by Jill Barnett
“Horace?” she said in a firm and even tone. “Are you my butler or a social secretary?”
The servant had the good sense to flush.
“Is there more champagne?”
“In the icehouse, Miss Bayard.”
“Then get it.” She gave the closest maid an icy nod. “Emily, the lobster and crab trays are empty. And, Muriel,” she said to another, “I suggest you get those loaves of bread that were cooling in the pass-through sliced and out to the tables immediately. There’s no butter or cheese and the caviar dishes are not full.” She scanned the kitchen. “Where is the beef I paid a fortune for?”
Three cooks shifted and grabbed for an oven door.
She sniffed the air for a moment, then spun around to glare at one of those cooks. “Surely those aren’t crab cakes I smell burning?”
She let the sudden stillness of the moment work for her, then she clapped her hands once more. “All of you . . . move! Now!”
The kitchen was a sudden flurry of motion and commotion. Cooks opened and closed the cast-iron oven doors, silver serving trays clanked against the counters, and servants scattered around the hot room like frightened quail. Within minutes they were barreling out the various kitchen doors with heavy serving trays that held fish dishes and huge hanks of rare beef, sparkling long-stemmed crystal, or chilled bottles of wine balanced on their stiff and uniformed shoulders.
Satisfied, Georgina left the kitchens and took the flagstone path that led back toward the party and to John Cabot, who probably needed to be saved from the bills and coos and dizzying eye flutterings of more-money-than-she-can-count Phoebe.
Georgina turned at the corner of the kitchen building and stopped. It was almost as if she knew what she’d see before she ever turned that corner.
He was still there. Now he leaned against the side of the brick building, one booted ankle crossed over the other. One arm was resting on the open shelf of the serving pass-through while the other held a loaf of warm crusty bread—her guests’ warm crusty bread.
He was looking right at her with an expression that said he’d been waiting.
She took a deep breath and planted her hands on her hips. “Still working hard, I see.”
He saluted her with what was left of the bread loaf.
“I thought I gave you an order.” She used her haughtiest voice.
“Aye, that you did.” He took another mouthful and grinned at her while he chewed, appearing for all the world to not care a whit what she said or did, no matter what her tone.
She started to move.
“You give orders well, George.”
“Pardon me?”
He nodded at the pass-through. “All you have to do is clap your hands and they all jump to obey you.”
“I was referring to that word you used to address me.”
“George?”
She shuddered.
He seemed vastly amused and pleased with himself.
But she was smart enough to realize if she made an issue out of that horrid name, then he would only use it to irritate her. “I don’t see that the manner in which I deal with my servants is any concern of yours.”
“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong.” He finished off the bread, wiped his hands on the front of his shirt, and straightened. “You appear to be a woman who can handle her problems with little opposition.”
“Heaven knows, I’ve had enough practice,” she muttered.
“Trouble in paradise?” He glanced around the grounds. “I’d think a place like this would insulate you from trouble.”
She just raised her chin and didn’t say anything, but some weak part of her wanted to bare her secrets and tell him just how much trouble she was really in.
“I suppose your children obey you as well as the help.”
“Not that it should matter to you, or that I should tell you anything about me, but I am not married.”
His expression flickered with something ever so briefly. “Your family must be disappointed.”
“My family is dead,” she shot back. He made her sound like a spinster. “And I’m only twenty-two.”
Just the barest of smiles hinted around his mouth, but his eyes still held hers until he looked down and shook his head as if the oaf found her amusing. “Old enough to handle servants. Old enough to handle parties, but not children.”
“What do you mean by old enough?”
He gave her a shrug.
“Age doesn’t matter unless you are cheese. And I never said that I couldn’t handle children.” She’d never handled a child in her life, but she wouldn’t admit that to him.
His stance was relaxed, nonchalant, but it was his knowing grin, so cocksure and arrogant, that rankled her.
“I can handle anything.”
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “So, George, you think you can handle children.”
“I think I’m handling one now.”
He laughed then, and the sound was warm and rich and made her want to laugh with him.
A truly annoying thought.
A second later he had closed the distance between them in two long strides that caught her completely off guard. He moved swiftly and stealthily for so large a man.
“What a waste that you have no husband, George.”
He looked as if he wanted to touch her, so she stepped back quickly. “I don’t have a husband yet. And my name is not George.”
“Yet?” He gazed down at her with amusement. “Are you planning on finding a husband in the next hour?”
“Yes, actually. I am planning on exactly that.” She grabbed her skirts. “Now if you will just let me by, I’ll see if I cannot remedy my marital situation, the one you obviously find so interesting and amusing.”
“So you want to be married.”
She just raised her chin.
He held her with a look that made her want something she should never want. “Let me pass, please.”
Again he didn’t move.
“Perhaps you would wish to feel the point of my heel again.” She raised her foot and her hem and wiggled the toe of her silk slipper.
