by Shana Galen
“What the hell is it?” Ethan scowled and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. A quick glance at Francesca showed him her cheeks were flushed, her hair disheveled, and her dress wrinkled. She looked as though she’d just awakened from an erotic dream, pupils wide, gaze misty. She’d been attempting to straighten her gown but clasped her hands behind her back as soon as Pocket entered.
Ethan watched her pretend to study the stitching on the lady’s saddle hanging beside her. She looked completely absorbed and completely guilty. She’d never be any good at deception, he thought, and was unexpectedly pleased by the idea. Not so pleasing an idea was that at the moment her innate honesty worked against them. Anyone who gave her a passing glance would know she had been up to something she shouldn’t. And with the state of their attire, it would not be difficult to guess what.
“It’s that clutch-fisted Mrs. Priggers, my lord.” Pocket tiptoed forward, gripping his handkerchief between two fingers. “The woman refuses to provide me with additional drying oil, and, what with the state of your boots, I do not see how I shall ever render them waterproof if”—he stopped and teetered—“Oh, dear! I beg your pardon, miss!”
He’d finally noticed Francesca, who had turned away from the saddle and was straightening her skirts again. Ethan hadn’t bother with his shirt or cravat. “Miss Dashing, you know Mr. Pocklington, my valet.”
She gave Pocket a nervous smile. “Good day, sir.”
“Miss Dashing.” Pocket bowed nimbly. His sharp stare met Ethan’s and there was a distinct look of censure in his shrewd, iron-gray eyes. Ethan knew Pocket didn’t approve of his dalliances with women, though the loyal servant had never actually voiced an opinion. But from the deepening of the creases around the valet’s mouth, Ethan wondered if a lecture might not be in his future. Apparently, trollops in London were one thing, daughters of viscounts quite another.
There was one way guaranteed to distract the valet, though.
“You were saying something about drying oil, Pocket?”
The valet’s frown was replaced by pursed lips of indignation. “Yes, my lord. I am sorry to speak ill of your housekeeper.” He gave Francesca a cursory nod. “But, as I said, she refused—” His eyes widened. “Aagh!” Pocket shrieked.
Ethan jumped. “What is it?”
Pocket rushed forward, and Ethan leapt from his chair, spinning in a wild half circle. Where was his pistol? “What do you see, man?”
Without waiting for an answer, Ethan reached for Francesca, pushing her safely behind him as Pocket rushed by, bent down, and scooped his master’s tailcoat from the floor.
“Look at this!” Pocket’s voice rose to a near screech. He was holding the tailcoat aloft and shaking it vigorously. “Even my exceptionally thick-bristled brush will not clean this properly.”
Ethan scowled. He’d backed Francesca, wide-eyed and rigid, into a corner against the wall. Now he stood, arms outstretched and legs braced apart in front of her. It took a moment for his mind to grasp the fact that there was no real threat—besides the daggers shooting from Pocket’s eyes.
“Devil take it, Pocket!” Ethan lowered the arms shielding Francesca. “I thought it was something serious.”
He heard Francesca chuckle and realized how foolish he looked.
“This is serious, my lord,” Pocket huffed, shaking the tailcoat at him in accusation. “Need I remind you that your wardrobe is extremely limited at the moment? What, with the majority of your clothes at Winterbourne Hall and the rest at Grayson Park, I do not know how I shall ever keep you properly outfitted.”
Ethan could feel Francesca inching from behind him, hear her quiet giggles. He wanted to reach back and imprison her once again, recreate the sense of intimacy they’d shared a few moments before. But Pocket had hit his stride now. There was nothing to do but placate the man.
“I’ll send for the rest of my things from Grayson Park,” Ethan offered, feeling magnanimous and hoping Pocket would be mollified enough to leave the tack room. Instead, it was Francesca who scooted away from him—once again out of reach.
Pocket gave his lord a long-suffering look. “Pardon me, your lordship, but what good is fetching your garments from Grayson Park when you insist on soiling them?”
