The Passionate Prude

by Elizabeth Thornton

  “Have you spoken to her about it?”

  Armand shook his head. “Not yet. I’m too angry, and she is too…well, low in spirits. The time is not right. One day though, we shall have to have this out.”

  She laid a restraining hand on his sleeve. “Don’t be too hard on her. Who was there to advise her? Now that she has Gareth, things will be different.”

  “I daresay, if ever they get together again, which doesn’t seem very likely at this point in time.”

  “Nonsense. That’s why I’m here.”

  “What?”

  “To get them together again. It’s Mama’s dearest wish. She and O’Toole concocted this scheme before she removed to Bath. Gareth is bound to come after me. But I won’t be here. Mama said that you are to escort me to Bath so that Gareth can have a clear field with Deirdre.”

  “I’ll do no such thing,” he stated emphatically. “I refuse to put your reputation at risk.”

  Lady Caro’s eyes flashed with anger. “If you are afraid that I shall attack you in the closed carriage, let me assure you, sir, that my abigail will be there to protect you. Of course,” she grated through clenched teeth, “if I had been one of your lightskirts, I expect you would have got rid of my abigail to make mad, passionate love to me.”

  “But Caro,” Armand soothed without much success, “you must see how, loving you as I do, I cannot possibly take advantage of you.”

  Lady Caro’s brows drew together. She tossed her head. “I don’t think,” she said in withering accents, “that I shall ever understand the logic of men.”

  Armand looked at her for a long, thoughtful moment. He sighed. He shook his head. Finally, he said in a resigned tone, “Have it your own way.” His arms went round her waist and he drew her forward till their bodies were locked together. “I disclaim any responsibility for what follows,” he warned her.

  She tipped up her head till their lips were only inches apart. “I absolve you,” she murmured on an uneven breath.

  Armand’s head descended, and the lady in his arms was very soon aware that a long engagement would not suit her at all. She wondered how soon the combined influence of three determined women could wear down the resolve of a brother who was known to be soft-hearted to a degree, in spite of appearances to the contrary.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  It was closer to three hours rather than the expected two before Deirdre heard the clatter of her husband’s curricle at the front entrance. She opened the sitting room door a crack and cautiously peeped out. Annie, Deirdre’s abigail and general maid of all work, had gone to answer the peremptory summons of the knocker. Deirdre glided noiselessly to the head of the stairs, hoping to divine her husband’s temper by the tone of his opening remarks to her servants. It was the merest bad luck that, after Annie had taken his lordship’s hat and coat, he should happen to run into O’Toole as the groom came out of the kitchen.

  The silence was arctic, but no less chilling was Rathbourne’s voice as he coldly intoned, “Et tu Brute?” and before Annie could show him the way, he was taking the stairs two at a time. Deirdre whisked herself into the room and had just taken up her place at the card table, where she was engaged in playing a solitary game of picquet, when his lordship entered.

  Deirdre blinked. O’Toole had led her to expect a hollow-eyed wraith with two days’ growth of beard on his face. Rathbourne looked to be insultingly healthy and well groomed. His tanned features were set off admirably by his mahogany, windblown locks, giving him an even more rakish appearance than usual, and his snug-fitting blue superfine emphasized the breadth of his shoulders. She was conscious of the tight-fitting beige pantaloons over muscled thighs but dared not drop her gaze to appraise him further since his eyes had narrowed on her face. He was an absolutely magnificent creature, a young lion, and that she had held off such a specimen for one hour, never mind five years, seemed totally incomprehensible. She noted the hard set of his features and did not think that she would very easily worm her way back into his good graces.

  “So this is Marcliff,” he said carelessly, and shut the door behind him with a snap. “It’s very nice,” he elaborated, and his eyes moved slowly about the room before coming to rest on Deirdre.

  Deirdre was conscious of his hard scrutiny, and as he crossed the distance that separated them in a few leisurely strides, she composed herself to sit unmoving until he was done looking her over.

