He pressed the release, heard the soft pop as the locks clicked open, and half expected her to make a dash for the house before he could grab the umbrella and get out of the car.
But she waited for him, letting him come around to the passenger’s side and open the door for her. She stepped out, ducked under the umbrella’s cover and together they ran for the front steps of Grace Place to the shelter of the darkened portico.
Once safely there, Peter shook the umbrella and snapped it closed, but when he turned to say good-night to Thea, she was already disappearing into the cavernous gloom. Without saying good-night or goodbye, she slipped inside, the heavy wooden panel closed behind her and Peter found himself with the door shut quietly, but firmly, in his face.
He had a moment’s impulse to laugh at the simple indignity, but he was too confused by her odd behavior to find anything funny about it. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He’d been dating since he was barely a teen and no other date had ever ended so abruptly or left him in such a rotten state of mind. What in Sam Hill had he done to her?
He’d returned her home before her grandmother’s midnight curfew, despite his intention to keep her out late. Her virtue hadn’t at any time tonight been compromised…or even tested. He’d done his best to be attentive. He’d actually even enjoyed the evening more than he’d have thought possible. True, he hadn’t expected much, but then he’d never found Thea boring. He’d always thought of her reticence as a challenge and her lack of conversation as a choice, not an indication that she had nothing to say.
Turning, Peter looked out at the sodden night, trying to recall the evening and when, exactly, it had gone wrong and what, if anything, he might have done to prevent it. She’d seemed to have an okay time at the wedding. Well, at the reception, anyway, but who—other than the bride and groom and maybe their families—had a really great time during the actual wedding itself, anyway? Maybe Thea hadn’t enjoyed the dinner. Maybe the duck had been too rich for her and upset her stomach. Maybe she’d had too much champagne punch or not enough. Maybe she was tired from all the dancing or from his persistent efforts to get her to talk. Maybe she didn’t like the wind blowing her hair. Maybe she didn’t like looking at the ocean at night. Maybe she didn’t like sudden storms.
Or maybe, she just didn’t like him.
Waiting for a lull in the storm, Peter leaned against one of the twin columns and watched as the rain came faster and harder than before. He considered the possibility that Thea resented this arranged date, that she resented him for seeing it through to its sad and soggy conclusion. He didn’t blame her if that was the way she felt, but would she have been happier if he’d refused his grandfather’s request? Would it have made a difference if her grandmother hadn’t insisted she accept? Or perhaps Thea had wanted to go out with him and was disappointed with the reality of the evening.
How was he supposed to know if any of the possibilities occurring to him held any basis in fact? And what would he do about it, even if he did happen to alight on the truth? He couldn’t save Thea, although after tonight, he had to admit someone certainly ought to do so. There was a certain noble appeal, too, in the idea of being a white knight to her damsel in distress.
On the other hand, Thea was no Sleeping Beauty, locked away in an ivory tower by her wicked old grandmother. She had money. She had a name nearly as old and honored as his own. She had an education, she’d graduated from Wellesley, or so he’d heard. She had intelligence—he knew that for a fact—even if she did seem to work pretty hard at keeping it under wraps. No, Thea didn’t need some well-meaning, but misguided, man to save her. She was fully capable of saving herself. Why she didn’t was another mystery altogether, but it was ridiculous for him to spend any more of his time worrying about her.
The rain let up by degrees, lessening its steady descent, and when it had slacked to a fine drizzle, Peter unfurled the umbrella again, calculating, as best he could in the dusky light—Davinia Carey certainly didn’t waste any money on outside lighting—a feasible route around the puddles to the car.
“Kitty? Kitty, kitty, kitty?”
The voice floated like a birdcall somewhere near the treetops, soft as a whisper, soothing and familiar.
“Ally? Kitty, kitty?”
Peter went down the steps, looking up to the dark windows above. Whatever lights were on inside were curtained off from within so the front of the house remained brooding and dark. Forgetting the puddles, he moved across the lawn, still looking up, following the urgent whispers to the driveway, around to a long view of the east side of Grace Place.
