She bit off her retort. It would only serve to amuse him, no doubt. She decided to ignore his ribald remark and give him an answer to his query. There was, after all, no reason to keep it from him. It mattered not one way or the other if he knew.
“I’m bound to Paris to find my father.”
And find him I will, she swore to herself. He was alive. In her heart, she knew he was as alive as she.
“Paris?” Duncan’s expression became grave as Jacob quickly busied himself with arranging the plates upon the small table in Duncan’s room. Duncan propped himself up in the bed once more. ‘”Tis not safe in Paris. Or in France, for that matter. Madmen roam the streets.”
She felt her heart quicken at the description. “Yes,” she said softly, “I know.”
He watched her face. Jacob withdrew from the room, but Duncan took no notice. “But yet you wish to go there?”
“Yes. I must.” She took a breath. There was no comfort to be found. “I have no choice, as I said. My father is there somewhere.” Her voice lowered. “I know he is.”
He reached to take her hand again, this time as a friend. “Tell me.”
She shrugged, the words tangling hopelessly in her mind. What was she doing, telling all this to a stranger? She was by nature her own confidante, unless it was to her father she spoke. No one else had the patience to listen and to understand.
“’Tis a long story.”
But he would not permit her to extract her hand this time. “Tell me,” he coaxed again softly. Then a smile chased away the somber expression. “While you feed me.”
“Feed you?” she echoed incredulously. He looked no more in need of being fed than she did.
He nodded in reply. “Yes, feed me. The spoon is heavy and I am weak.” His green eyes sparkled like June bugs in the wind. “I need nourishment.”
Nourishment her foot. “What you are sorely in need of is manners.”
His eyes teased her, and she found them hard to resist. “You may teach me that, too, while you are about it, if you wish.”
Beth placed the bowl of soup on the stand next to his bed. When she sat down, she saw his smile widen. “You really are infuriating.”
His eyes watched her, committing each movement to memory. “And your humble servant.”
She seriously doubted that the man beside her had ever known a humble day in his life. Pride was etched into his features. Not a false pride, but one that spoke of his knowing exactly what he was capable of. Exactly how far his reach extended.
Carefully she dipped the spoon into the steaming broth and raised it to his lips. They remained closed, spread in an amused smile.
A bit of soup dripped into her cupped hand that hovered beneath the spoon and she winced. She should have let it just drop on his belly. It would have served him right. “Open for me.”
“Gladly.” His eyes shone with a jest he did not share with her.
It was a mistake to remain, Beth thought.
She dipped the spoon into the broth again.
As she coaxed the soup into him, he coaxed the full story from her. It emerged in jumbled bits and pieces, but he had the whole of it by the time the bowl was empty and she had pushed aside her own plate.
Finding himself with an appetite, Duncan reached over her to take up her half-empty plate. The meat was cold, but he could remember a time when he had chewed on rotting crusts of bread and been grateful for it.
He cut a piece and studied it with the way of a man who loved his food to the last morsel. “So you are determined to go.”
“I am going,” she retorted.
If he hadn’t understood that by now, then he hadn’t really been listening. What did she expect? She cleared away the bowl from the stand, leaving it on the table where Jacob had placed it when he had brought it in.
She frowned as she looked up at Duncan. His britches had slipped a little and now clung tightly to his hips. Trim, narrow hips well suited to riding a horse.
Or a woman, a small voice whispered perversely in her head.
She averted her eyes and purposely looked at his face. “Really, it is no business of yours what I do.”
He waved that away with his good hand. “We can talk of that later.”
“Later,” she echoed in disbelief.
Just how long did he think she was planning to stay? She had already informed him of her hurry. Was he deaf? Or merely mule-headed?
Finished, he moved the dish aside on the bed. “I shall make you a trade, Beth.”
Though she loathed the role of servant, she loathed slovenliness even more. Lips pressed together, she took up the plate and placed it next to the other with a bang.
“And that would be?”
“Stay and tend to me.” Duncan saw her brow raise and hurried to continue, “Just until the rains cease.”
There was more to his tone than that, unless she missed her guess. “Yes? And what am I to get out of it if I remain?”
Her very countenance forbade him to be bawdy, although he was sorely tempted. The woman was made for loving, and he had made up his mind to wear her down at first opportunity. He had not lied before. The idea would be hers. But there was nothing to stop his whispering it into her ear until she believed it to be her own.
“If you remain, when they have ceased, I shall provide you with a coach and someone to drive you to Dover.” He looked at her pointedly. “And accompany you across the Channel.”
Someone else who saw her only as a weak woman, in need of protecting. She drew herself up, her shoulders braced. “I need no company.”
He was swiftly becoming convinced that she was the most stubborn woman on the face of the earth, but then, he had never encountered real opposition before. Women had a tendency to cleave to him.
“You are a woman alone,” Duncan pointed out patiently.
She remained silent about her abilities to ride and shoot a pistol close enough to a man’s head to part his hair without harm. There was no need to inform him of that.
“I have Sylvia.”
The manners she claimed he did not possess prevented him from laughing aloud. “As I said, you are a woman alone. That makes you a tempting target for some hot-blooded reprobate.”
