by Betina Krahn
The servants’ hall was a long, oak-paneled room furnished with a tressel table and numerous, comfortable old chairs. Antonia was on the other end of the room opening a door that presumably led to some other part of the house. In bounded a small horde of cats: neat little calicos, solid-colored specimens in a variety of shapes and sizes, long-haired aristocrats with their tails up, and big, bruising tabbies pushing their way to the front of the food line.
They sniffed and frisked around Antonia’s feet while she talked to them in honeyed tones, asking them if they were hungry. When they caught the scent of the bowl Remington was holding at arm’s length, they quickly abandoned her for him. Before he could move, they were upon him, meowing, rubbing against him, climbing onto his shoes, and digging claws into his trouser legs.
“Cats,” he said irritably, trying to shoo them away with his feet. “I might have known you’d take in cats as well as old maids.”
“Widows,” Antonia corrected, watching his nostrils flare and his body tense.
“Where’s the difference?” he said, shaking one leg to free it of a set of claws. “Go away—scram!”
“Oh, there’s a great deal of difference between a maiden lady and a widow.” She watched his predicament with vengeful pleasure. “Widows have experience in the world, while maiden ladies generally do not.”
“Experience with men,” he supplied archly, watching her reaction. There was a hint of heightened color in her cheeks. And for the first time he found himself wondering about her experience with men. Sir Geoffrey Paxton. After meeting her the other evening, he had learned that she had been married to a man who by all accounts was old enough to be her grandfather. She didn’t seem to think much of men in general, and it gave him cause to wonder what old Geoffrey had done to his young bride to make her dislike men so.
She carried several battered bowls from the stairwell outside the door to the table. “You may do the honors.”
He stood for a moment resisting, then decided to save confrontation for another time and portioned out the scraps using the spoon Gertrude had slipped into the bowl. As he lowered the dishes, the cats rushed to eat, and he barely got his hands out in time. Stepping high in order to avoid the creatures, he found one of his feet unusually heavy. When he was safely out of their way, he peered at the back of his leg and found a very young kitten hanging on to his trouser leg for dear life.
“Ye gods—I’m being climbed,” he said through a clenched jaw.
When he looked up, Antonia was staring at him.
Her eyes drifted over the layer of flour, the grease spots, and the grimace of disgust he wore. His hair was hanging over his forehead, there was a streak of dirt across one of his cheeks, and his starched collar and silk cravat both were beginning to wilt. The same could not be said, however, of his shoulders. If anything, they seemed to be broader and more powerful than ever—the result, she realized, of wearing a waist cincher that emphasized the contrast between his oversize shoulders and his much smaller waist. The corset might not have been such a brilliant idea after all.
“That’s one of the babies. Here—” She detached the kitten from his leg, then stepped back, assessing his snarly mood through the filter of her lashes. “It was born just a month ago.” The little beast was all fur and eyes and ears as she lifted it for him to see. “Isn’t it adorable?”
“The only thing I detest more than babies is cats.” He gave the mewing kitten a wince of disgust. “That means cat babies rank at the very bottom of my list.”
“Now, that does surprise me, your lordship,” she said, cradling it against her and giving its ears an affectionate scratching. She looked up without raising her head. “I thought women occupied that unenviable spot in your esteem.”
“Then perhaps you should have read the articles I have written with a less jaundiced eye,” he said testily. “I have stated succinctly in each of them that I do not loathe or despise women. I only hate the things women do to men.”
“The things women do to men?” she said, feeling a flutter of disquiet in her stomach at the way his eyes intensified and darkened. “And just what do we do to men that you find so objectionable?”
“You lure and beguile and entrap us … with our own weaknesses.” He set the bowl on the table and brushed his hands together to clear them of debris. Then he took a step closer to her, and she took a step back.