“Darn it, Ally. How did you get out this time? Don’t you know it’s raining?”
Peter thought he heard a tiny, discontented mewling in reply and, as he came around the corner, he searched the shadows of the trees for the cat. It was too dark to make out such a small shape on such a large, dark branch, but there was no mistaking the very feminine shape in the lighted window. Well, in truth, he was going on speculation because until this minute he’d never known Thea Berenson actually had a shape, much less a very nice shape. At some time, on some level, of course, he must have noticed because he had danced with her and even if their bodies had never flirted with a close embrace, he had held her in his arms during many a song.
But he’d never seen her so clearly.
Or more probably, he’d never really looked. The light pooling in the room behind her cast a perfect, rather enchanting, and impossible to miss, silhouette as she leaned out through the open window, her arms bracing her weight against the sill.
“Oh, Ally,” she said. “Just look at you. You’re soaked to the skin. Why on earth would you go out on a night like this?”
The cat mewed pitifully in response somewhere out among the tree limbs and Peter watched, fascinated as much by the sweet, soothing sound of Thea’s voice as by the sight of her crawling through the window out onto an upper branch. She was minus shoes, a dress and any appearance of an inhibition. The best he could tell, she had on a slip that started just above her breasts and ended a long way shy of her knees. Its silky whiteness all but glowed in the dark and it was amazingly easy to follow her progress as she made her way along the branch. She crooned to the cat, reassuring it in rhythmic tones, and under the cover of her speech, Peter moved closer until he was below—several feet below—the sloping limb along which she crept.
Unnoticed as yet, he stood, a smile curving across his lips. Thea in a tree, risking life and limb to rescue a silly cat. Who would have thought she could be so foolishly brave? He wondered briefly if he should call out to her, but he didn’t want to startle her. It occurred to him to climb the tree and offer to help in the rescue effort, but he’d need a ladder even to reach the lowest branch, which would require assistance from inside the house and he was quite sure Davinia Carey did not know—nor was there any need for her to know—that her granddaughter was up in a tree at midnight. And wearing only some rather form-fitting underwear.
Definitely better if Peter stayed quiet and close by…in case Thea needed help.
“Come on, Ally,” she whispered hoarsely. “Make some effort, will you? It’s wet and cold out here and rescuing you isn’t nearly as much fun as it was the first five or six times you got yourself stuck in this tree.” She inched along, her slip creeping slowly, but surely, up her thigh.
Peter couldn’t have looked away if he’d tried.
The rain picked up its rhythm again, rustling first in the leaves of the oak before plopping with increasing insistence all around the outermost base of the tree. Still sheltered beneath the spreading branches, Peter moved with Thea, keeping her in sight as she got closer to where Ally, the cat, apparently waited to be rescued.
“See?” Thea said to the cat. “It’s still raining and any minute now, we’re both going to be soaked through to the skin. So please, crawl down here to me and let’s get back inside. Come on, Ally. You can do it. Just a little bit farther…that’s a good kitty.”
/> There was a crack, a splintering jolt of a sound, as Peter stepped on a fallen, brittle limb and felt it snap into pieces beneath his shoe. He looked down, then up again as the silence from above warned him he’d blown his cover. “It’s me, Thea,” he said softly, not wishing to alarm her. “Peter.”
“Peter?” Her voice lost its confidence, the touch of derring-do he’d heard in it not five seconds ago having fled without a trace. “What…what are you doing down there?”
The question made him smile. “I’m here to help,” he said softly. “If you need help, that is.”
“I thought you’d left.”
“Not yet. I was on the porch, waiting until the rain let up a little.”
“Oh.” Her pause continued into a slightly embarrassed hush. “You had an umbrella.”