She arched a knowing brow. “And you would be the one to know about reprobates.”
He was amused at her accusation. “It takes one to know one,” he agreed. Dramatically, Duncan placed a hand to his breast, though he would much have rather placed it on hers. “But I am reformed.”
She would no sooner place her fate in his hands than she would attempt to swim across the Channel to France. “I seriously doubt that.”
But he was not one to give up easily. ’Twas the fight he enjoyed. The victory was but an added boon. “Put me to the test.”
Her eyes narrowed accusingly. “I unwittingly did— last night.”
The soulful eyes that turned to Beth’s asked for her to grant him another chance. “One lapse does not a reprobate make.”
There was something there in his eyes that spoke to her, that touched a portion of her soul she had not known existed. Uncomfortable at its discovery, Beth sighed and shook her head.
“I have to be mad ...”
“But—?” he urged eagerly, knowing that he had already won.
Beth felt it best to keep her distance from him. She paced about the front of his bed.
“Since I have no coach and no choice, as you have pointed out, I shall take you up on your offer. All but the companion. He can turn back with the coach, once Sylvia and I are aboard ship.”
Crossing to him, she placed her hand in Duncan’s. ‘”Tis a bargain.” Hopefully, not with the devil, she added silently.
He was surprised at the gesture. The women he knew did not shake hands. America had to be a very interesting country, he decided. No wonder Sin-Jin had wanted to return.
He curved his fingers about her soft flesh. “You shall not regret it,” he promised.
Something small and nameles
s within her warned Beth that she already had cause to.
Slowly she removed her hand from Duncan’s. But the warmth generated there refused to leave even after their hands no longer touched.
She pinned him with a look that had often sent her sisters scurrying for shelter. “That remains to be seen, Duncan.”
This would be a woman who would meet him thrust for thrust. She would not disappoint him when the time came. And the time, he hoped, would come soon.
Mindful of his shoulder, he allowed himself only a short laugh, but it was filled with a lustiness that brought a shiver of anticipation to her spine.
“I like your manner, Beth. You have spirit.”
If he meant to flatter her into dropping her guard against him, it would not succeed. “I would not test how much, if I were you. You might just find that you have received far more than you bargained for.”
He could hope, Duncan thought, settling back in his bed as content as a cat in cream. For that he could truly only hope.
Chapter Thirteen
Samuel had placed her, Beth discovered, in the bedroom right next to Duncan’s.
It made the task of moving her trunk from one room to the other an easy one for Jacob. But even if it had meant taking her trunk to another floor, Samuel remarked and Beth would have had to agree, Jacob would have willingly followed her to the ends of the earth, dragging the trunk in his wake like a weight that had been tied to him by decree.
Beth moved slowly about the room, taking in its measure. She was not certain yet if it appealed to her tastes or not, though she would not be here long enough for that to matter very much.
The room was smaller than Duncan’s, but far more ornately decorated. Duncan’s room had the look of a man’s place about it, its furnishing sparse, but what there was in it was massive. Much like the man himself.
In her room, there was so much, either hanging, or lying, or scattered, that Beth felt oppressed.
Oppressed by the tapestries on the walls and the heavy draperies at the casements. By the portraits of ancestors long gone to their reward, looking somberly down at her as she paced about.
The room had been perversely bedecked in shades of scarlet, as if whoever had had a hand in it had feared that it might all go unnoticed if the colors were muted. Samuel had informed Beth as he’d brought her to it that the room had belonged to the former mistress of Shalott, the late earl’s widow.
The late earl’s subtle executioner, it was believed by many.
She was to sleep in a bed that had once cradled the body of a murderess, Beth thought. A shiver sliced through her.
Though she was far more aware that there was evil in the world than were her mother or the other women in her family, Beth could not bring herself to understand why one person would be intentionally wicked to another.
Why a person would kill another for what he carried in his pouch, or because he did not care for the way another person looked upon him.
She did not understand why, she thought, as she fingered the draperies, a woman would intentionally poison her husband if she no longer wished to be with him.
Or why countrymen turned on each other because they stood on different sides of a question, different sides of a privilege.
It made less than no sense to her.
The sound of grunting coming from the doorway behind her scattered Beth’s thoughts like so much corn thrown on the ground before chickens in a barnyard. She turned in time to see Jacob and Hank struggling as they carried a cumbersome oblong tub between them.
“Steady now, men,” Samuel warned. “If you drop it, there’ll be a dent in it for sure and Duncan will not be pleased about it.”
“Damn it, old man, you have the easy part of it, flapping your lip while we put our backs to it. This thing is heavy,” Hank grumbled, as he shuffled, moving backward over the doorsill.
The reproving look that Samuel shot him was black. “If you put more of that energy into your back and less into your mouth, you wouldn’t be struggling with your end of it like some fresh-faced girl. No offense, mistress,” Samuel amended quickly, slanting a look toward Beth to see if he had angered her.
“None taken,” she assured him as she crossed to him. Now, what was all this about?
With a heavy sigh, Jacob and Hank deposited the tub in the center of the room. Samuel impatiently waved them out again.
