Minerva tossed aside her broken quill and searched around the room for something more substantial with which to defend herself, for a man climbing into an attic window in the dead of night could hardly be up to anything good. But before she could make a move across the room, the man was hoisting himself up onto the sill with a groan.
He was an extremely tall and disreputable-looking specimen, whose broad shoulders blocked out the moonlight and cast a menacing shadow over Minerva from top to toe. She didn’t manage to make out much more than a pair of dark, glinting eyes and a head of equally dark, shaggy hair—and oddly, what appeared to be a man’s red silk dressing gown—before he was tilting in her direction, his massive arms spreading wide to brace himself.
In sheer panic and having no wish to become like a heroine in those dreadful gothic novels Lady Blundersmith had secretly enjoyed (the hypocrite), she pushed at the figure with all of her strength.
Two huge pawlike hands wrapped around hers, holding tight, and for a moment she feared he meant to take her with him out the window. Death by defenestration was not at all how Minerva had envisioned her life ending. The Leighton twins weren’t involved, for one—unless this was yet another one of their pranks gone very, very awry.
She screamed in terror, for that was what one did when plummeting from old Norman keeps with strange men, and tried in vain to jerk her hands away as clothing ripped and her feet left the floor.
It took no more than a blink of an eye for her to realize that she wasn’t falling forward, but rather backward, and just another blink before she was slamming into the floorboards, the wind knocked out of her body at the impact. One last blink, and the intruder landed on top of her, whacking the rest of her breath from her lungs.
Twice in two years! How was it possible that she’d ended up squashed like a bug under someone twice in two years! Granted, the intruder was not Lady B’s size (that is, the size of HMS Victory), but he was no butterfly either. He was the approximate weight of a blacksmith’s anvil, and just as immovable.
And his hands had landed in as rude a place as possible upon her anatomy. If he had expected to find some padding there to cushion his fall, he was out of luck, for her chest had all the variation in landscape of East Anglia. But it was also rather exposed since she’d shucked her dressing gown and loosed all of her buttons earlier, thinking herself quite safe from molestation in her own room. All of the tussling about hadn’t helped either, and the ripping noises she’d heard as she fell must have been the rest of her bodice.
He was fondling her naked breasts.
Even Arthur had never gotten so far.
She would have screamed again had he not squashed all of the air from her lungs. She brought her knee up, just as her father had taught her, and aimed for the seat of his masculinity. He shifted to the right just in time, and her knee only managed to catch at his hip. His balance was thrown off by the blow, however, and he moved his hands from her breasts to the floorboards on either side of her head to brace himself.
Her breasts, at least, thought this a much better arrangement.
“Oi!” the man said, indignant, warm breath gushing over her forehead, eyes flashing with indignation. “No need for that, madam!”
She tried kneeing him again but only succeeded in causing him to collapse even more fully across her chest. He was hot as a furnace—unnaturally so, as if he were fevered, though she hardly made a habit out of taking the temperature of men’s bodies. And he smelled strongly of leather, bay rum, something almost medicinal—spirits, most likely—and a fair bit of mannish sweat.
Ugh.
She began to struggle in earnest, and so did he, although he didn’t seem in any particular hurry to molest her again. In fact, she couldn’t figure out what he was doing with all of the tugging and grunting on his end, but he did seem to be going out of his way not to touch her, despite the fact that they were hopelessly tangled together. “Would you please remove yourself!” she finally managed to breathe out once his bulk shifted from her chest.
“I am trying, madam,” the man growled. “But my banyan is stuck beneath your bony arse!”
She gasped in outrage and shoved at his shoulders before she gave in to the urge to claw out his eyes, as she so desperately wanted to do. He reared back, as if reading her desire to maim, and the moonlight finally revealed his face. A crooked, bladelike nose that had been broken one too many times. A broad forehead hidden beneath a messy fringe of brownish curls. Hawklike, rough-hewn features more startling than truly handsome. Full, mobile lips so at odds with the rest of his stark angles. And those eyes. Oh, she remembered those eyes. She’d seen them just hours before in duplicate, gazing up at her with false contrition amid piles of dead amphibians.