“Still do.” He held it up for her to see if, indeed, she could make out the shape of a man and his umbrella in the shadows below. He had the advantage of the light from the window spilling down across her, illuminating the shimmery fabric of her slip, creating quite an interesting configuration of silhouette and womanly shape before it fell away, long before it could reach the shadows where he stood. “Is there a ladder somewhere nearby? That might help.”
“No,” she whispered back. “Monroe would be bound to hear you.”
“Monroe being…”
“Our butler.”
Peter nodded, wondering how Monroe had come to let the cat out on a night like this. “How are you planning to get down?”
“I usually go back in the way I came. Through the window.”
Usually. As if she did this on a regular basis. “With the cat in your arms?” he asked.
“Tucked inside my shirt,” she answered and then the embarrassed pause was back, as if she’d only just realized what she wasn’t wearing. “Um, it’s pretty dark out here, isn’t it?”
“I can’t even see my hands,” he said, which was technically not a lie, as he wasn’t looking at his hands and didn’t intend to take his eyes off of Thea long enough to find out if they were, in fact, clearly visible. A raindrop plopped full on his cheek. “It’s starting to rain again,” he added, leery of her ability to get the cat and get back inside the house in a downpour. “Maybe I should try to get up to that window and come out to help you.”
“No.” Thea’s whisper was fierce and determined. “I’ve almost got her now. Hold still, Ally…” She reached out—Peter saw the gleam of her skin as she leaned forward along the branch—but then, with a soft and startled, “Oh,” she fell, tumbling down from her perch.
He barely had the presence of mind to step forward and catch her before she landed in his outstretched arms. They both hit the wet ground with a splash, a thump, a couple of oomphs! and a yowl of dismay from the cat, who clawed her way out of Thea’s arms and climbed back up the tree as fast as she could scamper.
Chapter Four
The fall knocked the breath out of Thea and it felt like forever before she was able to suck in a deep, filling gasp of air. The very instant she did, however, she became wholly conscious that she was lying atop Peter Braddock. Full-length, front-to-front, face-to-face, and—Holy Cow!—he wasn’t breathing. She pushed up, bracing herself with one hand on the ground while she pressed the other to his chest, pushing beneath his jacket, searching for the right place to check his heartbeat, hoping, hoping, she hadn’t killed him.
“Peter?” she said, willing him to open his eyes. “Oh, please, don’t be dead.”
The rain beat down with renewed intensity, splashing through the tree leaves and striking her backside in a rhythmic tattoo that made it difficult to be sure the steady pulse beneath her palm was actually Peter’s heartbeat. But then she felt his chest rise beneath her touch as he took several shallow breaths and a sweet, dizzy relief washed over her.
She stayed awash in that feeling right up until the moment he opened his eyes and an electric awareness shot the relief to pieces and danced like fire from her heart to her toes then back again.
“So much…for proving…what a he-man…I am,” he said between gasps. “I’d really planned…to catch you and…set you on your feet…not crumple…the minute you…landed.”
“You broke my fall.” His eyes at close range were a mesmerizing blend of greens and golds and Thea thought it might be possible to spend a century charting them all. “That was pretty brave.”
His smile came slowly and, maybe just a tiny bit, pained. “Are you okay?”
She tested, flexing her ankles, her wrists, feeling the thrum of attraction everywhere her body touched his…which seemed to be an amazing number of places. “Yes,” she said, still breathless from one thing or another. “Are you?”
He nodded. “It’s still a little difficult to catch my breath, but other than that, I seem to be fine.”
“I’m so sorry.” She’d been so reckless to climb out after Ally, especially on a night like this, so careless to get caught out as she had, so stupid to fall out of the tree. “I could have killed you.”
“I don’t think so.” His lips curved upward in a grin. “I’m made of pretty tough stuff…and you’re a lightweight.”
She realized she could have moved—ought already to have gotten off him—and a blush as warm as summer rose in a wave to her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “No wonder you can’t breathe.” And she started to push away.
Peter’s arms came around her, warm and strong and tight. “Don’t be in such a hurry, Theadosia. Right now, you’re the only thing keeping me from getting even wetter than I already am.”
