“Especially Lady Flora,” Adam muttered under his breath as he swept by them.
“You’ve got nerve,” Flora scolded him as they entered the empty foyer, glaring at Adam through the lace of her lashes. “As if I’m in need of your rescue.”
“Who’s carrying whom?” he pointedly whispered, as he started up the stairs.
“You needn’t sound so smug. It’s all your fault anyway that I’m so tired.”
“Right, and elephants fly,” he snorted, his long strides taking them to the second floor so swiftly she marveled at his strength. “I’ll remind you tonight when you’re, shall we say—anxious,” he softly said, “exactly who’s at fault.”
“You presume too much, Mr. Serre,” she said with the coy accents of a fashionable lady. “I may not be interested in seeing you tonight.”
He didn’t answer, his concentration focused on remembering the location of her room. “There,” he softly said, recognizing Flora’s bedchamber from the numerous rooms they’d occupied last night. “And it’s not presumption, darling,” he quietly murmured, gazing down at her. “It’s deductive reasoning. You can’t last more than a few hours”—his voice dropped a half octave—“without it.”
“I certainly can. Your ego is monumental, Mr. Serre.”
“Not as monumental as your delectable libido, Miss Bonham,” he cheerfully noted, in great charity with the world after an uninterrupted hour of carnal relations with the delicious Lady Flora. Shifting her to one arm, he reached for the doorknob, unlatched the door, kicked it open, and walked inside the sun-filled room.
“My libido is none of your concern,” she said with that female dialectic that overlooked pertinent facts such as their mutually gratifying regard for libidos in the hour past. “And I can survive perfectly well without you,” she coolly finished, annoyed at what she viewed as masculine conceit.
“Fine,” he casually replied, walking over to the bed. “We’ll play billiards tonight instead. Or you can entertain us at the piano.” He placed her on the bed, pulled off her boots, unfolded a comforter, and covered her, tucking it neatly under her chin. Kissing her lightly on the forehead, he smiled as he stood upright. “I haven’t heard you play. Can you manage Chopin?”
“No.”
“A shame.” He was walking over to the windows. “Do you play billiards?” He began pulling the yellow brocade drapes closed.
“Extremely well.”
He turned from his task to gaze at her briefly. “For money?”
“Of course.”
He grinned. “Well, then, the evening won’t be completely wasted.” He stood in the half shadows, framed by the swathed and draped brocade, tall, handsome as sin, a bronzed half-blood with dark, sensual eyes, a hard warrior’s body, devastating charm, and a luxurious sense of pleasure.
“Although I could change my mind,” Flora murmured, gazing at his tantalizing image, her eyes heavy with sleep.
“Plan on it.” His voice was scarcely a whisper, the sound too low to be heard in the bed across the room.
He remained motionless for some time, gazing at her in slumber, wondering how he’d become so obsessed. Her heavy hair lay in shimmering auburn on the lace-trimmed pillow, her face had the look of a Madonna in repose—although she had that sultry sensuality of a Bouguereau Madonna. Her lips, slightly parted in sleep, were bee-stung ripe and luscious, the color of mountain cherries, her dark lashes shadowed her flushed cheeks. The soft, plump breasts he’d suckled and caressed only minutes before, rose and fell in opulent mounds under the white silk coverlet, and his eyes drifted lower to the valley between her thighs, to the sweet delight that drew him like Circe’s song. But her beauty alone wasn’t responsible for the magnitude of his attraction, because beautiful women had been a constant in his life since adolescence. She was more than an exquisite woman; Flora Bonham exuded a rare vitality and a more rare capacity to see beyond the vanities of society. Gifted with a sharp intelligence, she was also playful, challenging, inquisitive, unreservedly candid—at times embarrassingly direct. She was also the first woman he’d met who was his equal in bed—wild, inventive, provocative … lush as a Persian odalisque.
Like an addiction, she could make one forget duty, reason, the clear-sighted vision of sensible goals.
She was frankly perilous to his peace of mind.