“You trap us into marriages in which we become little more than indentured servants to your unquenchable desires for things and status. You spend our money, our time, and our energy as if all three were limitless.” With each complaint his voice lowered a notch, becoming a deep, powerful vibration as he moved still closer. “And you never let us hear the end of it if we try to spend any of the three for ourselves.”
She could feel the heat of him reaching for her in some real but intangible way, and stepped backward again, into the edge of a chair.
“You weigh us down with your delicacy, your helplessness, and your coquettish dependency. And you wear us down with your vapors, your silences, and your tears.” He loomed over her, leaving her no easy avenue of escape. She was forced to stand her ground and look up into his penetrating eyes.
“You play on our sympathies, our passions, and our sense of decency.” Those liquid eyes began an unhurried inventory of her at alarmingly close range. She could scarcely breathe. “In short—you wrap us around your little fingers.”
His gaze settled on her lips, and under his scrutiny they became dry and embarrassingly sensitive. She swallowed hard and suppressed the urge to wet them.
“Not all women behave so,” she protested, in a voice that had dried to a whisper. “I have never wrapped a man around my little finger.”
“Oh? You think not?” He leaned slightly into her, his fascinating mouth curling in a smile that made her knees go weak. “And what about the rest of you?” he said quietly. “Have you ever wrapped a man around the rest of you, Antonia Paxton?”
She gasped softly, knowing she should push him away and put him in his place. But her outrage was somehow muffled by his nearness; she couldn’t summon an ounce of proper indignation. He was so close … his mouth so full, so exquisitely mobile. Would his lips feel soft or hard? Cool like his logic or hot like the rest of him?
In her thoughts the space between them closed, his body pressed against hers, and his arms wrapped her. In her mind she melted against him …
He watched her eyes soften and darken with rising emotion, felt them tracing his features, watched them settle with delicious reluctance on his mouth, just the way his were settling on hers. Her lips were ripened by the tension between them into sleek, swollen berries just waiting to be tasted.
On pure impulse he lowered his head and tasted them. Sweet … Lord, they were sweet. Just like cherries. And as they parted with surprise, they were so delectably warm … soft and yielding, sensuous in their initial hesitation. He seized her shoulders and pulled her toward him. Instinctively, her head tilted and her lush mouth molded to his, accepting, then exploring the changing caress of his lips. One of her arms wound hesitantly around his waist, and his whole body came to life as her body leaned into his. Suddenly he was vibrating with a tension of wanting that was deepening with every responsive motion of her lips. His throat was tightening, his loins were catching fire …
Would you look at that? Gertrude stood with her hands folded, staring through the glass window in the upper half of the servants’-hall doors. She had watched Lady Toni and his lordship come nose to nose, with their eyes bright and faces heated. She sighed wistfully. It was so nice to see a passionate kiss once again, and doubly pleasing to see Lady Toni being kissed to the ends of her toes.
But in the middle of that lovely kiss something caused the earl to jerk his head up, and he glowered at something. Gertrude frowned as she watched, Lady Toni lifted her other hand and the kitten she was holding. Part of his lordship’s shirt came up, caught in the little creature’s claws, and he scowled and shrank back
. Gertrude huffed disappointedly and thrust open the doors as if she had just arrived at them.
“Oh, there ye be, yer lordship. No time to waste … we got servin’ to do.”
Antonia and Remington jolted apart with their faces aflame and their eyes averted. She mumbled something about checking on the table and escaped up the rear stairs, and he snatched up the scrap bowl and stalked back into the kitchen with a countenance like a thundercloud.
They didn’t see each other again until Antonia entered the dining room, when Hoskins announced dinner was served. She had recovered and was all the more determined for having surrendered to his licentious intentions. Her behavior, she blushed to think, had been hoydenish, inexcusable. Going all soft and giddy, imagining all manner of scandalous things—the temperature of his lips, for heaven’s sake! He was the enemy here, and if there had been any doubt of that, his well-rehearsed diatribe against women should have removed it. But when he kissed her, she allowed it.