Though he looked a bit changed from the man she recalled from two Novembers ago—too thin, too pale, nearly a shadow of that bear of a man who’d brawled and cursed his way across the Duke of Montford’s ballroom—there was no doubt in her mind that she was squashed beneath Lord Marlowe.
She’d only had to think of the devil, it seemed, for him to drop out of the heavens—and onto her bosom.
“You!” she breathed.
His craggy, bushy-eyed brow furrowed. “Me?”
Clearly he had no recollection of her. And why should he? He’d doubtless been in his cups that night, if not concussed from the Marquess of Manwaring’s coshing, and would never remember the wallflower he’d inadvertently caused Lady Blundersmith to faint upon, even though she’d told him how to stop his bloody nose.
She had half a mind to remind him, but before she could get another word out, the door to her room swung open, and half the school’s staff—including the baldpated Fräulein Schmidt, wielding a candlestick—burst through the room.
Minerva glanced between the gathering, gasping throng—Fräulein Schmidt was starting to smirk, the cow—to the half-dressed viscount hovering above her, and then on to her exposed bosom, and groaned.
She couldn’t even begin to fathom why the viscount was climbing the walls of West Barming in a red dressing gown at three in the morning, but she knew without a doubt that it meant trouble.
This was not going to end well.
CHAPTER TWO
IN WHICH OUR HERO RESCUES DAMSELS IN DISTRESS
AFTER HAVING AT long last wrangled the feral creatures he called his daughters into the carriage and escaped past the front gates of West Barming School for Recalcitrant Young Ladies—an establishment that had all the grim allure of Fleet Prison—Evelyn Leighton, Viscount Marlowe, thought he was at a safe enough distance to make one final grand gesture. He cracked the window and leaned out to shield his actions from his daughters—who, God forbid, should pick up any more of his bad habits—and gave those cold, bleak Norman walls the good old-fashioned two-fingered salute they deserved.
Newcomb chose at that moment to swerve around some imagined obstruction, nearly tossing him from the carriage window and into the muddy lane. There was no shielding the girls from the litany of curses startled from his lips as he clutched at the window frame for dear life. After the night’s—morning’s?—excitement, he hadn’t much strength left, and Newcomb, the shifty bastard, had to know this.
Montford’s head coachman had been gently bullied into his current assignment by the duke, since nearly all of Marlowe’s own malingering staff had deserted his employ during his protracted illness. The overbearing duke always turned into a clucking mother hen when one of his friends fell ill, so Montford had thus seized the first opportunity he could to set Newcomb upon him, ostensibly to see to it that Marlowe did not get himself killed on his journey. But Newcomb, an ex-prizefighting Liverpudlian, was hardly an exemplar of deferential servitude. The bastard was taking every opportunity to remind Marlowe of how little he wanted to be here, in the arse end of Kent, on this fool’s errand.
Well, Newcomb could bloody well join the club. It wasn’t as if Marlowe wanted to be here either, in a region of the country that was perilously near the family seat
and his thrice-damned sire. He was hardly in any fit state to be out of bed at all, but he was damned if he was going to let his children molder and rot for one moment longer in that ludicrous excuse for a school. And after the morning he’d had dealing with the headmistress and her staff, it seemed his haste had been justified. Frigid, parochial beast of a bureaucrat! He’d had to invoke his damned title before she’d even let him see his own daughters.
He was still working out what the bald Teutonic woman sneering in the shadows had to do with anything, but the whole thing smelled a bit too much like Bedlam for his taste.
He himself could admit to impaired judgment to think it a good idea to climb into that woman’s open window last night—on the top floor, no less, of that extremely tall old Norman keep. But his instinct to sneak inside and kidnap the twins under the cover of night had been the right one, judging from the trouble it had been to extract them from the school’s clutches in the light of day. He’d make no apologies for his actions, as ill conceived as they’d been.