And she’d become an inexplicable fire in his blood.
Chapter Five
The picnic was the kind of perfection one encounters only on rare occasions in life. The weather was warm and sunny, so the mother vixen Lucie had alluded to had brought her kits out of their den to play, and for the better part of an hour the party from Adam’s ranch was enthralled by their gamboling play. The picnic group was downwind from the foxes and distant enough so the humans could whisper and not be heard; Lucie particularly was prone to loud, sibilant exclamations of astonishment. Even Mrs. McLeod, who was not called Cloudy to her face, was heard to utter a restrained “Heavenly days!” or two when the babies rolled themselves into furry balls and tumbled down the hill in sport.
Mrs. McLeod had managed the journey uphill on Charlie without mishap, but it had taken both men to help her down from her saddle. At which point she’d dusted off her black bombazine skirt and said, “Did my chair get packed?”
She was now ensconced in a folding campaign chair like an oriental potentate with a bonnet, her several double chins bobbing as she directed the disposition of the picnic like a born general.
“Le Comte,” she said, with the harsh pronunciation of her native glen, even the ladies’ finishing school in Edinburgh not successful in smoothing her consonants. “Did you think to bring the telescope? I see some kind of animal down the ridge there.…
“Lucie, offer the earl some of the queen’s meringues.…
“Lady Flora, do sit down on that cozy blanket and help yourself to some of the smoked-salmon sandwiches.”
Adam had handed her the telescope with dispatch, and for some moments, so intent was she on the landscape beyond the lens, the stream of orders ceased.
“I’ve missed you,” Adam quietly told Flora as he returned to the plaid blanket spread on the ground, reaching past her for his flask of cognac tucked away in the bottom of the picnic basket.
Blushing at the intimacy in his tone, she quickly glanced to see if anyone had taken notice. But Lucie and her father were working on the assembly of a small wooden boat the earl had carved while they were watching the kits play, and Mrs. McLeod was momentarily content surveying the mountainside.
“No one’s looking,” he whispered, uncorking the silver container. “I’m the soul of discretion. Would you like some?” he offered, tipping the engraved flask in her direction.
She nervously shook her head, not as blasé as Adam, who was the least likely soul of discretion she’d ever known.
“It’ll help you relax,” he said with a warm smile, offering her the flask again. “You’re nervous.”
“I’m happy nervous.” Flora politely took a sip. She was in marvelous good spirits, fully rested after her nap, intensely conscious of Adam’s presence and of his solicitous charm. She glanced over to Cloudy. “But she reminds me of my short-lived governess. Nerves from childhood.”
“Cloudy’s harmless.”
“In what way?” The woman had the look of an overfed drill sergeant.
“She overlooks my peccadilloes and sincerely loves Lucie.”
“Which is enough.”
“More than enough. Loving Lucie would be enough.”
And she realized suddenly that beneath the impudence and air of casual disregard, he’d experienced his own kind of heartache. “You’re very lucky to have Lucie,” she said.
“I know. Even with Isolde as the maximum price.”
Flora didn’t remember her own mother, for she’d died when Flora was very young, and she’d never known life with two parents. But she knew that to have an uncaring mother like Isolde must be painful.
“Now, if she just
won’t come back,” Adam went on with a grin, “in the words of a popular song, ‘Life would be grand.’ ”
“Where did you find her?”
His face went dead for a moment, and a muscle clenched high over his cheekbone, the black rush of memory etched on his liver.
“I mean Mrs. McLeod,” Flora quickly interjected, the intense bitterness of his expression alarming.
The malevolence instantly disappeared, and he seemed to breathe again. “I found Mrs. McLeod at Fort Benton, standing at the end of the gangplank after disembarking from the last steamer of the season at nine-thirty in the morning on October eighteenth, four years ago.”
“A very specific memory, apparently.”