Allowed it? She had positively encouraged it. She knew him for a woman-hating cad, not at all the sort of man she could possibly want—if indeed she ever actually wanted a man. Why on earth had she kissed him back? He was there to seduce and humble her.
Antonia took herself sternly in hand, patching up the cracks in her resistance to him with bits of his own denunciation of women. By the time they sat down to dinner, she was once again the cool, determined protagonist of women and marriage … and once again Remington Carr was her devious and implacable opponent. She made a point of ignoring him through the meal, which was not difficult, since he was seated at the far end of the table.
Remington, however, found ignoring her quite difficult. The details of their encounter kept irrupting unexpectedly into his thoughts: the softness of her skin, the heady feel of her shoulders in his hands, the seductive parting of her lips. He found himself staring covertly down the table, wishing he could trade places with her goblet and hoping she would lick her lip so he could catch a glimpse of her tongue. After a few moments he found himself on the edge of a raging arousal, and he clamped his hands hard on his thighs and took several controlled breaths to combat it.
What in the hell was wrong with him—drooling over a kiss like some schoolboy in short pants? Irritably, he took himself in hand and told himself there was nothing wrong with taking a bit of pleasure from that kiss. It felt good. And better yet—it was a potent confirmation of his instincts about her. He had made that all-important first step on the road to conquest.
But if ignoring her was difficult, he found ignoring the others utterly impossible. Antonia’s ladies fussed over him as if he were their long-lost son. Was his chair comfortable? they wanted to know. Did he care for a bit of wine with his meal? Did he want another serving of cottage pie? Did he like the fruit sauce a little sweeter? And what did he learn with Gertrude in the kitchen that morning?
He felt like a schoolboy called to give an accounting of his marks at term’s end. Though the women were gracious to a fault and offered tidbits of advice that seemed well-intentioned, he soon found himself aching with tension, poised at the very razor’s edge of his defenses. He was not used to being in the exclusive company of women, and older women at that. When it was time to clear away and return to the kitchen with Gertrude, he was actually grateful; it was a chance to escape them.
Once back in the kitchen, he was plunged up to his elbows in a huge pan of soapy water and spent the next half hour scrubbing and rinsing and drying dishes and pans, a duty Gertrude assured him was only temporary and occasioned by old Esther’s absence. Once the dishes were put away and the worktables cleaned, Remington learned his first major lesson about women’s work: it never ends.
“Supper?” he said with genuine horror. “You cannot mean we have to do the entire thing all over again.”
“That’s th’ way it is wi’ women’s work,” Gertrude said, shrugging philosophically. “No sooner done than it begins all over again. Eatin’ begets livin’. Livin’ begets more eatin’. A body’s alwus cookin’ an’ washin’ up after.”
“Gertrude’s right, of course. As soon as a task is finished, preparations for that same task begin again,” came Antonia’s voice from the doorway. He whirled and found her standing there with a small tea tray in her hands and a thoughtful expression on her face. “And those tasks are repeated endlessly through the days and weeks and years of a woman’s life. That is a fundamental principle of ‘women’s work,’ your lordship. And one of the things that makes women’s work much harder than it seems.” With a little smile at Gertrude, she deposited the tea tray on the table and left.
Remington sat for a minute thinking about that, wondering if it was really true, or if he was somehow being led down the garden path.
He didn’t have much time to dwell on it. Gertrude strode over and plunked a large copper bowl on the table in front of him.
“Potatoes,” she ordered. “And plenty of ’em.”
Later that night Remington shuffled through the front doors of his house with a gait eerily reminiscent of old Hoskins’s. Working in a house full of females apparently rendered a man all but incapable of putting one foot in front of the other. He prayed with everything in him that it wasn’t a permanent condition.
Handing the hat and gloves he hadn’t had the energy to put on to his butler, Phipps, he issued orders that his valet draw him a bath and prepare his bed. Then he staggered through the house to his study, where he collapsed in his chair. He couldn’t remember being this tired. And beneath the exhaustion that flattened his emotions, he couldn’t remember being this angry, either … both with Antonia Paxton and with himself.