The blush curled down her neck, trickling with rising heat into her breasts. She was half-naked, scratched by the tree and the cat, soaked to the skin, chilled to the bone, and having very unladylike thoughts about the man she was lying upon. Not her usual modus operandi. Not even close…well, except for the scratched by the tree and the cat part. “I should go in,” she said in a rush of shyness. “You should go home.”
“I can’t just yet.”
“Oh, no, you are hurt.”
“No, but your cat is back up in the tree.”
She looked up, but Ally was long gone, probably farther up in the oak than she had been before. “Well, she can stay up there the rest of her life for all I care. I’ve saved her neck a dozen times and she’s nearly cost me mine twice today already.”
“Twice today?” His smile flashed with teasing good humor. “Did I see you out here earlier, Thea? Maybe just as I drove in to pick you up?”
“I don’t see how you could have, Peter,” she lied. “I was inside getting ready.”
He grinned, still holding her against him. She had never been this close to him before. She wasn’t sure she’d ever been this close to any man. She knew she’d never been this wet while being this close to anyone. Her slip clung to her like a second skin, and a thin skin at that. Maybe in this instance, being close to Peter was better than pulling away. The minute she moved away from him, he’d be able to see right through the wet silk and that would be more embarrassing even than this.
But not nearly so pleasant.
The thought deepened the heat in her cheeks. Between the cold rain falling on her backside and Peter using her as an umbrella, she could start sizzling at any second. Better to get up before something really humiliating happened. She pushed again against his chest and this time, he let her go.
“Thank you for breaking my fall.” The words came out in a rush, as she tried to pull the clingy silk away from her body in the vain hope it would be less revealing. “Don’t worry about the cat. She’ll figure out how to get down sooner or later, I imagine.”
“Apparently, she hasn’t figured it out in the dozen or more times you’ve had to crawl out of your window to rescue her.” He sat up, shrugging out of his sodden jacket, picking at the silk shirt which clung to his chest with a damp attention to detail.
Thea wished she looked half so good in her wet slip as he looked in his wet shirt. But he wasn’t even looking at her and
probably wouldn’t notice if she took off every stitch of clothing she had on. Peter was a gentleman, and even if he hadn’t been, he had no desire to look at her body, whether it was wet, dry or merely damp. She struggled to her feet, slipping a bit in the slick grass.
Peter caught her arm, helping her get her balance even as he got his feet under him and stood up. “You must be freezing,” he said with a frown. “You’ve got goose bumps. Here, put on my jacket. It’s wet, but maybe it’ll provide a little bit of warmth.”
There was something more going on than being cold, but Thea couldn’t have told him what it was if she’d wanted to, so she pushed her arms through the sleeves of his jacket, which was very damp, but still provided some comforting warmth. And it smelled nice…like Peter’s cologne. Or more aptly, like Peter’s cologne in the rain. “I’d better go in now.”
“Okay. I’ll go with you.”
“You w-will?”
“Well, if we can’t get to the ladder without rousing the butler, I’ll have to climb out your window to get to the cat.”
Peter Braddock in her bedroom. Now there was a fantasy she’d never even allowed herself to imagine. Well, okay, so maybe she had thought about it once or twice when the moon was full and she was in a particularly daring mood. But in the flesh? She shivered at the idea of him stepping inside her room and seeing the private space where she lived and dreamed.
“Come on, Thea.” He took hold of her arm, making the decision and turning her toward the front of the house. “You have to get in out of this rain before you catch pneumonia.”
She gathered her wits enough to make a feeble protest at his choice of direction. “No, not the front. I go in through the kitchen. It’s…closer.” It was also safer, as it was a long way from her grandmother’s rooms.
After two steps in the right direction, though, Thea stumbled, her bare feet slipping again on the wet grass.
“Put your arms around my neck,” Peter said a second before he lifted her in his arms and settled her wet body against his wet chest.
The Blacksheep's Arranged Marriage Page 6
