The Bath Trilogy

by Amanda Scott

  His fingers tightened against her flesh as he said huskily, “I couldn’t bear it when you came out here with that idiot, Manningford. You are too good for him, Caro. You need a man who knows how to treat you, who understands you need a firm hand on the rein. I’m going to kiss you, love. I can wait no longer.”

  Every nerve ending in her body came alive, and although she disliked hearing him call Brandon an idiot, the description was apt enough just then for her to ignore any immediate inclination to defend him. Thus it was that when Lyndhurst pulled her into his arms, she went willingly enough, albeit with more curiosity aroused than passion, since the scene had begun just as all her favorite authors were wont to describe such moments.

  His muscular arms caught her and held her captive, and when she looked up at him, his mouth captured hers in a burning kiss. But there all similarity to the tenderly written passages that had so often delighted her came to an abrupt end. There was no answering surge of rapture that swelled from her toes and coursed through her veins. Nor was there delight or joy or an instant awakening of true love. Instead, she felt a sharp sense of panic when she attempted to pull away and he would not let her go.

  His arms tightened crushingly around her, and she felt his tongue pressing against her lips. There had been nothing about tongues in any of her books. Not one word. She struggled and tried to turn her head away. She even tried to hit him, but he was too strong. Indeed, she realized when she felt one of his hands push her bodice aside, he was holding her easily with only one hand and still she could not free herself. His hand was beneath the lace now, beneath even the silk, moving over the soft bare skin of her breast toward its tip.

  She tried to kick him, but her thin slippers did no damage except in failing miserably to protect her toes.

  Sydney Saint-Denis’s familiar drawl startled them both. “Oh, here you are, Carolyn. I have been looking for you.”

  Carolyn went still, not wanting to look around, not wanting him to see her, hoping that he would think he had made a mistake, for even worse than being trapped by Lyndhurst was having Sydney find her in his arms.

  III

  SYDNEY TOOK A LONG, steadying breath, mentally reciting the brief Chinese phrases that would help force his temper back under his normal, rigid control. It had been a very long time since he had felt this close to losing it. There had been many such times before his two years in China, of course, but none since till now. The feeling receded quickly enough, and he said in the same amiable tone he had employed before, “Sorry to take you away when I know you looked forward to this assembly, but Mother is feeling a trifle bilious and has expressed a desire to return home. Cousin Judith is attending to her, of course, and I daresay you could find someone else willing to look after you, but I felt certain you would want to accompany them.”

  “You intrude, Saint-Denis,” Lyndhurst snapped, glaring.

  “Do I?”

  The viscount had removed his hand from beneath Carolyn’s bodice, but it still rested possessively on her shoulder, and Sydney felt his body relaxing and his mind clearing. In his head he could hear an echo of Ching Ho’s lilting voice cautioning him to remember that “The supple willow does not contend against the storm, yet it survives.” When Lyndhurst, without another word, suddenly released Carolyn, Sydney was not surprised, for he had seen such reactions before. It was simply a matter of will.

  With Carolyn, however, it was a far different matter. She was astonished when the viscount released her, for she had heard no change in Sydney’s drawl when he spoke the two short words, and when she had peeped around at him she could see nothing unusual in his manner. But Lyndhurst said nothing more, not even when Sydney held out his arm to her and she placed her fingers on it. The whole scene, she thought, was very strange, for no matter how one strained one’s fertile imagination to do so, one simply could not imagine Sydney in the role of rescuer. Thus, it was all the more irritating to feel obliged to him.

  She found it difficult to believe the episode had ended so simply, and as she walked with him back to the torchlit pathway and on toward the ballroom, she found that she was expecting more, expecting Lyndhurst to follow them, somehow to force the issue. If he was following them, however, she could not hear him, and she would not give him the satisfaction of looking back.

  “Do you want to walk a little longer before we return, to recover your countenance?” Sydney asked politely as they drew near the broad stone steps leading into the ballroom.

