes, In this Spot Revisited the Earth.’ ”

  Lisle remained at the railing. He still hadn’t recovered from the ride: Olivia’s arms wrapped about his waist, her satanic breasts pressed against his back, and her legs tucked up behind his. Physical awareness still vibrated the length of his body, particularly where it had met the front of the saddle.

  She’d got him so befuddled that he’d ridden straight past the turning.

  He hadn’t had time to fully collect his wits before she climbed over the fence, offering him an excellent view of her petticoats and stockings.

  It was her typical hoydenish behavior, the same she’d exhibited when they’d been together in the past. She thought of him as a brother. That was why she didn’t mind her skirts and that was why she hadn’t hesitated to climb up on his horse behind him.

  But he wasn’t her brother and he wasn’t the boy he’d used to be, deaf, dumb, and blind to a flurry of feminine undergarments. Not to mention that in girlhood she wouldn’t have worn stockings like those, with their alluring blue embroidery, or petticoats trimmed in excessively feminine lace. And in those days, she hadn’t owned shapely legs and splendidly turned ankles—or if she had, he hadn’t noticed.

  After he’d got these matters sorted out and his reproductive organs calmed down and his mind functioning again, he stepped over the fence to stand beside her as she finished reading the ornate tribute to the first balloon ascension in England.

  At the end she looked at him and said, “Isn’t it amazing? This quiet meadow saw such a momentous event. How wonderful that they’ve marked the spot.”