  He selected a comfortable soft upholstered chair next to the sofa she occupied and sat himself down, crossing one booted foot over the other with negligent grace.

  “You look awful!” he said baldly, his bright gaze lingering on the dark smudges under her eyes and the pale cheeks. “It’s obvious that you’re not looking after yourself. If you’d remained at Belmont, where you ought to be…”

  “If memory serves,” she said with icy dignity, “I was told to leave. Nor was the order rescinded.”

  “Oh that!” He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture and answered her playfully. “When have you ever done as I have asked? I told you to remain in Henley and you bolted for Dover; I instructed you to make for Antwerp, and you entrenched yourself in Brussels; I warned you not to leave the Great Hall, and you immediately made for the ramparts. How could I know that in this instance you meant to act like a conformable wife? I am not a mind reader. Besides, I don’t believe for a minute that you left on my say-so. Oh no, Dee, you cannot lay the blame for this ridiculous separation at my door.”

  Deirdre shot him a quelling look from under slashed brows, then she remembered that she had a task to perform. She blinked as if to dispel the frown in her eyes and she gave him a perfect view of her small even white teeth through the parted curve of her lips.

  “May I offer you tea, or something?” she asked in her best hostess manner.

  “The ‘something’ will do nicely, thank you. Sherry perhaps?” He watched her movements covertly as she rose and with her usual grace went to pull the rope that would ring a bell in the pantry. Hope flared in his heart. She hadn’t annihilated him with that rapier tongue of hers, as only she could, nor had he been ordered off the property at gunpoint. In fact, she was behaving in a suspiciously amenable manner. What was she up to? The temptation to tumble her into his arms and kiss her senseless was ruthlessly crushed.

  A decanter of sherry and two glasses were duly procured and Rathbourne noted with no little approval but scant surprise that the appointments and service at Marcliff were impeccable. Belmont, no less than he, was missing the touch of its mistress. He almost said so, but caught himself in time. After all she had made him suffer, he should be paddling her backside! What the devil had possessed him to accept her hospitality as if he were a guest and she the grande dame? It had put him at a definite disadvantage.

  “Where are they?” he asked without preamble, and his mouth set in a cruel line. If she was shielding St. Jean again…

  Deirdre watched him warily over the rim of her glass. She had observed the play of emotions that had crossed his face and had deduced that his lordship was in one of his volatile moods. Instinct warned her to be cautious. Very cautious.

  “Who, dear?” she prevaricated, and set the sherry aside untouched. With a practiced flick of her wrist, she flipped over the two hands of cards, face up, which lay on the table in front of her.

  Rathbourne’s glittering eyes followed the deft movements of her fingers. He watched mesmerized as she selected a card from one set and discarded it on the table. She then repeated the process with the other hand.

  “What, may I ask, are you doing?” he asked with restrained impatience.

  Her eyes lifted and her long, curly lashes batted up at him. “I’m playing out a hand of picquet,” she managed with wide-eyed innocence.

  “Picquet? And whom do you play against?”

  “Myself.”

  Her eyes lowered and her attention became fixed on the cards on the table.

  Rathbourne shook off the suspicion that he was being toyed with. He
had an explosive temper. His wife knew it. The poor girl was probably shaking in her shoes, expecting momentarily to come under the full lash of his tongue. His expression softened. He would, he decided, be generous in victory.

  His voice gentled. “Tell me where they are, Deirdre. You must know that I cannot permit my sister to make a runaway marriage. If, in a year or two, they still feel as strongly, and St. Jean has proved to me that his way of life is more settled, then I may be persuaded to change my mind.” His offer, he thought, was magnanimous.

  He looked into a pair of stormy green eyes and his confidence faltered.

  “My brother,” said Deirdre through clenched teeth, “would never do anything to compromise Lady Caro. Unlike some I could name, Armand is a gentleman.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked angrily.

  “It means that your sister’s virtue is safe with my brother, which is more than could be said of mine when you decided you wanted me.”