  His words, reminding her again of the circumstance in which he had found her, brought a surge of delayed mortification that nearly stopped her feet in their tracks and her breath in her throat. Taking herself in hand, however, she managed to reply with tolerable calm, “There is no reason to walk farther, sir. I am not distressed.”

  “I disagree,” he said with a note in his voice that she could not decipher. “You cannot have expected Lyndhurst to behave in so ungentlemanly a fashion.”

  She did not wish to argue the point, particularly since she could not with any honesty refute it. “I was afraid he would be angry with you,” she admitted.

  Surprisingly, Sydney chuckled. “I believe you expected him to demand my blood and are disappointed that he did not.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” she retorted, nettled.

  “He could not do so, of course. He knows you are a guest beneath my roof, so he must have realized what a solecism he would commit if he refused to relinquish you to my care. You were not wise to come out with him, however.”

  The words were matter-of-fact, spoken without the least note of censure, but Carolyn bristled nonetheless. “I can take care of myself, Sydney,” she said tartly. “I was curious to learn how Lyndhurst would behave, but I could have managed him perfectly well on my own. And although I am living under your roof, that does not give you the right to tell me what to do.”

  “Dear me, did I do so?” He drew her with him away from the steps, back toward the central garden path.

  “You said I was unwise!”

  “Yes.” Amusement gleamed in his eyes.

  “You have no right to reproach my behavior, particularly when you are making me do the very thing you said I was wrong to do with Lyndhurst!”

  “Perhaps you are right,” he said, “but you must still agree that I know more about his character, and my own, than you can know, so you’d be wise to heed my advice when I offer it to you.”

  “Well, I don’t agree,” she snapped. “It wasn’t Lyndhurst who brought me outside but Brandon Manningford, and you can’t say I was unwise to come out with him, for not only is he harmless but his family and yours have known one another forever!”

  The amusement in Sydney’s eyes deepened. “Do you hear yourself? Certainly, I can say you were unwise to come out here, no matter who escorted you, for only observe the consequences. And to be pretending that I should approve of young Brandon, who is as loose a screw as can rattle, only because Mama has allowed you to run tame with him and because I call friends with his sister and her husband, is the height of foolishness.”

  When she would have responded, hotly, he silenced her by saying quietly, “You are in general a more worthy opponent, Caro. Either you are too cold to think properly, or Lyndhurst upset you more than I realized. You went so still in his arms when I spoke that I thought myself mistaken in believing you’d been struggling with him. But whether I was mistaken or not, you must agree that my years and experience, if not merely my masculinity, make me a better judge of the British male than you can hope to be.”

  She would admit to no such thing, but she did not argue with him, deciding that there was nothing to be said to any man who made so a daft a statement, and certain that the time would come when she would prove him wrong or know the reason why. Silence reigned between them until Sydney said, “You were all over the shop, you know, which is not the way to go about it.”

  “Whatever are you talking about?” she demanded.

  He reached for her hand. “Look,” he sai
d, “I’ll show you. Bend your fingers so that your fingertips touch the top edge of your palm. Like that, yes,” he said when she had obeyed him. “Keep your thumb in. Now, if a fellow grabs you like Lyndhurst did, jab him in the throat or ribs with your knuckles.”

  “Well, I never saw anyone make a fist like that, and I doubt he would even notice it,” she said, looking at her small hand.

  “A featherweight like you can do more damage with knuckles braced like that than with a rounded fist,” he said, “especially if you keep hitting at the same place, rather than flailing away as you were doing. You’ll divert his attention to the pain, and once you’ve done that, bring your knee up between his legs as hard as ever you can. He will notice that, I promise you.”

  “Well, I suppose he might,” she replied naively, “but I doubt I could do it, even in this skirt, and skirts not meant for dancing are even more narrowly cut than this one, you know.” She experimented, finding that although she could raise her knee a little, she could not, without pulling her skirt up a good distance, raise it high enough to do as he recommended.