Ethan saw Francesca press her lips together, suppressing another fit of laughter. She was enjoying this—seeing his valet reprimand him—far too much. She was also edging closer to the door.
“And now I understand there is to be a betrothal ball,” Pocket continued. “And you have absolutely nothing to wear and—”
“Francesca,” Ethan interrupted as she reached for the doorknob.
She turned back to him and raised an amused eyebrow. He could see she was completely aware that, with his valet in the room, there was little he could do to forestall her.
“Yes, my lord?” Her voice was sugary sweet.
“Where are you going?”
“I thought I would check on Nat. And perhaps you would like a few moments’ privacy to tend to your domestic affairs?”
Pocket was nodding his head in approval, and Ethan glowered at him. “That’s not necessary.”
She held up a hand. “Oh, no, I insist. Apparently, I have a ball to prepare for.” It didn’t surprise him that she’d given in. With her parents behind him, she must have known he would win. What troubled him was the way her eyes gleamed. It was as though she’d just realized how much exasperation a betrothal ball would cost him and was relishing the thought.
She turned to Pocket, standing beside her with his handkerchief in one hand and Ethan’s tailcoat in the other. “Mr. Pocklington, I would be happy to speak with Mrs. Priggers about the drying oil you need. Is there anything else you require?”
“Thank you, Miss Dashing.” Pocket inclined his head, gracious as ever. “And, as a matter of fact, I could use a few ounces of yellow wax.”
Francesca nodded.
“And turpentine,” Pocket added.
“Very good.” Francesca turned to the door again.
“Oh, and Burgundy pitch, if she has it, and some lye—”
“Pocket,” Ethan growled.
Pocket spread his hands. “If it is no trouble, miss.”
Francesca smiled. “It’s no trouble, but perhaps you should write me a list?”
“With all due haste, Miss Dashing.”
Francesca pulled the door open, her gray dress and tousled hair swirling around her as a chill November draft blew in. “No hurry, Mr. Pocklington,” she said above the wind’s sighing.
She gave Ethan a parting glance, not sympathetic in the least, and stepped outside, shutting the door behind her.
“Charming girl,” Pocket said in the room’s sudden silence.
“Charming? She’s a witch.” Ethan glanced out the window and spotted his sibyl heading toward the stables, where Nat was resting. The loyal Peter trailed behind her.
“A witch? Oh, dear me, no,” Pocket countered. “A sweet girl, if I ever saw one. And far too good for the likes of you,” he muttered the last and shook the tailcoat in tacit reproach.
Ethan watched Francesca greet Shepherd. The head coachman exited the stables, leading Thunder. Francesca approached the colt carefully, patting the horse’s nose then nuzzling her face into his neck when he didn’t quite shy away from her. How had she won the horse over so quickly? he wondered. Was it some kind of magic? It wouldn’t surprise him if tomorrow he learned wood sprites and elves from the hills and vales had taught her the art of enchantment.
Whatever powers she possessed, they obviously worked on humans as well. He was certainly bewitched by her, and he had yet to find a way to break her spell. Even now, he couldn’t take his eyes from his petite enchantress, and he could still taste her—magic, dark and sweet—on his lips.
One of the grooms darted from the stables carrying a brown cape, and Shepherd took it to wrap around her shoulders. Ethan frowned. Over the past few days, Ethan had noticed that the exasperating woman never remembered to bundle up. She
was definitely a free spirit—as unbound and wildly ravishing as the idyllic Hampshire countryside she so adored.
Even her hair refused to stay confined to its topknot. She threw back her head, bursting into laughter at something Shepherd said, and it blew about her like swirls of chocolate dancing across the caramel of her cape. Ethan wanted to wrap his hands in that hair, inhale its scent, her scent. He could still smell her on his fingers...
Magic.
Pocket tsked. “Far too good for you, my lord.” The valet stood next to him now, observing Francesca from the window.
Ethan scowled. “Thank you, Pocket.”
Pocket nodded and waved the tailcoat under Ethan’s nose. “I shall come back to the tailcoat issue later, my lord.” He fingered Ethan’s limp cravat with a grimace. “Now, about the cravat situation.”