“Well, get on with it,” he instructed. “You’re not done yet, you know.”
Beth drew her brows together as she stared at the metal object. Bemused, her question tumbled out with no thought behind it.
“What is it?”
Samuel looked at her, surprised. Surely they had tubs to bathe in where she came from. “Why, it’s a tub for bathing, mistress.”
She wondered if he thought her that naive. “Yes, I realize that, but what I meant was, I didn’t ask for any to be brought.”
Samuel smiled. “Duncan thought you might want to refresh yourself after the long night you spent at his side, tending to his wounds.”
It was a thoughtful gesture, Beth readily conceded, one she would not have immediately attributed to him.
As she looked upon it, people began filing in behind her, carrying kettles and pots of water before them. Steam rose seductively from each and every container. Beth looked quizzically at Samuel, taken aback by the unannounced parade.
He gave a slight shrug of his even slighter shoulders. “What’s a tub without water? Hey, you there.” He wagged a bony warning finger before Tommy’s face. “Mind you don’t spill any.”
Pot after pot was emptied into the metal receptacle. The level within it climbed ever higher. Beth watched, mesmerized. To be clean again, after endless days of travel, to wash away dust that had become almost a second, unwanted skin upon her .. . it seemed like a blessing too precious to wish for.
Beth sighed without realizing it.
Samuel smiled to himself. He clapped his hands together, calling for the line to move more quickly. Those who emptied their pots retraced their steps back to the kitchen and the twin cauldrons that were boiling water on the hearth.
There was a lag and Samuel stepped to the doorway. “Be quick about it, or it will be too cold by the time the mistress uses it,” he called down the stairs.
In response, two more women hurried into the room, a large, black pot supported between them.
Beth wanted nothing more than to immerse herself in the tub and let the waters work their miracle upon her. But she recalled last night, when her desire had led her to be less than utterly cautious. The smirking look in Duncan’s eyes was the price she now had to pay for her haste. She was not about to commit the same error again.
“Samuel.” She laid a hand on his shoulder, not knowing quite how to modestly phrase the question that sharply arose in her mind like the lightning that had streaked across the brow of the summer sky last night.
From her tone, he gathered that there was a secret to be imparted. Samuel liked nothing better than being privy to secrets.
“Yes, mistress?”
She began slowly, searching for the proper words, ones that would not frame her in the wrong light. “This is the former duchess’s room, is it not?”
He had told her as much not more than half an hour past. Surely she remembered. “Yes, mistress, that it is.”
“Is it—connected to the other room, by any chance? To the earl’s?” Beth couldn’t bring herself to call it Duncan’s room. It made her question much too intimate.
Her eyes swept over the wall which separated her room from Duncan’s. She saw no door, but old manors were known for secret passages that lovers might use in the dead of night for trysts.
Samuel shook his head vigorously, the straggled gray locks whipping through the air like tiny gray serpents.
“Oh, no, mistress. I heard that she was a virago. Beautiful, but deadly.” He inclined his head, his voice lowering even more. “She went about her own way a great deal.” His expression sobered. “Had l
overs, so the stories went.”
He’d heard tell of that in the town. The barkeep there liked to number himself among the woman’s lovers, but Samuel had his doubts. No woman could have had as many as they said she had, but he would have dearly loved to verify that on his own.
“A woman like that would not have permitted her room to be connected to her poor, cuckolded husband’s.”
It made perfect sense. Still, would a husband with a wife like that not want somehow to confirm his suspicions discreetly?
Beth bit her lip, knowing that Samuel might take umbrage for Duncan.
“And there are no . ..” she waved her hand airily, “. . . knotholes, perhaps?”
Samuel cocked his head. Was she asking him if there was a way to observe Duncan without being seen?
“Why? Were you hoping to—?” He saw the shocked expression seize her features. Quickly he retreated. “Oh, you mean the other way of it?” He shook his head, the picture of piety. “Oh, no, mistress. There’s no way that anyone can look in on you.” He crossed his heart, as if that was the end of it. “Unless, perhaps, it might be a bird.” With a flourish, he gestured toward the partly open window. “Though there’d be none flying in this sort of weather, I’d wager.”
He nodded benevolently as Jacob deposited the last bit of hot water into the tub.
“You’ll have your privacy, mistress, I swear it upon my mother’s grave. And I’ll even post a guard for you at the door, so none can enter by accident.” He winked at her. “Or by design.”
She was a winsome lass, and he could well see her concern. There were those in the house who would profess ignorance of the room’s occupation and pretend to stumble in just for a look at her pleasing form. Were he younger, he might have used the same excuse himself. As it was, the more settled, ample figure now tempted him. A man enjoyed having something to hold onto. He thought of Sylvia and smiled to himself.
She breathed a sigh of relief. “That would be greatly appreciated, Samuel.”
He beamed at her words of thanks. “Consider it already done, mistress.” A stubby finger beckoned Jacob forward. The younger man had been loitering in the room, searching for an excuse to remain a little longer. “You, there, Jacob. You’ll stand at the lady’s door until such time as she wishes you to be gone.”
Moonlight Surrender (Moonlight Book 3) Page 10