  He raised his quizzing glass to watch her, and said, “Daresay you’re right. Well, if you find yourself in a rare enough pickle, you’ll just have to hike up your skirt, that’s all. Or if you like, I’ll teach you a few other tricks.”

  She could not imagine any tricks he might know that would be of any more use to her than what he had just suggested, but she did not say so, for she had no wish to hurt his feelings, and even more to the purpose, she could no longer ignore the chill. When she shivered, he noticed at once and took her back inside, where she discovered that although Lady Skipton had not asked him to do so, he had indeed sent for his carriage.

  Inside the carriage, he said no more about what had happened, and Carolyn was grateful to him, for she had no wish to hear Lady Skipton’s observations on the subject. After some consideration, however, she realized that she could trust Sydney not to betray one foolish lapse of judgment to his mother. Lyndhurst was not really dangerous, after all. It was only the dark garden and her own active imagination that had made him seem so. And while she had not been particularly wise to go with him, he would surely never really have dared to seduce her.

  As for having gone out with Brandon, it was the outside of enough for Sydney to cavil at that. To be sure, Brandon had deserted her, but that had been through nothing more malicious than thoughtlessness, for which he would be most apologetic when next they met. So certain was she of this that it came as no small shock when they chanced to meet in Milsom Street the following afternoon to be greeted with Brandon’s reproaches.

  “Where did you disappear to last night?” he demanded after making his bow to her and to Miss Pucklington, who, wrapped in a myriad of her most colorful shawls as protection against the day’s chill, had walked into town with her to exchange two books at the subscription library. “One instant you were beside me, and the next you’d disappeared into thin air! Not at all the thing to do, m’ girl, and so I should not need to tell you.”

  “Well, of all the cheek!” Carolyn retorted. “You no sooner saw those horrid men swilling blue ruin, or whatever was in that jug, than you left me to join them with never another thought for me or my safety. And now you dare to criticize me!”

  He grimaced at her. Then, clearly becoming aware that Miss Pucklington was watching them both with an expression of avid interest on her thin face, he said hastily, “Forgive us, ma’am. ’Tis nothing of consequence. Just a minor disagreement between friends, but we ought not to be sniping at each other in the street this way, putting you to the blush for our manners.”

  “Oh, don’t bother about me,” Miss Pucklington said kindly. “I need not remember or repeat what I hear, you know.”

  Carolyn, her attention on Brandon, had likewise forgotten her companion, but now she glanced at her with merriment in her eyes. “Dearest Puck,” she said, “I doubt you have ever forgotten a single word spoken in your presence. But we needn’t mind her, Brandon,” she added. “Puck never gives one away.”

  “Thank you, my dear,” Miss Pucklington said, turning pink as she moved to allow a gentleman to pass by, “but I daresay Mr. Manningford is right in saying that we ought not to stand here blocking the footpath, you know. Perhaps he would care to escort us back to Bathwick Hill House for a hot cup of tea.”

  But that did not suit Mr. Manningford. “Tell you what, Caro,” he said, plainly accepting Miss Pucklington as an ally, “I still don’t agree I was at fault. Well, dash it all, you ought to have stayed with me and not gone flitting off by yourself, oughtn’t you? But I ain’t one to contradict a lady,” he added hastily, if inaccurately, when a steely glint instantly replaced the twinkle in Carolyn’s eyes. “I’ll make it up to you by riding with you tomorrow and you can say whatever you like to me then. Since I know you dislike riding on your own with only a groom to bear you company, I can’t say fairer than that, can I?”

  “You’ll forget,” she said flatly, unappeased.

  “No, I won’t,” he retorted. “Might, in the usual way of things, but the fact is, I left m’ gold watch as collateral for a horse I bought, and I want to get it back. Horse is worth more than the watch, but I might want to do business with this fellow in future, so there you are.”

  “But how will wanting to get your watch back make you remember you’re to ride with me?” she demanded.

  “The gypsy camp is on Saint-Denis’s land,” he said, as though that simple statement explained everything.