“She saved my life,” he solemnly said. “I remember the absolute minute.” And he did, because he’d just come out from Carson’s Saloon that morning, where he’d spent the night, drinking, gambling, and taking his turn with the ladies upstairs. He was miserably hung over, he was miserably married to Isolde; he’d come north to meet the nursemaid supposedly sent from St. Louis to take care of their expected child, and the woman wasn’t aboard. There wouldn’t be another steamer up the Missouri until spring, and the thought of Isolde touching his child was enough to give him nightmares. Not that she’d consider the possibility, but he’d feel safer with someone—preferably someone large and menacing—in charge of the nursery.
All Isolde had done in the short months they’d been married was complain: of the heat, of the cold, of the dust, of the wind, of the lack of courtiers nearby, of Adam’s propensity for drink—a recent tendency since his marriage—of the inconvenience of her pregnancy. Which he considered eminently more of an inconvenience for him, since he’d been forced to marry her as his father’s last dying wish.
Not that he didn’t assume responsibility for his child, but the circumstances of its conception had always given him pause, and the word “scheming” on that particular occasion had always struck him as appropriate.
“And you’ve been together ever since,” Flora politely noted as the silence lengthened.
Brought back to the more enjoyable present by the sound of Flora’s voice, Adam said, “Cloudy turned out to be perfect. Her prospective employer hadn’t come to fetch her, so she became our Cloudy by default.”
“She reminds me of the queen.”
“A considerably larger version, though,” he asserted with a grin. “I have to use utmost diplomacy since she outweighs me by several score pounds.”
“You’re diplomatic? I thought your propensities tended toward the autocratic.” But she said it with a devastating smile that heated his blood.
“And you like it,” he murmured, gazing at her with a shamelessly brazen look.
“I don’t.” But she was blushing, and she felt the small pulsing between her legs as if he only need look at her like that and she opened for him.
“Then I’ll have to think of something different tonight, something you do like.”
Her nipples stiffened at his soft, husky words, at the promise of pleasure, at the memory of their heated play in the stable hayloft. “You have to stop.…”
“I’d like to lay you down right now, over there, behind that outcropping. You couldn’t make any noise, or the others would hear you; you’d have to take me inside you without a sound; you couldn’t even breathe hard, or they’d wonder what we were doing, and when you climaxed, I’d let you scream into my mouth. And afterward you’d feel my sperm slippery on your legs under your skirt when we returned to the picnic, and I’d know it was there too when you drank your lukewarm lemonade and ate your salmon sandwiches.…”
He’d moved to block her body from the others, although everyone was intent on the boat construction, but if they glanced over, he didn’t want them to observe the pink blush on Flora’s face or notice her agitated breathing, or the tips of her nipples pressing through the fine linen of her pristine white blouse.
“I’d rather not play billiards too long tonight if you don’t mind,” he murmured, touching one protruding nipple with a light, brushing fingertip. “I’d like to show you my bed.”
“I’m obsessed with you,” Flora whispered, holding her hands tightly clasped in her lap to still her trembling.
“After one game, then, I’ll say good night … and wait for you upstairs.”
At dinner that night as the fish course was being served, Adam was handed a message by one of the servant girls.
“Excuse me,” he briefly said after scanning the note and, rising from the table, he left the room.
He returned in only a few minutes with a guest in tow, a tall young half-blood like himself, so close in physical resemblance, his kinship with Adam was obvious.
“I’d like you to meet my brother,” Adam said, using the Absarokee term of kinship for his cousin.5 “Lady Flora Bonham, Lord Haldane, James Du Gard.”
“Forgive me for intruding,” the man said with a bow, a trace of a French accent in his words, “and for my appearance, but Adam insisted.” He was dressed in the hybrid fashion of the frontier in a combination of leather and cloth, his fringed leggings and moccasins topped with a tunic shirt and vest.
“By all means join us,” George Bonham said. “We’re not formal. You’ve had a long ride from the looks of it.”
“He’s up from Virginia City,” Adam said. “Here, sit down, Esh-ca-ca-mah-hoo,” he went on, calling him by his Absarokee name, “Standing Lance.” Pulling a chair out, he signaled for a servant. “Would you like wine, bourbon? Or perhaps coffee.” He knew his cousin was fatigued after hours on the trail.