He glanced down at her hem after taking what seemed like an hour to rake his gaze down there, then held up his hands in mock surrender and stepped out of her way with over exaggerated gallantry.
She moved swiftly and smoothly away from him, walking with her head high and something inside her hot and simmering. When she was a goodly distance away she called back, “Give me a few minutes and then perhaps my future husband will have you thrown out into the streets right on your thick head.”
Feeling completely proud of her sharp-tongued self for a great parting shot, she marched past the rosebushes, a winner’s smile on her lips and her heart beating just a little too fast for her own comfort.
“George!” That deep voice called out to her. “My head isn’t the only thing that’s thick.”
Chapter 11
Never marry for money, ye’ll borrow it cheaper.
—Old Scottish proverb
Georgina sat in the corner of her bedroom, plucking rose thorns from her fingers.
“Ouch!” She held up the sharp thorn and scowled at it. She didn’t know rose thorns could be that thick.
Immediately she groaned and felt herself flush. She was still embarrassed, mostly because she understood exactly what he’d meant. When you were raised with an older brother, you knew about men and women, about intercourse. If you didn’t know about it, you’d never understand what your brother and his friends were talking about, grinning about, or joking about.
She dabbed witch hazel on her skinned palms and tried to picture John Cabot instead of a tall blond man with a face too handsome to be real.
When that didn’t work, she tried to imagine the Cabot fortune: piles of money gleaming in the light, golden and heavy, a few thousand gold bricks all lined up like German soldiers, stacks of stock certificates, mortgages, bank notes and bonds, and jewels in blue velvet boxes with the Cabot mono
gram, diamonds in particular, which were a wonderful investment and all that much better if they were set in platinum and dripping from your ears, neck, fingers, and wrists.
She smiled. Ah, avarice could bring such splendid thoughts!
But when she opened her eyes, all she saw was the flowered wallpaper of her bedroom and the way it was starting to show age and turn yellow. Even the patterned carpet that had been woven in Antwerp especially for Grandmother Bayard didn’t look rich in a room with old draperies and dingy cushions.
She tried to imagine the room completely redone with watered silk hangings, eighteen-karat gilt frames for the paintings, and French antiques. Just that night she had heard Phoebe talking about a bedroom suite she had seen that had once been used in Versailles.
Georgina would buy it before Phoebe. Yes, one of the first things she would do would be to refurbish all twenty-eight rooms of the house. As Mrs. John Cabot, she would have enough wealth and influence to bribe the importer, enough to buy anything she desired and still never even scratch the surface of the Cabots’ golden fortune.
She closed her eyes and concentrated on the images of the new rooms, Phoebe’s face, and the vast amounts of Cabot money. What she saw instead was golden hair limned in moonlight and a wicked male smile that made her flush. She snatched up the witch hazel and swabbed her heated face with it, thanking heaven that the path had been so dark in that spot, otherwise he’d have seen her digging her way out of the roses she’d walked into and her humiliation would have been complete.
If she had an ounce of sense, she’d have ignored that classically chiseled face, the man’s powerful stance, his amusing banter in that unbelievably stirring voice. She should have had him thrown out. The reason why she hadn’t was not something she cared to analyze at that moment.
“Ouch!” She sucked in a breath as she plucked out the last and the sharpest thorn. She blew on her finger, stood quickly, and tossed the witch-hazel cloth on her dressing table.
Leaning down, she peered in the oval mirror. There was no need to pinch her cheeks. They had plenty of color. She settled for tucking a strand of loose black hair back into the French knot at her neck, then she left the room.
Within a matter of minutes she was down the stairs and back in the gardens, but on the other side, following a different secluded path—the path that led to the gazebo and to her goal.
John Cabot was waiting there for her.
This was it!
For some reason she couldn’t explain, she slowed her steps, then stopped altogether. She could see the cupola of the gazebo and the whimsical but rusty weather vane that was perched atop it. It had a Bayard clock in the center, but its face was unreadable in the dark.
Oddly, the weather vane was pointing the wrong way. What wind there was had been and still was coming from the west, which meant that vane should have been pointing toward the east.
It seemed today that her life was filled with contradictions and impossibilities; clocks that wouldn’t keep time, foolish girls who used the Bayard gala to break engagements instead of bonding in one, servants who didn’t do what they were bid, deliverymen with voices that made her arms break out in goose-flesh and who asked her outrageously personal questions that she had actually answered, and now weather vanes that pointed into the wind.
She began to walk again, a little faster, almost as if she were running away, but the image of that brawny deliveryman went right along with her.
Why couldn’t blue blood and all that money have a little brawn and muscle? She supposed wishing for a wealthy man with a fine stature and a handsome face was rather like asking for the moon on a silver platter.
John Cabot was a good five inches shorter than she, and he was already losing his hair. But he had money, all that lovely money.
She turned and looked back at the outline of her home, which was backed by the stars and a blue-black sky. The light from the lanterns waved gently from the soft summer sea breeze, making the house look as if it were alive and breathing.