  “Gypsy camp? Goodness, are there gypsies on Bathwick Hill? Sydney cannot know that!”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t think it would bother him. Gentle enough folk if you keep your pockets sewn shut.”

  “Well, Godmama would not approve at all, but how exciting! Will you really take me to their camp?”

  He looked for a moment as though he were having second thoughts, and she knew that he had not previously considered that it might not be quite the thing to do, so she said quickly, “I should like to visit one above all things, and I know I shall be perfectly safe with you.”

  “Safe? Of course you’ll be safe with me. What a dashed silly thing to say!” And he made no comment whatever after that about the proprieties, or lack thereof.

  Miss Pucklington was not so reticent, however, once he had gone and they walked together along the broad expanse of Great Pulteney Street, toward Bathwick Hill. “Cousin Olympia will not approve of such an expedition,” she said gently.

  “No, but I don’t intend to tell her,” Carolyn said. “Sydney probably will not approve either, but I shall go with Brandon all the same, and I shall be perfectly safe, too, Puck. He won’t dare to desert me a second time.”

  “He truly deserted you last night? I didn’t know.”

  “Oh, that was nothing,” Carolyn said airily. “We were only in the garden, after all, so it was no great thing. I mentioned it to him only because I wished to remind him that a gentleman does not walk off and forget the lady he is escorting. He would never do so at a gypsy camp. And, in any event, I have never heard of any gypsies hereabouts doing anyone any harm.”

  “They steal,” Miss Pucklington said flatly.

  “Well, of course they do,” Carolyn agreed. “Gypsies always steal. ’Tis their nature, I suppose, through not having had the benefit of a Christian upbringing. Although,” she added with a mischievous grin, “I have never heard of them actually stealing babies, despite the great number of romantic novels that are written about beautiful young girls who are stolen from their wealthy families at birth and raised by the gypsies.”

  “Surely, you don’t believe you were stolen by gypsies?” Miss Pucklington inquired suspiciously.

  “No, of course not,” Carolyn said. “Nothing so interesting ever happened to me. I do not live in the pages of a book, you know.” On the contrary, she thought, her life was perfectly ordinary and Lyndhurst the closest likeness to a hero she had ever met. Most depressing, for dangerous as he could look, he was rea
lly only annoying, not exciting at all. And doubtless, the gypsy camp, if Brandon did remember to take her there, would turn out to be just as depressing, and dull into the bargain.

  Her outlook had improved, however, after a good night’s sleep, and by the time Brandon presented himself at Bathwick Hill House the following morning, she was looking forward to the outing with pleasurable anticipation. Thus, she was not at all pleased to see Sydney approaching them from the direction of the stables just as Brandon was lifting her into her saddle.

  “Say nothing about where we are going,” she hissed, shooting an oblique glance at her nearby groom to assure herself that he was out of earshot.

  “No fear of that,” Brandon muttered, adding in a louder tone, “Good morning, Saint-Denis. A fine day, is it not? Been out riding already, I expect.”

  “Some time ago,” Sydney said, holding out his hand.

  His buckskin breeches and dark blue coat, Carolyn noted, seemed to have been molded to his trim, well-muscled body, and had clearly been tailored by experts. His snowy neckcloth was tied in a less intricate style than he sported with his evening dress, but not a hair was out of place, and she decided that if he had been riding, he had maintained an extremely sedate pace. That would not do for her. Her impatience communicated itself to her mount, and the black gelding fidgeted beneath her.

  “Where are you off to?” Sydney inquired, glancing at her but making no move to steady the gelding.

  “Oh, just hereabouts,” she said airily, “if Brandon can manage to bestir himself to mount within the next hour or so.”

  “Patience, madam,” Brandon said. Stepping toward his long-legged roan and taking his reins from the groom, he swung into the saddle with the easy grace of a man who spent a great deal of his spare time on horseback, then glanced at her with teasing laughter in his eyes. “Sure you want to do this, m’dear? Not too dangerous for you?”