He’d been chastised enough by that hellcat who’d greeted him. He scowled down at his punctured, bruised, and ink-stained hands. She’d tried to stab him to death with a quill, not to mention push him out of her window. Her attic window. She could have killed him had she weighed more than six stone and had all the fighting strength of a guppy. But she’d been tenacious in her quest to knee him in the family seat, he’d give her that. He had the bruised hips to prove it.
He rubbed at said bruises and finally turned his full attention to his girls. They sat on the seat opposite him, their matching sets of brown eyes fixed on him with an intensity that made him squirm.
So, no warm embraces yet, if ever again.
“What?” he grumbled.
Laura just sniffed at him, crossed her little arms over her chest, and turned her head toward the window in a snit. He would have blamed her proclivity to sulk on his late, unlamented wife, Caroline, but alas, the behavior was pure Leighton. His own twin brother, Evander, had been the undisputed master. Marlowe himself was not too shabby at it either, though from an early age he’d learned to do it behind closed doors, away from the taunts and threats of his family. Evander, that sly fox, had somehow always been able to evade those deprecations—had always, in fact, been able to avert all the attention and blame in his direction when anything went pear-shaped.
Not that he was comparing Laura to his brother—also late and very unlamented. But sometimes it was so hard.
So hard to look at Laura and Bea both, and not see himself and Evander as they were at that age. The two of them had been so happy then . . . well, as happy as one could be with the Earl of Barming for a father.
And Bea, who may have looked like him but was so much like her mother at that age that it hurt—so brash and brave and bright—just deepened her scowl, knocking him out of his head once more.
Definitely no warm embraces.
“How could you, Papa?” she cried, sounding supremely disappointed in him.
“What?” he repeated. What had he done now? Had they not wanted him to rescue them from that armpit of a school?
“How could you send us to such a dreadful place?”
Ah. So that was the problem. He crossed his arms like Laura and mimicked Bea’s disgruntled expression. “That was your grandfather’s work, Bea, not mine.”
She sniffed, unconvinced. “He said you knew. He said you wanted us gone.”
That cruel, manipulative old liar, banishing his own flesh and blood to the blind cheeks of his holdings and then blaming Marlowe for it. Oh, when he next saw his sire, there was going to be hell to pay, his vow not to rise to the earl’s bait be damned. “I was too sick to know my arse from my elbow, Bea, you know that. Didn’t even know he’d sent you here until a few days ago.” He cocked his eyebrow. “Or the reason he’d sent you here.”
Bea and Laura both had the good sense to squirm in their seats at the mention of their transgressions while guests at Montford’s London palace.
“It was all Antonia and Ardyce’s idea,” Bea declared firmly.
“I’ll bet it was.” The younger two Honeywell chits were hellions of the first order (unsurprising, considering their older sister was the impetuous Astrid Honeywell, now the Duchess of Montford, who had beguiled the normally straight-laced duke into matrimony through some alchemy of mischief and misadventure Marlowe had yet to understand), but Marlowe knew his girls only too well to think them completely blameless. Having the four children tossed together had been begging for trouble. He’d made the mistake of doing so a few years ago when the duchess’s sisters had first come to London. When the nurseries of Montford’s London house had begun to resemble 1789 France, however, Marlowe had thought it best to keep his daughters as far afield from the Honeywells as possible.
But he had not given this bit of sage wisdom to his older sister Elaine, Countess of Brinderley, who, unable to cope with the twins and her own five (or was it sixteen now?) children, had shipped the twins off to Montford’s at some point during Marlowe’s illness. Marlowe had not discovered this until he’d come out of his delirium enough for Dr. Lucas to decide he was not going to cock up his toes.
By then it was too late.
Weeks too late. Barming had already “intervened,” and not even Montford had been able to fight off his claim. Marlowe doubted the duke had even wanted to after what the twins had done to his gardens.
“You’re lucky no one was injured or killed. What were the two of you thinking? I expect you’ve learned your lesson, stuck in that dreadful place,” he said.