  His color heightened, but he managed to say with tolerable calm, “Our cases are entirely different. I never wanted to…It was your obstinacy…If you had…Oh what’s the use? You’ll never understand.”

  He bolted the sherry in his hand and got to his feet in one lithe movement. “Where are they?” he demanded, and his voice held a suggestion of menace.

  “How badly do you want to know?” asked Deirdre, and ignoring the threatening figure who loomed over her, she flexed her fingers and dealt another pair of cards.

  His long fingers closed over her wrist. “Deirdre,” he warned at the end of his patience.

  “What can you do if I don’t tell you?” she asked coolly. “Beat me? I think not—oh, not that you wouldn’t like to, but in my delicate condition, you wouldn’t take that chance. How will you find them if I don’t give you their direction? They could be on the way to Gretna Green, or Brussels, or perhaps to my friend in Aberdeen.” She flashed him a commiserating smile. “Poor Gareth! You know to your cost how easily I can lay a false trail.”

  “Deirdre,” he protested in mingled exasperation and anger. That she should believe him capable of hurting her in any way was a shaft that had slipped under his guard. “How could you even think that I would beat you, whatever the provocation?”

  “Oh, don’t tell me! I know! You’ll beat me for that remark.”

  He saw that she was laughing at him, and he was slightly mollified. “It’s only a figure of speech, after all.”

  “So I’ve learned,” she intoned politely. “But to get back to business. I have the information you want, and there’s only one way you’ll get it out of me.”

  “How?” he asked, and something kindled in his eyes.

  “We’re both gamblers, as events have proved. Let the cards decide. The loser pays a forfeit.”

  His eyes brightened to amber. “Picquet?” he asked with new interest, and pulled his chair closer to the card table and sat down.

  “Naturally!”

  “You’re on! Foolish girl, you know you cannot win.” He gathered the cards into his hands with a flourish, and grinned wickedly as he shuffled them and dealt them each a hand.

  He saw a fleeting smile that bordered on the self-congratulatory curve her mouth and he said with belated caution, “In the very faint chance that I should lose, what forfeit do you have in mind for me?”

  “Only an hour of your time,” Deirdre responded smoothly, and her eyes lifted to look guilelessly into his.

  “An hour of my time? For what purpose?”

  “That would be telling,” she said cryptically, and her lashes lowered to conceal her expression.

  Rathbourne’s brows snapped together, but a moment’s reflection convinced him that he had nothing to fear. At picquet, he was invincible. He relaxed and said with unfeigned good humor, “Shall we commence play?”

  Thirty minutes later the Earl pushed back his chair and said accusingly, “You’ve been practicing!”

  “What a poor loser you are to be sure,” said Deirdre pleasantly, and quickly slipped the cards into the drawer at the side of the card table. “Are you trying to weasel out of paying your forfeit?”

  His expression was guarded. “Certainly not! One hour of my time, Deirdre, and not a minute more. Now, how may I serve you?”

  Wordlessly, Deirdre rose to her feet and walked to the door. The Earl watched through narrowed eyes as she turned the key in the lock. She then stalked to the open window and threw the key out onto the driveway below. He heard the faint rattle as steel struck cobblestones.

  She turned back to him. “You are now my prisoner, as I was once yours.”

  Green eyes, wide and unblinking, stared into golden. Rathbourne leaned into the soft upholstery at his back and said softly, “And if I am?”

  Deirdre took a deep breath. “And I learned from you that in some circumstances, only desperate measures will suffice.”

  Her fingers moved to the small row of buttons at the bodice of her spencer, and with slow, deliberate movements, she eased them, one by one, out of their buttonholes. She dragged the spencer from her shoulders and threw it with studied carelessness on the back of a chair. Her breasts rose and fell as if she was laboring under some profound emotion. Rathbourne saw it and a pulse sprang to life at his temple.

  “Deirdre,” he growled deep in his throat, and his hands moved involuntarily to wrench the immaculate neckcloth from his throat. “This had better mean what I think it means. I won’t let you turn back now.” His coat and shirt quickly followed his cravat to the floor, but his fingers at the waistband of his pantaloons stilled when he heard his wife’s icy accents.