“Coffee’s fine.”
“James tells me that Meagher has received official authorization from General Sherman for his militia. Now that the acting governor can issue government vouchers to the local merchants, his citizen army will be moving beyond the confines of the local saloons.”
“Does it affect your clan this far north?” the earl inquired, aware that distance was a distinct advantage in the wilderness.
“Since Bozeman was recently killed and the Lakota are causing trouble as far west as the Musselshell, Meagher has any number of excuses to lead his vigilantes just about anywhere. And unfortunately, he now has the vouchers to finance his operations.”
“His men have been promised plunder in addition to wages,” his cousin added. “They have permission to keep ‘all the property they capture from the Indians,’ were Meagher’s words.”
“How dangerous will they be to your valley?” Flora asked.
“We can protect ourselves,” Adam quietly said. “They may not bother us.” His words held a curious threat despite his soft tone. “James assures me my land claim is secure, and I trust his expertise. He’s my legal adviser.”
“Thank your father instead for having the foresight to guarantee title through Congress.”
“Papa understood the value of land,” Adam said with a grim smile. “A family’s estates are improved by marriage and maintained by sound fiscal responsibility, he always said.”
“A shame Isolde had those vineyards he wanted,” his cousin said with a grin.
“A shame that his health was so precarious,” Adam murmured. “And that you weren’t finished with your studies at the Sorbonne. You might have been able to find me a less confining way to acquire that land.”
“You’re forgetting his marked interest in Isolde’s ducal bloodlines.”
“Or more aptly belle-mère’s interest in ducal bloodlines. Papa chose to marry for love. Tell me what you know of the telegraph from General Sherman,” Adam went on, disliking the discussion of his personal life. “And what of the talk of reapportionment? Has anyone given a date for the new elections?”
And through the remaining courses conversation was exclusively political. Two forts, one at the forks of the Musselshell and the other near the big bend of the Yellowstone, were scheduled to be operating soon to supply Meagher’s citizen army. Governor Green Clay Smith was still in Washington pursuing the interests of
the territory from the comforts of civilization while Acting Governor Thomas Meagher was in the process of living up to his reputation as a former Civil War general in the Irish Brigade.
When dessert was served, Adam excused himself to say good night to Lucie. She’d gone up to the nursery early, tired after their journey into the mountains.
“Have you been here long?” James asked the Bonhams, having intercepted a small glance between his cousin and the dazzling Lady Flora that suggested an intimacy beyond that of casual guest.
“Three days,” the earl replied. “We came north to buy some of Adam’s bloodstock.”
“And Papa is enormously pleased with his purchases,” Flora added with a smile. “Tell him, Papa, about the mile time Aleppo ran this morning.”
“You’re sorry you and Adam missed them, I’ll wager, now that you heard how fast he ran.”
“What was the time?” James inquired, taking note of the sudden blush coloring Lady Flora’s cheeks, aware of his cousin’s interest in beautiful women, recalling suddenly the gossip from Aurora Parkman and others in Virginia City concerning Adam and Flora’s temporary disappearance from her husband’s party.
“Damned if he can’t run the mile in one forty-six. Sweetest goer I’ve seen since Argonaut took the Gold Stakes at Ascot in sixty.”
“Are you shipping him back to England, then?”
“Eventually.”
“Will you be in the territory long?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” the earl replied, waving away the servant with the cordials. “It depends on the time necessary to assemble my specimens.”
“And whether Papa wears out his welcome with the Absarokee,” Flora added with a gracious smile. “He’s studying the culture and bringing back fauna and flora for the collection at Göttingen and for Professor Prichard in London.”
“Do you assist your father?”
“More likely the other way around,” the earl proudly declared. “Flora was the youngest person to have a paper presented to the Royal Society.”
“Congratulations, Lady Flora,” James politely said. “You expect to study us for some time, then.”
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