Laura just huffed out another breath and continued to glare out the window. Bea continued to look a bit contrite, which was a start, at least.
“We were there for Christmas, Papa! Christmas!” Bea said mournfully, her eyes wide and pleading and just begging for his forgiveness. His anger over their antics, half-hearted at best to start with, began to fizzle quickly. He’d been too worried about them to muster up much outrage. And they’d been punished enough, God knew, in their exile.
He’d never been able to resist Bea’s puppy eyes—or Laura’s for that matter, though it had been an age since Laura had looked at him like that. She barely looked at him at all these days, and he was beginning to wonder if it were she, and not Bea, who would give him the most trouble when she was older.
It was always the quiet ones.
But just the thought of that—his twins older, of marriageable age—was nearly enough to send him swooning back to his sickbed.
“You did almost succeed in burning down London,” he pointed out, for though he wasn’t cross with them, he was prepared to give them an extremely hard time about their bad behavior for the foreseeable future.
Bea immediately began to negotiate. “It was one small building—”
“Two,” he corrected. “The groundskeeper’s cottage and the greenhouse.” Both of which had been built by Sir Christopher Wren . . . but Marlowe doubted a string of short-lived governesses and West Barming School for Recalcitrant Young Ladies had equipped the twins with an appreciation for fine architecture.
“And it wasn’t as if the duke will miss it, as he never used it anyway—”
“Not the point, and there were two buildings.” He thought it rather important to stress that. “And I’m sure the groundskeeper missed his home. That you burned down. With Chinese rockets. On a dare. With Honeywells.”
“Ugh. Christmas!” Bea reiterated. “With no one for company but Fräulein Schmidt and Miss Jones. It was dreadful!”
Laura nodded her agreement, the first sign of life he’d seen from her since they’d left the school. She held out her hands, which were covered by a rather poorly made pair of chartreuse-colored woolen mittens. Beatrice wore a matching pair in canary yellow.
Well, he said matching. The stitchwork was as appalling as the color choices.
Had they been forced to make their own clothing? Was that what they were implying? Had the earl sent his precious babies t
o a glorified workhouse? Oh, good God, he knew it had been bad, but not that bad.
The memory of that hairless woman kept flashing through his mind. He’d begun to write it off as a fever dream, hoping it was a fever dream, because he really, really didn’t want to have to call out his own father.
Well, he did. He’d always wanted to call out the old Tory pig, but that was beside the point. He was not a violent man. Aside from his war record. And all the dueling. And the brawling he’d done all through school. And the notorious and surprisingly sticky fight he’d had with Sebastian just two Novembers ago at Montford’s ball. Though in his defense, the latter had just been a ploy to get Sherry to come to his senses and admit he was in love with Katherine.
Never let it be said that he wouldn’t suffer utter social humiliation—and a broken nose—for the sake of his best mate’s happiness.
But he was absolutely not willing to hold against himself the ridiculous kerfuffle that had landed him on his deathbed for the last four months. It was absolutely not his fault some angry bastard had taken offense when Marlowe, walking the streets alone after a night in his favorite gambling hell—and minding his own bloody business, thank you very much—had tried to stop the man from picking his pockets with a fist to his jaw. It wasn’t his fault the bastard had then knifed him in the back, stolen his valuables, and thrown him into the Thames. It was the Thames’s fault. That polluted cesspool had given him a fever. And the knife wound had certainly not helped.
Well, perhaps he needed to reassess his life choices a bit, since even he could see a worrying trend developing.
Whatever the case, it would be, alas, some time before he was well enough to kill his father for sending his children to live in a workhouse with baldpated bedlamites. While he was over the worst of the fever, it had left him about as capable as a kitten. He still couldn’t quite work out how he’d managed to scale the side of the school—or precisely why he’d thought it such an excellent idea last night. There had admittedly been several more sensible points of access on ground level.
Regency Romp 03 - The Alabaster Hip Page 2