  “I,” she said deliberately and with great dignity, as she struggled in vain to undo the button at the back of her gown, “I am supposed to be seducing you. What the devil do you mean by cooperating?”

  A great gust of laughter convulsed the Earl. “Seducing me?” he asked incredulously. “Deirdre, don’t you know that seduction can only take place when one of the partners is reluctant?”

  “Well, of course I know that,” she said crossly, and gave up the attempt to undo the buttons at her back. “I’ll just have to make love to you with my clothes on,” she said prosaically. She lifted her skirts and gave the Earl a perfect view of her shapely legs as she carefully unrolled each silk stocking in turn.

  He beat back a dizzying wave of desire. “Deirdre,” he said hoarsely, “there’s no need to seduce me.”

  “There is every need,” she retorted, and Rathbourne groaned as she began to wriggle suggestively out of her drawers.

  “But why?” he asked, his eyes lazy as he watched her movements.

  Deirdre’s head came up and she looked at him as if he had been the village idiot. “Well, isn’t it obvious? I have to persuade you to my will. If it can work for a man, I don’t see why it shouldn’t work for a woman also!”

  Rathbourne savaged his locks with a distracted hand and moved automatically to Deirdre’s best damask-covered sofa. “But I didn’t persuade you when I seduced you. You ran away from me…to Brussels.”

  “Damn, so I did!” said Deirdre with a hint of irritation. She stepped out of her drawers and, with commendable aplomb, threw them on the growing pile of her discarded clothes. “It’ll have to be the other method then. What did you call it? Oh yes, now I remember, blackmail.”

  “Blackmail?”

  She moved gracefully and came to stand over him. “I am a bit muddled about the process, but I think a little blackmail with a healthy doze of seduction thrown in for good measure should persuade you to my will.”

  His hand reached out and caught her wrist, not hard, but with enough force to ensure that the adorable creature standing before him in such tempting deshabille would find her escape cut off if she were foolish enough to make the attempt to flee him.

  “But what is your will, Dee?” he asked softly.

  Her free hand came to rest on his naked shoulder and she leaned down till her face was only inches from his. He turned his head up, and the tip of
her tongue, warm and sensuous, traced the swell of his bottom lip. He held himself in rigid control and groaned. “Tell me.”

  “My will,” she said earnestly, “as you well know, is to breed a houseful of babies with soft red tresses.”

  He administered a rough shake and she fell into his arms. “And?” he prompted.

  Her eyes were bright with laughter. “And to be by your side, as your consort, helping to build a future for our children and our children’s children.”

  He made to crush her to him, but she spread her fingers against his chest to ward him off.

  “And,” she continued with quiet persistence, “to make our home a place of welcome to all the members of our families, yes, and in-laws too, even if we would like to see them at Jericho on occasion.”

  His eyes bathed her in a golden haze. “Aren’t you going to insist on settlements and so on?”

  “Oh that! I never doubted for a minute that you had made some provision for me.”

  “Thank you for that. And Maria Dewinters?”

  She hung her head. “I read the papers this morning. I owe her an apology, and you also.”

  “Dee, how could you think, for one minute, that I would ever want another woman after what we have been to each other?”

  “Do you love me so much?” she asked archly, and smiled into his eyes.

  “No, you conceited wench. I can scarcely handle one woman. What makes you think I’d be fool enough to take on two?”

  “Gareth Cavanaugh, you’d better kiss me now before we start quarreling,” said Deirdre through her teeth.

  Much later, Deirdre looked at the clock on the mantlepiece and said languidly, “Your hour is up, Rathbourne. I have to let you go now.”

  “Mmm!” said his lordship noncommittally, having no desire to be ousted from a position which was eminently satisfying to him. “I’m a generous loser. I’ll give you another hour.”

  “But don’t you wish to know where Caro and Armand have gone?”