“Cravat situation?” Ethan spared a last glance out the window before turning his attention back to Pocket. “I’d hardly call it a situation.”
“I agree, my lord. Crisis is a better term.”
Ethan gritted his teeth and eased into the wobbly chair behind the desk. With half a dozen servants yet to interview and an apparent cravat crisis on his hands, it would be a long, long—he eyed Pocket wearily—long afternoon.
Twenty-one
“Damn.”
He wanted her. Wanted her as much as he could remember wanting any woman—more. And he couldn’t have her. Not without a price, and that price was marriage.
Ethan stared into the black, storm-ravaged night. Shards of rain hit the window’s thick glass, and the wind pushed restlessly against it, making his elbow cold and damp where it rested against the French doors.
Swearing again, he turned from the window and threw himself into Brigham’s chair. Marriage. Would the idea have been so abhorrent to him if he hadn’t witnessed, daily, the pain of his mother’s second marriage? Marriage was nothing without loyalty and constancy, and Ethan didn’t believe in women’s constancy, didn’t have much faith in most men, either. Given time and opportunity, lovers would stray. Victoria had taught him that lesson well.
Victoria—a shining example of his immature and misguided belief in love’s capacity to conquer all.
He’d loved her. Loved her with heart and soul—body burning with unfulfilled desire for the mere touch of her. She’d been beautiful. All shimmering gold hair and blinding alabaster skin, so stunning it had pained his eyes to look at her. He’d wanted her with a passion that, at four and twenty, was unparalleled. But he’d done no more than offer her chaste kisses and promising glances. She was a lady, and he gave her every courtesy, every consideration.
He needn’t have bothered. The roiling rage he’d experienced when he’d found her in Leigh’s arms—not talking innocently, as his detractors claimed, but with Leigh’s hand fondling her bared breast and her skirt hiked practically to her neck—had almost consumed him. He could have, cheerfully and without regret, killed them both.
But he hadn’t. He’d shown remarkable restraint, escaping into his work for the Foreign Office and the terrors of the Revolution in France. It wasn’t until he’d returned to London that he’d heard the lies about him almost killing his—former—best friend.
No doubt Leigh had spread the rumors. He had been angry and humiliated when Victoria had refused his offer of marriage. Apparently, she’d realized just how modest Leigh’s income really was. Victoria’s final marriage to a lowly Irish peer did nothing for her status in the eyes of the ton. Guilty or not, she would always be tainted by scandal.
When he’d returned from France, Ethan had seen no need to plot revenge. Victoria and Leigh were their own punishments.
But even now, sitting in Brigham’s desk chair and staring into the Hampshire night, Ethan felt a wrench from the old anger, the humiliation. Francesca was nothing like Victoria, he told himself, except that Francesca too was beautiful.
No, not beautiful, he corrected. If she’d been beautiful he would have noted her when they were first introduced. She wasn’t at all classically beautiful, as her sister was destined to be and as Victoria was.
Something else in her attracted him. Something more. Something wild and untamed in her face and eyes and hair. She wasn’t merely beautiful. She was ravishing. Violently ravishing—a hard beauty, like the harsh rocky hills and moors of his home in Yorkshire, tempered with the softness of Hampshire’s sloping green knolls and stately meadows.
She was like the fabled lodestone rock he’d heard sailors discuss when his work had demanded he sit for hours in seedy dockside taverns. Her magnetism drew him in, and he saw himself surrendering, one by one, the defenses he’d erected since Victoria.
Witchcraft, he decided. Chalk it up to witchcraft. He didn’t want to consider any other possibilities, though one in particular came unbidden to his mind more frequently of late.
He was falling in love with her.
Even as the idea entered his mind, he shoved it aside with a violence that should have crushed it. But somehow the notion continued to survive the assault and return when he least expected the attack.
Ethan scanned the stack of papers he’d laid on the viscount’s desk and extracted one. He perused the missive then flicked his gaze to the clock. Three and a quarter. Outside the wind began to wail again, but the knock on the French door was sharp and peremptory. Ethan rose to open the door.