She stood there for only a second, then she turned back, determined to see this through. Long ago she had decided that the Cabot millions were worth a marriage that might not be the kind in fairy tales, not that she believed that drivel. They were just stories that made people think like fools.
Georgina Bayard was no fool.
She knew what she had to do. She knew a few sweet comments, a long and lingering look, a kiss, and John’s wonderfully fat and golden pockets would be hers.
And so would his bald head.
She chewed on her lower lip. Everything would be fine. Everything would. She had already resigned herself to spending a lifetime looking down at her husband, of ignoring his thinning hair and shiny scalp.
So what if he was short and squat and a little dull? For the sake of her home, her name, and her pride, she could live with him for the rest of her life.
And on her wedding night, when the moon was full like tonight, and the stars were almost too bright, so bright you felt as if you could really reach out and touch them, she would look into John Cabot’s eyes and say goodbye forever to those last few feelings of innocence and desire that were still lingering deep inside her heart.
Yes, she would. It was all planned out in her mind. On her wedding night, she would just close her eyes and think of redecorating.
So in less time than it took to blink, Georgina’s feet moved forward, one step, then another, a survivor heading toward her goal.
As she drew closer she could make out John’s silhouette outlined in the yellow glow of the hanging lantern above the gazebo. She took one more step, then stopped and looked down at her dress.
It was midnight blue and she had chosen the silk because it matched her blue eyes, made them look bluer, and her hair even shinier and blacker. Just in case, she pinched her cheeks, then she looked down, gripped the neckline of her gown, and wiggled until her cleavage spilled over and was way overexposed.
No reason to leave everything to chance. She would make her own luck. So she plastered a smile on her face, raised her chin, and tightened her hands into fists, then took one last deep breath.
A second later someone grabbed her from behind.
Chapter 12
Stolen sweets are the best.
—Colley Cibber
The clock struck, but Calum didn’t notice the hour. With the last gong, he removed his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose. He realized, with the same sudden awareness he had when waking from a deep sleep, that he had been lost in his work again. He leaned back in his chair and stretched with a low groan from his stiff muscles.
He did this sometimes, lost himself in his work, times like now when he knew that the last ship from Scotland this year was due to dock sometime within the next two weeks. Experience had taught him that the ship could arrive as early as tomorrow.
He took a deep tired breath and rubbed his burning eyes, then scored his fingers through his dark hair and rested his head in his hands for a moment. He needed to be ready. Everything on that ship was his responsibility. He put on his glasses.
He looked around him and realized it was dark outside. The clock above the fireplace read a little after two in the morning. Seven hours he’d been working without a break. When he was immersed in his work, like he was tonight, Calum just lost time.
But time was one of the few things he didn’t try to control. To a man who made his life orderly, who lived by routine, and who needed consistency like he did, time was a friend. It gave him a framework in which to work, helped him discover new levels of efficiency, and select methods that made the vastness and demands of his job controllable.
Calum developed systems for everything. He always put his clothes on in a certain order: pants, shirt, belt, socks, shoes, and he laid them out across his bedchamber so he could dress while walking to the dry sink. It saved time.
His bed was huge, but he only slept on one side and laid pillows down the middle so he wouldn’t disturb the other side in
his sleep. That way he could get up, and only have to tuck in the sheet with the perfect pleated corners on the one side. It took only half the time and allowed him the extra minutes he needed for tasks like shaving. His dark beard was so thick he needed to shave his face twice: each morning and again in the evening.
He understood that sometimes he might get a tad carried away with his desire for a certain regimented routine, but he accepted that about himself. His methods were what made him successful. The same meticulous sense of order that Eachann teased him about, in truth, allowed Calum to focus, and focus intently.
Being organized gave him the freedom to concentrate completely on a task, which in turn allowed him to eke thirty hours from a twenty-four-hour day—to have more time, and time was the basis by which he planned his day, his night, of how he had learned to organize himself and his life. He had been doing it with such efficiency for so long that his routine was as much a part of him as the blood bond he shared with Eachann.
He took a deep breath and stood up, stretching again. His brother hadn’t returned.
Calum moved to the window and looked out at the bay. All he saw was a thick white mist that made it look as if the world ended outside his window.
It was that impenetrable wall of fog that engulfed the islands every September. Eachann had claimed the fog would come early this year. And it had.
Calum turned away, thinking that his brother must have decided to stay ashore. He crossed the room and relit the logs in the rock fireplace, then swept up a few of the ashes that had drifted on the hearth.
He started to straighten, then stopped for a moment and polished the brass andirons, moved on to polish a candle branch, and some heavy bookends cast in the shape of lion heads. He set the bookends back and ran the cloth over the leather book bindings, then made certain that each gold-embossed spine was aligned with the next. He turned around and glanced out the window again, thoughtful and feeling edgy.