Look at him, he thought, blearing down his slouched body at his rumpled coat, ruined trousers, and badly scuffed shoes. He was a shambles—filthy, dusty, grease-spotted, and covered with cat hair from the waist down. His hands were scalded, his muscles seemed to have turned to butter, and he could scarcely breathe.
Rallying irritably at the realization of what caused that last discomfort, he launched himself out of his chair and ripped open his coat to stare at the vile engine of female fashion that was squeezing him in two. He fell on the knot with both hands, tugging and prying, working frantically to loosen it, all to no avail.
“Good heavens, my boy,” came a voice from the doorway. “When did you start wearing one of those cursed things? I didn’t even know you had a prolapse.”
Remington’s head jerked up with eyes ablaze. “I don’t have a bloody prolapse,” he snarled, jerking at the ties with frustration.
“Then why are you wearing a corset?” Paddington Carr stared quizzically through a thick pair of spectacles at his nephew.
Remington stared at his eccentric old uncle. “It belongs to … a friend. I’m wearing it for him.”
“Dem peculiar bloke, ain’t he?” The old boy crept closer and adjusted his spectacles to study the details. “All them pink posies on it. Downright femmish, I say. But then, a man has a right to a few crotchets here and there. You know you’ve got the laces all bollixed up, don’t you? They’re supposed to start down here and work up, hitting every hole—”
“Yes, dammit—I know!” Remington shouted, slipping over the edge. He wheeled and went for the closest cutting edge in sight—a bayonet hanging above the fireplace with two India Corps rifles. He jammed the blade down through the laces, gave several upward rips, and nearly staggered with relief when the thing slid to his feet.
His uncle frowned at him, then wagged his head. “You know, you could avoid all that if you’d just learn to tie a decent bowline. Dem useful knots, bowlines.” Having dropped that jewel of wisdom, the old boy sauntered off with his nose once again stuck in his newspaper.
Remington’s shoulders began to quake and a moment later he broke out laughing. He laughed so hard, his face began to hurt and his sides began to ache. He laughed until he had purged every bit of angry tension from his body. It was a full minute before he noticed Phipps and Manley standing in the doorway, looking at
him as if he’d lost his mind.
Perhaps he had taken leave of his senses. He’d just spent twelve bloody awful hours wearing a suffocating corset and doing slave labor in a kitchen, in hopes of seducing a woman and ruining her matchmaking career—all as a favor to a group of men he was at school with fifteen or twenty years ago! He was exhausted and confused by his own randy impulses and wishing that he’d never laid a hand on his intended victim. All evening he’d suffered the most arousing and inconvenient obsession with her mouth. And to top it all, his dear old uncle now believed he was going “femmish” and developing a yen for wearing women’s unmentionables.
It was all Antonia Paxton’s fault, he decided, swaying up the long staircase with his arm across his valet’s shoulders. Devious female. Her with her indecently pouty lips, come-hither eyes, and dragon’s heart. A true daughter of Eve, if there ever was one. And starting tomorrow, he was going to see that she paid handsomely for it.
The next morning Antonia rose early and spent a long while deciding to wear her midnight-blue challis dress with the leg-of-mutton sleeves and covered buttons down the bodice. She pulled her hair back in its familiar chignon, but decided at the last moment to add a small curl at each temple. And on impulse she dabbed a bit of rose water on the lobe of each ear.
She stood before her mirror smoothing the long waist of her dress, viewing it from several angles, and feeling quite pleased with her previous day’s work. There had been a few tricky spots, such as his lordship balking at the corset and that wretched encounter in the servants’ hall. She would have to see that never happened again. But all in all, it had gone rather well. And today he was going to spend time with Eleanor Booth, their resident expert in cleaning and sometime inventor, and by evening he would drag himself out the door, exactly as he had last night, an exhausted but wiser man.