Francesca brushed at a wayward curl and pressed her ear to the door again. She bit her lip. Squinted. But all she could hear were muffled voices. Men’s voices.
The storm had woken her, and she’d gone down for a glass of milk. Then she’d heard sounds in her father’s library. She was silent as a mouse as she moved. At half past three in the morning, the last thing she wanted was to be seen eavesdropping.
“Both your and Grenville’s theories can go to the devil!”
The voices on the other side of the door rose in argument, and Francesca caught her breath, pressing her ear firmly to the smooth wood.
“You have your list of suspects. While you and the secretary run off at the mouth and waste time investigating half the peerage, I’m sailing for France. I’ll get my hands on the real bastards.”
Francesca frowned. She knew the speaker wasn’t Ethan or her father, but there was something familiar about the man’s voice, the tenor and the cadence.
“It’s the leader that’s important, and that man is here in England.”
The last speaker was Ethan. She was sure of it. Clasping her hands together, she tried to temper her excitement.
Ethan was a spy. A spy! Why else would he be discussing suspects, France, and the Foreign Secretary? She’d actually guessed correctly. Now she had the proof.
“—and you don’t have the experience to go alone.” Ethan’s muffled voice pulled her attention back.
“The devil I don’t—” the other man began loudly.
There was a muted curse, and the voices lowered. Francesca huffed in frustration, pushing her ear so tightly to the door it ached.
“London!”
Francesca almost clunked her head against the wood when the voices rose again.
“What the hell am I to do in London, Ethan? Sit on my arse at Drury Lane?”
“I told you. I want a complete report on each of these men,” she heard Ethan answer, voice tinged with warning. “Begin with Ashton and work down the list.”
Francesca bit her lip. Ashton. He was a respected member of the House of Lords and had been to her family’s town house in London on occasion. Did Ethan suspect him of some wrongdoing? She’d heard the other man speak of traveling to France. Could Ashton be a traitor, aiding the French in the ongoing war? It was almost unthinkable that an Englishman, a peer, would stoop to such treachery.
“It’s a waste of time. I won’t do it.”
“Yes, you will.” The command in Ethan’s voice was undeniable. “You’ll do what I tell you to. And if I tell you to go to South Walk at Vauxhall and sit under the ruins of Palmyra from two to five each a
fternoon, humming ‘The Jolly Young Waterman,’ you damn well better do it.”
Francesca sucked in her breath. Whoever Ethan’s companion was, she could tell he wouldn’t like being ordered about.
“The South Walk,” the man answered, his voice tight.
“That’s right. Under Palmyra.” Ethan was definitely not backing down.
“The hell I will.”
Francesca winced, lifting her ear from the door a fraction of an inch to brace herself for the coming explosion.
“Now if you’d said the Dark Walk at Vauxhall, I might consider it.”
Francesca frowned and leaned in again. The tenseness in the other man’s voice was gone. She wouldn’t have called his tone affable, but he didn’t sound angry anymore. And what was he talking about? The Dark Walk? Where all the lovers met? Were the two men joking?
“Oof!”
The door swung open, and Francesca tumbled inside. Two strong hands caught her before she skidded to the floor, and she looked up into Ethan’s molten eyes. “Miss Dashing.”
She winced as the blade of his voice cut her pride. “Ah—” She tried to remember the excuse she’d formulated for just such a moment, but her mind went blank when she glanced down and saw the gap in Ethan’s open robe, revealing his chest.
His bare chest.
He still wore his trousers and boots, but under that gaping robe he was bare to the waist. Heat, warm and fluid, rushed to her face, and for some reason she couldn’t explain, she yearned to run her fingers over that expanse of flesh.
And so much flesh! Her fantasies hadn’t accounted for the hard, flat planes of his abdomen or the line of dark, curling hair that disappeared into a V below his waistband. Like a hooked fish, she gulped great bursts of air in an effort to dispel the wave of dizziness threatening to overwhelm her.
